Discourse Community Ethnography

The discourse community I will examine for the ethnography project is a black market; the network of people who distribute and consume a certain illegal substance recreationally. My friends have had experience with this community for a few years, and I have learned about different genres of communication, types of identities, and the common goals that members of this community share.

This type of community is quite unique, because it’s members are influenced by a number of external pressures. The first and most obvious is the law. As the primary function and activities of this community are illegal in most of the United States at this time, one common goal is to keep the network and community structure secret. This facet of this community affects it’s members’ identity is numerous ways, and also affects their ability to integrate with other types of discourse communities.

Being a sort of ‘secret society’, it’s hard to accurately measure statistics about the membership of this community, but I can safely assume certain things, through anecdotal evidence, to estimate the size and spread of this group. This community is certainly global, and operates in a tier system. The size of this community is also certainly massive, and like any other massive group, has smaller groups that may operate independently from each other. For this reason, I’ve decided to focus my examination on the discourse community I am familiar with, one that is more local.

I feel that it would be extremely liberating, for both the discourse community of academia and for the one that I will examine, to have a serious and honest look at how this community and it’s modus operandi affect the individuals involved, either indirectly or by proxy. I also feel that my examination may shed some light on the nature of black markets and the people involved, and help adjust our view of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, as it often comes down to large discourse communities pitted against one another with different (or, perhaps more similar than one would believe?) motives and beliefs.

I hope to learn more about how membership in a particular discourse community affects an individual’s identity and ability to participate in other communities. The discourse community I will examine is certainly a non-dominant Discourse, and rarely is it ever a primary discourse. In this case, identity in a black market community will be at odds with other identities that an individual must assume when functioning in other aspects of their lives; even more so than other non-dominant Discourses, like Judaism, because being a Jew isn’t illegal (although perhaps we may draw parallels between persecution of a non-dominant Discourse at different periods of time?).

I feel like I can add much to the conversation in terms of the role discourse communities have on identity formation, or in this case, identity splicing. Participation in this community comes with a limit. Entering the community demands a certain type of saying-doing-being-valuing identity kit combination. However, the longer one stays in the community, the more it will replace one’s primary discourse, and the harder it will be to re-integrate into one’s original primary discourse, or for that matter dominant discourses. There is also an obvious psychological/behavioral altering element that comes hand in hand with membership, and while this won’t be the focus of my examination, I will allude to it when necessary, as it definitely has a formative influence in an individual’s identity formation within this group.

I expect to use Gee’s article Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics to help define and prove this group as a discourse community, to help examine identity formation, and in comparing different discourse communities. I also plan to use Swale’s article The Concept of Discourse Community to challenge the notion of a discourse community. Finally, I plan to use Wardle’s article, Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces to help conclude how different notions of identity are connected with miscommunication in groups.