Donal Carbaugh

How is cultural identity accomplished interactively? What happens when different cultural identities contact one another? This book presents a series of papers, from classic essays to original expositions, which respond to these questions. The view of communication offered here -- rather than ignoring culture, or making it a variable in an equation -- is based on cultural patterns and situated communication practices, unveiling the multiplicity of factors involved in particular times and places. The contributors to this unusual volume represent a wide range of fields. Their equally diverse offerings will serve to clarify cultural distinctiveness in some communication phenomena, and lay groundwork for the identification of cross-cultural generalities in others.

Cultural Communication and Intercultural Contact

This handbook brings together 26 ethnographic research reports from around the world about communication. The studies explore 13 languages from 17 countries across 6 continents. Together, the studies examine, through cultural analyses, communication practices in cross-cultural perspective. In doing so, and as a global community of scholars, the studies explore the diversity in ways communication is understood around the world, examine specific cultural traditions in the study of communication, and thus inform readers about the range of ways communication is understood around the world. Some of the communication practices explored include complaining, hate speech, irreverence, respect, and uses of the mobile phone. The focus of the handbook, however, is dual in that it brings into view both communication as an academic discipline and its use to unveil culturally situated practices. By attending to communication in these ways, as a discipline and a specific practice, the handbook is focused on, and will be an authoritative resource for understanding communication in cross-cultural perspective. Designed at the nexus of various intellectual traditions such as the ethnography of communication, linguistic ethnography, and cultural approaches to discourse, the handbook employs, then, a general approach which, when used, understands communication in its particular cultural scenes and communities.

The Handbook of Communication in Cross-cultural Perspective

Cultures in Conversation introduces readers to the ethnographic study of intercultural and social interactions through the analysis of conversations in which various cultural orientations are operating. Author Donal Carbaugh presents his original research on conversation practices in England, Finland, Russia, Blackfeet County, and the United States, demonstrating how each is distinctive in its communication codes--particularly in its use of symbolic meanings, forms of interaction, norms, and motivational themes. Examining conversation in this way demonstrates how cultural lives are active in conversations and shows how conversation is a principal medium for the coding of selves, social relationships, and societies. Representing 20 years of research, this volume offers unique insights into the ways social interactions not only gain shape from, but also are formative of cultures. It makes a significant contribution to communication scholarship, and will be illuminating reading in courses focusing on cultural communication, language and social interaction, intercultural pragmatics, and linguistics.

Cultures in Conversation

Patrice M. Buzzanell

This timely volume provides an in-depth look at why the field of communication is so central in initiatives for social impact around the world. In Distinctive Qualities in Communication Research, editors Donal Carbaugh and Patrice M. Buzzanell bring together scholars with varied and productive approaches to communication to address the question of what distinguishes communication research from similar studies in other disciplines. Each contributor responds to the question: "What makes your research communication research? How does your program of inquiry treat communication not simply as data, but as its primary theoretical concern?" Their responses are the heart of this book. The questions addressed and answered herein define the qualities that set research in communication apart from work in related fields, such as social psychology, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. The book begins and ends by looking across these studies generally, bringing into view not only the specific possibilities in the study of communication today, but also what such study contributes generally to understanding human problems, social relations, and communities. This volume provides an invaluable resource for graduate students beginning their study in communication; academics needing to define the distinctive contributions that communication research makes; and administrators who want to understand the scope and breadth of work in communication. It provides an invaluable resource for defining the role of communication research in the academic community and the contributions it makes to the study of human interaction.

Donal Carbaugh

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