A Linguistic Anthropological Reflection on Interview: An Examination of Interview Data in Studies on Identity

The purpose of this paper is to examine interview techniques critically from a linguistic anthropological perspective. In general, anthropologists tend to use interview as a research method, while assuming that they can gather transparent information that has only referential meaning. In this paper, I portray the interview as a kind of ``communication`` between the interviewer and the interviewee, and I use an anthropological framework to analyze interview excerpts taken from other researchers` studies on identity. I draw particular attention to the structure of conversation, the relationships between participants, and the contextual meanings of the utterances. As a result, three aspects were found to be relevant to the construction of meaning in the interview process: 1) the way in which the researcher controls the topic of the interaction; 2) the extent to which the researcher`s presupposition clashes with interviewee`s and 3) the asymmetrical nature of the relationship between the researcher and the informant can influence the answers given by the informant. The contribution of this paper is to reflect on anthropological methodology by focusing on the interview processes as interaction between the researcher and informant. The paper, however, did not deal with how interview is represented and is used to (re)produce texts and it will be examined in the future study.ope