Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis

by David J. Silverman

Harvey Sacks's early death in 1975 robbed the social sciences of one of its most original thinkers. Although he published relatively little in his lifetime, his lectures and papers were enormously influential in sociology and sociolinguistics, and they played a major role in the development of
ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. The recent publication of Sacks's Lectures on Conversation has provided an excellent opportunity for a wide-ranging reassessment of his contribution.

In this new book, David Silverman provides a clear introduction to Sacks's work and reassesses its value for sociology, linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. Using a variety of examples, he explains Sacks's ideas on method, language and talk-interaction. He argues that Sack's work offers a
highly original perspective on language and social life and raises fundamental questions for the social sciences--questions which, after more than twenty years, remain vitally important and largely unanswered.

Written in a lively and accessible way, this book will be of particular interest to students of sociology, sociolinguistics, social theory and method, but it will also be of interest to students and researchers in anthropology, psychology, and related disciplines.

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

David J. Silverman is Professor of History at George Washington University. He is the author of the award-winning This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and Troubled History of Thanksgiving (Bloomsbury, 2019), as well as Thundersticks, Ninigret, Red Brethren, and Faith and Boundaries. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, National Geographic, and the Daily Beast. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

[文里 宋 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Conversation analysis drastically overturns the definition of language.