Hardly Speaking: Ethnographic Rapport and the Ordinary Ethics of Host-Guest Interaction in Upland Sulawesi (Indonesia)

Within anthropological folk theory, rapport has often been represented as pivoting on unproblematic notions of co-presence, fuzzy relations of friendship, and on a primacy of denotational content (see Goebel, this volume). Contrary to this naïve view, this chapter focuses on the semiotic and (meta-)pragmatic components of the ethnographic encounter. Drawing on my gradual and unplanned involvement in the domestic chores of the household where I was hosted, I describe how during my fieldwork in upland Sulawesi I learned how to make offers and elicit preferences in a pragmatically acceptable way. As my role shifted from being a guest to being a host of my host’s guests, I discovered, through a series of misunderstandings, the role of food-mediated commensality in the reproduction of local hierarchies and developed a new understanding of how ethnographic rapport is built through minute, yet meaningful, instances of conversational exchange.