Language Arts & Disciplines Sociolinguistics
Talking Violence
An Anthropological Interpretation of Conversation in the City
- Publisher
- Memorial University Press
- Initial publish date
- Jan 1987
- Category
- Sociolinguistics, Cultural, Urban
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Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780919666566
- Publish Date
- Jan 1987
- List Price
- $21.95
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Where to buy it
Description
Talking Violence is a conversational journey around St. John's, reconstructing the repeated discussions about violence heard in bars, cars, courts-of-law, halfway houses, hospitals and the university. Rapport offers an interpretation of these conversations; arguing that language should not be viewed as an instrument of coercion directing its users to the reproduction of a monolithic social structure, but rather as a vehicle of creativeness allowing people to construct local identities for themselves and their own worlds of meaning.
About the author
Educated at Cambridge and Manchester Universities, and a Fellow of the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Nigel Rapport has conducted fieldwork in the Yorkshire Dales and Newfoundland, and held research and teaching posts in social anthropology at Manchester and Memorial.