Ethnography of Communication: Analysing Literature as a Cultural Artifact

This paper explores Hymes approach to analyzing language, widely known as Ethnography of communication. The approach provides an important methodological tool in investigating the relationship between text, society and culture. Based on multidisciplinary approach, ethnography of communication examines how a text shapes and is shaped by social and cultural contexts. It investigates texts within a particular culture or speech community by considering factors of social and cultural contexts: setting, participants, purpose, speech acts and norms relating the text and speech. This paper draws attention to the main argument of the approach that a language use is not just about the words used by its users, but also about the social and cultural practices, beliefs, and norms that influence how the language is used, shapes and is shaped by social and cultural factors. Discussing Hymes framework of communication, this paper focuses on important concepts like speech community, speech situation, speech event, speech acts, components of speech events. The paper also distinguishes between Chomskyan notion of competence with the Hymes notion of communicative competence as the true object of inquiry in the study of language use. Focusing on the theoretical foundations, the paper highlights methodological strengths of the approach over other methods of literature analysis especially the relevance of social and cultural context as a crucial factor in analyzing texts as cultural artifacts. Although, the model was developed for language analysis of indigenous speech communities, the paper argues the relevance and usefulness of the model in analyzing literary texts as cultural artifacts. The paper emphasizes the unique position ethnographic approach offers by providing insights into how the social and cultural factors, for instance identity, social status, prestige, relationship, are responsible for shaping text and speech.