Dealing with Discrepancies between Visually Inferable Membership Categories and Language Fluency in Japanese Shop-Encounter Interactions

• In Event: Research in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis: Categories and Identities in Interaction I

Abstract

Echoing historical and theoretical research on relationships between ethnomethodology and gestalt psychology, empirical work influenced by the idea of gestalt contexture has emerged in recent years. In the same vein, the current study aims to elucidate how a particular structured context is endogenously produced and modified in interaction. From a perspective of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, we examine how participants orient to their membership categories and language fluency as interdependent resources for producing and modifying scenes. More specifically, focusing on Japanese shop-encounter conversations that revolve around a shop employee’s compliment on a customer’s language fluency, this study investigates how participants manage discrepancies between compliment recipients’ perceptually inferable membership categories and their fluency in Japanese, which is not a predicate bound to the inferred categories (e.g., “non-Japanese” or “foreigner” categories). Our analysis demonstrates that shop employees’ compliments and the customers’ brief acceptance or downgrading of such praise serve to produce a “complimentable” scene. However, the participants may modify the scene by providing accounts through invoking membership categories bound to the predicate of “fluency in Japanese.” In particular, the customer’s self-categorization of hafu (half Japanese or mixed-race), a Japanese term which may imply the conspicuousness of a person’s appearance, serves as an account for both the customer’s fluency in Japanese and the complimenter’s category misattribution based on the visual cues. Our findings illuminate the normative structures whereby a participant’s fluency in a particular language is tied to their racial-ethnic and/or nationality-related membership categories. Such structures are reproduced in interactions in which a person who deviates from the norm is treated as an exception requiring explanation. Methodological implications for analytical approaches to visually inferable but not explicitly mentioned membership categories are also discussed.

Authors

• Ryo Okazawa, Shizuoka University

• Mika Ishino, Doshisha University