Talk About Rice: A Discursive Approach to Studying Culture

The paper examines the ways in which people talk about others of different culture or ethnic origin. I analyse interview talk of the British W.W.II veterans about their experiences at the prisoners of war camp in Japan and recent activities of reconciliation. Proposed is a discursive approach to the study of culture and cross-cultural communication, in comparison to work in cultural anthropology and ethnographic conversation analysis. The discussion is guided by two analytic concepts— membership categorisation and ethnification processes. The paper concludes that the ways in which cultural knowledge is constructed, established and shared are discursive accomplishments of a social action of accounting for the war-time past.