electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies (ejcjs)
Conference and Seminar Papers

KenkyuProceedings of a Postgraduate Research Seminar in Japanese Studiesth

Oxford Brookes University Research Centre, Oxford Brookes University, UK, Saturday 28 July, 2001
Post-Graduate Network in Japanese Studies (PGN)

Talk About Rice: A Discursive Approach to Studying Culture

Kyoko Murakami
Ph.D candidate
Department of Human Sciences, Loughborough University
K.Murakami@lboro.ac.uk

Introduction
This paper1 examines the ways in which people talk about others, in particular those ofdifferent cultures or ethnic origins. It explores the notion of ethnification or how people
ethnify others in talk in a cross-cultural context. Taking a discursive approach informed bydiscursive psychology (Edwards and Potter 1992), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967), andconversation analysis (Heritage 1984), I look at how cultural otherness is constituted and put
to use in talk, I also show ways in which a particular cultural aspect of others is made to be a
topic of concern in interaction and establish its relevance to accomplishing social actions.
Discourse examples are taken from interviews with British World War II veterans, who weretaken as prisoners of war by the Japanese. In these interviews, they gave accounts of their
wartime past and share their views and experiences of reconciliation. The analytical task is
twofold: first, to illustrate how rice is rendered as a member’s category relevant to theinterview talk and how it becomes a discursive resource; secondly, to examine a process of
ethnification, defined as ‘ethnic identity as a situated accomplishment of interlocutors’ (Day1998, 1994; Moerman 1974). Lastly, I discuss the methodological payoff of the discursive
approach as a way of studying culture and cross-cultural issues.

1This paper is reprinted by kind permission of the on-line journal, Forum Qualitative Social Research 2(3); it isavailable at http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/3-01/3-01murakami-e.htm. The author is grateful forcomments and suggestions from David Middleton, Steven Stanley, Jean Valsneer and David Weltman on thedrafts on this paper and for assistance with transcription by Steven Stanley. This chapter forms part of her Ph.D
research examining the social organization of identity, accountability and sense-making in acts of reconciliation
and remembrance by British prisoners of war.

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The discursive approach: reconciliation and ethnification
The paper is part of a larger study that examines communicative actions with respect topeople’s experiences of reconciliation and remembrance of World War II. The study explores
people’s accountability with regard to past events and actions. It looks at the way in which
they produce a version of the past in accordance with their identities and positions, in theprocess of accomplishing social actions: blaming, justifying, defending, arguing, apologisingand the like (Buttny 1993). It also shows the ways in which people claim consequences of
having participated in activities of reconciliation and discuss what it means to carry out
reconciliation in these activities. Social practices of reconciliation concern issues of social
remembering (Middleton and Edwards 1990), in other words, people remember (and forget)
together and recount shared experiences of the past by participating in various forms of social
activities.
From a systematic observation of a large corpus of data gathered for the study, certain topics
and experiences were found to be brought up again and again by the former prisoners of war(POWs) in these interviews. Such topics included food and eating practices in camps,
especially rice and a rice diet. It seems that events and experiences related to rice were central
to POW life and emblematic of the culture of the camps. Extracts used in this paper concern
conversational topics of rice and a rice diet. The ex-POWs’ accounts of rice and rice diet areused to mark the Japanese as cultural other and display their past and present understanding of
the Japanese people and their cultural practices. My aim is to produce some empiricallygrounded observations and discuss how the topic of rice and rice diet is brought off as aculturally emblematic category, and used to accomplish specific social actions, that is to claim
and account for their difficulty with rice diet in the POW camp.
Production of cultural knowledge and its development and dissemination have been aprincipal academic concern for a number of anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers andpsychologists. Their academic endeavours are invested to explicate forms of cultural
knowledge in terms of folk theories, folk psychology and cultural models. The discursive
psychologist, Derek Edwards states that ‘approaches to categories and categorization areclosely linked to notions of cultural knowledge’ (1997: 250). Cultural knowledge isconsidered in ‘the ways in which ordinary people categorize and understand things and events,
including human actions and mental experiences’. Edwards argues that much of the analyst’s
discussions on these forms of cultural knowledge are based on analytical categories thatanalysts themselves conceptualise the culture which they are set to investigate. Consequently,‘important features of common-sense understanding are systematically obscured, such that weare left with nothing but abstracted cognitive sense-making to explain the data’ (251).
Drawing on this discursive psychological approach to studying culture, this article argues thatthe ways in which cultural knowledge is constructed, established and shared is a discursive
accomplishment. Discursive psychologists and discourse analysts are concerned with
explicating how cultural knowledge becomes available to people - the ways in which people
come up with and make use of categories and categorization. A discursive approach provides
an analytical tool to investigate what it is to be (or not to be) a cultural member of acommunity. It does not insist that the analyst generate conceptual categories and apply astandardised measurement technique to analyse the data. This approach provides an empiricalbasis for studying the constitutive nature of forms of cultural knowledge.

49

I consider two studies in anthropology to see how culture is studied in various social science
disciplines. Ohnuki-Tierney’s work on rice as self (1993) is the most relevant work on rice. It
typifies an anthropological approach to cultural knowledge and the symbolic representation ofself through food. She takes a view that ‘food is a way of marking the cultural other’ andexamines collective representations of self, change, continuity, structure and transformations
in relations to other people (4). The work is based on the notion of ‘a presentation andrepresentation of the self using food as metaphor of self’ and explores how the Japanese use
the metaphor of rice to think about themselves in relation to other peoples (e.g. ethnic groups
or nationalities). It aims ‘to show how the Japanese notion of the self has taken on a different
contour as a different historical other has emerged and rice and rice paddies have served as
the vehicle for deliberation, although not always conscious, in these processes’ (5). She
acknowledges a methodological challenge in studying collective representation of
consciousness as follows (6):In a broader framework it is a question of the development of a powerful representation of the self by
the people themselves, on the one hand, and of how to reconcile a dominant representation withapparent multiplicity within a culture, on the other hand.

The discursive approach differs from Ohnuki-Tierney’s approach. Instead of looking at
multiplicity of voices, selves and variability of people's views and opinions and positions as
something to reduce to a model or fit to a conceptual category, the discursive approach views
them as discursive resources for the purpose of achieving social actions such as arguing,
justifying, agreeing and disagreeing, claiming differences and similarities in representing
culture of their own and others. Therefore, tensions between individual and collective
representations and between heterogeneity and homogeneity are not treated as a problem andto be resolved in terms of contested or negotiated meanings and symbolic interpretations in
studying culture and self. In this vein, the task here is to show and demonstrate what people
do with culture, the ways in which they make cultural difference at issue and attend to theissue of self-representation vis-à-vis cultural others. This paper proposes that the discursive
approach provides a basis for showing people’s (members’) moment-by-moment and hereand-now sense-making of their culture, and others, in relation to the past, present and future.
Particularly relevant to the present paper is the ethnographic and conversation analytic studyof Thai culture by Moerman (1973). Writing of his approach, he comments that ‘culturally
contexted conversation analysis tries to limit the ingredients of interpretation, the componentsof meaning’ to explicate ‘members inquiries as locally occasioned, managed andaccomplished, within and with reference to the ‘here-and-now’ circumstances of theirproduction’ (1987: 7). He analyses talk between villagers and an official, and highlights someinstances of locally triggered significance of cultural systems in which rice (and other food) as
identity marker or a member’s category do the business of labelling ethnicity. Also, theinteractional use of the category ‘rice’ invokes social relations of power and authority of state,
which constitute the dominant and dominated in a particular social setting. Such conversation
analysis permits us to see the active situated use of cultural ideas and local production of
meanings accomplished in interaction.
I now introduce the analytic concept of ‘ethnification processes’, with which the use ofidentity categories in ethnic (and linguistic) group categorizations have been explored.
Ethnification processes are defined as ‘processes through which people distinguish an
individual or collection of individuals as a member or members respectively of an ethnic
group’ (Day 1994). Notably Day’s study takes a discursive approach, and views ‘ethnic
identity as a situated accomplishment of interlocutors’ (151). The important distinction he50

draws is that the discursive perspective does not ask ‘how someone's ethnic backgroundshapes or determines what they say, but, rather to ask how this ethnicity becomes a resource
for them - and others to use’ (Day 1998). Within this view ethnicity identity is a topic in its
own right, and its relevance for interlocutors becomes an empirical question.
In the following I will present the data and demonstrate how the discursive approach toanalysing interview materials might apply to cultural issues. The analysis is guided by the
analytical concept of membership categorization and ethnification processes. The analysis
will illustrate the ways in which participants’ claim of difficulty with a rice diet is addressedin the interview setting where participants’ and the interviewer’s orientation to culture
becomes at issue.

Data analysis: the cultural practice of a rice diet in a Japanese Prisoners of War camp
Towards the end of World War II, sixteen British prisoners of war died due to illness anddiseases in a labour camp located in the mountains of central Japan. A grave for the dead
POWs was built by fellow British POWs. After the war local Japanese villagers refurbishedthe grave and erected a memorial. Initially, British soldiers were captured by the Japanesearmy in Singapore in December 1941 and worked on the construction of the Thai-Burma
Railway from 1942 to June 1943. Three hundred British POWs were then transferred to Japanto work in a copper mine until the end of the war in August 1945. Forty-seven years after thewar, in October 1992, twenty-eight former POWs and their family members returned to Japanand visited this grave on a reconciliation trip.
In spring 1999 I set out to interview surviving POWs and family members who took part inthis reconciliation trip. The key interview question was why they decided to go on thereconciliation trip. This question was designed to elicit their accounts of wartime captivity
and post-war experiences of living and coping with difficult times: war-related disease,
trauma, and presumably other medical problems as well. Also, the interview invites them toshare their views on reconciliation and their troubled past. The occasion of the interview
created a participatory framework of revisiting the past. That is to say, the participants, being
engaged in a conversation with a Japanese interviewer, were doing the remembering of thepast events and actions. Such remembering is a socially organised communicative action
situated in a cross-cultural social setting.
Two extracts were selected from a transcript of five-hour recording of a group interview withthose veterans who agreed to take part in the research. They were asked to share and discuss
their views and post-war experiences of reconciliation with respect to their captivity in the
POW camps in Thailand and Japan. The interview was conducted in a participant’s home in acity in the north-east of England. The participants include four former prisoners of war who
took part in the reconciliation trip in 1992 and two of their spouses. These two spouses did notaccompany their partners on the reconciliation trip. The interviewer is the researcher herself.
Extract 1 exemplifies a view that rice is a members’ category with which the participants
display their cultural understanding of rice and a rice diet and establish its relevance in talk.
Prior to this interview segment, they trace their experience of being transported from Thailand
to the camp in Japan. They speak of a drastic change of diet. What is demonstrated here is thatthe participants use ‘rice’ as a category which is emblematic of life at the Japanese POW
camp. ‘Rice’, as being central to the life at the camp, is brought off as a conversational51

resource, while the participants account for what it was like to live and work in a Japanese
POW camp. The ex-POWs’ work of managing accountability entails the presentation of rice
diet an unfamiliar cultural practice of the Japanese, as well as a claim for the POWs’ difficultywith such a diet.
Extract 1. Souvenir from the camp.2
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39

Ted
Interviewer
Pause
Ted
Charlie
Interviewer
TedInterviewer
Ted
Charlie
Ted
Interviewer
TedInterviewer
TedInterviewer
Pause
Ted
SidneyMary
Interviewer
Ray?
Interviewer
Ray
Charlie
SidneyRay
PauseCharlie
Interviewer

I’ve got all sorts of souvenirs.
Hmmmm.
>got a< little or – a little box of that, we used to, you know.
We got breakfast out o’ a little brown bowl (2.) pap rice[(.) a uh, and it was rice (.) crushed ((clapping sound))=[aye=um huh.
In water (.) and they called it like porridge [you know.
[Yeah.
Just a little brown bowl like that. That’s what we got.
That was at five o’clock in the morning.
[Was it six o’clock about ?
[Ye, that was six o’clock.
A six o’clock then you went.
[(.) Then you got a (.) your little box (.)[Hmmmm.
Your bento, was it?
Hum, lunch [box,[and they used [to put rice in there.
[((clapping noise))[Uh huh ≠And maybe if your’re lucky a little bit of uh Soya sauce orsomething in it.
Aye, if you were lucky.
º (hhhhh) º
If [you’re lu(h)cky(h).
[(The first time) the first [time (when)[lucky[( ) just plain rice.
The first time we got those boxes they had been varnishedor something [hadn’t they?
[( ) They were quite …
[No, they hadn’t.
You couldn’t eat the rice.
[O≠hh
[( )

2

The transcription convention used in this paper is the one developed by Gail Jefferson for the purposes of
conversation analysis (Atkinson and Heritage 1984). A glossary on the notation is given in the appendix.

52

The analysis of the extract focuses on the ways in which cultural otherness is constituted
through telling about items that the POWs used to use in the camp and later brought back to
Britain as memorabilia, or ‘souvenirs’ (l. 1). The word ‘souvenirs’ suggests that the things
they brought back are worth remembering. Stories produced about these items give rise toboth personal and shared meanings of the past in the present interactional circumstances. A
tangible object such as a lunch box, which represents a particular past at issue, becomes an aid
for recalling past events that are relevant to a particular conversational setting andorganisation of social relations. In other words, the objects work as discursive resources forentering into a particular moment in the past and establish its relevance in interaction. In thisextract, ‘rice’ is treated as a common reference point, and the talk about rice establishes amutual understanding of what it was like to live with a rice diet and other related cultural
practices that were markedly different from and unfamiliar to their own.
In this extract, ‘rice’ deserves a term which denotes something more than a reference point,
perhaps a membership category? The membership category refers to classifications or social
types that may be used to describe persons in its original definition (Sacks 1992), but it is later
extended to collectivities and non-personal objects (Hester and Eglin 1997). Descriptions ofobjects and events provide for the accountability of actions; they are used to generate excusesand deal generally with ‘attributional’ issues of cause, intention and responsibility (Edwards
and Potter 1992). A fine-grain analysis of the organisation of turn-taking and uptakes unveils
the ways in which various descriptions as to how rice was cooked and served in the camp are
produced in situ interactionally. These descriptions ascribed to the category ‘rice’ constitute a
claim for the participants’ difficulty with a rice diet, and they are subsequently formulated asa problem.
In the opening sequence, a reference to souvenirs is specified in Ted’s utterance, ‘a little box’
to put in ‘a little brown ball (2.) pap rice’ and eat with (ll. 4 and 5), and his detailed andanimated description of what the box is and how it was used for eating rice (ll. 4-6 and 9).
The term ‘souvenir’, as referred to things which the POWs brought back from the POW camp,
seems to be ironic considering the context in which the interview is about their experiences of
captivity and reconciliation. ‘Souvenirs’ are generally a reminder of some positive
experiences in the past, but in this case the experiences may not necessarily be pleasant. But
does the interviewer treat this as irony? Here, the interviewer’s receipt and the brief pause (l.
3) seem to solicit and encourage the speaker Ted to produce a further description and accounts.
The descriptions make reference to a mealtime and crockery to serve rice with, including
details as to how rice was prepared and how it was served and eaten in the camp. For instance,
the exact mealtime is debated among the participants, Ted and Charlie, marking somesignificance of the time of breakfast (ll. 12-15). This exchange makes a point (and even acomplaint) of how little and infrequent the POWs ate at the camp. Issues dealing with foodshortage and scarcity are talked about later.
Let us look at how the author’s identity as Japanese is marked and made relevant in talk. In
line 18, Ted actively seeks the interviewer’s response by checking his memory of a Japaneseterm for lunch box that is at issue (ll. 16 & 18). First, after the debate over the breakfast time,
Ted refers back to the topic ‘little box’ in line 16 (“Then you got your little box.”) and a brief
pause at the end for his pursuit of the interviewer’s response. Then, in line 18, he specificallyasks the interviewer to reply to his question “Your bentō, was it?”. The Japanese word bentō,
the English equivalent of ‘lunch box’, ethnifies the interviewer as Japanese, someone who isassumed as culturally informed and linguistically competent on the topic in progress. The

53

joint construction of what bentō means is accomplished interactionally; the interviewer
displays her knowledge by offering a gloss in English (l. 19, “Hum, lunch [box].”), which iscompleted by Ted with his embodied action (l. 21). This joint construction of what bentomeans not only ethnifies the interviewer, but also constitutes a mutual understanding of theparticular past at issue (ll. 16-23).
The talk in this extract illustrates how Ray’s problem with a rice diet is expounded in therhetorical work that is accomplished with the category ‘rice’. The difficulty of eating rice isdiscursively formulated by the description of the box, a rice container used to serve andtransport rice at the Japanese camp. In addition to the descriptions given by the participants inreference to how the box was used, the speaker’s embodied action, for example, clapping
sound of simulating the packing of rice in the box (ll. 6 & 21) demonstrates a cultural practiceof what was done with rice in the Japanese camp.
Next I focus on the latter part of the conversation (ll. 24 onwards) and discuss how the talk of
the box mediates further telling of difficulty with a rice diet and affords the speaker Ray’s
claim of difficulty with rice (l. 36, “You couldn’t eat the rice.”). How is this claim formulated
as sensible and legitimate without making an explicit blame? The difficulty with a rice diet is
attributed to two features of rice and its cultural practice. First, tastelessness of rice is invokedin Ted’s description in line 24 (“… and maybe if you’re lucky a little bit of uh, Soya source orsomething in it.”). This formulation seems to be ironic, for “maybe if you’re lucky” orients tothe opposite of being lucky, and it is offered as a mitigated claim of the extremity of the hardconditions of the camp. This claim is endorsed and warranted in the way in which Ted’sutterance is duly picked up, that is, the affiliational uptakes of the other speakers such as
Sidney’s recitation of the utterance (l. 26), followed by Mary’s laughter (l. 27), and theinterviewer’s recitation and interpolated laughter (l. 28). The interviewer’s summation in line
31 - “just plain rice” - displays her understanding of the nature of the problem and aligns
herself with the other speakers.
The second feature is the unusual appearance of the box. This is registered in Ray’s
description of the box in line 32 – “The first time we got those boxes they had been varnishedor something, hadn’t they.” The emphatic reference to the rice holder as being ‘varnished’, aswell as rice being served in a little box, exoticises the cultural practice of how rice was eaten.
All these allusions to how food was prepared in the Japanese camp have bearings on the
speakers’ normative expectations of how to prepare food in their own culture. Ray’s claim ofdifficulty with the rice diet as something legitimate and warrantable is achieved by how hedescribes the preparation of the rice.
In the ensuing section, I will examine further the ways in which this claim of difficulty withrice is handled interactionally and discuss the interactional consequences of it. To this end, I
will use an analytical concept of membership categorization device (Sacks 1992). I will argue
that culture is treated as a topic of talk and a members’ concern, rather than it being presumed
an a priori concept. I will then consider the usefulness of such a concept in analysing
discourse.
In the next extract, the participants are discussing their experiences of, and displaying theirknowledge of rice. Various descriptions regarding the category ‘rice’ have emerged and are
attributed to a particular ethnicity or culture of other. In Sacks’ terminology (1972),
describing can be considered ‘a category-bound activity. (1972). He notes that many activities
are common-sensically associated with certain membership categories. Considering that the54interview pertains to war-time events such as captivity in a POW camp, what has beenrealised as part of a members’ category can be highly consequential to the future trajectory ofinteraction and become a source of potential conflict among the interlocutors. We now look at
how those categories and descriptions are introduced and developed, and identify what areinteractional upshots as part of managing the delicate nature of the interaction.
Extract 2. Rice in the camp.
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
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62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77

Ray
Charlie
Ted
CharlieRay
Pause
Charlie
Interviewer
Charlie
Interviewer
Ted
Charlie
Interviewer
Ray
Charlie
Ted
Interviewer
Ted
Ray
Ted
Interviewer
Pardon?
Interviewer
Ray
Charlie
Interviewer
Charlie
Ted
Charlie
SidneyTed

Cos anyway, all our cooks didn’t know how to cook rice,
did they?
Well, ur … they’re quite No … [(unless)][they’re] quite – canny.
Some of the rice was, er:
Not as good as the Japanese rice (.) the rice (.) Japaneseis flakey (a bit), innit, [you know[Um, ummm.
But we got inferior rice as the prisoners of war.
Oh, ye[ah?
[Oh:::h.
We didn’t get the best rice.
Hu[mmm.
[Well, the first rice you got it had been treated withlime, hadn’t [it? Really for sowing.
[It ha:d, aye.
We had lime rice (.) I think it[was used for plantin’ the rice.
[What’s that?
Oh.
A lime rice and was the other one? (.)∞Lime and something else∞
The lime (was to) with the preserve it, er:[as: a seed rice, you see?
[(It was another kind) and it was a [horrible[It’s a brown rice?
Pardon?
Brown rice? It’s like uh (.)
Oh yeah [( )[with the rusk on, you mean.
[Not – not refined rice.
[Ah, we used to get that sometimes.
[Ah, we used to fight for rice polishers (.) Didn’t we?
[Aye.
[Rice polisher(h).
You know when you polish the rice - the-This extract is rich with a collection of descriptions (or subcategories) regarding the categoryof rice - Japanese rice, flaky rice, the inferior rice, the best rice, rice for sowing, lime rice,
planting rice, seed rice, brown rice, and unrefined rice. How do these categories work in55

relation to Ray’s earlier claim of the difficulty with a rice diet in the camp? How is his claim
handled in the interaction? Let us focus on the ways in which the speakers, Ray, Charlie andTed bring off categories of rice in interaction and see what they accomplish interactionally.
The problem of a rice diet is formulated as a legitimate problem for the POWs. Here the exPOW speakers do not make an explicit criticism of the Japanese rice diet, nor do they
implicate the interviewer into the problem of this cultural practice.
In the opening sequence, Ray goes on to elaborate on his problem with a rice diet. By
formulating in this way, Ray implies that a rice diet is not just his problem, but that it is also
problematic for the other prisoners, including experts such as cooks (ll. 40-1, “All our cooks
didn’t know to cook rice, did they?”). Here, as the speaker is normalising the problem, heoffers more descriptions of rice (l. 45, “Some of the rice was er ….”). This is followed by abrief silence (l. 46), perhaps indicating his pursuit for comments from others. Charlie takes
over from Ray, providing a description of rice that elaborates on Ray’s point. Here twocategories of rice become available (ll. 47-48): one is the rice which was eaten by the POWs,
and the other Japanese rice that is, by implication, of better quality and is presumably eaten by
the Japanese. This contrasting set of categories, made by the speakers’ descriptions, suggeststhat the problem of a rice diet is linked to their being British POWs. The problem of rice diet,
originally attributed to the food with no substance and taste, is now being reformulated as
implicitly having to do with differential treatment (possibly discriminatory) at the POW camp.
Let us examine line 49 onward to see how the participants and the interviewer work on thisproblematic statement. In doing so we can examine how multiple categories of rice, delivered
interactionally, contribute to accounting for the troubling past. In Charles’ statement (l. 49,“…but we got inferior rice as the prisoners of war”), we can consider the use of collective
voicing of ‘we’ and as spelling out the identity position of ‘prisoners of war’. This is an
implied criticism of the Japanese. Charlie implicitly blames the Japanese at the camp, perhaps
for their differential treatment of the POWs. In addition, he suggests that it may have been
done deliberately on the part of those Japanese who treated the POWs. The adjective ‘inferior’,
which appeals to the morality (or lack of among the Japanese) in their treatment, and thus
makes the criticism legitimate.
The interviewer responds to this problematic attribution as a dispreferred answer, seeking
further explanation (l. 51, “Oh yeah?”). Ted's emphatic response in line 52 overlapped with
the interviewer also seems to attend to Charlie’s problematic statement. Charlie’sreformulation (l. 53, “We didn’t get the best rice.”) is elaborated by Ray who offers morecategory-related terms “treated with lime” and “rice for sowing” (ll. 55-6). Additional
categories mitigate Charlie’s charge (and suspicion) that the POWs were served with theinferior rice on purpose. Following from Charlie’s agreement (l. 57), Ted endorses thiscategory (l. 58) and offers another category “[rice] used for plantin’ the rice.” The
descriptions of both speakers, Ted and Ray, in lines 62-65 seem to be making sure that they
stay on the topic of “the lime [rice] with preservatives” and “seed rice.” These categories in
the upshot audibly work as a readjustment of Charlie’s earlier problematic formulation, byemphasising technical properties of rice, rather than judgmental or moral attribution.
Not only do the ex-POW participants but also the interviewer participate in talk about rice.
How does the interviewer handle this potentially problematic talk? When Ted speaks of lime
rice in lines 55-6, the interviewer actively seeks an explanation (l. 57, “What's that?”) andacknowledges Ted’s explication (l. 59) as a news receipt (l. 61, “Oh.”). The category that theinterviewer offered, “brown rice” (l. 67) matches up with a collection of categories for rice -56rice for planting and sowing, or “seed rice.” The interviewer claims her understanding of riceserved in the camp by producing the category “brown rice” as one of the various rice
categories. “Brown rice” is accepted by Ray in line 70 and Charlie with his reformulation as“[rice] with rusk on, you mean” (l. 71). The interviewer has another go at producing “not notrefined rice” for reassurance, and this is ratified by Charlie (l. 73). As shown here, theinterviewer produces a few categories and displays her cultural knowledge that is relevant to
the topic of rice. She is not a passive hearer of the talk about rice, but takes part in theongoing discussion, signalling her participation. The turn-taking and production of categories
of rice illustrate the ex-POWs’ work of accountability to address the difficulty of the rice dietin the camp - what it was like to live in extreme circumstances, in which food and eating
become a crucial daily concern. The interviewer’s role is noteworthy here; her participation in
the talk about rice collaboratively accounts for the problem of the rice diet. The ex-POW
participants manage to talk about the problem vis-à-vis the Japanese interviewer without
becoming hostile and making an overt criticism of the cultural practice of eating rice.

Conclusion
The extracts analysed in this paper concern the conversational topic of rice and rice diet at theJapanese POW camp during World War II. Rice was treated as a key topic of conversation in
the interviews with the ex-POW, while discussing their views and experiences ofreconciliation. As demonstrated in the analysis of the extracts, a close examination of talk ofrice and a rice diet allows us to see what people do with a seemingly mundane topic such as
rice, in a cross-cultural interactional setting. By focusing on the analytical concepts of
ethnification and membership category, the analysis illustrated the ways in which theculturally emblematic category of rice is used by the participants and how certain descriptions
and predicates of rice and a rice diet are developed interactionally in order to do the businessof accountability - claiming the participants’ difficulty with rice diet in the Japanese camp. It
is important to note that rice itself is not bound to an intrinsically fixed symbolic meaning as
shown in the participants’ talk about their experiences of rice and a rice diet. Cultural
anthropologists would treat rice in terms of a symbolic representation of self and society atlarge, but here rice is treated as a member’s concern and a discursive resource in performing
social actions, with which interlocutors orientate themselves to what it is to live in a culture ofothers. Cultural otherness is constructed through such talk.
Rice and its related activities are central to the life of the POWs, and therefore are emblematicof the culture of the camp. The talk offers a reference point, or context, in which theparticipants discursively manage a sensitive domain of issues without having to be hostile toone another. This point is evidenced in the ways in which ex-POW participants and theinterviewer display their understanding and affiliation to an argumentative position as in situ
discursive accomplishment. The analysis takes place at a micro-level, focusing on turn-taking
and how sequential organisation unravels ethnification processes of which the participantethnifies the interviewer and seeks her alignment to work on potentially problematicstatements and claims. In turn the interviewer’s accommodation to the ethnification isregistered as part of the interactional upshot.
So, does the discursive approach miss out any connections with with the grand theories ofculture? How do we make sense of our own analytical enterprises without having to address
larger theoretical issues of society - power, social structure, gender and ethnicity, and so on,in studying cultural practices? Are we simply complacent with technical production of57

vignettes of empirical observation and indifferent to the macro-level concern with theorisingand conceptualising culture? The analysis advocating a discursive approach makes seemingly
ordinary features of social life and people’s everyday activities, such as talk, visible to others.
The analysis outlines the participant’s way of understanding and making sense of culture incontext where talk is naturally occurring. Explication of what people do in talk illustrates
people’s way of sense-making activities and how such activities are performed.
Studies of culture and cross-cultural communication have traditionally concentrated onclassifying and interpreting features of data taken from a particular culture. The researcher
then puts forward a universal model, concept or set of explanations of the culture through hisor her theorising cultural phenomena and application of standardised measurement techniques.
In contrast, the discursive approach commits to explicating locally produced and situatedmeaning in the making, so illustrating the ways in which members handle cultural issues andestablish their significance interactionally. The discursive approach employed in this analysis
provides a viable tool as it permits us to see the very moment-by-moment process in talkwhere people’s cultural understanding and knowledge are displayed, shared and established as
relevant. Membership categories such as rice are discursive resources to achieve social actionsof accountability of the past in social practices of reconciliation and other socially organised
sense-making activities.
References
Atkinson, J. Maxwell and John Heritage (eds.) (1984). Structures of social action:
studies in conversation analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Buttny, Richard (1993). Social accountability in communication. London: Sage.
Day, Dennis (1994). ‘Tang’s dilemma and other problems: ethnification processes atsome multicultural workplaces’. Pragmatics 4. 315-336.
Day, Dennis (1998). ‘Being ascribed, and resisting, membership of an ethnic group’. In
Charles Antaki and Sue Widdicombe (eds.) Identities in talk. London: Sage. 151-90.
Edwards, Derek (1997). Discourse and cognition. London: Sage.
Edwards, Derek and Jonathan Potter (1992). Discursive psychology. London: Sage.
Heritage, John (1984). Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity.
Hester, Stephen and Peter Eglin (1997). Culture in action: studies in membershipcategorization analysis. Washington, DC, International Institute forEthnomethodological and Conversation Analysis: University Press of America.
Garfinkel, Harold (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall.
Middleton, David and Derek Edwards (eds.) (1990). Collective remembering. London:
Sage.
Moerman, Michael (1973). Talking culture: ethnography and conversation analysis.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Moerman, Michael (1974). ‘Accomplishing ethnicity’. In Roy Turner (ed.)
Ethnomethodology: selected readings. Harmondsworth: Penguin Education. 54-68.
Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko (1993). Rice as self: Japanese identities through time.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sacks, Harvey (1992). Lectures on conversation. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Appendix[
Underliningº I know it º()(.)((text))she wa::nted
hhh.hhhbu-u>he said<<he said>
solid.= =We said
Sto(h)p i(h)t.

Overlap begins.
Signals vocal emphasis.
‘Degree’ signs enclose obviously quieter speech.
Inaudible, indecipherable utterance, uncertain hearing.
Micropause, audible but too short to measure.
Additional comments from the transcriber, e.g. gesture, context orintonation.
Prolonged syllable or sound stretch.
Audible aspiration or laughter.
Audible inhalation.
Hyphens mark off a cut-off of the preceding sound.
‘Greater than’ and ‘less than’ signs enclose accelerated talk.
The same signs inverted enclose slower talk.
Latched utterance (with no interval between words).
Laughter within speech is signaled by ‘h’s in parentheses, audibleaspiration within a word.

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