Enfield-Sidnell2017
Enfield-Sidnell2017 | |
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BibType | BOOK |
Key | Enfield-Sidnell2017 |
Author(s) | N. J. Enfield, Jack Sidnell |
Title | The Concept of Action |
Editor(s) | |
Tag(s) | EMCA, Linguistic Anthropology, Action |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Year | 2017 |
Language | English |
City | Cambridge |
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Number | |
Pages | 242 |
URL | Link |
DOI | |
ISBN | 9780521895286 |
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Edition | |
Series | New Departures in Anthropology |
Howpublished | |
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Abstract
When people do things with words, how do we know what they are doing? Many scholars have assumed a category of things called actions: 'requests', 'proposals', 'complaints', 'excuses'. The idea is both convenient and intuitive, but as this book argues, it is a spurious concept of action. In interaction, a person's primary task is to decide how to respond, not to label what someone just did. The labeling of actions is a meta-level process, appropriate only when we wish to draw attention to others' behaviors in order to quiz, sanction, praise, blame, or otherwise hold them to account. This book develops a new account of action grounded in certain fundamental ideas about the nature of human sociality: that social conduct is naturally interpreted as purposeful; that human behavior is shaped under a tyranny of social accountability; and that language is our central resource for social action and reaction.
Proposes a view of social action with unprecedented commitment to empirical data, allowing readers to evaluate current views of action based on how language is actually used Presents a new theory of social action through language, challenging long-held ideas of the nature of speech acts
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