Beyond Mundane Reason: Conversation Analysis And Context

Conversation analysts have sometimes been taken to task for apparently choosing not to deal with the "context" of the conversational activities they examine (Cicourel, 1981). In Talking Culture Moerman (1988) describes a blend of ethnography and conversation analysis, and suggests that ethnography describes contextual data extrinsic to interaction while conversation analysis provides non-contexted structural descriptions of talk. In the present essay I re-examine the posture of conversation analysis toward context, and show that conversation analysis may supply details of cultural context rarely provided in ethnography. Conversation analysts describe talk-intrinsic details which provide us with accounts of social action that take us beyond' 'mundane reascMi'' (Pollner, 1987), and extend our sense of what' 'context'' could mean. Conversation analysts aim to describe methods f(x social action which are both context-sensitive and context-free. Rather than ignoring context, this stance makes "context" a central and problematic issue for each inquiry. Detailed analysis of interaction suggests that the components of context are not transparent. In order to explicate conversation analytic notions of amtext, I compare Moerman's "culturally contexted conversation analysis" [CCCA] to two essays illustrative of conversation analysts' ap-