Language & Communication 32 (2012) 277–292

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Language & Communication

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Non-alignment in footing, intentionality and dissent in talk aboutimmigrants in Italy

Valentina Pagliai ⇑CUNY Queens College, Powdermaker Hall 314c, 65-30 Kissena Blvd, Flushing, NY 11367, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history:Available online 11 August 2012

0271-5309/$ - see front matter � 2012 Elsevier Ltdhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2012.06.002

⇑ Tel.: +1 718 997 5510.E-mail address: v.pagliai@yahoo.com

1 My fieldwork research was carried out betweenPistoia) and included participant observation and fieldlocal government or anti-racist associations, focus geveryday conversations, more than 149 hours of convand public dinners, shops, conversations in recreatioarticle are pseudonyms.

2 Or around anti-racializing discourses. Argumenta

In this article I argue that non-alignment in footing can be performed as an argumentativetool, and as a strategy to disengage from conversations or to avoid voicing an opinion. Thisis relevant to contexts where people engage in racializing discourses toward immigrants.Here non-alignment in the framing of events can veil disagreement or can force an inter-locutor to unveil particular stances, such as racializing ones. Toward understanding howfooting can be used in these ways, I distinguish two ways of interpreting non-alignment,that I call ‘misalignment’ and ‘disalignment.’ I argue that these are managed differentlyin interaction and that their distinction depends on the shifting and co-constructed natureof the attribution of intentions in interaction.

� 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Imagine a conversation between a barber and a client in a barbershop, in Tuscany. The client states that he is now workingwith ‘‘serious workers’’ and no longer with Albanians. This statement invokes a common discourse in Tuscany of Albanianimmigrants as lazy and possible troublemakers, a discourse that racializes Albanians insofar as these characteristics are con-sidered genetic and connected to a biologized view of culture (see Taguieff, 1987; Events Foundation, 2002; Baumann, 1996;Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991; Stolcke, 1993). The client appears to assume shared background knowledge with the barber,which would allow understanding. The barber at this point could participate in the assessment of Albanians, either agreeingto uphold such a view, or disagreeing and rejecting it. But the barber does neither. Instead, he asks: ‘‘why were Albanians notserious?’’ Namely, he treats the statement as new information and displays that he does not share the background knowl-edge for the talk. Yet it is hard to believe that the barber knew nothing of such widespread local discourse. So, what wasexactly going on here?

In my work on racialization of migrants in Italy I have been exploring ways in which people do being racist in everydayinteractions as well as how they may uphold or refuse racializing discourses.1 While in some cases the participants upholdincipient racializations (Pagliai, 2009), in other cases they do not, and disaffiliate from racializing stances, or argue against them.Withdrawing from the conversation, changing topics or displaying lack of background knowledge may also show how the par-ticipants resist voicing an opinion, or committing to a state of affairs, around racializing stances and discourses.2

. All rights reserved.

2005 and 2009 in the Tuscan Metropolitan Area (extending between the cities of Florence, Prato andnotes, videorecording of everyday conversations, interviews with local persons and with members of theroup interviews with members of recreational clubs, and media watch. During the videorecording ofersations were recorded. The contexts included barbershops, hair dressing salons, private dinners, feasts

nal clubs or public areas. The identity of the participants is held confidential; all the names used in this

tive language per se can be deployed to dissent with anti-racist discourse as well as with racializing one.

278 V. Pagliai / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 277–292

To understand what is happening in interactions like the one I sketched at the beginning, I reconsider the concept of align-ment in footing as separate from, albeit connected to, affiliation, both of them being in turn part of stancetaking.3

A similar distinction has been proposed by Stivers, who argues that alignment and affiliation refer to very differentactivities in conversation, which can be independently enacted and are interpreted separately by the interactants (2008,pp. 31–32). Stivers notes: ‘‘In contrast to alignment, with the term affiliation I mean that the hearer displays support ofand endorses the teller’s conveyed stance’’ (2008, p. 35). In her work, Stivers clearly distinguishes between forms of feedbackthat communicate alignment (such as vocal continuers) from those that communicate affiliation (such as nods in mid-tellingpositions) (2008, p. 32 and fol.) and she notes that ‘‘aligned responses are not necessarily affiliative’’ (2008, p. 36).

In Erving Goffman’s original formulation, ‘‘A change in footing implies a change in the alignment we take up to ourselvesand the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance. A change in our foot-ing is another way of talking about a change in our frame for events’’ (1981, p. 128; emphasis mine). Goffman saw frames as‘‘schemata of interpretation’’ (1974, p. 21) and later Tannen defined them as ‘‘structures of expectation based on past expe-riences’’ (1993, p. 53). Locher notes that frames can be considered as that part of context, which should be understood asdynamically shaped by interaction rather than static (Locher, 2004, p. 49; see also Goodwin and Duranti, 1992). This last con-sideration points at an active role of the participants in selecting the appropriate framing of the (speech) event, partially pres-ent in Goffman’s idea of footing as something that people actively ‘‘change.’’ To change footing means to change the basis forinference and action. Footing underlines the role of people as agents in choosing and changing the context.

Here, I maintain that shared frames are evinced by the participants based on the attribution of: shared (chosen) context ofreference;4 shared topic; and shared key of the speech event, namely its ‘‘tone, manner, or spirit’’ (Hymes, 1974, p. 57), asevinced from both spoken, paralinguistic and non-verbal cues.

In this article, I will expand Goffman’s definition by adding two distinctions: first a distinction between alignment andnon-alignment in footing; second, a distinction between two ways of managing non-alignment in interaction: namely asmisalignment or as disalignment. Henceforth:

1. Alignment refers to the participants’ orientation to a common frame for events. This orientation becomes displayed inthe way they manage the production or reception of an utterance.5

2. Non-alignment refers to the participants’ orientation to different frames for events, displayed in the way they managethe production or reception of an utterance. Consequently:

2.a. Misalignment refers to a non-alignment that is managed by the participants – and thus co-constructed – as acci-dental (for example, as due to temporary distraction).

2.b. Disalignment refers to a non-alignment that is managed by the participants - and thus co-constructed - as willful(for example, as intention not to communicate).

As I will show below, this second distinction is theoretically important and necessary to understand how people manip-ulate the framing of the conversation to obtain certain communicative effects - for example, to create the appearance of mis-understanding. It is also immediately clear that the distinction between misalignment and disalignment depends on people’sinterpretation of the intentions of other speakers (and even of the intentions of the self) and of the speech act itself as goaldirected or not.

Stances and stance-taking are variously defined in the scholarship. As Robert Englebretson notes (2007, p. 1), this probablyreflects the richness of the scholarship itself and its diverse interests.6 Jaffe, for example, considers them as ‘‘taking up a posi-tion with respect to the form or the content of one’s utterance’’ (2009, p. 3). A useful definition was proposed by Du Bois, where‘‘Stance is a public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means, of simultaneously evaluatingobjects, positioning subjects (self and others), and aligning with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimension of thesociocultural field’’ (2007, p. 163). This way to look at stances underlines their complexity and their being a discursive activity(Lempert, 2009, p. 226). Thus in our initial example, the client’s stance is expressed through his positioning toward and descrip-tion of a third party: Albanians.7

Kockelman operationalizes stances as ‘‘semiotically indicated modes of evaluative and intentional commitment thatspeakers take toward states of affairs’’ (2004, p. 142). I will adopt this definition here because it allows me to include anddistinguish both footing (alignment) and affiliation (agreement) in my analysis, while accounting for the role of intention-ality. Agreement and disagreement are stances that people take vis-à-vis those expressed by others. Following Kockelman, I

3 From Goffman on, the concepts of alignment and agreement (and non-alignment and disagreement) have been used at times interchangeably, at timesseparately. In this article, I keep them separate, and I consider alignment and non-alignment as part of footing, agreement and disagreement as affiliation.

4 The attribution of a shared context of reference would be based on the interpretation of available contextualization cues. See also Schiffrin (1994, p. 103),who considers contextualization cues as a ‘‘framing device.’’ Such shared context includes shared background knowledge.

5 Stivers’ definition of alignment is partially different from mine, but not incompatible. She writes that ‘‘When a recipient aligns with a telling, he or shesupports the structural asymmetry of the storytelling activity: that a storytelling is in progress and the teller has the floor until story completion’’ (2008, p. 34).A definition of alignment as orientation to a common frame for events can be seen as inclusive of such acknowledgment and supporting of the telling. Generally,Stivers appears to be more concerned with the participants’ distinction between affiliation and alignment (2008, p. 36), while my focus is on distinguishingdifferent ways in which non-alignment is deployed and interpreted.

6 For alternative views on stance, see also Goodwin (1998, 2006), Kiesling (2005), Johnstone (2009), Lempert (2008, 2009), Ochs and Schieffelin (1989).7 However, Du Bois focuses mostly on agreement (all but one of his examples in the article are of agreement) and he uses the words ‘‘alignment’’ and

‘‘agreement’’ interchangeably.

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will define agreement as a display of a common evaluative and intentional commitment toward a state of affairs (the world,truth, reality, etc. – including also a moral order, which may include having similar beliefs, values, intentions, etc.). Vice ver-sa, disagreement is a display of an evaluative and intentional commitment to a different and possibly opposite state of affairs(which also indexes that the participant has different beliefs, values, intentions, etc.).

Regarding intentionality, Kockelman writes: ‘‘An intentional status is a set of commitments and entitlements to signify andinterpret in particular ways (normative ways of speaking and acting attendant upon ‘‘holding a belief’’ or ‘‘having a desire’’).An intentional role is any enactment of that intentional status’’ (2007, p. 396). These intentional statuses are fundamentallyambiguous, he notes. However, just as a uniform (as an emblem) can disambiguate a social status, in the same way inten-tional statuses can also be disambiguated (2007, p. 396). This, Kockelman argues, happens when a person indicates their ori-entation to a state of affair. He then concludes by saying that ‘‘Intentional statuses, then, are no more ‘‘private’’ than socialstatuses: each is known only through the roles that enact them and only relatively incontrovertibly known when these rolesare emblematic’’ (2007, p. 396).

In stance-taking, agreement and disagreement can be relatively more emblematic roles of intentional statuses (that de-clare intentionality in relatively less-ambiguous, and more public, ways) or less emblematic (in those cases when affiliationis more ambiguous). (And it must be kept in mind that ambiguity is partially determined in the interaction itself). Non-align-ment in footing can add a further veil, making stances less emblematic, thus allowing the speaker to retain a level of deni-ability.8 As I will show, non-alignment in footing may lead to attempts to disambiguate intentions, and to the co-constructionand managing of non-alignment as either misalignment or disalignment.

The distinction between aligning/non-aligning (footing) and agreeing/disagreeing (affiliation) is thus fundamental. Thefirst refers to the frames for interpreting events, rather than a particular commitment with respect to them. When we crossfooting with affiliation the following cases are possible (examples will be given later in the article):

Having drawn this distinction, in this article I will argue that non-alignment in footing can be actively performed. First, Iwill show that non-alignment can be used as a strategy to disengage from conversations, in those cases when the persondoes not want to participate or does not want to agree or disagree. In the barber and client exchange, for example, non-align-ment has the effect of withholding agreement with a racializing stance. Second, I will show that non-alignment can be de-ployed to dissimulate, or ‘‘cloak,’’ a disagreement, veiling it as lack of a common framing for events. Third, non-alignment canbe performed as an argumentative tool to undermine common sense, negating to an interlocutor the possibility to veil astance behind ‘‘accepted truths’’ and consequently forcing them into open stance-taking. As such, non-alignment can forcethe articulation of the logic behind truth statements, including assertions based in a naturalized view of ‘‘racial’’ difference.

In sum, non-alignment can be used to argue without arguing, while the inherent fluidity, indeterminacy and revisabilityof the distinction between misalignment and disalignment can afford a speaker an eventual ‘‘way out’’ from confrontations.This is possible because, at least in the West, intentionality correlates with accountability for one’s actions. Non-intentionalactions, seen as accidental, do not carry the same weight in terms of accountability – and consequently, in terms of attribu-tion of responsibility. Alignment and non-alignment therefore are part of the ‘‘communicative means by which responsibilitymay be claimed, diffused, or evaded’’ (Hill and Irvine, 1993, p. 5). In the contexts I will present here, where Italians talk aboutimmigration – deploying racializing or anti-racist discourses, and at times taking opposite stances – non-alignment in foot-ing enables nuanced and complex ways of arguing, negotiating or refuting assessments and opinions. In exploring howspeakers align or do not align with racializing (or anti-racializing) discourses, I show the articulations as well as points ofresistance, at the interactional level, of racial formation processes that shape national views and influence policies towardimmigrants, offering a contribution to critical race studies. Additionally, I hope to add to the important work by Hill(2008), who has been examining the role of perceived intentions in the attribution (or not attribution) of racism.

8 There is definitely a continuum between more and less emblematicity. As I will show later, non-alignment may at times very thinly veil a disagreement, inwhich case it is a more public display of intentional status. Still, it retains deniability.

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In the following sections, I will first return to Schema #1 to give examples of the various cases. I will then give an in-depthanalysis of the exchange sketched at the beginning of this article, showing how the barber did not align with the client. Next,I will further discuss the distinction between misalignment and disalignment through the analysis of two additional exam-ples taken from videorecorded conversations, and one example taken from my fieldnotes. I will show how non-alignmentintroduces a layer of strategic deniability in an interaction. Since participants can never be completely sure if a person is mis-aligning or disaligning, non-alignment can enable a speaker, literally, to argue without arguing.

1. Crossing footing and affiliation

1.1. Case 1. Participants display alignment and agreement (Align + Agree)

This is the case which is most commonly exemplified in scholarship on stances. The participants display an orientation toa common framing of the events and a common evaluative and intentional commitment toward a state of affairs. As a con-sequence, a common point of view is shared and, as I argued elsewhere, can be reinforced (Pagliai, 2009). Here is an examplefrom my research:

Transcripts #2 (two Tuscan men talking about immigrants, from Pagliai (2009)).9

Here the participants display alignment through ongoing engagement with a common topic (immigrants), shared contextof reference (Italy today as a situation/setting, plus shared background knowledge), etc. Agreement is shown through the co-construction of the utterance. A common view on the moral order is upheld, which is believed threatened by immigration.

1.2. Case 2. Participants display alignment and disagreement (Align + Disagree)

In this case, the participants display an orientation to a common framing of the events but an evaluative and/or inten-tional commitment to a different state of affairs. They may not share a common view of reality/truth, which is thereforenot reinforced. Disagreement can possibly lead to an argument. Here is an example recorded during a dinner among friends:

Transcripts #3 (Two Tuscan men talking about Chinese and Italian migrants).

Here Mat(teo) not only disagrees with Gio(vanni) in regard with a fundamental diversity between Chinese and Italian mi-grants, but he does it without any attempt to moderate the force of the disagreement to protect face. He also interrupts hisfriend. At the same time, Matteo’s utterance perfectly engages Giovanni’s topic, and is oriented to the same framing of theevent: a serious discussion about Chinese immigration in Prato and its supposed economic consequences.

1.3. Cases 3 and 4. The participants do not align in footing

One could see as non-alignment a famous example of miscommunication in male/female interaction: Tannen’s anecdoteof wives reporting trouble at work to their husbands as a way to obtain emotional support, but obtaining problem solvingadvice (Tannen, 1990, pp. 52–53). In this case the conversationalists appear to be oriented to different frames for the event

9 See Appendix A for the notation used.

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(Tannen, 1990, p. 33). When people are not aligning, they may still agree or disagree, but what are they agreeing and dis-agreeing about?

I will dedicate the rest of this article to discussing cases of non-alignment. However, before I go into the examples frommy research, I will give two simpler ad hoc examples:

Non-alignment + Agreement: The husband is not listening to the wife (maybe reading the newspaper) but he agrees with-out paying attention and without really knowing the context of her remark.

Wife: What she did yesterday was really nice.Husband: Sure it was.

Non-alignment + Disagreement: Albert is talking about the neighbor. Bea thinks he is talking about the dog.

A: I think he is great.B: No way, he’s always chasing away my poor cat.

When non-alignment in footing is perceived,10 it becomes subject to interpretation. In particular the co-participants maymanage it as a case of misalignment; for example, by supposing that the husband has misunderstood the wife’s framing of theevent, may not have enough knowledge of the topic to understand it, is distracted or simply did not hear her, etc. Alternatively,it may be interpreted as a case of disalignment: the husband intended not to align, and therefore faked misunderstanding, dis-traction, or not hearing.11 When a husband does not answer his wife’s attempts to communicate, is he simply not understand-ing? Is he trying to reinforce (or simply taking for granted) his male patriarchal power? The answer given to this questiondivided, from the 1970s through the 1990s, the field of gender and language studies into a ‘‘difference’’ paradigm and a ‘‘dom-inance’’ paradigm. In fact, this is a question about intentionality.

It is important to keep in mind that in interactions the attribution of intentionality for an utterance is always revis-able, debatable, and depends on the participants’ interpretation of what is going on in the overall encounter. Alignment,disalignment and misalignment in footing are not decided once and for all in the mind of the speaker, but coproduced throughthe way the participants interpret and react to each other’s words. Given a husband’s perceived non-alignment, a wifecannot establish once and for all if he is disaligning or misaligning. She can only guess, interpret, take her pick. Thisis not only a consequence of the fact that she cannot read inside his mind, but also of the fact that the interpretationof the non-alignment itself is co-constructed in the interaction between them (as well as probably affected by powerdifferentials).

Interpreting a non-alignment as misalignment or as disalignment leads to very different consequences for the ensuinginteraction. They are managed differently. For example, misalignment may be managed by furnishing further information.If the non-alignment is interpreted as disalignment, then the intentions behind it may be further interpreted. For example:is the husband trying to put his wife down? Is he being facetious? Or is he simply a jerk?12

2. Cloaking disagreement

It is important not to assume that achieving a common footing in interaction is always the goal of the conversation-alists. People may not want to display a common footing for political purposes, or to avoid confrontations. As Heritagenotes, ‘‘It is a commonplace that speakers may respond to earlier talk in ways that may blur, conceal or otherwise avoiddisplaying their true appreciation of its import [. . .] so as to influence the direction of the talk toward some desiredobjective’’ (1984, p. 260). In other words, they display that they are not uptaking the frame for events invoked in theprevious speaker’s turn. As Goodwin and Goodwin note, ‘‘next utterances characteristically transform [prior] talk in somefashion – deal with it not in its own terms but rather in the way in which it is relevant to the projects of subsequentspeakers’’ (1987, p. 4). Additionally, participants may display to perceive an alignment in footing where a non-alignmentis the case.

Of particular importance, is that non-alignment may be perceived as faking distraction, or misunderstanding, etc. as away to avoid conflict, or to avoid openly disagreeing: I call this cloaking a disagreement. In this case, if the interaction leadsto successive aligning in footing, the participants may ‘‘uncloak’’ the disagreement (start an argument) or avoid uncloaking it(for example by changing topic).

To clarify this case, I will borrow an example from Goodwin (2007) and try to add a further layer to his analysis. In thisarticle, Goodwin presents the case of a father trying to explain fractions to his daughter. Goodwin’s detailed analysis showshow father and daughter display their stances through the interplay of verbal, kinesthetic and embodied means of commu-nication, using the environment around them as well. In Goodwin’s data, the daughter at first shows little interest in her

10 The co-participants may never realize that they are not aligning.11 This, I believe, could be relevant to the theorization of crosstalk as well. Misunderstanding can be read as misalignment or disalignment. Importantly, even

if the misunderstanding is perceived as misalignment, people are aware that there is always the possibility that the other may be ‘‘faking it’’ – namely be indisalignment.

12 I am not making any claim here about the interpretation of the original examples of cross-gender interactions. But see Leto De Francisco for an attempt tointerpret similar interactions (1998).

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father’s attempt to teach her. Goodwin explains that the father sees the interaction as an occasion to teach the daughter howto understand fractions by working together through them. The daughter instead reads the ‘‘contextual frame’’ (Goodwin,2007, p. 63) as one in which the father will simply give her the correct answers for her homework. She engages minimally,watches TV, etc. (2007, pp. 63–64).

This can be rephrased by saying that the two are displaying a non-alignment. The father first manages it as misalignment(non-intentional, accidental, temporary distraction) and tries to achieve alignment through summons and requests. Good-win notes that ‘‘The use of a summons to someone who is only a couple of feet away, indeed lying on the same bed asthe speaker, is clearly dealing not with issues of mere copresence (for example, a summons to call an absent child to dinner),but rather of alignment to the activity being pursued by the summoner’’ (2007, p. 64).

Sandra at this point starts displaying an orientation to the father’s framing of the interaction (teaching how to), but at thesame time she also displays disagreement. Thus the interaction is evolving into an argument:

The interaction breaks down and the father temporarily leaves (2007, p. 67). In other words, the father’s insistence onobtaining engagement from his daughter has the effect of achieving alignment in footing, but uncloaks Sandra’s disagreement(Align + Disagree).13

In sum, not-alignment acts as a veil, that can make the participants’ intentional statuses appear more ambiguous, and adddeniability. This can protect them from the eventual consequences of openly disagreeing (such as escalating to a verbalfight). Such protection is, of course, always relative, and also depends on the co-participants’ interpretation of an utteranceas more or less ambiguous.14 In ‘‘playing’’ with footing the participants deploy, to use Paul Friedrich’s term (1986), the inde-terminacy of meaning in communication. This is particularly important when considering conversations where racializing state-ments are made. In Tuscany, in contexts where locals are talking about migrants, speakers may display racializing stances withwhich the recipient might not wish to agree, in a situation in which taking a stance of open disagreement is excluded as unde-sirable, or made impossible by the social relationship among participants.15 Footing has a shifting quality as the display is con-tinuously interpreted and reinterpreted. This, in turn, is connected to the continuous interpretation and elaboration of one’sown and others’ intentions.

3. Avoiding agreement with racializing stances and undermining common sense

With this in mind I will now examine the interaction between the barber and the client mentioned at the beginning of thearticle. I will show the following: how non-alignment allows the barber to avoid indicating ‘‘their orientation to a state of af-fairs’’ (Kockelman, 2007, p. 396); the way non-alignment can undermine common-sense truths; and the way in which non-alignment can lead to the abandonment of a topic. Three people were present in the barbershop: the barber, a young man whowas having a haircut, and the research assistant, who was sitting in the waiting area, reading a book.16 The young client wasoriginally from Romania, but had been living in Tuscany with his parents for two years. He spoke Tuscan Italian with native flu-ency, with a very slight foreign accent.17 The barber was Tuscan and had lived in the city all his life. Barber and client, who kneweach other, had been talking about friendship and relationships between women and men. The barber offered advice on how tomeet and date local Italian women. At one point, the client explained that he wanted a young but rather conservative haircut. Thebarber asked how the client wanted the sideburns, jokingly suggesting a more alternative look: only one sideburn. The clientlaughed and answered that his parents would not like that. Then he introduced a further reason for wanting to look ‘‘nice:’’he did not work with Albanians any longer, thus introducing a new topic. In the ensuing exchange, the barber did not align.

Transcripts #1, Part 1.18

13 Stivers also shows a similar result in her analysis, with a speaker revealing her stance openly as a consequence of non-alignment from the receiver (2008, p.47).

14 The co-participants can also force the speaker to ‘‘come out’’ and state their position in less ambiguous terms.15 As I show elsewhere (Pagliai, 2011), people may find themselves in contexts where they feel pressured to agree with racist views that they do not share. In

these cases, they may experience notable stress both in acquiescing and in disagreeing.16 The videocamera was turned on and left generally unmanned from morning to evening, except for changing tapes and batteries. The recording was done by

a male research assistant, Claudio Guler, who was more or less ‘‘hanging around’’ in the shop. Since in this context most of the people present were male, Idecided my presence would have disrupted the normal conversation excessively. The participants were told that ours was a research on language andconversations and that we were interested in the recent changes in Tuscan society. The research assistant was instructed to ask no questions about immigrationand to avoid initiating any topic, but to answer questions if asked.

17 Not only are Italian and Romanian related languages, but also Romanians often speak Italian fluently already when they migrate to Italy.18 For the notation, see Appendix A.

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((The client is sitting, looking toward the mirror. The barber is standing behind him and looking at the client’s head, whilebrushing off shavings of hair from the client’s neck.))

At Line 1, the client starts his utterance with a poi ora (‘‘plus now’’) that typically functions as a disjunctive in Tuscan,announcing a contraposition between a past situation and a present situation. The client states that now he works with ‘‘seri-ous’’ people and no longer with Albanians. The words gente seria, semantically complex, carries the meaning of ‘‘hard work-ing’’ and ‘‘morally irreprehensible’’ and is the opposite of the insulting word leggera meaning ‘‘lazy, untrustworthy person’’(lit. ‘‘weightless, light,’’ but used as a noun). Thus he sets up a contrast: Albanians are not ‘‘serious people.’’ This sentence alsointroduces a new topic for conversation: his new job versus his old job. The client foregrounds a precise stance toward such atopic, which can be easily connected to a racializing discourse, common in Tuscany, about Albanians: Albanian immigrantsare lazy; they do not want to work hard. The client leaves his utterance incomplete, ending with stable intonation and with asicchè (thus, therefore), which requires something more to be said. However, he stops speaking. In other words, he appears toinvite the barber to step in and construct the next piece of the utterance. As Sacks (1995, p. 651; see also Schegloff, 1982)shows, utterances are more often co-constructed incrementally by the conversationalists, than produced as a unit by onespeaker at a time. Such incremental construction, in the case of utterances containing racist or racializing statements, canalso diffuse responsibility for the statements made, by having them shared among several participants (Pagliai, 2009).

That the client may need some support appears likely, considering his position as a migrant himself. At the time of this record-ing, Summer 2006, Romanians were not yet European citizens. This young man was an ‘‘extra-communitarian immigrant,’’ justlike Albanians. The discourse of laziness he invokes is used as much against Romanians as against Albanians. Hostility towardimmigrants has been growing steadily in Italy over the last two decades, aided by stereotypical representations in the mass med-ia. The client thus chose a dangerous stance by invoking a racializing discourse that could be used against him, to affirm a sub-stantial difference between the self and ‘‘Albanians’’ (indirectly, also, between Romanians and Albanians as migrants).

However, the barber does not offer support and produces a minimal feedback, after a pause (Line 3). It is an interjectionthat can be translated as ‘‘I see.’’ In addition, while the client had a slight smile as he spoke, the barber does not smile. Theclient, after seeking eye contact with the barber (Line 3), takes the floor again to continue his utterance (Line 4). Seeking eyecontact shows that the client has perceived the possible non-alignment and is seeking visual alignment (Goodwin, 1981).

At this point (Line 5), the barber starts talking, overlapping the client, and the client relinquishes the ground. The barberasks a question: ‘‘why were Albanians not serious?’’ This is a request for clarification, underlined by the barber’s delay inproducing this utterance, and his paralanguage (the barber asks the question in a monotone, without any perceptible laugh-ing). Thus the barber displays non-alignment. Instead of framing the client’s utterance as an invitation to a joking session orchatting session about Albanians, he appears to treat it as a piece of information that is new to him, and unexpected enoughto require a clarification. He does not show that he shares the background information needed to appreciate the joke, namelyfamiliarity with the discourse about ‘‘Albanian laziness.’’ Note that the barber not only is not aligning, but also does not affil-iate or disaffiliate with the stance expressed by the client.

At this point the client must decide, interpret, if this non-alignment is a misalignment or a disalignment. In other words, ifthe barber’s lack of knowledge makes it impossible for him to expand on the topic or agree (misalignment), or if the barber isfaking not to know, probably because he disagrees and wants to avoid an argument. As I noted earlier, it is unlikely that thebarber lacked knowledge about the discourse of ‘‘Albanians’ laziness,’’ considering its wide diffusion in the area.19 But if theclient interprets him as knowing, then he could see the barber as disaligning (intentionally avoiding to pick up the topic) byspeaking as if he did not know. Yet, one cannot completely exclude the possibility that the barber indeed lacked knowledge

19 In my fieldwork I found this discourse time and again in the recordings of everyday conversations, in the interviews, and reported in my fieldnotes. As it istrue of this kind of stereotypical images, they are often paired with other contradictory ones (lazy and stealing our jobs) unproblematically. See also van Dijk foridentical stereotypes of immigrants in Holland and in California (1987). The image of immigrants as lazy in general is very diffused. I have found it in my studyof Italian immigration to the United States (in that case the Italians are the lazy ones) (Pagliai, 1995; Stella, 2003).

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of the discourse. Because of this deniability afforded by non-alignment, if confronted, the barber can always pull out of a pos-sible confrontation by declaring lack of knowledge, or offer agreement (possibly as a way of bailing out of an argument).20

The client’s next utterance (Line 6, below) reveals that he has interpreted the barber’s utterance (and his intentional sta-tus) as ambiguous. In fact, next the client attempts to disambiguate it. While the client has been smiling slightly through theinteraction until this point, now he stops smiling and looks up to the barber: he recognizes that the barber is not participat-ing to his attempt to co-costruct jokes at the expenses of Albanians. He does not immediately answer the barber’s question,but first asks a question in turn, also a request for repair: he asks the barber to clarify his question.

Transcripts #1, Part 2.

This (Line 6) could be a request for clarification or expression of difficulty in hearing. The barber’s repetition of his ques-tion with variation in word order, in Line 7, manages the client’s inserted question as a request to repeat due to difficulty inhearing. The barber does nothing to clarify his intentional status.

Next, the client produces the second part of the adjacency pair, by clarifying (Line 8) that Albanians are not ‘‘serious.’’ Byfurnishing additional information, the client displays that he is treating the barber’s utterance as a misalignment due to lackof information. He attempts to resolve the misalignment into alignment. The interjection macchè, with no adequate trans-lation in English, carries the strength and obviousness (evidentiality) of the evaluation while implying a disapproval. Thestatement is emphasized through his paralanguage (the words are stressed) and head gesture, to mean something like ‘‘thereis no way that Albanians can be serious.’’ Namely the client’s utterance treats the statement ‘‘Albanians are not serious peo-ple’’ as common knowledge, (indisputable) truth.

As Kockelman notes, ‘‘truth is not (primarily) a question of correspondence between an assertion and the state of affairsbut rather a question of the social relation between a speaker and an addressee—in particular, the ways in which the addres-see—or addressees, however distal, sundry, or unsuspecting—takes up one’s claim and thereby presumes it in subsequentactions’’ (2007, p. 384). In this case the barber, by not picking up the client’s initial claim, does not sustain its truthfulness.The client reaffirms such truthfulness. But in doing so, the client has to further his stance, embrace the racialization – alone –and stand alone as responsible for it.

Thus, an important outcome of the barber’s non-alignment is that it undermines the assumption that a certain statementis ‘‘common knowledge’’ and therefore (universally/naturally) held true, requiring its reinstatement. Yet truth, reality andmoral order are stronger precisely when they do not have to be reinstated or explained, when they can be treated as com-mon, natural knowledge. By asking for clarification one can show that what the other says is not necessarilycommonsensical.

As the client starts talking the barber looks at him briefly (Line 8), then turns and walks to the other side of the shop,putting a notable physical distance between himself and the client. The client is looking down at the same time, so thereis no eye contact. After a pause, during which the barber is looking for something, the barber gives a short assessment (Line9). One word, male (bad). Since the barber is still at the opposite side of the shop, he raises his voice to be heard. Apart fromsuch raised volume, the paralanguage is rather a monotone. While the barber here does engage in an assessment, he is not so

20 As Irvine (1993, p. 110) notes in the case of insults, ambiguity allows participants to get away with almost anything.

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much giving an evaluation of Albanians (‘‘it is bad that Albanians are not serious’’), but rather of the behavior itself (‘‘it is badnot to be serious’’). Namely he only clearly displays a stance of agreement on ‘‘seriousness.’’ He does not clearly display astance of agreement about the underlying truthfulness of the client’s statement regarding Albanians. Instead, the barbershifts the agreement on something irrelevant to the client’s core argument. He is still witholding an affiliation with the cli-ent’s original stance. The barber also does not expand or pick up the client’s original topic: the old and new job. The relativemonotone and late delivery of the barber’s agreement offers very little support to the client’s stance, and in fact silence en-sues. After a long pause, as he starts coming back toward the client, the barber repeats the same word (Line 10). He is notsmiling. As Goodwin and Goodwin have shown (1987, p. 37), such repetition of assessments is a way to close topics. A longpause follows, then the client takes the turn again and shifts topic, going back to the previous one: finding a girlfriend. Thetopic he had introduced in Line 1 (new job and coworkers) is abandoned.21 The barber in the end displayed agreement but didnot align, did not share the frame (common topic, common key), and therefore the agreement was ‘‘off-target’’ and could notsupport the original stance of the client. (Did he ‘‘intend’’ to disagree? That of course, we will never know.)

As a final note, I should point out that an open disagreement on the barber’s side could endanger the face of his client, andcould make the barber lose a customer. There is therefore a powerful constraint to the barber’s ability to openly disagreewith his client. Yet his unresponsiveness remains notable, especially if we speculate a bit more on the client’s choice of topicand stance. The client appears to be trying to establish a distinction between ‘‘serious, hard working people’’ and ‘‘not serious,lazy people’’ where ‘‘serious’’ would include himself AND the barber. My interpretation is that the client was working atbuilding common ground, a ground for sharing a sense of common belonging, through the racialization of a common ‘‘Other,’’Albanians. But he did not achieved it in this exchange. Immediately after, however, as the topic shifted back to ‘‘getting agirlfriend,’’ (not shown here) the barber aligned and contributed actively to the topic, he became talkative and engaged,and the common ground was built as ‘‘men/us’’ vs. ‘‘women/them.’’

4. Why do Chinese immigrants never die? Arguing without arguing

A story circulates in Tuscany about Chinese immigrants, an urban legend that many people actually believe as true. Itcould be entitled ‘‘Why Chinese people never die,’’ and goes as follows: when a Chinese immigrant dies, the other Chinesesecretly destroy the corpse. Then they pass the ID, work permit and all the personal documents of the dead person to anotherChinese immigrant, making him or her a legal resident.

Shortly after arriving from the United States, in summer 2005, some relatives of mine invited me to a dinner, and amongthose present were their friends, whom I did not know. At one point one of the guests, Alessio, addressed me by asking whyChinese people never die. At that time, I had never heard the story, so I hesitated, not knowing how to answer. In hindsight, Ican see that he was inviting me to participate in a joking session about Chinese immigrants. To align, I had to know the story,recognize the joking key, and see behind it the stance taken toward immigration.22 If I had aligned, then I could have shownagreement with Alessio’s stance (co-construct the joke and/or laugh about it with him) or shown disagreement (maybe directly,by saying ‘‘that story is a legend, your joke is racist’’) and possibly begin an argument. But I remained silent.

This prompted the intervention of another guest, Daniele, who told me, ‘‘With all the Chinese immigrants in Prato, manyof them older, you never see a funeral. You never see a tomb in the cemetery.’’23 By giving information, Daniele displayed to beinterpreting and co-performing my silence as a misalignment, due to lack of background knowledge. He did not give the com-plete story yet, but more like a hint of it. Namely he gave me an opportunity to repair the missed answer.

At this point I decided that Alessio’s words had been a question addressed to me as an anthropologist and proceeded to guessthe answer: ‘‘I think, that it could be because Chinese people prepare their own burial places well in advance of dying, and it istogether with their kin. So they want to be brought back to China after they die.’’ Still, my footing was not in alignment with theirintended framing. I was not offering any agreement or disagreement with Alessio’s implied stance toward immigration.

Alessio and Daniele interrupted me and proceeded to say: ‘‘No, no. The reason is that they reuse the documents to bring inanother immigrant.’’ They went on telling the story, adding particulars and offering agreement to each other with co-con-struction of utterances and laughter. I was left out, probably seen as beyond hope.

While Alessio and Daniele managed my behavior as misalignment, I could have been faking not knowing the story.24 Theinitial silence could have been due to hesitancy to agree with the underlying stance toward immigrants, while also hesitating todisagree openly with a person I barely knew and risk ruining the face of the host. Let’s suppose that I was indeed disaligning, thatI was willfully refusing to align with Alessio. What was I doing with the anthropological explanation? I was presenting adifferent ‘‘truth,’’ a different moral system. In other words, I would have cloaked a disagreement, in a way that attempted topreempt an argument.

Now, if Alessio and Daniele interpreted my utterance as disalignment and as cloaked disagreement, they could uncloakthe disagreement. But to do so they would force conflict, endangering face. They would have been responsible for starting

21 Stivers shows something similar in her analysis, where the main teller abandons the effort to continue a topic when the appropriate answer is notforthcoming (2008, pp. 51–52).

22 This is a common stance in Tuscany and it is connected to racist discourses that present Chinese immigrants as illegal immigrants, entering Italy throughillegal means, and as ‘‘dishonest cheaters;’’ also, as implied by the story, as all ‘‘looking the same.’’

23 Since this conversation is taken from fieldnotes, the words are not exactly the same as they were said during that evening.24 Since I had been living in the United States for more than fifteen years, but I had visited Tuscany often, it was equally plausible that I may or may not know

the story. Managing my reaction as misalignment had the advantage of protecting everybody’s face.

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a possible argument. Alternatively, Alessio and Daniele could avoid to uncloak the disagreement, act as if I was misaligning,and enlighten me about the story. And enlighten me they did. In doing so, they also performed agreement with each other,offering to each other that common upholding of shared reality that I had not given them and, through my anthropologicalexplanation, possibly endangered.

Again, I underline that what counts as disagreement, as misalignment, as disalignment, etc., is co-constructed in the inter-action itself. The outcome is neither predictable nor completely planned in the mind of the original speaker. Intentions aresimilarly co-constructed, emerge and become relevant as part of the interaction. As Duranti notes, ‘‘A thought may not becompletely developed before the act of speaking (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) and language may force us to be over-specific withrespect to our desires (Dennett, 1987). In other instances, the implications of our words are often made apparent by the reac-tion of our audience’’ (2006, p. 36). As an interaction proceeds, intentions are both proactively and retroactively reinterpretedby ‘‘subjects’’ who are also being constructed together with them.25 In this example from my fieldwork, not even I can say if myactions were completely a misalignment or partially a disalignment. If Alessio and Daniele had decided to start an argument,what would have I done next? Would I have pleaded for misunderstanding or would I have engaged in the argument?

Note that no matter what Alessio and Daniele’s interpretation of my actions was, my anthropological explanation was onrecord now. It could not be ignored as an alternative explanation of any story of ‘‘why Chinese people never die.’’ And while itwas a rather essentialist explanation (assuming all Chinese would want to be buried back in China, and even accepting theunconfirmed statement that one cannot see funerals of Chinese immigrants), it negated the widespread discourse about Chi-nese immigrants as only apparently legal while effectively using illegal means and deception to obtain legal status. In the end,if I had indeed known the story and disagreed with the stance, my non-alignment would have been an effective strategy that Icould have deployed to avoid offering agreement and to displace the racist discourse with minimal danger to face: arguingwithout arguing.

5. Non-alignment as a strategy in argumentative exchanges

In the barber/client exchange, non-alignment was used to avoid engaging in a topic. However, non-alignment can also bean argumentative tool used when actively engaging in debates. Non-alignment is a powerful strategy that can allow partic-ipants to bring up critiques without resorting to open disagreement. Like teasing, it carries within itself the possibility of adisclaimer or a negation of agency or intention. A participant may give cues, for example through their non-verbal commu-nication, as to how a non-alignment should be interpreted, or refrain from doing so. A participant may at the same time cloakthe disagreement and ‘‘dare’’ the other participants to uncloak it. Participants may actively look for such cues. It may be help-ful to envision a continuum, from those cases that are more clearly interpretable as misalignments, to those that are barelyveiled disalignments. At the extremes of this continuum, there would be cases more emblematic of intentional statuses,while toward its center there would be the less emblematic cases.

Schema #2 More emblematic misalignment

______________________________|____________________________

(least emblematic)

More emblematic disalignment

In those cases where a non-alignment in footing is paired with an affiliative stance of disagreement (non-alignment + dis-agreement) the difficulty of distinguishing between misalignment and disalignment can protect the speaker from directreprisal argument, or make his/her argument harder to deconstruct.26 This can be seen in the next example, from a conver-sation in a community center for the elderly, held one afternoon in summer 2007. This is a community center where retireesspend time doing a range of activities: from crafts and sewing, to amateur theater, cooking and parties, card games, oral-historybook writing, and medical check-ups.27 Every week some of the members gather in the main hall, sit in a circle of sofas and chat,have soft drinks and pastries. I obtained permission to videotape one of these gatherings. The people present enjoyed telling mehow things were at the time of their youth, and eventually they went on to discuss recent changes. At this point they startedbringing up the topic of immigration.

At the beginning of the following exchange, a total of about fourteen people were present, of which two were males28 (seeSchema#3). To my right was Marco, a man in his early sixties. At a corner were two middle-aged women sitting on chairs: Elisaand Laura. The whole space was part of a much larger hall where other people were sitting or passing by and separate conver-sations were being carried out.

25 Or better, the subject is both interactionally and historically constructed; historically since the subject can be considered the resulting sedimentation ofprevious encounters, each of them involving some degree of agency and intentionality.

26 Of course, success in using such strategy is not guaranteed. While non-alignment is a protective veil, its effectiveness will depend on how the interlocutorsread it and on what they decide to do with it. This will depend on many contextual factors as well.

27 The retirees range in age from their sixties through the nineties, and are at times accompanied by younger personal nurses or companions. In any givenafternoon there can be twenty to forty people coming and going, and the atmosphere is lively and active, with much joking and bantering. Women are themajority, but men are present too. The place is sustained through municipal funds and is non-religious and politically non-partisan.

28 A few of the women present had severe Alzheimer-like symptoms and were not responsive to the interaction or had a hard time participating. They were,however, included as much as possible and the others at times addressed them or made an effort to make them talk.

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Transcripts #5.((When Laura starts talking I look at her. Laura and Elisa look at me. The others are attending to other tasks or keep

switching between looking at the speaker or at me.))

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((both Laura and Elisa turn toward somebody at their left and this exchange is momentarily abandoned while animateddebate about something else continues in the background))

In Line 1, after a disclaimer of racism,29 Laura starts listing three parks and plazas in Pistoia affirming they have changedtheir name (Lines 1 and 2). The name change is a metonym for the change of the people populating the plazas. These are placeswhere often migrants gather to spend leisure time together. The statements are hyperbolic.30 Laura continues with anotherhyperbolic statement: around town there are only foreigners (Line 3). After a second disclaimer (Lines 3 and 4) she declaresthe presence of immigrants-only in public housing (Lines 4 and 5).31 Then she concludes (Lines 6 and 7) with the hyperbolicstatement that Italians don’t exist any longer. Note that Laura has been consistently using an ironic tone, hyperbole and met-aphors (the names of the plazas stand for the people present in the plaza). She has been constructing her negative stance towardthe immigrant presence in a joking key.

At this point, in Line 8, Elisa takes the turn in overlapping to disagree with Laura in an emphatic tone. Elisa negatesLaura’s statement and proceeds to name streets in Pistoia with Italian names (Lines 8 and 10; she has to repeat herwords after I ask her to repeat, due to strong background noise). The disagreement is not mitigated through hesitation;on the contrary there is a paralinguistic and kinesthetic highlighting of the disagreement. Yet, what is she disagreeingwith?

In effect, Elisa may be interpreted as not aligning with Laura. Laura’s statement is metaphorical (ironic and tongue incheek too), while Elisa manages it as factual. Elisa answers as if Laura had claimed that the names of the plazas had actuallybeen changed. Thus while her disagreement is strong (although she plays it down by smiling at the end), her intentional sta-tus remains veiled, allowing deniability. If she is interpreted as misaligning (it could be possible that Elisa did not get thesarcasm), then she is not veiling a disagreement with Laura’s stance. But, she could also be interpreted as disaligning, fakingnot to get the joke, cloaking a stance of disagreement.32 The effect of Elisa’s words, overall, is to contradict Laura’s statement,but with enough deniability to be able to quickly withdraw from a confrontation, if needed.

Non-alignment can thus be seen as a powerful and flexible tool not only in avoiding arguments but also as part of argu-mentative exchanges. This will appear even more clearly in the following exchange, happening later in the sameconversation.

While the ‘‘plazas’ names’’ topic was abandoned, the conversation on immigration continued, and Marco joined theexchange to defend migrants. First, the participants discussed the difference and similarities between present immigra-tion to Italy and past Italian immigration to the Unites States. Then, after several exchanges, Marco appealed to humanbrotherhood, a feeling close to Christian ideas in a context in which many of the people present regard themselves asChristian.

29 The use of disclaimers reveals that she is aware her statements can be read as racist or prejudiced toward the immigrants. See van Dijk (1987) for adiscussion of these kinds of disclaimers and their meaning.

30 The attribution of Albanian citizenship to these immigrants also shows a ‘‘lumping’’ of immigrants of various origins under the label ‘‘Albanian.’’. Albaniansare the largest immigrant group in this city, accounting for about half of the immigrant population. However, many of the immigrants frequenting these plazasare not necessarily Albanians.

31 The discourse that migrants ‘‘steal’’ public housing is actually commonly heard in the metropolitan area. According to it, the local government makes unduediscrimination against Tuscan citizens in giving public housing, favoring migrants. Since migrants are in average poorer than the local population, they mayindeed be in the lists to receive public housing in proportionally greater numbers. However, this does not explain the presence of the discourse of privilege. Forexample, in Prato people commonly believe that Chinese migrants get favored for public housing. However, actual data shows that only 1 Chinese immigrantfamily had ever applied for one by 2009 (Bressan et al. 2009).

32 The participants were momentarily distracted after Elisa’s words and so there was no uptake of them.

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Transcript # 6

Marco starts (Line 1) by stating a general moral: all people should be treated as brothers and sisters, including migrants.While he is still building his argument, Laura starts talking twice in overlapping (Line 2). The second time, Marco stops talk-ing to allow Laura to produce her utterance, which is an answer to the first part of Marco’s utterance (‘‘we are all brothers’’).Laura states that she is an only child (Line 3), after which Marco resumes talking.

Laura can be interpreted as non-aligning and disagreeing (Case 4 in Schema #1). She frames Marco’s statement as factualrather than a metaphoric moral statement, and she proceeds to refute it by pointing out that she is an only child. But notethat she is disagreeing with the truth value of the factual, not the metaphorical-moral statement (it is not true that we are allbrothers33 because I do not have one)– she does not agree or disagree with the moral statement.

Marco, upon resuming his talk, in Line 4, immediately agrees with Laura’s statement. Notice the repeated ‘‘I know’’ andthe head nod. Has he changed his mind? Not really, since he goes on to further expand his previous argument. To understandwhat is happening we need to keep the concept of disalignment separate from that of misalignment (and footing from affil-iation). We also need some background information, namely that earlier in the evening Laura had narrated about growing upwithout siblings.

Marco manages Laura’s utterance as if she had switched back to the previous topic of her growing up. Namely, as amomentary misalignment. He manages her utterance not as ironic, but as a factual statement, about her being an onlychild.34 Not only, but he does not even try to ‘‘correct’’ her non-alignment, instead quickly dismissing it through agreement,and goes on with his argument (he was answering to a previous argument by another participant who had sustained that Ital-ians are too tollerant and ‘‘nice’’ toward immigrants; he continues to answer such previous argument). In fact, he could dismissLaura’s critique exactly because it was presented as (thinly) cloaked in a non-alignment. Imagine, by comparison, what couldhave happened if Laura had presented a disagreement in alignment. For example, if she said: ‘‘I don’t think that the feelingsof brotherhood should be applied to immigrants,’’ or something similar. Then Marco would not have been able to dismiss itas easily. He would have had to answer to it somehow, probably escalating the argument. The deniability of intentional statusin the non-alignment thus enables both sides to avoid escalating the argument.

Was Laura’s argument a failure then, since she could be so easily dismissed? Not necessarily. She managed to interruptMarco’s argument and disaffiliate with him. Moreover, if Marco had managed Laura’s utterance as a disalignment and at-tempted to uncloak the disagreement, he would have had to deal with the deniability of the disalignment first. And, Lauracould pull back from a cloaked disagreement much more easily than she could pull back from a disagreement in conditions of

33 In Italian there is no equivalent to the English word ‘‘sibling’’ and the male term ‘‘brother’’ is used instead.34 His reading of Laura’s utterance as still referring to that previous conversation is actually quite unplausible, since Laura has been building several

arguments against immigration after the discussion of growing up without siblings (including the one seen in Transcript #5). Her utterance here is part of suchsequence of anti-immigrant arguments.

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alignment. After all, she was a bit worried about appearing racist in front of a camera, as she had stated herself (Transcript#5, lines 1 and 6), and she may not want to openly contradict such commonsensical discourse as universal brotherhood infront of a Christian audience.

6. Footing, intentionality and racializing discourse

Some scholars have labeled the tendency to focus on intentions a ‘‘personalist ideology’’ (Duranti, 1993b; Keane, 2002)that, as Hill argues, can be used to defend a speaker from accusations of racism (2008, p. 88). 35 At the same time, insofaras people believe they exist, intentions do exist, at least as a constructed social reality.36 Just like the belief in ‘‘races’’ – the beliefin intentions can shape and give form to people’s actions, or the way their actions will be seen by others, and it can limit them.In my research context, participants co-construct and interpret non-alignment in footing as either unintentional (misalignment)or intentional (disalignment). The social personae participating in the interaction are imagined in the same process of imagin-ing, co-constructing and interpreting their intentionality.

Intentions are often perceived behind racializing statements37 – witness the recent discussions in the media of the meaningor intentions behind Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s repeated use of the insulting N-word on-air during her program.38 Dr. LauraSchlessinger later apologized, yet she insisted that her use of the word was as example and not as insult (non-alignment)and she appealed to the first amendment and freedom of speech rights.39 Namely, she argued that her intentions were not toharm. However, in the end her intentions are a matter of negotiation. They are interpreted by audiences on the backgroundof her previous political stances, as well as indexically anchored to people’s perceptions of her racial belonging as White. Sim-ilarly interesting is the recent ‘‘slip’’ when, during the TV program On the Record with Greta Van Susteren (Fox News, August 10,2010), while the anchor was discussing the accusation of ethics violation by African American California Democrat MaxineWaters, the picture shown on screen was that of another African American woman, Shirley Sherrod.40 Simple mistake? Yetthe semiotic arrow (Silverstein, 1992) indexed the common racializing discourse that ‘‘all African Americans look the same,’’and racist and insulting intentions were imputed. Greta Van Susteren immediately apologized for herself and her team onher Blog saying that their ‘‘mistake’’ had been ‘‘unintentional.’’ The perception of intentionality or non-intentionality matters.In both cases the interpretation of the speaker’s intentions is also connected to the framing of the context of talk, and may resultin the attribution of racism to the speakers – in other words, to their construction as racist subjects. In her analysis of Whiteracism, Hill brings several examples of similar deployment of intentions in media analyses of racist discourse by public figures,and notes that the distinction between a racist slur and a ‘‘gaffe’’ depends exactly on such attribution (Hill 2008, p. 89 and fol.).

However, as I have shown, people can also play with intentions not just to absolve themselves from accusations of racism,but also to disassociate themselves from racializing discourse. The indeterminacy of intentions per se, and even the claimingof particular intentions, does not necessarily reinforce racist ideologies. It is, rather, an argumentative tool that speakers candeploy to do several things, including disaffiliating themselves from racist statements. An attention to context and to whatthe participants are actually achieving is fundamental in understanding how the ‘‘personalist ideology’’ translates in racial-ization processes, or can be used against racism.

In sum ‘‘Subjects,’’ their mutual alignment, and their intentions in building (or not building) that mutual alignment areemergent in the interaction itself. They are co-performed through it and they are continuously revisited and re-thought asthe interaction proceeds. In other words, their intentions, personality, goals and identities are interactionally attributed tothem including, for example, being racist or not.41

7. Conclusions

In this article I have argued that non-alignment in footing during interactions is managed differently, as misalignment oras disalignment, depending on how the participants co-construct and interpret the intentional status behind a speaker’snon-alignment. This allows participants to exploit non-alignment to achieve various things. It can be used, I have argued,

35 Starting from Michelle Rosaldo’s critique on intentionality (1982), intentions have been considered as connected to a Western cultural view of the Self as astable and integrated whole. In the wake of M. Rosaldo’s study on the Ilongot (1982) other authors have shown that intentions and motives may not be asrelevant in other cultures as in the West (Duranti, 1993a, 1993b; Du Bois, 1992; Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984). However, in recent work Duranti (2006, 2008)proposes to adopt Husserl’s idea of aboutness in an attempt to construct a universalistic definition of intentionality that would encompass differentialunderstandings at the cultural level.

36 Phenomenologist Alfred Schutz, in his landmark analysis of intentions, believed that a person does not need proof that the other has intentions. Rather, sheor he simply acts as if the other did. As Heritage notes, in Schutz the question for the social actor is not if there are intentions, but rather what are the specificintentions of the specific speaker (1984, p. 57). This ‘‘presupposition of intentions’’ may not be relevant in every society and historical moment.

37 And anti-racializing ones too.38 On August 10, 2010. Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a popular, politically conservative, radio talk show host and author of self-help books. Her program, called

‘‘The Dr. Laura Program’’ airs on hundreds of radios worldwide. As a consequence of her ‘‘flap’’ she left the sindicated radio and her show moved to Sirius XMRadio.

39 During an appearance on Larry King Live show, on TV, on August 17, 2010.40 Shirley Sherrod had been recently and wrongfully accused of racism, which had led to her resignation as Georgia State Director of Rural Development.41 My take here goes against Du Bois’ recent definition of intersubjectivity as ‘‘the relation between one actor’s subjectivity and another’s’’ (2007, p. 140). Du

Bois affirms that ‘‘It should be noted that intersubjectivity presupposes subjectivity’’ (2007, p. 140). However I believe that, on the contrary, it is subjectivitythat is constructed and takes shape through intersubjectivity.

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to withdraw from a conversation, by not uptaking a topic; to avoid affiliating; to upend and negate the shared quality ofstatements and discourses presented as commonsensical or universally recognized truths; finally, they can be used to cloak,or veil, disagreements.

If a participant does not share a certain point of view, but does not desire to start an argument, non-alignment can be apowerful tool through which they can disagree without disagreeing and even ‘‘silence’’ the opponent. The barber, for exam-ple, did not sustain the client’s incipient racialization, and avoided acceptance of a prejudicial discourse as truth.

The distinction between footing and affiliation, and between disalignment and misalignment furthers our understandingof argumentative language – but it can have consequences for the theorization of the ‘‘Subject’’ of racism. This ‘‘Subject’’emerges together with his/her intentions in the interaction. This means that the ‘‘racist/racializing subject’’ (and, by contrast,the ‘‘anti-racist’’ subject) and the ‘‘racist intentions’’ are emergent in interaction. Just like the participants can do being-racisttogether, together they construct each other’s ‘‘intentionality,’’ in a given context, as a racializing/racist or non-racializing one.

Finally, the distinction between misalignment and disalignment has consequences for the conceptualization of misunder-standing. The study of cross-cultural miscommunication (crosstalk), for example, has relied on the assumption that misun-derstanding is due to unconscious mistakes in the use of contextualization cues. Undoubtedly misunderstanding is mostoften unwanted. Yet a more careful attention to particular conversational contexts reveals that it can be at times activelyperformed. Considering non-alignment in footing may help to recover the sense of agency that is negated when crosstalkis attributed uniquely to a reified ‘‘culture.’’ No matter how we insist that ‘‘it was just all a misunderstanding,’’ in the endthe possibility remains that it may not be a misunderstanding at all. Crosstalk then may not simply be something that hap-pens and befalls the speakers, but may be the result of agentive choices and interactional managing of them. In the casesdiscussed here people seems to treat a non-alignment as misalignment first, and only later, if at all, as disalignment. How-ever, in cross-talk many cases show a preference for reading non-alignment as disalignments. Thus, it seems that the generalfeelings of the participants, the context, the stereotypes that they may have of each other, past experiences with each otheror with people perceived as being alike, can have a large influence on the interpretation of the non-alignment as disalign-ment or misalignment. This is relevant to a theory of racialization insofar as crosstalk has been often invoked to explainthe emergence of racist prejudice and stereotypes, as well as discrimination. Mistakes and misunderstandings are often in-voked to renounce responsibility for racializing statements and stances. By recovering agency in non-alignment we avoidrunning the risk of ignoring personal responsibility in racialization.

Acknowledgments

The research on which this article is based was made possible by grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthro-pological Research, the National Science Foundation, and Oberlin College, and by a fellowship from the Remarque Institute. Iam indebted to Ignasi Clemente, Susan Frekko, Marjorie H. Goodwin, Erika Hoffman-Dilloway, Paul Kockelman, Michelle Ko-ven, Jennifer Reynolds, Jonathan Rosa and Chantal Tetreault for their suggestions on previous versions of this article.

Appendix A. Notation

The participants are speaking in Tuscan dialect. In the transcription of the examples I am using a basic CA notation (Atkin-son and Heritage 1984), with the following additions:

?

Looks toward �HS Negative headshake to express ‘‘no’’ or disapproval +HS Positive headshake to indicate ‘‘yes’’ or approval nn Approximate point where gesture begins Italics English translation ((in double parenthesis, above the speaking Line)) Gestures

˘ ˘

Spoken while laughing ¿ Partially raising intonation (half-question tone)

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Valentina Pagliai (Ph.D. UCLA 2000, Linguistic Anthropology). Her main areas of research are racial formation processes in discourse, gender identities, andargumentative language. She recently guest edited an issue for the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (June 2010) entitled ‘‘Performing Disputes: Cooperationand Conflict in Argumentative Language.’’ Other recent publications include: ‘‘Politics, Citizenship and the Construction of Immigrant Communities in Italy,’’accepted for inclusion in the edited volume Integration, Globalization and Racialization: Theories and Perspectives on Immigration; and ‘‘Unmarked RacializingDiscourse, Facework and Identity in Talk about Immigrants in Italy’’ (Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, August 2011).