Full Description
Bushnell and Moody present a rich investigation into the navigation of friendships, adopting discursive and ethnographic perspectives to examine Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English interactional data.
Since the definition of friendship is hard to pin down, most sociocultural anthropologists have tended to focus on issues of kinship and descent, while leaving friendship as a residual or interstitial issue. However, this book puts friendship as the central focus and offers unique perspectives from the participants themselves. The interactional work implicated in the accomplishment of making and being friends, and the trials and tribulations of friendship, are both explored through the many detailed analyses showing how the participants navigate the calm and rough waters of friendship in and through their everyday interactions.
Researchers, undergraduates, and postgraduate students in the fields of conversation analysis, pragmatics, and other social sciences will benefit from the real-life examples in the book as well as the analysis.
Contents
Navigating friendships in interaction: Introduction 1. Doing "being friends" in conversation-for-learning: From language learner-tutor to buddies 2. "Awkward moments" during first-time informal online ELF interaction and their social relational consequences 3. Getting to know you: A microethnograpy of "(not) making friends" in first-time interactions in Japanese 4. Social relationships and institutional roles: Categorizing "novice" and "expert" in foreign language housing 5. Voicing the belonging: Joking practices with deviant Japanese among international students at a Japanese university 6. Pointing out shared commonalities: An investigation into pointing-initiated affiliative sequences as interactional co-displays of friendship 7. Togetherness to build friendship: Rhythmic synchrony through mutual reactions in Japanese multi-party interaction 8. "She says she's going to buy leather boots": Displays of (dis)affiliation in friends' responses to reported complaints 9. "There is no love among us": Jocular mockery in Chinese mealtime conversation 10. "Ijiri" as a poetic ritual of bonding among Japanese college soccer club members 11. Say that to my face: Maintaining an intimate relationship after face threatening through negative evaluation 12. "Feeling close" while "being close"? Toward integrating discursive approaches with evolutionary perspectives on friendships
