No. 11. "Performance, Speech Community, and Genre," Richard Bauman, Judith T. Irvine, and Susan U. Philips, 1987.

This number of the Working Papers and Proceedings of the Center for Psychosocial Studies is made up of three related papers, "The Role of Performance in the Ethnography of Speaking," by Richard Bauman, "Domains of Description in the Ethnography of Speaking: A Retrospective on the 'Speech Community,'" by Judith T. Irvine, and "The Concept of Speech Genre in the Study of Language and Culture," by Susan U. Philips. The papers were originally delivered at a session on the Ethnography of Communication: Current Trends and Prospects, at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, in Philadelphia, December 5, 1986.

We are now in the 25th year since the publication of Dell Hymes's essay, "The Ethnography of Speaking" (in Anthropology and Human Behavior, T. Gladwin and W. Sturtevant, eds., pp. 15-53. Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington), an appropriate occasioning principle for taking stock of what has been achieved in the ethnography of communication in the ensuing quarter-century. Each of the following papers is a critical examination, both retrospective and prospective, of a foundational concept in the ethnography of communication, assessing its place in the ongoing development of this field of inquiry, including its relation to other key concepts and its relevance to thought in anthropology, linguistics, and adjacent disciplines more broadly.

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