Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Jane E. Goodman and Leila Monaghan -- Body ritual among the Nacirema / Horace Miner -- Culture blends / Michael Agar -- Five principles / Richard Bauman -- Thick description : toward an interpretive theory of culture / Clifford Geertz -- Winking as social business / Jane E. Goodman -- Speaking of ethnography / Leila Monaghan -- The emergent quality of performance / Richard Bauman -- Poetics, play, process, and power : the performative turn in anthropology / Dwight Conquergood -- Narrative lessons / Elinor Ochs -- Greetings in the desert / Ibrahim Ag Youssouf, Allen D. Grimshaw, and Charles S. Bird -- Let your words be few : symbolism of speaking and silence among seventeenth-century Quakers / Richard Bauman -- "To give up on words" : silence in western Apache culture / Keith Basso -- "What we need is communication" : "communication" as a cultural category in some American speech / Tamar Katriel and Gerry Philipsen -- Writing Cousin Joe : choice and control over orthographic representation in a blues singer's autobiography / Harriet Joseph Ottenheimer -- Talking culture : ethnography and conversation analysis / Michael Moerman -- The triangle of linguistic structure / Robin Tolmach Lakoff -- The grammar of politics and the politics of grammar : from Bangladesh to the United States / James Wilce -- Conversations : the link between words and the world / Leila Monaghan -- Conversational signals and devices / Deborah Tannen -- A cultural approach to male-female miscommunication / Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Borker -- Preface and "put down that paper and talk to me!" : rapport-talk and report-talk / Deborah Tannen -- Swearing / Lars Andersson and Peter Trudgill -- Swearing as a function of gender in the language of midwestern American college students / Thomas E. Murray -- Speech communities / R.A. Hudson -- Encounters / Erving Goffman -- Symbols of category membership / Penelope Eckert -- Word up : social meanings of slang in California youth culture / Mary Bucholtz -- Odd girl out : the hidden culture of aggression in girls / Rachel Simmons -- Sporting formulae in New Zealand English : two models of male solidarity / Koenraad Kuiper -- Inner-city teens and face-work : avoiding violence and maintaining honor / Robert Garot -- Speech play / John Holmes McDowell -- "If I'm lyin, I'm flyin" : the game of insult in Black language / Geneva Smitherman -- Power and the language of men / Scott Fabius Kiesling -- Mayor Daley's council speech : a cultural analysis / Gerry Philipsen -- Linguistic ideology and praxis in US law school classrooms / Elizabeth Mertz -- Participant structures and communicative competence : Warm Springs children in community and classroom / Susan U. Philips -- Footing / Erving Goffman -- "An association for the 21st century" : performance and social change among Berbers in Paris / Jane E. Goodman -- Signing / Leila Monaghan -- Variation in sign languages / Barbara LeMaster and Leila Monaghan -- The founding of two deaf churches / Leila Monaghan -- Attacking the bureaucratic language of car sales : a case study of a car sales event / Roger W. Shuy.

This volume introduces students to the varied communicative practices of social communities in the US and beyond. It explores interpersonal interactions in a range of settings: from high school slang in California to sign language use in a deaf church.