A Confrontation on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands

Researching how the Australian state relates to the Muslim Malay community on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands (an Australian territory), Herriman and Winarnita provide an example of rapport with a potential research participant going wrong. They see this experience as providing insightful and important data. In this example, Herriman is following a suggestion to interview a new participant when, by chance, he meets with Ifti. Ifti immediately accuses Herriman of wishing to do a study that would enrich Herriman, making him a millionaire (after the study had been published as a book). In addition to providing another example that questions the very possibility of rapport, Herriman and Winarnita analyze this “Ifti moment” as an expression of Ifti’s ideology. Namely, Ifti saw Herriman’s government-funded academic research as merely a continuation of the profits and the historical exploitation of Muslim Malays of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, the majority of whom are receiving government benefits for unemployment, pensions, and so on.

Intimacy through Time and Space in Fieldwork Interviews

Chapter 5 continues to engage with theory, meta-methodology, and methodology through a novel synthesis of work on scalarity, intimacy, stancetaking, chronotopicity, kinship, and narrative. After defining intimacy as “. . . an emergent feeling of closeness in combination with significant levels of vulnerability, trust, and/or shared identities that can very across time and space” (Perrino & Pritzker, 2019), it goes on to provide the reader with a discursive and procedural view of what intimacy, vulnerability, and trust look like. In doing so, this chapter provides a discursive picture to terms that have often been associated with the notion of rapport while demonstrating that close attention to the discursive features of anthropological interviews not only provides unique insights into the co-construction of different types of rapport but also offers further evidence that challenges the notion that one needs to establish rapport before engaging in interviews. More specifically, Perrino explores how the co-construction of intimacy becomes a central aspect of researcher/collaborator’s rapport in anthropological fieldwork settings. She shows how intimate relations are processual phenomena of interaction in speech participants’ oral narratives as they unfold in interview settings in two field sites: Senegal (West Africa) and Northern Italy. In doing so, she highlights how kinship chronotopes are also discursively appropriated and co-constructed as part of both her and her consultants’ ongoing efforts to inhabit particular participant roles (i.e., to engage in role alignment).

Reimagining Rapport

This chapter sketches the use of the term rapport within anthropology, sociology, and sociolinguistics and its relationship to the closely related concepts of phatic communion and communication. In pointing out that the latter two concepts have received much more scholarly attention, it argues for a reimagination of the notion of rapport, theoretically, meta-methodologically, and methodologically. The chapter starts to define rapport as an emergent social relationship that is built during situated embodied encounters. The interpretation of such social relationships requires a reflexive approach that historicizes semiotic resources and social relations. In reimagining rapport, the chapter develops a number of concepts found in linguistic anthropology, role alignment, and acts of belonging, before then introducing the nine remaining chapters, which critically reflect on ways of conceptualizing rapport.

Hardly Speaking

Within anthropological folk theory, rapport has often been understood as pivoting on unproblematic notions of co-presence, fuzzy relations of friendship, and the centrality of denotation—that is, what people talk about, rather than how they talk (see Goebel, Chapters 1 and 2, this volume). Contrary to this conventional view, this chapter focuses on the semiotic and meta-pragmatic components of the ethnographic encounter. Drawing on her gradual and unplanned involvement in the domestic chores of the household where she was hosted, the author describes how during her fieldwork in upland Sulawesi she learned how to make offers and elicit preferences in a pragmatically acceptable way. As her role shifted from being a guest to being a host of her host’s guests, she discovered, through a series of misunderstandings, the role of food-mediated commensality in the reproduction of local hierarchies and developed a new understanding of how ethnographic rapport is built through minute, yet meaningful, instances of conversational exchange.

Rapport in the Anthropological Imagination

This chapter examines the development of ideologies about rapport within anthropology over the last ninety years. It examines rapport’s relationship with movements in anthropological thought from: observation to participation, homogenization to focuses on diversity, the denial of coevalness to the celebration of coevalness, informant to co-participant, and denotational to conational meaning. In doing so, it points to how this development has privileged ideas about positive social relations in fieldwork encounters. This chapter argues that imitations of Bronislow Malinowski’s ideas have helped construct an anthropological folk term, rapport, which was semiotically configured to include co-presence, situated language use, and warm-fuzzy social relations, while erasing much of what goes on in face-to-face encounters. This type of erasure, including the mediated nature of many such encounters, and the contexts in which they are embedded, helped inadvertently produce a focus on denotational meaning in a discipline that was all about conational meaning, that is, context.

Coda

This chapter highlights this collection’s key contributions to social inquiry. It argues for a reimagining of rapport as: emergent; co-constructed; ever-changing from one conversational turn to the next; mediated; linked to communicative events in other times and places; and not to be conflated with positive social relations, such as friendship or fellowship. Thus, rapport can no longer be seen as something that magically emerges at a certain stage of research, nor can it be seen as primarily a result of the embodied practices of the researcher. Consultants actively contribute to the situated formation of moments of rapport, and understanding of all of this requires careful reflexive work that contextualizes the connections between researchers’ interactions with consultants and other communicative events. The methodological implications of this theoretical and meta-methodological reimagining of rapport are many. These include a need to pay more attention to meta-pragmatic commentaries that evaluate embodied behaviors as part of broader methodologies for closely examining situated encounters. While such methodologies are well known to sociolinguists, lesser known to both sociolinguists and social scientists are the ways that fixedness creeps into our analysis and representations of social relations. By reimagining rapport, we can overcome these limitations, while moving toward more sophisticated ways of understanding, interpreting, and representing context.

Rapport with God

In taking up Brigg’s (1986) earlier cautions about researchers imposing their conceptual frameworks on communicative activities that are being studied, this chapter considers how rapport is conceptualized among a diverse array of Muslim Indonesians across time and space. In doing so, it examines the ideologization of the sign vehicles used for the mediation of rapport. At the same time, it provides insights into some of the understandings that constitute preconditions to rapport. In this case, it shows how different languages and embodied practices are constructed as mediums associated with different ways of establishing rapport with God. In looking at rapport in this way, the chapter models one way for exploring local theories of rapport.

Rapport to Fit In—Rapport to Stand Out

This study examines rapport management language used for role alignment among participants in a group interview conducted as part of research on Indonesian youth language. Particularly relevant are repetition, vocatives, use of English, and questions. Role alignments emerge interactionally as participants (re)negotiate varied stances and subject positions and thus manage degrees of harmony and disharmony within the group. While most participants in this particular interview enact fairly stereotypical roles (e.g., as participant/interviewee or researcher/interviewer), one participant uses rapport management language in unusual ways and thus enacts for himself a liminal position between participants and researchers. Role alignments can thus be used differently by various participants in the production and maintenance of differing and flexible identity positions. Rapport is shown to be not only the concern of the researcher during a fieldwork encounter, but also something that community members are attuned to, both with the researcher and with each other.

Alignment and Belonging in the Sociolinguistic Interview

This chapter examines five first meetings of the author (an Anglo-Australian researcher), a Javanese research assistant, and five Javanese study participants. The meetings were interviews within a larger project, which explored how Indonesian youth used language styles to enact an identity known as gaul (literally, “sociable”). In the current chapter, the author reviews transcripts of these meetings and highlights how the research assistant facilitates rapport and orients him (the researcher) and the participants (the researched) to youth identity as a stance object (cf. Du Bois, 2007). The research assistant often does this through a series of rhetorical moves that enable interview participants to achieve role alignment as “researcher” and “researched,” respectively. This chapter shows how such role alignment is an interactional process, which often entails snap judgments about interactional preferences, common ground, and moral concerns. These judgments may be recognized as acts of belonging, which interactants must tend to quickly, to establish rapport and to collect good data. Yet, this chapter ends by pointing out some of the perils of negotiated alignment and belonging, and how discursive moves to establish rapport can, in fact, lead to the collection of less-than-best data.

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.