Talking Culture Ethnography and Conversation Analysis [Paperback]

Argues that anyone—anthropologist, psychologist, or policeman—who uses what people say to find out what people think had better know how speech itself is organized.

Talking Culturetackles an important task—bringing conversation analysis and ethnography into a fruitful rapprochement. . . . [Moerman's] insights into the construction of inequality between Thai peasants and officials provide us with a sense of just how fruitful the marriage of conversation analysis and ethnography can be. —American Anthropologist

Argues that anyone—anthropologist, psychologist, or policeman—who uses what people say to find out what people think had better know how speech itself is organized.

Selected byChoicemagazine as an Outstanding Academic Book

There is nothing else like it. . . . The best introduction to conversation analysis for an anthropologist and the only example of the full-scale employment of it in a non-Western culture. —Charles O. Frake, Stanford University