A dialogical approach in an educational conversation on the topic of ethnicity and identity

Abstract

This article presents a look at ethnicity from the point of view of some important sociological and socioanthropological theories and based on empirical data. One of these theories is Frederick Barth's theory of ethnicity. Everyday life communication and the practice of social interaction are the subjects of the study of ethnomethodology by Harold Garfinkel, and it is an important topic in the dialogic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin. In my study of ethnicity, these approaches, since it is in them that communication is given a primary role, are central and are also reflected in the research method - the method of conversational analysis. Two empirical examples from a rural hospital in Kazakhstan show speech genres in which the ethnic category becomes an integral part of the action and an important means of communication. In this case, the interlocutors resort to the ethnic category in order to clarify the identity of the person they are talking about. In such moments of social interaction, ethnicity is important for interlocutors not in the sense of collective group identity, which divides people into groups, covering up a person's personality, but as information necessary for recognizing and clarifying a specific personality. We are not talking about family, friendship or other close relationships in which the ethnic difference has either long been forgotten or did not matter at all, but about relationships where the interlocutors do not have sufficient information about each other. In this sense, ethnic categories can be compared to a certain extent with the name of a person. The author believes that the use of ethnic categories in everyday language speaks about the similarity of people, about their common speech practices, which are often dominated by stereotypical knowledge, about their common socialization, communication environment, worldview that developed at the beginning of the formation of the (multinational) Soviet state.