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Pragmatics
Vol. 12:3 (2002) ► pp.347–359

Everyday interactions and the domestication of social inequality

This article examines the distribution of relationships of power and authority as an activity in gossip sessions among members of a community in Pohnpei, Micronesia. The position of Bourdieu, that the interactionist approach cannot elucidate important aspects of the sharing of power in society, is used as a starting place to examine ways in which interactants in everyday conversations manipulate and organize gendered identities and the entitlements of certain classes of individuals to particular types of power.
Keywords: Social inequality, Gossip, Gender, Ethnomethodology, Micronesia
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 September 2002
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.12.3.04kea
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Keating, Elizabeth
2009. Power and Pragmatics. Language and Linguistics Compass 3:4 ► pp. 996 ff. DOI logo

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