This chapter and the next will present a critical review of the more common data-collection techniques and analytical procedures currently practiced by professional linguistic anthropologists. With the exception of occasional references to practical questions, this chapter will emphasize the logic of research habits and procedures rather than the technical solutions needed to solve common research problems. In a few cases, I will briefly discuss what I consider some of the most innovative and interesting ways of documenting the role of communication in the constitution of culture. A more specific discussion of the practice of transcription will be done in chapter 5.

Linguistic anthropologists use traditional ethnographic methods such as participant-observation and work with native speakers to obtain local interpretive glosses of the communicative material they record. They also use elicitation techniques similar to those employed by typological linguists interested in grammatical patterns. Recently, these methods have been integrated with new forms of documentation of verbal practices developed in such fields as urban sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and conversation analysis. The advent of new technologies for the electronic recording of sounds and actions has broadened the range of phenomena that can be studied, increased our analytical sophistication, and, at the same time, multiplied the number of technical, political, and moral problems that a fieldworker must confront.