Finding Culture in Talk: A Collection of Methods - Hardcover

by N. Quinn (Editor)

This edited collection presents a range of heretofore unpublished, unavailable methods for the systematic reconstruction of culture from interviews and other discourse. Authors set the design and evolution of their methods in the context of their own research projects, and draw general lessons about investigating culture through discourse. These methods have largely grown out of the work of the cultural models school, and represent the approaches of some of the very best methodologists in cultural anthropology today. An impetus for the volume has been inquiries from researchers, many of them graduate students, about how to conduct the kind of research that cultural models theorists do. This is not a linguistics book; unlike approaches to discourse analysis from linguistics, this volume focuses on culture, treating discourse as a medium especially rich in clues for cultural analysis, and hence a window into culture.

Author Biography

Naomi Quinn is Professor Emerita of the Cultural Anthropology Department at Duke University, USA. Among her publications, she is co-author of A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning (1997) and editor of Finding Culture in Talk (2005). She is a past president of the Society for Psychological Anthropology and was awarded that society's 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award.