Involvement in linguistic practice: An ethnographic appraisal

This paper is a critical examination of ‘involvement’ as an analytic category in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. The discussion first identifies a variety of conceptual problems associated with the nature and locus of involvement. Then a number of ethnographic studies focusing on the relationship between language use, emotionally, society, and culture are described, and the usefulness of involvement as a descriptive and theoretical tool is evaluated. This paper shows that involvement, a notion which assumes Western views of interaction, emotionality, and personhood, does not adequately capture the essence of the interactional dynamics described in these ethnographic reports. An alternative agenda is outlined, in which the relationship between emotionality and linguistic practices is solidly grounded in a critical examination of the cultural and social dynamics in which it is embedded.