Watkins Susan Cotts, Swidler Ann
Visiting Research Scientist UCLA, Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, California Center for Population Research, Institute for Social Science Research, 4284 Public Policy Building, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1484,
Poetics (Amst). 2009 Apr;37(2):162-184. doi: 10.1016/j.poetic.2009.03.002.
Social scientists have long struggled to develop methods adequate to their theoretical understanding of meaning as collective and dynamic. While culture is widely understood as an emergent property of collectivities, the methods we use keep pulling us back towards interview-situated accounts and an image of culture as located in individual experience. Scholars who seek to access supra-individual semiotic structures by studying public rituals and other collectively-produced texts then have difficulty capturing the dynamic processes through which such meanings are created and changed in situ. To try to capture more effectively the way meaning is produced and re-produced in everyday life, we focus here on conversational interactions-the voices and actions that constitute the relational space among actors. Conversational journals provide us with a method: the analysis of texts produced by cultural insiders who keep journals of who-said-what-to-whom in conversations they overhear or events they participate in during the course of their daily lives. We describe the method, distinguishing it from other approaches and noting its drawbacks. We then illustrate the methodological advantages of conversational journals with examples from our texts. We end with a discussion of the method's potential in our setting as well as in other places and times.
长期以来，社会科学家一直在努力开发出足以符合他们对意义的理论理解的方法，这种意义是集体性的且具有动态性。虽然文化被广泛理解为集体的一种涌现属性，但我们所使用的方法却一直将我们拉回到基于访谈情境的描述，以及将文化视为存在于个体经验中的一种形象。那些试图通过研究公共仪式和其他集体创作的文本，来探寻超个体符号结构的学者，在捕捉这些意义在现场被创造和改变的动态过程时会遇到困难。为了更有效地捕捉意义在日常生活中产生和再产生的方式，我们在此聚焦于对话互动——构成行动者之间关系空间的声音和行动。对话日志为我们提供了一种方法：分析由文化内部人士所产生的文本，这些人会记录他们在日常生活中无意中听到的对话或参与的事件中谁对谁说了什么。我们描述这种方法，将其与其他方法区分开来，并指出其缺点。然后，我们用文本中的例子来说明对话日志的方法优势。最后，我们讨论这种方法在我们所处环境以及其他地方和时间的潜力。
