INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION

Summary

When we published Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking back in 1974, we framed the work as ushering in a new phase of research in the ethnography of speaking. The first phase, beginning with the publication of Dell Hymes's foundational essay, ‘The Ethnography of Speaking,’ in 1962 and proceeding through the early 1970s, was preliminary and programmatic, marked by a series of articles and edited collections that sought to define this new subfield of linguistic anthropology and to suggest what kinds of research might be carried out under its aegis (see Preface; Bauman and Sherzer 1975). Much of this work was seen to be converging and contributing toward the ethnography of speaking, but not yet exemplifying it, insofar as little research published in that first period was expressly and primarily undertaken for a purpose that might appropriately be called the ethnography of speaking, that is, carrying out the program outlined by Hymes and Gumperz. By the early 1970s, however, the ethnography of speaking had finally developed to a point where a number of scholars had taken up the repeated calls for fieldwork issued in the first decade and carried out original research guided by its principles. Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking grew out of our mutual concern to present the first fruits of that research and to attempt to synthesize its results – however exploratory that synthesis might be – in a way that might help to shape the subsequent development of the field.