Cultural Difference as Conversational Object

Abstract

This paper explores the existence of culture as an available, hearable, objective, scientific feature of conversational interaction by closely examining some examples of sociolinguistic and ethnographic studies in educational settings, and of the effects of cultural difference on conversational interaction. It contrasts these approaches with an ethnomethodological approach to studying the phenomenon of cultural difference in interaction. The argument developed through this analysis is that it is more heuristic to think of cultural difference as a phenomenon created reflexively through participants’ orientation to each others’ talk and action, and thus as a contingent feature of that interaction.