Explanation, Interpretation and Critique in The Analysis of Discourse

Critique of Anthropology
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Explanation, Interpretation and Critique in the Analysis of Discourse

Stef Slembrouck
Critique of Anthropology 2001 21: 33
DOI: 10.1177/0308275X0102100103
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Article
Explanation, Interpretation and

Critique in the Analysis of
Discourse1
Stef Slembrouck
Department of English, Ghent University, Belgium
Abstract The first half of this article offers an assessment of critical discourse
analysis, as developed since the 1980s and understood at the time in terms of a
much-needed departure from predominantly descriptive modes of linguistic
enquiry which prevented an adequate thematization of power, inequality and
ideology. In this review I draw attention to some enduring tensions in the
models aspirations between (1) being an interpretative mode of enquiry which
inevitably adopts a discourse participants point of view, (2) offering social-theor-
etically informed explanations of discourse which overcome limitations inherent
in a participants outlook and (3) formulating an interventionist programme of
emancipation which prioritizes dialogue with institutional members. With an eye
to relieving some of these tensions, I explore, in the second half of my article,
what might be gained from a dialogic confrontation with reflexive research tra-
ditions within linguistic anthropology. In particular, recent work on the natural
histories of discourse takes the situatedness of entextualizations of discourse-in-
context as one of its main forces of enquiry.
Keywords critical discourse analysis critique institutional intervention
natural history of discourse (re)contextualization/entextualization
How do we recognise the shackles that tradition has placed upon us? For if we
recognise them, we are also able to break them. (Franz Boas quoted as a motto
in Fairclough, 1989: 1)
Central to this paper is a concern with the epistemology of institutional
intervention in discourse-oriented research. Social intervention is an old
theme in research, especially if one accepts antecedence in sociology (calls
to enlighten society with its insights can be traced all the way back to its
founder, Auguste Comte). In language-oriented research, however, the
theme has emerged more recently. But, as in sociology, it is a dimension of
research practice which is bound to sit rather uncomfortably with
researcher-identities, because it marks the point where the relationship
between researcher and researched cannot possibly be figured away, where
a retreat into theoretical relativity can never be enough to lay to rest differ-
ences of opinion and where, in the best cases, accountability is genuinely
Vol 21(1) 3357 [0308-275X(200103)21:1; 3357;016271]

Copyright 2001 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

34
Critique of Anthropology 21(1)
felt towards communities beyond the corridors of universities. It is also the

domain where the authoritative pronouncements of science are most likely
to be experienced as powerful acts which create or sustain social realities
one of the observations which informs Pierre Bourdieus advocacy for a
retour reflexif within sociology, i.e. redoubling sociological efforts by system-
atically complementing the outward-looking gaze at reality with the inward-
looking depths of self-analysis. It is such a reflexive (re)turn which this
article tries to accomplish. Its starting point will be an assessment of a recent
but influential European tradition in discourse analysis whose analytical pri-
orities lie in a critical engagement with power, ideology and inequality, and
whose ultimate ambition it is to take its findings back to the lifeworlds of
the researched. In this review, I shall draw attention to some enduring ten-
sions in this tradition (perhaps not altogether unexpectedly) between
securing a space of explanatory leverage for the analyst and an interpreta-
tive epistemology rooted in participant perspectives. This is the mainstay of
the first two sections. In the third section of my article I seek to demon-
strate that some relief for these tensions (although not their resolution;
this would be ultimately counter-productive) is offered by research tra-
ditions situated within linguistic anthropology. In particular, the writing of
natural histories of discourse is a strategy which can be instrumental in
laying bare some of the shadows cast by the contingencies of doing
research, and therefore presents itself as one way in which a reflexive ideal
may be put into analytical practice, and a way which offers, moreover, some
purchase for intervention. I shall exemplify this argument by revisiting an
instance of my own research practice, while also attending to some wider
implications for critical discourse research. However, first let me put criti-
cal discourse analysis (CDA) on the map, as a break in linguistic enquiry
prompted by specific historical conditions and academic concerns. The
reader should note that my account is weighted towards Norman Fair-
cloughs work a choice which in more than one respect marks where I
come from.
A double intellectual promise with multiple births and

baptisms
The birth of CDA can be situated in the second half of the 1980s with key
discussion groups in Britain (and Australia).2 Its emergence as a critical
approach to the analysis of institutional text and talk was no by means acci-
dental, in that it was prompted by a perceived need to respond to particu-
lar developments in late capitalist society in Britain (and to some extent
elsewhere in Europe). Let me say something about the societal develop-
ments first, though I can paint these only very schematically here. From the
end of the 1970s onwards, British society was undergoing its most radical
post-war transformation in the course of the Thatcherite political project.

35
Slembrouck: Explanation, Interpretation and Critique
This included a number of contested developments such as the end of the

consensus model which involved trade unions as a major player in socio-
economic decision-making, an attempt to redefine the relationship
between politicians and citizens along individualist and consumerist lines
and wide-ranging financial cuts in the public sector which led to an aggres-
sive remodelling of social welfare, education, health provision, etc. on neo-
liberal principles. These developments were by no means restricted to
Britain but may have been felt more strongly there, possibly because of
Britains post-war model role as a European welfare state and partly because
of the particular political constellation that allowed Thatcherism to survive
politically unchallenged for more than a decade. Within the academic
world, cultural studies was among the first to respond programmatically to
these circumstances. After Stuart Hall had become director of the Birming-
ham Centre for Contemporary Culture Studies in 1972, the centre was
given a new paradigm founded on the ideas of French structuralism and a
sociological method of enquiry, while also linking up cultural studies with
political struggle in the Gramscian sense. Its main interest was in mass
culture and consumer society and its intellectual programme prioritized a
critical response to social, economic and political changes in Western, late
capitalist societies. In the 1980s, the thematic ground shifted towards new
ethnicities in Britain and an analysis of the New Right (e.g. Hall and
Jacques, 1989). Through its political analyses in journals such as Marxism
Today, cultural studies became a major source of inspiration for early work
in the critical analysis of discourse. Undoubtedly, the post-structuralist
orientation within cultural studies must have facilitated linguistics specific
adoption of its project as, in it, a central place is allocated to the study of
symbolic practices as a prerequisite for an understanding of the creation
and transformation of social relationships in everyday social practice.
However, when looked at from within the more specific landscapes of lin-
guistics, CDAs arrival was equally foreshadowed by earlier, more isolated
attempts at staging a critical agenda in language enquiry including Fowler
et al. (1979), Bolinger (1980), Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Leith (1983)
and Mey (1985). CDAs arrival also coincided with more critical directions
in sociolinguistics, such as detailed in Cameron et al. (1992), Cameron
(1995) and Rampton (1995).
As already noted above, the paradigm of critical discourse analysis came
with the double promise of, first of all, an interpretative mode of linguistic
enquiry with explanatory ambitions and, second, the development of an
emancipatory project of empowerment aimed at eliminating social inequal-
ity. I am taking the reader here back to the particular venue of Sociolin-
guistics Symposium 8 held in London at the Roehampton Institute in April
1990, a few months after the publication of Norman Faircloughs Language
and Power because perceptions there and then reflected an urgency about
moving away from a predominantly descriptive orientation within
(socio)linguistics, towards an interpretative mode of enquiry with explicit

36
explanatory ambitions. The latter followed from an insistence that lan-

guage study should adequately take account of social context and, for it to
do so, it is instructive that its ties with social theory were renewed by
drawing upon a new canon of social-theoretical work in particular the
writings of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Jrgen Habermas.
Descriptivism was thought of as potentially serving the social status quo
as it meant that prevailing institutional practices were accepted as contem-
porary givens which are open to description but which are not thought of
as historically conditioned outcomes and not represented as subject to
change and struggle over change. Additionally, the social-theoretical turn
entailed the promise of a departure from prevailing positivism in varia-
tionist sociolinguistic research measured against the degree to which,
within the latter tradition, language use was seen as a reflection of static
social variables and issues of power and struggle were left outside dis-
cussion. Within professional discourse studies more specifically, the social-
theoretical turn meant an engagement with institutional analysis in a way
which overcame the limitations of problem-solving-oriented work (as
detailed in e.g. Alatis and Tucker, 1979, and Di Pietro, 1982) and of earlier
work within European traditions of institutional discourse analysis (e.g. Sin-
clair and Coulthard, 1975, on classroom discourse). Rather than seeking to
repair certain communicative deficits in the language practices of pro-
fessionals, CDA advocated a focus on the analysis and explanation of the
constitutive role of language use within institutional practices and within
the larger social ordering of institutional domains. (See for instance
Sarangi and Slembrouck, 1996, as to what such a shift might mean for the
study of bureaucratic language practices.) CDAs explanatory ambitions
thus aimed at covering all relevant strata of analysis: from (micro) text-in-
situation through the (meso) institutional to the wider (macro) socio-
cultural moving correspondingly from the analysis of text through the
study of processes of text production, consumption and distribution to an
explanatory assessment of discourse as sociocultural practice. Note in this
respect also the central role that was assigned to the concept of an order
of discourse (whose origins are in Foucault, 1971): it meant that, through
analogy, social systems could be analysed in terms of particular orderings
of genres and activity types which are specific to institutional domains and
which could be characterized by relationships of overlap, mutual exclu-
siveness, etc. This concept made it possible, for example, to understand the
advance of private economy logic in the public sector partly in terms of a
colonization of the discourse practices of education, public health, social
welfare, etc. by the genres and normative conventions of the private
economy, especially advertising in this way explaining hybridity and
heterogeneity in textual designs in terms of a re-articulation of discourse
conventions in the wake of changed socio-economic conditions. This also
created space for a discussion of lived contradictions and ambivalence in
discursive practice.

37
I think it is fair to conclude that CDA has, in a number of respects, radi-

cally transformed the Western-European academic landscapes of language
study. Let me just list a few of its accomplishments. It successfully claimed
recognition beyond its own boundaries for the need for a constant engage-
ment with social-theoretical debate, even when researchers central pre-
occupation is with the study of language use,3 while forcing the
much-needed thematization of the multiple relationships between lan-
guage use, power and ideology. As a result, CDA played an important role
in closing some of the notional gaps that separated departments of lan-
guage study, communication studies and centres for cultural studies. It has
also been instrumental in politicizing the field of applied linguistics cer-
tainly in the British-Australian context. When set against prevailing
(socio)linguistic models of style and register, CDA has contributed to a
reconceptualization of the language-situation dynamics with language use no
longer seen exclusively as a reflection of situational-contextual variables,
but more dynamically as also shaping context (in this respect, CDA is both
preceded by and echoed in parallel developments elsewhere).4 It has also
advanced the view that social orders are necessarily also symbolic orders,
with the result that, programmatically at least, discourse analysis has been
assigned a more central place in social-scientific enquiry. However, it
remains to be seen to what extent CDA has succeeded in setting an agenda
for more empirical, text-oriented discourse analysis within the social sci-
ences more generally, and to what extent its impact has been confined to
linguistics. Next, CDA has encouraged research into the heteroglossic prop-
erties of discourse practice (e.g. relying on a particular interpretation of
intertextuality as a pivotal principle in the dynamics of discourse produc-
tion). In this way, CDA has contributed to the present wave of Bakhtinian
thinking in linguistic enquiry (again with parallel developments elsewhere
e.g. Hanks, 1987, for linguistic anthropology). Not unimportantly, CDA
has, in some respects at least, succeeded in problematizing (1) models of
social reproduction which see power exclusively in repressive terms (versus,
for instance, Foucauldian conceptions of power which concentrate on the
enabling, productive effects of power) and (2) models which see ideology
exclusively in terms of a reproduction of values (versus views in which lan-
guage practices are seen as often inherently ambivalent in their ideological
orientations and in which language use is not just seen as a vehicle for
ideological reproduction but as open to contradictory ideological invest-
ment). Finally, CDA entails a project to revitalize a diachronic linguistic per-
spective by redefining the scope of enquiries into language change (for
instance, a focus on discourse change as an effect of and as contributing to
shifts in sociocultural values).5
On the applied side of the things, CDAs emancipatory programme
of empowerment and the elimination of social inequality follows directly
from its political roots in intellectual traditions of the Left, but note that
such aspirations are almost unavoidable conclusions for a model which is

38
aimed at explaining discourse. The difference between the two moti-

vations is one between the moral-ethical imperative of should and the
social-scientific criterion of can. In a maximalist reading, the latter means
that the promise of an exhaustive and comprehensive social-linguistic
explanation logically entails the promise that analysis can yield criteria for
determining what can count as desirable change as well as provide adequate
guidelines for practical implementation. In this respect, CDA has been one
of the most ambitious social-linguistic projects but, as is illustrated in the
quotation from Boas at the beginning of this article, an attempt which is by
no means unique in its desire to crack the code of the social with an eye
towards a better society.
CDAs interpretative claims and explanatory ambitions
Let us now examine more closely what exactly is meant by interpretation,

explanation and critical consciousness in the context of CDA. I am
taking Faircloughs writings as an example but note that distinctions such
as those between description, interpretation and explanation are of general
interest to anyone who is seeking to link up micro-practice with the broader
social picture. In my review I shall also set up a contrast between Fairclough
(1989), whose publication more or less marked CDAs take-off as a recog-
nized paradigm, and the very recent Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999), so
as to capture some of the developments of the past decade. As already men-
tioned, Faircloughs methodology is based on an analytical progression
from description (concerned with the formal properties of texts), through
interpretation (the interactional processes of text production and interpre-
tation), to an explanation of discourse (where the main objective is to
portray a discourse as part of a social process, as a social practice, showing
how it is determined by social structures, and what reproductive effects dis-
course can cumulatively have on those structures, sustaining them or chang-
ing them [1989: 162]). With regard to both stages, interpretation and
explanation, the author stresses the essential similarity between what the
analyst does and what participants do while insisting that there are also
differences (1989: 141). First, interpretation:
. . . the analyst must draw upon her own MR (interpretative procedures) in
order to explain how participants draw upon theirs. The analysis of discourse
is necessarily an insiders or a members task which is why I have called the
resources drawn upon by both participant and analyst members resources
(MR).
But if analysts are drawing upon their own MR to explicate how those of partici-
pants operate in discourse, then it is important that they be sensitive to what
resources they are themselves relying upon to do analysis. At this stage of the
procedure, it is only really self-consciousness that distinguishes the analyst from
the participant she is analysing. . . . For the critical analyst, moreover, the aim

39
is to eliminate even that difference: to develop self-consciousness about the

rootedness of discourse in common-sense assumptions of MR. (1989: 167)
The difference is reinstated but cast in different terms when discussing the
stage of explanation:
The position of the analyst in explanation is more easily distinguishable from
that of the participant in that the resources the analyst draws upon here are
derived from a social theory. . . . However, self-consciousness is just as
important if one is to avoid importing untheorised assumptions about society,
or acting as if explanation could be theory-independent or theory-neutral.
Participants do have, to varying degrees, their own rationalisations of discour-
sal practice in terms of assumptions about society, but such rationalisations
cannot be taken at face value. Again, for the critical analyst, the aim is to bridge
the gap between the analyst and the participant through the widespread
development of rational understanding of, and theories of, society. (1989: 167)
In short, since interpretations of discourse always draw upon members

resources, one of the pitfalls to be avoided in critical discourse enquiry is
that of reproduction, as a likely but undesirable side-effect of interpre-
tations which are based on common-sense understandings. To the extent
that members resources are conceptually affected and distorted by
relationships of domination, they can be called ideological.6 Thus, repro-
duction connects the stages of interpretation and explanation, because
whereas the former is concerned with how MR are drawn upon in process-
ing discourse, the latter is concerned with the social constitution and
change of MR, including of course their reproduction in discourse prac-
tice (Fairclough, 1989: 1623).
At this point, I would like to draw the readers attention to the para-
doxes inherent in this position. All analysis is seen as inevitably interpreta-
tive in nature (hence, the position of the discourse analyst is fundamentally
similar to that of the language user whose practices are the focus of atten-
tion). However, in one and the same moment, discourse practices are seen
as affected by social determinants in ways which are not transparent to
social subjects, because discourse, it is claimed, has effects which are not
transparent to language users but which, by implication, will be revealed in
critical discourse analysis, when the analyst provides an explanation of dis-
course. Conversely, if the critical analysts activity is essentially, like that of
the discourse participants, interpretative in nature, the question must be
asked how that position can change adequately into an Archimedean per-
spective, i.e. a position that is sufficiently and adequately different/distant
to provide an explanation which overcomes the limitations inherent in a
participants outlook (so that it becomes possible not only to offer an ade-
quate explanation of that participants perspective, but also to formulate
conditions and outline directions for change). The answer to this is that
social theory makes the difference. Given the range and diversity in
social-theoretical models and resources, four questions arise. First, to what

40
extent has CDA succeeded in thematizing and resolving some of the

inevitable contradictions between the various social-theoretical options?
Second, has it fully taken on board the implications for how one concep-
tualizes the language user? Third, is access to social theory sufficient to
draw a distinction between researcher and researched, between discourse
analyst and language user? Finally, can social theory exhaust the space
reserved for explanations of discourse?
As to the first question, let me begin with a bit of historical background.
The view that analysis is inevitably and inescapably interpretative in nature
has in some respects been informed by CDAs rejection of an exclusively
object-oriented, formalist paradigm in linguistic enquiry. As Fairclough
notes (1989: 152), the implications of a radical dependence of interpre-
tation on situational context can be somewhat alarming for linguists who
have been used to seeing meaning as a purely linguistic property of lin-
guistic forms themselves. This rejection is echoed in a rejection of objec-
tivism for the social sciences more generally (cf. Fairclough, 1989: 27).
However, whereas here the perspectives of the participants and their con-
textual orientations are being embraced, exactly the opposite happens
when the term interpretation is used in its second sense, i.e. as a stage
which corrects delusions of autonomy on the parts of subjects in discourse
and which makes explicit what for participants is generally implicit: the
dependence of discourse practice on the unexplicated common-sense
assumptions of MR and discourse types (Fairclough, 1989: 162). Part of the
contradiction resides in the implicit Marxist underpinnings of the second
claim. To call interpretation and explanation two successively applied pro-
cedures of unveiling or demystification (1989: 141) in more than one
respect echoes the objectivism of dialectical materialism which, in one of
its versions, reads that ideological critique is a matter of turning false con-
sciousness into true consciousness, thus restoring the autonomy of social
subjects by providing a true insight into the socio-economic determinants
which govern their lives and which, in a slightly different (Gramscian)
version, identifies naturalized common sense as the site of the ideologi-
cal. Both are echoed in CDAs practical programme of participant
empowerment (see for instance Fairclough [1989: 234] on the dialectic
relationship between consciousness-raising among oppressed groups and
engagement in struggle; cf. also Fairclough [1992b: 9]).
However, CDAs theoretical resources have not been exclusively
Marxist. Fairclough (1992a) devotes a complete chapter to Foucault, but
overall he relies more on a Gramscian model based on hegemony (thus
creating room for fluctuating power imbalances, contestation and, corre-
spondingly, partial and incomplete naturalization at the level of social
awareness). In addition, chapter 7 harbours an appeal to negoti-
ative/mosaic models inspired by, among others, Anthony Giddenss soci-
ology of late modernity. As to the very recent publications, it can be
observed that CDA continues to be unclear about its exact preferences for

41
a particular social theory but note that this remark is by no means meant
disparagingly. Whereas Fairclough (1992a: 2234) suggests that a choice
such as that between an explanation which appeals to hegemony and one
which appeals to post-traditionalist negotiation may be a matter of which
particular domain is being examined, Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999:
17) expressly disclaim support for any call for stabilizing method or theory
within CDA, preferring instead to construct a research agenda on contem-
porary social life which is rooted in an ongoing dialogue with the narra-
tives of late modernity, feminism and postmodernism (Baudrillard,
Bernstein, Bourdieu, Giddens, Habermas, Haraway, Harvey, etc.).
However, it should be clear that each of these social-theoretical alternatives
entails a particular conceptualization of the social subject-cum-language
user, their perceptual horizons and attendant scenarios of likely and plaus-
ible institutional policy and intervention. This brings us closer to answer-
ing the second question.
Let me just raise some of the difficult points. Foucaults conceptual-
ization of power rules out emancipation, by treating resistance and
subjectivity with it as superfluous to the workings of discourse/power-
regimes; and he is quite happy to jettison the notion of a subject liberated
through knowledge in order to salvage a general idea of an ethics of the
self however much this tends to be perceived as inherently problematic
and self-contradictory. Mesthrie et al. (2000: 325) similarly draw attention
to the power-serving purposes of what is socially useful, which leave insti-
tutional representatives with very tangible dilemmas. And what about the
language user who emerges in Bourdieus theory of field-based positions
and habitus in a market of symbolic exchanges? Should one think of insti-
tutional intervention in terms of injections of symbolic capital? Yet a differ-
ent language user is presupposed by post-traditionalist society, in which
decision-making is thought of as reflexively informed as a result of
increased personal and reflexive access to expert systems. Where does this
leave one with the idea of consciousness raising as the distinction
between those who are aware and those who, thus far, have remained
unaware collapses in more than one respect in the light of self-awareness
as a widespread strategy adopted across professional and institutional sites?
The point here is absolutely not that I should want to challenge the fruit-
fulness of a transdisciplinarity which continually renews itself and is
exotropic (cf. Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999: 11213), but rather that
the language user as an inevitable entity in research and as a target of
intervention has largely been left out of the social-theoretical discussions
and dialogues which CDA has engaged in so far. The net result of this may
be that the analyst is left rather without theory and method when facing
that language user in the course of institutional intervention, except for a
rather under-defined commitment to the dissemination of a critical body
of knowledge in a one-directional flow from expert critical discourse analyst
to lay (and/or professional?) institutional member. In one sense, then, it is

42
to be regretted that a particular approach which is based on the assump-

tion that methodology can never be free from theory leaves its own eman-
cipatory project largely outside its own social-theoretical debates.
Approaching the same issue now from a rather different angle, the con-
clusion may be that more is in fact needed than just putting the language
user into the orbit of social-theoretical debate. Description, interpretation
and explanation are also very much labels which denote particular types of
research activity customarily scaled from lower to higher-level activities
(description as unproblematic, routine activity; explanation as activity
which is heavily invested with theoretical assumptions and ambitions). One
of the problems with Faircloughs proposal may be that it maps research
activities on to social phenomena at different levels in a way which may well
endorse such traditional associations: description is text-oriented (micro),
interpretation is oriented towards situated interaction (meso), while expla-
nation is oriented towards the broader societal picture (macro). Of course,
the higher-level appeal to social-theoretical traditions has been important
in accomplishing a break with descriptivism and autonomist conceptions
of language use (in which explanations refer to the language system), but
it is also true that each of the three activities plays a role at each of the three
levels and that one has to be wary of viewing even the most rudimentary
activities, say transcription, as theory-free. Can one describe and not inter-
pret? Can one interpret interaction and not appeal to theory? I am aware
that these are classic questions but it is worth repeating one or two of them
here. If one accepts that the language user is a theoretically structured
object, then this also applies to analytical concepts which pertain to micro
and meso phenomena and I can see no reason for restricting the scope of
language theory and/or social theory to any particular level of social
organization. Nor does it seem useful to me to put all the explanatory eggs
into the social-theoretical basket: social-theoretical reductionism is as
much an undesirable outcome as has been the linguistic reductionism of
past eras (cf. Verschueren, this volume).
This brings us to the one question which I have not yet addressed is
it feasible to maintain a difference between researcher/discourse analyst
and researched/language user on the basis of access to social theory? Not
really. For one thing, it is quite possible to conceive of all kinds of activity
(survey work, distributional analysis, comparative work, etc.) which analysts
may be intensively engaged in but which ordinary language users prob-
ably simply do not have the time to get into. Thus, there are other ways of
drawing distinctions between researchers and researched than access and
appeal to explanatory social theory.7 However, at the same time I would
like to stress that, if this issue is discussed only in terms of access to method
and theory, then one runs the risk of losing sight of whatever spon-
taneously productive hermeneutics there already are in the lifeworlds (cf.
Rabinow, 1986: 236ff). Moreover, distinctions crumble even further in
societal contexts which are characterized by widespread dissemination of

43
scientific findings and increased public access to expert systems, a remark

which becomes even more pertinent in the context of research which
focuses on the discourse practices of highly professionalized and academi-
cally trained occupations.
As a follow-up to this point, and turning to CDA research-in-practice,
one can observe that there have been few attempts to examine contextual-
ized interpretations of real participants in their own right (as noted by
Widdowson, 1995). CDA has been mostly text-based and at best speculative
in its claims about how actual participants are likely to interpret texts,
exchanges and moves within talk. The very first quotation from Fairclough
(1989) in this section underlines this, as it highlights analysts capacities to
draw on their own members resources to explicate how participants draw
upon theirs. Admittedly, Fairclough at this point may essentially have been
addressing the need to complement textual analysis with socio-cognitive
analysis, but note that such a concern may also betray a failure to engage
with institutional members beyond their appearance as implied partici-
pants in analyses of (complete? bounded?) texts.8 Probably more import-
ant, therefore, is the observation formulated in Sarangi and Roberts (1999:
394), that CDA has been mostly doing research on rather than with
and/or for institutions with critical efforts directed more at affecting
wider political formations which may bring about change in the long run
but are less likely to have an immediate impact on the workings of insti-
tutions. It remains to be seen to what extent such a restrictive stance has
been fed by a prevailing trope of institutions leaving behind a trail of
victims and to what extent there is a link with a correspondingly restrictive
focus on educational implementations in the form of critical text analysis
feeding on such a trope. Be that as it may, my concern here is with the possi-
bility of developing forms of intervention into institutional practices which
are aimed at involving professional, occupational and lay institutional
members, as well as encouraging a perspective in which the discourse
analyst participates in the institutional contexts. Whats more, if analysis is
to be rooted in the interpretations of discourse participants, CDA ought to
turn to a discussion of the conditions under which a dialogue can be con-
ducted between, on the one hand, the institutional participants who put
snippets of text and talk to particular uses and rationalize discourse prac-
tices on their own terms (in ways which may well be informed by pro-
fessional expert systems with a basis in scientific practice other than
discourse analysis) and, on the other hand, the discourse analyst who
cannot possibly find him/herself in a position other than that of being an
overhearer who reports and represents. However well-equipped the dis-
course analyst may be with a rich and complex social-theoretical potential
for contextualizing what is being overheard, s/he necessarily overhears and
interprets.
Coming full circle now, I must call the readers attention to some of the
accentual shifts highlighted in Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999: 35)

44
which indicate a departure from explanatory ambitions in-the-absolute. For

instance, there is the emphasis on a modest yet unrelativistic understand-
ing of scientific truth as epistemic gain, where what counts is relative
explanatory power and contributions to meeting needs as well as a call for
a reflexive understanding of the historical and social positioning of the
researchers own activity. While recognizing these shifts, my specific advo-
cacy here focuses on the need to make sure that the language user is not
theorized out-of-sight. This includes the need to foreground the processual
dimensions in arriving at participant-centred interpretations, without
which the imperatives of interventionist practice will continue to remain
little else than citables. In this respect it is regrettable that Chouliaraki and
Fairclough appear to have abandoned any further need for a conversation
with other approaches to language enquiry, with the exception of systemic
functional linguistics which is singled out as having most in common with
CDA and most to offer CDA (1999: 139).9
Natural histories of discourse
My main contention in the remainder of this article is that developments

in linguistic anthropology offer a way to begin conceptualizing the
neglected areas of participant interpretation and interpretative partici-
pation within critical discourse research. Linguistic anthropology is embed-
ded in an ethnographic tradition of knowledge-production as being
situationally contingent upon conditions of participation and represen-
tation. In itself, the condition of involved observation is an important pre-
requisite for interpretative participation within a specific institutional
context. Additionally, a focus on natural histories of discourse (NHD)
offers a way to conceptualize how analysts (and analysed) discursively con-
struct language events and language data as objects for scrutiny and how
these processes relate to the everyday lay, semi-expert and expert activities
of institutional members. I will argue that the key concepts of (re/de)con-
textualization and entextualization are central to addressing these issues. For
instance, through a brief analysis of one type of entextualization (the
research publication), I will show that the reification of data as detachable
text in social-scientific practice (to which CDA has hardly formed an excep-
tion) is partly responsible for divorcing explanations of discourse practice
from an active engagement with participant interpretations of social prac-
tice (including the analyst-cum-participant). Recontextualization, and its
antecedent concept of contextualization (see Gumperz, 1982), on the
other hand, are essential concepts if one is to grasp the real-time aspects of
language use in relation to the processes of doing language research. As a
consequence, critical dialogue almost by necessity resides in the careful
creation and recreation of context (Blommaert, this volume) and can

45
productively attend to the role which entextualizations play in this (Blom-

maert and Slembrouck, 2000).
Programmatically, the perspective of natural histories of discourse
amounts to an enquiry into the make-ability of text text as an artefact for
analysis and cultural transmission attached to which is the fundamental
consideration that the student of cultures engagement with such texts
forms no exception to these processes. In the editorial introduction to
Silverstein and Urban (1996a) the concept of natural histories of dis-
course is connected to a focus on:
contextually contingent semiotic processes involved in achieving text and
culture. These are recoverable in some measure only by analytically engaging
with textual sedimentations. Each chapter in our collective natural history thus
focuses on certain analytic moments in the entextualizing/co(n)textualizing
process. (1996a: 23)
Thus, natural historians of discourse take issue with the anthropological
idea of text-as-culture to the extent that such a view encourages the analyst
of culture to extract a portion of ongoing social action and draw a reifying
boundary around it, before enquiring into its structure and meaning
(compare with the rather common perception of culture as texts handed
down from generation to generation). To equate culture with its resultant
texts is to miss the point that the thingy-ness of texts is but one stage in
ongoing cultural processes and although on the surface that thingy-ness
may appear to have a quasi-permanent shape (which is by no means always
the case), it travels from context to context and, as a result, it will enter into
new differential orderings between textual artefacts and be surrounded by
changed conditions of replication, response, uptake, commentary and
explanation which may enhance, absorb, maintain or create difference
and will therefore not be indifferent to relationships of power and to the
inscription of categorizations related to competence, gender, ethnicity, etc.
The perspective of NHD equally draws attention to the full range of strat-
egies and modes of entextualization (e.g. transcription, copying, para-
phrasing, citing, editing, recording in a new medium, performing,
translating, commenting, etc.) and seeks to examine the specific ways in
which such performative operations are constitutive of social processes. As
Bauman and Briggs (1990: 78) add, a further significant pay-off of the
decontextualization and recontextualization of texts is a critical and reflex-
ive perspective from which to examine our own scholarly practice.
Recovering some of the shadow conversations in the case of Roy and lost
letter
A shift towards interpretative participation not only raises the issue of the
status and relevance of participant-based perceptions in the handling and
creation of textual artefacts; it also invites attention to the full range of role-
relationships which involve researcher, researched and others whether as

46
actual or hypothetical text producers or consumers heard in the data, as

empathetic or distanced overhearers and/or bystanders who record, tran-
scribe, interrogate, or act as a coach or as mediators who write about, talk
about and construct and frame data for analysis and interpretation, address-
ing audiences of a diverse kind. In this respect, Irvine (1996: 157) observes
in her discussion of role relationships in the context of NHD-research that:
There is no limit to these contextualizations and discourse histories to the
sense in which a multitude of other dialogues are implicated in the one at hand.
By the same token, I believe, there is no necessary limit to the participation
frames that can be imposed on the pragmatic present, fragmenting its partici-
pant roles and recombining them, in a complex calculus of mapping roles onto
persons present and absent (or, internally, onto aspects of selves). The intricate
laminations of participant roles, the many shadow conversations they reflect,
and the discourses they inform belong to the same dialogic process.
To elaborate this point I will draw upon an extended bureaucratic case
which Srikant Sarangi and I report on in Language, Bureaucracy and Social
Control (1996) and which I am staging here dramaturgically as an example
of CDA10 which is incipiently threatened with some of CDAs generic prob-
lems but as I hope to demonstrate can be subsequently rescued from
these through the writing of a natural history of discourse. The case was
prompted by a lost letter with instructions to the bank and a financial
penalty incurred as a result. Our analysis of the case takes up most of
chapter 5 of the book. This chapter analyses the procedures in the clients
efforts to find out what went wrong, who was to blame and how to get com-
pensation payment, but the analysis also serves the purpose of establishing
a client typology in the context of studying bureaucratic encounters: the
client is being categorized as a professional client11 a typification which
is evidenced through a particular interpretative listing of various com-
municative acts performed during the set of written and faxed correspon-
dences and telephone exchanges. The parties involved are the overseas
client (made anonymous in the book as Roy), the British bank, the British
postal agency (GPO in the data representation) and the overseas postal
agency (OPA in the data representation). For my purposes here it is import-
ant to note that the book not only contains a chronologically organized
analysis of the many turns in the case, but also Roys own gloss of the events
as well as his response to the researchers analysis (Roys two entextualiza-
tions are included as appendix 9a and 9b in the book).
Let me first draw attention to one particular disagreement which is
quite predictably revealed in a facts-oriented confrontation between the
three entextualizations. Concluding his response to the analysis, Roy writes:
(1) At a later point in the story, when I am about to ask the OPA for concrete
proof of the letters delivery, you refer to this as the only way for me to restore
my face with the bank. Of course, face was important to me at this stage, but I
was certain that the bank would only accept a GPO (i.e. British) document as
evidence that the letter had been delivered and that without this I would not

47
be able to claim reimbursement for my expenses. As you point out later, my

face is more threatened by the banks failure to reply to earlier correspondence
and their implication that I was lying. In fact, the bank has still failed to
apologise for this insult. It is interesting that you use the word risk here: Roy
is prepared to take risks as far as OPA and GPO are concerned, because this
will help to restore his face with bank. I saw the letter to OPA as the only course
of action available to me, given the circumstances. Maybe I am interpreting
your use of the word risk too narrowly. (Sarangi and Slembrouck, 1996: 231)
The first half of this passage is echoed in Roys gloss of events:
(2) OPA
The claim contained in OPAs letter of 24.12.92 that the letter had been duly
delivered posed a problem. I suspected that the bank would not accept such
an unsubstantiated claim from a foreign postal administration. Fortunately
OPA substantiated their claim by providing a copy of the documentary proof
that the GPO had sent them. (Sarangi and Slembrouck, 1996: 2289)
The corresponding passage in chapter 5 is:
(3) This raises the question why the OPA had not sent the receipt in the first
place? . . . We shall take up the first two questions here and return to the final
question later.
As far as the first question is concerned, institutions can be expected to
safeguard the face of other institutions ahead of clients. Bureaucratic insti-
tutions do not easily give away anything more than the necessary minimum.
This is especially so in critical situations where its credibility or that of a sister
institution is at stake. This may explain why the OPA did not enclose the receipt
in their correspondence dated 24 December 1992. Roy is prepared to take risks
as far as the OPA and the Post Office are concerned, because this will help
restore his face with the bank. As the situation develops, the OPA and the Post
Office become channels (rather than targets) instrumental in his relationship
with the bank. A second explanation is that institutions do not adopt a client
perspective in running their day-to-day activities. In this case the OPA could
not see the usefulness of forwarding this receipt as they were not aware of Roys
actions and reactions so far, or what Roy wanted to establish with the help of
this receipt. Extending this line of argument, we can conclude that institutions
offer information previously withheld when clients ask for it on record as Roy
now says I will then be able to take up the case with the bank. A third expla-
nation could be that institutions feel that clients should treat the reporting
activity of institutions as truthful and not look for further evidence (cf.
chapter 3). When the OPA reports that the Post Office has confirmed the
delivery to the bank, it should be accepted at face value. If clients undertake
to establish the truth by asking institutions to produce adequate evidence, then
there is the danger of clients turning bureaucratic (which is different from
turning professional) a threat to the existence and power of institutions.
(Sarangi and Slembrouck, 1996: 1089)
What is presented as calculated risk in doing x in the interpretative cat-
egorization of a set of client behaviours is being undermined through the
clients own representation of particular interactional moves as informed

48
by having no other choice but to do x. Is Roy just being modest here and
playing down a potential disagreement over what constitutes a risk? Note
also some of the wider differences, illustrated in the excerpts but charac-
teristic for the larger set of textual artefacts: there is, for instance, the I-
centredness of the gloss on events which can be contrasted with the
abundance of I/you-dialogisms in the response to the analysis and the
we (reader-inclusive)/Roy-dichotomy which structures the chapter draft.
Additionally, while there appears to be no overt dialogue with or explicit
response to the researchers chapter in the gloss on events, the response
to the analysis in chapter 5 is self-reflexively prefaced by in the following
I explain my reactions to various details of the narration and analysis in the
events in the bank story. Needless to add, other less straightforwardly
coded role relationships lurk in the background behind the two texts such
as one that follows from Roys awareness that his narration and reaction are
ultimately to be included in a published volume which will be overheard by
the wider academic community in which the two researchers have a repu-
tation to establish and defend. Echoing Hankss discussion of Goffmans
concept of frame-space (1996b: 170), it is not at all surprising that Roys dis-
agreements are conducted within the perimeter of propriety beyond which
a speaker is in violation. From a reading of the book one may also get the
impression that the gloss of events was written independently of and
before the chapter was drafted and that it was followed by Roys response
to the analysis again accomplished in complete independence of the two
discourse analysts engagement with the case. However, whereas the latter
may suggest that the chapter analysis itself can claim equal independence,
there are various traces of the presence of Roys point of view. For instance,
each of the three excerpts below can either be read in a speech represen-
tation-mode (for instance, presupposing in the case of (5) that the
researchers observed signs of relief and were able to link these to particu-
lar events because Roy told them) or in the mode of an omnipotent nar-
rator (in which case, the researchers must be seen as engaging in some
serious and rather disturbing forms of mind-reading):
(4) He decided to write the following letter to the Post Office, enclosing a copy
of the letter above while waiting to hear from the OPA about the outcome of
their action. Clearly, some clients perceive it as necessary to go beyond the insti-
tutional guidelines when material loss and face loss have been incurred.
(Sarangi and Slembrouck, 1996: 102)
(5) Roy was relieved to receive this information, because until now the bank
had not acted or even responded to any of his correspondence. (Sarangi and
Slembrouck, 1996: 108)
(6) He was rather surprised that OPA had complied with his request, despite
his initial suspicion that correspondence between institutions is not normally
made accessible to clients when they are third parties. (Sarangi and Slem-
brouck, 1996: 108)

49
At this point, it is worth revealing that the client was a close colleague
of one of the two authors and that there were intensive contacts between
the two of them during the events of the case. Around the same time, the
drafting of chapter 5 was being initiated and developed over e-mail. A few
months later the second author joined his co-author to revise the first draft
of the book and the colleague two corridors away (Roy in the data) entered
into a new set of role relationships, now joining the authors in discussion
and analysis over many cups of tea while also providing annotated com-
ments and feedback on other freshly revised chapters. At some point, the
idea was raised that Roy write up his own gloss of events and a response to
the authors analysis as well, for inclusion in the book. With this bit of back-
ground knowledge in mind, note how in the case of (4), Clearly, some
clients perceive . . ., it is now no longer clear whether the researchers
observation will be heard as arrived at by deduction or whether there was
a more direct antecedence in one of the many conversations with Roy.
It would certainly be worth spending a few more pages here on how
the texture of the chapter and its appendices selectively foreground some
of the discursive role relationships between Roy and the researchers, while
backgrounding/suppressing others. The schematic representation im-
mediately below gives a roughly sketched overview of the major sites, dates
and stages of (re)contextualization/entextualization throughout the
period during which the case unfolded and the chapter and its appendices
were composed.
1 Correspondence and 2 Recontextualisation/ 3 Recontextualisation/

exchanges involving Roy, the entextualisation of 1 in face-to- entextualisation of 1 and 2 in
British bank, the British postal face exchanges between Roy and various face-to-face exchanges
service and the overseas postal one of the two researchers and in between Roy and the two
service e-mail exchanges between the researchers while revising chapter
two researchers (parallel to events 5 (after the case had ended)
and involving narration,
argumentation and on-line
analysis)
N OVEMBER 1992 APRIL 1993 N OVERMBER 1992 APRIL 1993 M AY 1993
4 Selective recontextualisation/ 5 Recontextualisation/ 6 Recontextualisation/

entextualisation of 1, 2 and 3 entextualisation as a narrative in entextualisation as a meta-
published as CHAPTER 5 of the ROY S GLOSS OF E VENTS comment on the constructed case
book including selective published as appendix 9a in the (4 a n d 5) i n ROY S RESPONSE
citations from 1 as data for book and bearing no explicitly TO THE ANALYSIS IN C HAPTER 5
close analysis and bearing no acknowledged traces of 2 and 3 published as appendix 9b in the
explicitly acknowledged traces of book
2 an 3
MAY 1993 SEPT 1994 MAY 1993 M AY 1993

50
My selective (re)contextualization/entextualization of this particular

instance of research highlights some of the differences between talking
about a situation and its participants and talking with participants or
speaking from within a situation. Although brief and far from exhaustive,
my analysis lays bare how the writing-up process and publication of the book
has resulted in a suppression of the real-time aspects of doing research
(the (re)contextualizations in the background (2) and (3) in the
schematic representation above), while turning three (neatly demarcated)
texts ((4), (5) and (6) in the schema) into independent and detachable
units with specific deictic coding-orientations and restrictive effects on the
scope for representing an actual engagement in an interpretative dialogue
with the social actors in the case analysed. It is quite telling to note, for
instance, that, although Roy does figure once or twice in the first person in
the chapter text (e.g. the direct quotation in excerpt (3) above), at no point
does he feature as a second person addressed by (one of) the researchers.
The chapter text is representationally slanted towards writing about the
participants experience; it does not overtly recognize occasions of talking
with the participant (the latter is left to be inferred from representations
which adopt the participants experiential point of view and which are
clearly worded in monologic terms; there is no on-the-record signalling
that he was actively (dis)agreeing with the researchers or that his contri-
butions in discussions helped shape some aspect of the analysis, etc.). The
case reported on above I hope also makes the point that not all CDA-
research has been equally detached from a very direct involvement with the
lifeworlds of actual institutional clients, although in this particular case
there are alternative ways in which this could have been taken to the level
of representation. In this respect, the two appendices (in covert recognition
of the many shadow conversations) and the rather pervasive presence of
textual markers which can be taken to index the representation of speech
in the chapter text count as dialogic openings, although much depends
on the frame of reference in which the three texts are being read. Let me
now spell out some further implications from the above analysis for critical
discourse research.
A few implications for critical discourse research

The position which informs the writing of natural histories of discourse is
by no means novel. Most of the chapters in Clifford and Marcus (1986) were
concerned with the complex recontextualizations that comprise ethno-
graphic authority enquiring into its nature, tracing its generic histories
but also deconstructing it critically. In Cliffords terms (1986: 14) my self-
reflexive account above counts as both confessional and analytic. Nor is
the occurrence of such a position on social-scientific practice restricted to
the context of (linguistic) anthropological enquiry (compare for instance
Bernstein, 1990, on educational practices as constituted by grammars of
recontextualization). The assumption is indeed that theoretical practice

51
recontextualizes the practices which it examines by dislocating and relo-

cating them, while subjecting them to a logic which is internal to the theor-
etical paradigm and the distinctions, inclusions and exclusions which it
(dis)allows. But to insist on recontextualization as a process which takes
place in and through discourse practice across private and institutional sites
and as a process which rarely succeeds in fully covering up its own traces is
perhaps an even more fundamental realization. It foregrounds the role of
successive entextualizations as well as the critical openings inherent in
textual sedimentations.
Therefore, Urban and Silversteins (1996: 330) concluding observation
that in a culture whose ideology is the stable text, out there in the world,
perhaps we have done our job if we have destabilized this notion further,
in however small a manner applies equally well to practices of data rep-
resentation, interpretation and commentary within the totality of a
researchers daily activities. The questionable assumption is indeed that
data can be picked up with tape recorders, transcribed, inserted into a
research article, selectively re-inserted into a presentation hand-out and
remain unreconstituted by any of these moments of entextualization. In
addition to focusing attention on how, say, transcription practices shape the
construction of an object for social-scientific enquiry,12 the view that recon-
textualization permeates all social-scientific enquiry draws attention to the
full range of representation devices and strategies that go together with
speaking and writing about discourse practice,13 in this way drawing atten-
tion to the multiple ways of framing and inventorizing data, categorizing
and interpreting printed documents, talk and interactional moves under
investigation across different contexts and research sites.
However, there is more to be gained, viz. a simultaneous stress on two
faces of dialogism which, as Hanks (1996a: 206ff.) points out, should not
be kept separate. There is dialogicity in the interactive relation between two
or more individuals engaged in talk and there is dialogicity as multi-voiced-
ness in a single speakers speech along fundamentally social horizons of rep-
resentation, comment and replication (Voloshinov, 1973). In the analysis
above, dialogicity has taken us back from the research publication to the
dialogues of doing research: from the shadow discourses that can be layered
over the entextualizations of Sarangi and Slembrouck (1996) to the recon-
structed shadow discourses of the research process. Given that hermeneu-
tic and epistemological slippage from the sites of doing research to the
representations of scientific analysis cannot really be avoided, it is better to
develop a sensitivity towards it. Therefore, what I am suggesting here is that
a reflexive understanding of the textual trajectories of social science can
contribute positively to establishing what a participants perspective is and
the kind of justice that is (or can be) done to it. Such an understanding
may make the difference between bracketing participants out as fixed
context (in some cases, despite their active interpretative presence during
the research) and alternatively, negotiating with participants over

52
competing and conflicting entextualizations and their likely effects on the

constitution of researchable and researched entities.
The recovery of some of the shadow conversations in the case of the
lost letter has also resulted in a problematizing re-creation of the context
for the talk at hand a process which, almost by necessity, takes a historical
turn. In that sense, the writing of natural histories of discourse is not just a
resource for self-reflexive practice on the part of researchers of language,
it can also become an actively deployed strategy during institutional inter-
vention oriented towards prospective and retrospective (re)creations of
context focusing on power, identity, ideology, difference and desirable
change. One useful stepping-stone in this is that entextualization is also
often a real stake in institutional contexts especially if one thinks for a
moment about the role of records, forms of note-keeping, the translation
of information received on-line into institutionalized categories, etc., how
these affect institutional decision-making, how they revolve around selec-
tive representation and interpretative translation (often with moral over-
tones), how they constrain subsequent institutional action in different or
similar institutional sites, how such practices may index ideologies of text,
etc.14
The points developed immediately above take us back to a comparison
between the CDA and the NHD perspectives. The concept within CDA that
comes closest to recontextualization is that of orders of discourse.
Although both concepts bring to discourse research a sense in which life
within institutions proceeds along particular trajectories, their main uses
point in different directions. This suggests a complementarity as is indeed
reflected in some of the uptake of Bauman and Briggss (1990) seminal
article within European textual studies (e.g. Linell, 1998: 144). Whereas in
CDA, the concept of orders of discourse invites attention to the flow of
power along channels of procedurally related activities, via segregated sites
of talk and/or domain-based distributions,15 for NHD the notion of recon-
textualization has tended to highlight epistemological caution in relation
to authority in the case of competing entextualizations (e.g. Haviland, 1996;
Urban, 1996), a stress on dialogicity preserved in a textual artefacts (e.g.
Silverstein, 1996) and, in some cases, it has also brought with it an explicit
focus on institutionalized transformations of identity through in situ prac-
tices of de/recontextualization foregrounding institutionalized power and
ideologies of text (e.g. Collins, 1996; Mertz, 1996). Thus, while CDA can
usefully elaborate on the theme of contextualization by developing a
greater sensitivity towards context as a problem of (re)creation and con-
textualization as interpretative practice, one can see linguistic anthropo-
logical enquiries into the natural histories of discourse proceed along the
lines of developing a more explicit socio-political perspective on what con-
stitutes occasions of recontextualization within and across particular insti-
tutional sites as well as the role which these play in power-based expressive
economies (Collins, 1996, and Mertz, 1996, serve as examples here).

53
Conclusion
In this article I have referred to one particular way in which critical analysts
of discourse might engage themselves with the question why discourse is
the way it is: they should do so dialogically involving the voices of
institutional members both in actual dialogues and in the dialogues of
representation. To do this does not mean to discard the importance of
social-theoretically informed insights, but it does mean that critical
approaches to discourse analysis must drop any explanatory ambitions in
an absolute, causal sense, for, as long as this continues to be presupposed
in analytical practice, research will tend to be inclined towards an unprob-
lematic concept of text or talk in a static contextual space, with interpre-
tation as something that can be finalized and with social action-oriented
dimensions reduced to a function of the formal make-up of texts. Rep-
resentation is an important element in this, as closure in representation
may easily tip over into comfortable reassurance in interpretation. Thus,
active reflexivity can be interpreted in terms of a productive awareness of
contextualization at work while doing research. Like Blommaert (this
volume), I suggest that there is much to be gained from a view which
situates identity-forming practices in discursive trajectories along
institutionalized paths rather than in single texts or encounters. In
addition, the argumentation developed in this article insists that the same
observation be made for the parts where the textual trajectories extend into
the institutionalized sites of the critical academy. As for the perspective of
NHD, I hope to have demonstrated its considerable critical epistemologi-
cal strength. It is indebted, in more than one respect, to linguistic anthro-
pologys long-standing ethnographic tradition of direct involvement with
the communities studied. However, at this stage, it is not fully clear to what
extent institutional intervention is a priority for linguistic anthropology and
to what extent its practitioners wish to formulate their academic projects in
terms of an explicit engagement with ideology, power and conflict by
doing so, constructing participants actions and behaviours not just in
terms of cultural agency but also very much as institutional practice.
Notes
1 I am indebted to the members of the FWO Onderzoeksgemeenschap Taal,
macht en identiteit/Research Group on Language, Power and Identity for
their encouragement and active involvement in developing this article. Its first
form was as a presentation in the session The relevance of critique in discourse
analysis at the 98th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Associ-
ation (Chicago, November 1999). I am grateful to Mary Bucholtz for comment-
ing on the conference paper. The present version has benefited considerably
from detailed comments and constructive criticisms offered by Jim Collins, Ben
Rampton, Karen Sykes and Annemarie Vandenbergen.

54
2 Although CDA is often described as a Western European tradition, it must be

said that key discussion groups were also based in Australia (in the latter case,
often using social semiotics as a label which highlights affinities with systemic-
functional linguistics).
3 Over the past decade and a half, the list of standard social-theoretical readings
has grown considerably. Let me list some of the additions: Ulrich Beck on risk
society, Anthony Giddens on reflexivity, modernity and expert systems, Andrew
Wernick on promotional cultures, Zymunt Bauman on postmodern ethics, etc.
4 Although in some writings, this view is attributed to the influence of Foucault
and the specific post-structuralist inheritance (cf. the reversal of the
speaker/utterance-relationship in LArchologie du savoir), the view of language
use as also shaping context was heard from the very beginning in ethno-
methodology and conversation analysis as well. Compare also with Duranti and
Goodwin (1992) for a watershed in linguistic anthropology.
5 See also Kress (1989) for a more general historical-linguistic argumentation.
6 At this stage in his work, Fairclough defines ideology as a representation in the
interest of power imbalances.
7 Although he discusses this problem in very different terms, De Beaugrande
(1999: 273) in effect arrives at a similar conclusion when demonstrating the
usefulness of corpus linguistics for critical enquiry, and concludes that it
provides unexpected leads towards relations between discourse and society.
8 Note that Widdowsons (1995) alternative, in which discourse is defined as
(and reduced to) textual meaning actualized by a real reader, is equally
burdened by some of the textualist assumptions characteristic of much work
in linguistics (see the third section of this article for a further elaboration). In
addition, note that my point here is not to disclaim the usefulness of enquires
into textual or conversational meaning. My point is rather that there are also
many forms of socially meaningful engagement with text or talk other than
those concerned with a complete and coherent interpretation. Ethnomethod-
ology (e.g. Watson, 1997) in particular has been interested in the diversity of
the work done by and done to texts (for instance, the main point of use of many
signed contracts may well be to possess them rather than to read them;
similarly, television advertisements may be interpreted actively, consumed
passively, attended to selectively, used as a prompt to start a conversation, etc.).
9 By renewing its dialogue with systemic-functional linguistics, CDA has come full
circle with the intellectual descendants of Fowler et al. (1979).
10 A cautionary note on reception and personal politics of identity: although
Sarangi and Slembrouck (1996: 1889) conclude their book by advocating a
qualitative case-oriented social pragmatic approach to discourse in insti-
tutional contexts, their study has been mainly received as an instance of CDA
(received positively in Chouliaraki and Fairclough [1999: 88], with reservations
in Blommaert and Bulcaen [2000] and self-named as CDA in Roberts and
Sarangi [1999: 32]).
11 As distinct from a naive client (who is at great pains to cooperate with the insti-
tution) or a warrior client (for whom moral victory is more important than a
beneficial institutional outcome). See in particular Sarangi and Slembrouck
(1996: 177ff).
12 See for instance Bucholtz (2000) and Jaffe and Walton (2000). Both take the
issue also to the level of discussing some of the evaluative consequences in insti-
tutionalized implementations.
13 See for instance Blommaert and Slembrouck (2000) who discuss the impact of
data translations and representations of narrativity in terms of evaluative

55
(re)contextualization practice. Compare also with Watson (1997) on the links

between the textual practices of sociologists and lay textual reasoning.
14 In formulating these suggestions, I am also presupposing that criteria of social
scientific validity are linked up with the ethics (and not just the politics) of
client-oriented, practitioner-oriented or policy-oriented research. Equally at
stake are, therefore, the negotiation of relevance in attending to particular
contextual details as well as restrictions on what is the right time and place
for developing a rich description as a spur to judgement and experimentation
(Bloor, 1997: 236).
15 Cf. Sarangi and Slembrouck (1996: chapter 3).
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Stef Slembrouck is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University

of Ghent. His research focuses on the role of discourse in the construction of insti-
tutional identities. Recent publications include Language, Bureaucracy and Social
Control (with Srikant Sarangi) and a special issue of Text on speech representation
and institutional discourse. Address: Vakgroep Engels, University of Ghent, Rozier
44, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium. [email: stef.slembrouck@rug.ac.be]

Explanation, Interpretation and Critique in The Analysis of Discourse

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Critique of Anthropology

Explanation, Interpretation and Critique in the Analysis of Discourse

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>> Version of Record - Mar 1, 2001

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Explanation, Interpretation and

Vol 21(1) 3357 [0308-275X(200103)21:1; 3357;016271]

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felt towards communities beyond the corridors of universities. It is also the

A double intellectual promise with multiple births and

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This included a number of contested developments such as the end of the

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explanatory ambitions. The latter followed from an insistence that lan-

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I think it is fair to conclude that CDA has, in a number of respects, radi-

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aimed at explaining discourse. The difference between the two moti-

CDAs interpretative claims and explanatory ambitions

Let us now examine more closely what exactly is meant by interpretation,

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is to eliminate even that difference: to develop self-consciousness about the

In short, since interpretations of discourse always draw upon members

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extent has CDA succeeded in thematizing and resolving some of the

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to be regretted that a particular approach which is based on the assump-

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scientific findings and increased public access to expert systems, a remark

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which indicate a departure from explanatory ambitions in-the-absolute. For

Natural histories of discourse

My main contention in the remainder of this article is that developments

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productively attend to the role which entextualizations play in this (Blom-

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actual or hypothetical text producers or consumers heard in the data, as

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be able to claim reimbursement for my expenses. As you point out later, my

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1 Correspondence and 2 Recontextualisation/ 3 Recontextualisation/

4 Selective recontextualisation/ 5 Recontextualisation/ 6 Recontextualisation/

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My selective (re)contextualization/entextualization of this particular

A few implications for critical discourse research

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recontextualizes the practices which it examines by dislocating and relo-

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competing and conflicting entextualizations and their likely effects on the

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2 Although CDA is often described as a Western European tradition, it must be

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(re)contextualization practice. Compare also with Watson (1997) on the links

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Stef Slembrouck is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University

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