Moira Inghilleri ~ Goldsmiths College
Macro social theory and linguistic ethnography: 
a bridge (too far)?
This paper will consider the role that macro-theoretical perspectives can contribute to the development of research identified as 'linguistic ethnography'.  It will consider this issue through on-going research on interpreting activity in the political asylum system in the UK.  
This research has been concerned to theorise configurations of the social in relation to local, interactional contexts of interpreting throughout the asylum system and to consider how interpreters, as pivotal players in these contexts, contribute to the production or reproduction of the existent social order. While the primary focus is on the macro-institutional, however, the approach is empirical. 
Data is derived from an ethnographic approach, including observation of relevant sites and interviewing of key participants drawn from each level of organisational structure. Bourdieu's notions of field and habitus lend important theoretical support to the view taken in the research of interpreting as a socially constituted activity.
Rather than taking micro-textual features per se as the primary locus of data, this research takes the macro-social as its starting point in order to address the fundamental issue of what constraints there are on interpreting more broadly. 
Its methodological concerns are not with the micro-level features of interpreted exchanges themselves, but with how these exchanges are socially and institutionally-framed.  The perspective taken is that the ways interpreters work – the particular ‘communicative competencies’ that they bring to an interpreted event - are influenced by the social and political contexts in which both their work and the training that may inform their professional practice occurs.  It maintains that interpreters – though not unreflexively – are caught up in larger social configurations of power and control – both internal and external to their professional field of practice. 
References
Inghilleri, M. (2003) Habitus, field and discourse: Interpreting as a socially-situated activity,International Journal of Translation Studies, 15, 2, 243-268.
Inghilleri, M. (2005) 'Mediating Zones of Uncertainty: interpreter agency, the interpreting habitus and political asylum adjudication', The Translator, 11, 1, 69-85. (ISSN 1355-6509)