Introduction / Body ritual among the Nacirema / Culture blends / Five principles / Thick description : toward an interpretive theory of culture / Winking as social business / Speaking of ethnography / The emergent quality of performance / Poetics, play, process, and power : the performative turn in anthropology / Narrative lessons / Greetings in the desert / Let your words be few : symbolism of speaking and silence among seventeeth-century Quakers / "To give up on words" : silence in western Apache culture / "What we need is communication" : "communication" as a cultural category in some American speech / Writing Cousin Joe : choice and control over orthographic representation in a blues singer's autobiography / Talking culture : ethnography and conversation analysis / The triangle of linguistic structure / The grammar of politics and the politics of grammar : from Bangladesh to the United States / Conversations : the link between words and the world / Conversational signals and devices / A cultural approach to male-female miscommunication / Preface and "put down that paper and talk to me!" : rapport-talk and report-talk / Swearing / Swearing as a function of gender in the language of midwestern American college students / Speech communities / Encounters / Symbols of category membership / Word up : social meanings of slang in California youth culture / Odd girl out : the hidden culture of aggression in girls / Sporting formulae in New Zealand English : two models of male solidarity / Inner-city teens and face-work : avoiding violence and maintaining honor / Speech play / "If I'm lyin, I'm flyin" : the game of insult in Black language / Power and the language of men / Mayor Daley's council speech : a cultural analysis / Linguistic ideology and praxis in US law school classrooms / Participant structures and communicative competence : Warm Springs children in community and classroom / Footing / "An association for the 21st century" : performance and social change among Berbers in Paris / Signing / Variation in sign languages / The founding of two deaf churches / Attacking the bureaucratic language of car sales : a case study of a car sales event