Sociolinguists and Rapport

‘Rapport’ in fieldwork involves the temporary interactional suspension of strangerhood and distance. In traditional ethnography, it has positive value as a fieldwork ideal sketched in advisory rules of thumb. But in reflexive contemporary sociolinguistics, rapport looks like a craft term concealing a great deal of ideological work, covering ethnocentricity in gate-keeping encounters and ‘synthetic personalization’ in consumer culture. Can these two traditions be reconciled and if so, how? The paper proposes playback—retrospective participant commentary on recordings of interaction—as a productive reconfiguration of rapport that avoids the bad faith with which rapport is so easily identified.