Negotiated Meanings

Abstract

This article proposes a discussion on meaning or rather on meaning negotiations. I intend to combine an ethnographic anthropological approach with the lingüistic discourse analysis. In order to do that, I use the concept of social interaction, as found in Goffman (1986), and context, as defined by Geertz (1989) and Van Dijk (2011/2012). My empirical object is research data obtained through the method of participant observation as well as through semi-structured interviews, conducted among the employees of the Labour Department of the Federal Disctrict Government, in Brasilia (Secretaria do Trabalho do Distrito Federal). The observations revealled the dynamics of power within the negotiation process and the struggle to impose meaning in a burocratic context of working licenses emission. The classification cathegories and the method employed allow us to notice the maleability of meaning face to the arbitraryness of meaning attribution in the process.