2010. Discourse and Interaction in the Upper Amazon. Supplemented by Research Interviews in Spanish.

 

Spektrum. Berlin Series on Society, Economy and Politics in Developing Countries. Vol. 105. 520 pages.

 

Berlin, Münster, Wien, Zürich, London: LIT Verlag.

ISBN 978-3-643-11006-0.

 

Available at:

 

http://www.litwebshop.de/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=11&products_id=6937 

Key words:

  • Interview research
  • Interview situation
  • Face-to-face encounter
  • Context
  • Relationship
  • Stages
  • Meaning
  • Freshwater fish trade
  • Reanalysis
  • Peru
  • Iquitos

 

  • This book places the interview situation at center stage. It presents the interviews to highlight the evolvement of its content and its interactional process and progress in the course of several interviews with Elías Anselmi Salgado.[1] Anselmi is a merchant of dried and salted fish in the Peruvian north-eastern town of Iquitos, which is located in the Upper Amazon. He is one of 92 interviewees I talked to over a period of ten months, and stands out as an informed, eloquent and confident narrator.

 

  • Chapter I describes how I established contact and conducted a number of interviews with Anselmi, as well as the contextual situation of freshwater fish trade enterprises in that area, with special reference to Anselmi’s type of enterprise.

 

  • The first half of Chapter II lays out the objectives of presenting the interviews at length and in Spanish, explains the ethical principles that I followed through the different stages of research, and describes the rules that I applied while transcribing the tape-recorded interviews; the second half consists of the 25 interview transcripts.

 

  • Chapter III deals with the theoretical background to conducting and analyzing interviews with regard to discourse and interaction. It presents relational methodologies of conversation and interviewing aimed at eliciting detailed accounts which encompass the emergence of meaning.

 

  • Chapter IV introduces the notions of process, progress, identity, and relationship to describe the dynamics of discourse and interaction within the interview situation with Anselmi, and examines the interviews through the lens of those concepts.

 

  • Chapter V summarizes the research foci and the chosen approaches to analyzing (a) the interview content on the transactions and institutions of freshwater fish trade and (b) the successive face-to-face encounters with respect to their interactional dynamics and the quality of discourse. It identifies the relational and discursive stages Anselmi and I have passed through and concludes with remarks on requirements for discourse and interaction in conversational and interview contexts.

[1] For ethical reasons the names of interviewees have been changed and are represented by aliases.

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