in this final ethnography, i analyze two different social settings to uncover interpersonal communication patterns among the members of the interaction. the first setting was pretty professional and formal, a codeday team call where we were discussing the redesign of their website. the second setting, on the contrary, was a casual, friendly, hanging out call with friends. a few moments that stood out to me were: when a meme about an unknown third character led to group alignment and character judgement without extra information, when ojas would remember if someone got cut off and ask them to continue (something i like to call "conversational awareness"), and lastly when parnika would shout at saksham but not me even though we had similar jokes. analyzing these moments uncovers: how does power play into humor? can facework, as goffman describes, really be universal? how do regional cultural contexts affect ethnographic assumptions?

for these analyses, i mainly draw on four readings from the coursework. goffman's model of face and footing that explains how people manage impressions and roles during an interaction. cameron's theory of performative identity that shows how gender isn't fixed in stone, but that it gets shaped in the moment. hill's concept of indirect indexicality that showcases how jokes, even if they aren't harmful, may still have underlying subtle meanings about race, gender, or power. lastly, seizer's discussion of how obscenity in specific contexts is normal and doesn't actually indicate harm.

in the codeday meeting, where a formal and professional tone is expected, power was negotiated by humour and interruptions. when ramiz, hierarchically above, uses a metaphor about "eggs in a basket", i make a joke that "isn't that removing an egg?". this, although wasn't something i was thinking about, was a subtle way i challenged him. the group laughs at this, and returns to focus without any deviation. goffman would argue that this was a shift in footing as i joked and went into an informal state for a short moment but we all collectively returned back to the work mode. mainly, this joke wasn't disruptive, it didn't cause any deviation or distraction or elaboration. this aligns with conquergood's claim that humor in performance is both expressive and political, as it can challenge hierarchy without open confrontation.

another key moment in this call was when ramiz was about to speak something, i interrupted him and talked about something different. although i was the one who interrupted ramiz, ojas, after i was done talking, remembered to ask ramiz to continue whatever he was going to say. this act might seem small, but it's a clear example of goffman's facework, repair, something that helps restore power and balance in a conversation. here, ojas has something i like to call "conversational awareness". by being aware of the people in the conversation, he made sure to remember when someone got interrupted and then created a space for them to continue their thought. ojas's move reinforces ramiz's hierarchy and position without making it a huge deal.

like mentioned in the previous paragraph, it wasn't disruptive, but it definitely shifted the power in the interaction. it also shows ojas's frame of formality. as a friend, i know ojas in multiple different settings, which is why i can be sure that here, he is maintaining a strictly formal working mode, as most of his contribution to the conversation is about the work. this isn't surprising at first because a work call is supposed to be for working, but when you realize that even though this was a work call, we were all friends for years and have interacted with each other in many scenarios.

on the contrary, my fieldnotes 2 was a very loose, informal, friendly, people just hanging out and talking type of setting. a lot of the interactions in this call were gossipping, joking, and random tangents of lore. this second fieldnotes actually led to a lot of analysis, more than the first one, in my opinion. one of the biggest ones was all the dirty jokes made during the call. these were "that's what she said", "at least it's not black", "that's small", and "is it too big?" all these jokes may seem harmless to the group, but they subtly reinforces colour associations between white as good and black as bad, indexing bigger larger racial indifferences. this makes a clear case for hill to argue that this is indirect indexicality and subtle racism. however, i would argue that it's not racism. using seizer's reading on obscenity in stand up comedy, i would argue that this is another case of context and people involved. the conversation wasn't one colour dominated, it wasn't new people interacting for the first time, and it wasn't serious. language cannot be separated from the context, the people involved, their reactions, and the shared norms of the group, and even cultural norms. these jokes are all ambiguous in nature. as with anything ambiguous, taken out of context or looked at objectively, will make it seem like something it isn't. i would say that, regardless of the language used, the intent, the contexts, and mainly, the people involved, matter more.

an extension of the dirty jokes in my second fieldnotes, was the power structure of the group itself. when saksham made a crude joke, parnika screamed at him, saying "shut up saksham" in a humourous manner. even though she said it in a funny way, she did in fact shout at him, and he did in fact take it, without challenging it. this shows that if you isolated parnika and saksham, the power is heavily tilted towards parnika. this is clear, because i made similar crude jokes, but she never shouted the same way. of course that shows power, but it also show comfort. the other way to look at this would be to think of comfort. it could be that parnika is more comfortable shouting at saksham as they have a longer friendship than the one i have with either of them. they went to school together for about a decade, and i just met them last year in an event before i joined the team and started talking to them a lot more. it could just be that parnika doesn't feel the same amount of comfort around me to show the side of her that wants to shout. this is another moment of goffman's footing, as it could be that parnika is still maintaining a more balanced footing towards me, as she still is figuring out the relationship. it also reminded me of seizer's claim about obscene language is judged by who says it, not just on what is said. the same type of jokes from different people carries different social weights, because to parnika, the way i am perceived is different from how saksham is perceived.

another interesting moment is when parnika was introducing an external person, nandita, with a meme, and she frames it in a specific way with specific cues to get everyone else to adopt the same stance. we all take up a shared footing and orient toward the same judgement without discussing it explicitly. it also shows the power negotiations in that moment. it would seem that parnika has more power in this part of the conversation as she just got two other people to agree to her stance, and one of those people just got to know about this third person and has no background information. here, parnika was constructing nandita's identity in real time, it's performative. our judgement of nandita was challenged or reinforced every time more information was brought up. this also makes a perfect segue for honorifics spotted in this call. restating what i said in my second fieldnotes, "i bring this up to show two different things i've noticed. one is that these titles or honorifics are attached to a person's identity based on their actions and performance around everyone else in the team, or even among the participants during an event. two, to show that even though, i did not have a responsibility, i am referred to, with a title of "dada", which also goes to show that identity is relational based. it isn't about who you are or what your role is but it's based on how people around you treat you and feel about you in a social situations." this aligns with cameron's performativity reading about how identity is shaped with time and that it's not fixed.

lastly, how people dealt with interruption brings up a key insight. in both my fieldnotes, when someone interrupted someone else, they often remembered this and made an effort to let the other speak again. ojas remembered to do it with ramiz, and saksham remembered to do it with me. this behaviour reflects what goffman described as repair of face threatening acts. they are efforts to restore the imbalance in that interaction. apart from my fieldnotes, i started to notice this in other calls and conversations. i noticed that this "conversational awareness" was way more common among my north indian friends. in my south indian friend groups, this pattern was literally non existent. interruptions would still happen, but none of them were repaired. i'm not saying south indians are rude, it's just that maybe growing up in the southern regions of india, people didn't see interruption as a rude behaviour or as face threatening, so they never gave a second thought of repair. this, however is different from what i've noticed among people who grew up in the northern parts of india. so, maybe for these people, growing up, interrupting someone else was perhaps perceived as rude, or face threatening hence why they made sure to put efforts into repairing it.

this is where i want to sort of assert goffman's theory and push it further. goffman argues that everyone, across cultures, care about their face, and that they will try to protect it in interactions. he also says that how face is maintained, threatened or repaired, is contextual and can change. his idea that everyone cares about face and will try to protect is something i agree with, like when ojas and saksham both repaired and maintained face by this "conversational awareness". but, i also want to push it further by saying that in some regional contexts and cultures, the very acts someone might consider as face threatening might not be the same for others. in my opinion, the very act of face threatening itself is contextual. like among people who grew up in southern india, the very act of interrupting someone isn't even seen as face threatening or something that needs repair, unlike my interactions with people who grew up in northern regions of india. in my opinion, face threats and footing changes exist everywhere, what counts as a threat and how it's repaired depends on cultural upbringing.

looking back, i realize that my presence as both from the perspective of participating in the conversation and from the perspective of analysing these interactions deeply shaped what i noticed and how i interpreted it. in this ethnography itself, i make a claim saying that regional culture and upbringing can shape characteristics in us. it also most definitely can create biases that i might not even notice until someone else points out. as a south indian male, i might have overlooked some stuff or observed some things more than normal. i'm not saying this in a way that this makes my analysis bad. i say this in a way that i love that there's underlying biases and subtle things that don't meet the eye in the first glance. these biases, and cultural values are what makes me, me. these analysis, all my perspectives, all my tangents of thoughts, they're all a reflection of me because of these biases and cultural upbringing. i'd say that doing an ethnographic study isn't just about studying others, but also about understand yourself better, and how your values can affect what you see and how you see something. this ethnographic work has made me realise that i should be more conscious of myself and my traits, to make sure that my beliefs align with my actions and words. it has also kept me wanting to do these kinds of analyses as a third party observer, and for far longer in the future.

although theories from goffman, hill, seizer, and cameron helped me decode many of these rich points and moments that caught my eye in these fieldnotes, they don't explain everything. goffman can help with face and footing but can't really help with regional variations. seizer helps with power of obscene language use in a space, but does not explore how different genders have different access to that same power. hill shows ways of how racism is subtly implanted into seemingly normal conversations and interactions but doesn't help understand that these may have contextual meanings that don't intend to be racist or demeaning. my recordings, fieldnotes, and the readings, by themselves wouldn't have alone helped me end up at this analysis. it's only when we try to combine things from different places, we end up at analysing things that seem so normal on the first glance. interpersonal communication is complicated, messy, and performative, it's always evolving. the same tools by which we conduct humour, work, and build relationships with other people are the same tools that end up reinforcing inequality, often without the true intentions. interpersonal communication is complicated, messy, evolving, and human. this is what makes us human: we're always changing, we're always learning, we're always reinventing.

credits: this was a paper written by vishruth siddi for anth-a122 instructed by professor angelina chen

messy communication: what makes us human