Market Pitching and the Ethnography of Speaking

Abstract

The direct sales encounter has rarely been described in anything resembling its full contextual richness. Further, attention to this encounter has been largely confined to the primary retail sector of the economy. In this paper, a perspective drawn from linguistic anthropology is used to examine the persuasive rhetoric of market pitchers as it unfolds in a culturally significant setting. The secondary or informal economic sector is used as the fieldsite.