Notes for an ethnographic, critical, and multimodal analysis: on some discursive genres of presentation and offer

Abstract

The article proposes a methodological framework for analyzing texts and the respective (sub)genres they represent, more or less on a prototypical basis. The framework is based on the confluence of the ethnography of communication with critical discourse analysis, together with the consideration of several issues arising from the multimodal nature of texts. While ethnographic description places the text in its context of production and interpretation, and suggests some of its keys or relevant points, critical analysis makes their interpretation possible — in social interaction — without forgetting the power relations and ideologies which underlie the processes involved in producing and understanding oral or written discourse. The need for a multimodal component analysis is evident from the nature of the texts themselves and from the impossibility of analyzing them as purely or strictly verbal products. In this study the basic examples used are, on the one hand, cards which serve as prototypical presentation of seers and shamans (distributed in public), and on the other, examples of junk mail advertising electronic and computer appliances. In many ways these sets of cases represent the two extremes of a symbolic multimodal discourse: the use of the most modest resources (monochrome, crude, with very poor graphic capabilities and no images) versus the more baroque resources (polychrome, focusing on images, offering a range of resources, and much more elaborate); at the same time, a highly personalized reference (focusing on the supernatural abilities of an individual) against another very depersonalized one (focusing on objects and prices).