Análisis del discurso académico de la Antropología Social

Abstract

Within the disciplinary community of social anthropology, ethnography is understood as an approach, a method, and a text (Guber, 2001). The ethnographies, the object of this research, represent the textualization resulting from fieldwork (Marcus & Cushman, 1982). This article presents an analysis of ethnographies published in specialized Argentine journals, from the perspective of the complex genre or macrogenre (Martin, 1992). To this end, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) provides the theoretical framework for the analysis of academic discourse, in particular the stratified concept of genre, register, and language (Eggins & Martin, 2003). Under the category of complex genre or macrogenre, ethnography integrates basic genres such as narrative, descriptive, and argumentative through ideational strategies of projection and expansion (extension, elaboration, and amplification). Furthermore, to address the study of these extensive texts, the concepts of macrotheme and macrorheme allow us to understand the structure and the particular rhetorical-functional framework in which macrorhetorical movements can be identified (Hasan and Reza, 2004). This work aims to contribute to the understanding of specific discursive practices within the disciplinary field of anthropology and, complementarily, to evaluate the usefulness of LSF's theoretical tools for the analysis of academic discourse.