ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721

Negotiating sun use"

Constructing consistency and managing inconsistency
Justine Coupland a'*, Janet Holmes b, Nikolas Coupland c
a Centre for Language and Communication Research, University of Wales,
Cardiff CF1 3XB, Wales, UK

b Department of Linguistics, Victoria University of Wellingwn, New Zealand

Centre for Language and Communication Research, University of Wales, Cardiff, Wales, UK

Received 16 April 1997; revised version 29 September 1997

Abstract

Interview data from beach-side interviews conducted in Wales and New Zealand were
analysed to examine the formatting of responses made to questions about the health impli-
cations of bodily exposure to the sun. People interviewed articulated widely varying stances
and value-systems, varying from compliance with institutional prescriptions of safe sun use
to outright dismissal of such advice, in favour of body culture imperatives. But many indi-
viduals also showed 'internal' variation, in that they discursively negotiated stances which
privileged body culture values over health values. That is, despite their generally high
awareness of risks to health, they displayed many pragmatic resources which allowed them,
in their talk, to qualify, undermine and resist the dominant health promotional discourse. The
analysis illustrates one way of developing a pragmatic perspective on environmental change
and risk.

1. Introduction

This paper represents part of a larger project exploring Public and Personal Dis-
courses on the Global Environment. The project aims to investigate individuals'
discursively formulated understanding of global environment issues, and to relate
these formulations to scientific and technical discourses available in their commu-

Corresponding author. Fax: +44 1222 874242; E-mail: senjc@cardiff.ac.uk

* This project involves collaboration between Nikolas Coupland and Justine Coupland of the Centre
for Language and Communication Research at the University of Wales, Cardiff, Chris Lane and Janet
Holmes of the Linguistics Department at Victoria University of Wellington, and Allan Bell, a freelance
researcher based in Auckland. The early stages of this collaborative project have been supported by a
grant from the British Council (New Zealand), which we gratefully acknowledge. We are also grateful
to Srikant Sarangi for comments on an earlier version of this paper.

0378-2166/98/$ - see front matter © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S0378-2166(98)00055- 1
700 J. Coupland et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721

nities, primarily through the print media. In the first stage of the project we have
been focussing on individuals' formulations of their knowledge about the deple-
tion of the ozone layer and the human impact of this global environmental problem
- the dangers to health posed by sun exposure due to the increase in ultra-violet
light.
For the present study, we audio-recorded interviews with members of the public,
following a fixed question schedule, both in Wales and in New Zealand, about their
attitudes to sun use, their own sun exposure habits, their perceptions of media cov-
erage of this area and their understanding of the relevant environmental issues. This
paper comprises a qualitative analysis of the interviews, centring on the discursive
construction of informants' accounts of their attitudes to sun use and tanning relative
to their understanding of relevant health risks.
In an earlier analysis of some aspects of the project's print media data, Coupland
and Coupland (1997) have proposed that sun use and tanning issues lie at the inter-
section of potentially conflicting social priorities. Health, safety and ageing issues
generally stand in opposition to the imperatives of modem body culture and the
hedonistic ideology traditionally associated with spending time in the sun and sun-
bathing. Interviews in the present data clearly show that spending time in the sun is
seen as relaxing and pleasurable. Indeed, there is almost universal agreement among
them that the sun is an important factor in their leisure enjoyment. One interviewee
in the Wales corpus says 'it's a known fact that the sun makes everybody feel better
doesn't it?', and an individual in the New Zealand corpus claims that 'people smile
a lot more when it's sunny'.
But set against growing public awareness of the dangers of bodily exposure to the
sun, it is perhaps unsurprising to find that interviewees' answers to questions about
their sun use are sites of discursive conflict. This is the case particularly because all
these interviews were conducted on or near popular holiday beaches, the traditional
context for sun enjoyment. As Lee (1992) proposes, "[t]exts are typically the site of
contestation between conflicting perspectives, and linguistic processes constitute the
mechanism for the resolution of these conflicts" (1992: 136). We focus in particu-
lar, then, on the ways our interviewees discursively negotiate these sites of conflict
where they occur in answers to questions asked.
One of our main intentions is to show how respondents often manage to construct
consistent accounts of their knowledge, beliefs and behaviours relating to sun use.
Consistency is nevertheless an achieved quality of a particular verbal account, and
we find that individuals build their consistency on different ideological bases. But we
also focus on instances where respondents endorse inconsistent ideological stances,
at least from the standpoint of science and the health promotion agencies. This hap-
pens, for example, where they acknowledge the health risks associated with bodily
exposure to the sun but report that they follow risky practices. In these cases, we are
interested in the discursive means by which people rationalise their risky behaviour
or distance themselves from the ideological conflict that risky behaviour entails.
That is, we feel that a pragmatic perspective is of value as an alternative to a 'cod-
ing and counting' approach, which might seek generalisations about the contents and
distribution of people's beliefs about sun use. In line with discursive psychologists'
 J. Coupland et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721 701

general critique of established methods and assumptions within the social psychol-
ogy of attitudes (Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Potter, 1996; Edwards, 1997), we are
sceptical about the durability and distributional fixity of attitudes. What we intend
the interview data to show above all is that individuals establish meanings and val-
ues regarding this complex of environmental, recreational and personal priorities
negotiatively, positioning themselves relative to other voices and values in an on-
going debate. We take pragmatics to include the analysis of how meanings are made
contextually and cumulatively, and through linguistic implicature as well as refer-
ence. Some of the contextual dimensions which are important in the present data are
the competing value systems that are regularly textualised as coherent stances in UK
and New Zealand print media and elsewhere - which we refer to in this paper as
competing 'discourses' (see below) of risk and environmentalism. ~

2. The interview data

Eighty-one people were audio-taped in interviews at Tenby, a seaside resort in

south-west Wales (UK), in the northern hemisphere summer of 1994 (July), and
eighty at beaches in the Wellington area of New Zealand during the southern hemi-
sphere summer of 1994-1995 (January-February). 2 Two different researchers con-
ducted the interviews, one in each community, although each of them followed a
pre-planned schedule of questions (see Appendix A). 3 The national corpora are there-

t Our assumption is that pragmatic research has the potential to make a distinctive contribution to the
social analysis of risk (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982; Nelkin, 1985). Also, and as part of risk research
agenda, we suggest that various forms of language analysis can help us understand human responses to
the wide range of risks and threats linked to global environmental change (Beck, 1995; Bell, 1991).
Although our analyses at this point relate to one specific and limited domain of environmental risk, we
hope the approach we adopt demonstrates the potential for a new linguistic focus - one that might be
labelled 'ecolinguistics'. One forum at which the concept of 'ecolinguistics' was introduced was a 1993
AILA symposium. Its published rationale, referenced as Alexander (1993) was given as follows:
"Areas of work to be presented and discussed include questions such as: How are ecological problems
articulated in texts? What do we learn about ecological problems through various texts? Which syntac-
tic, semantic and pragmatic means are used in communication about ecological matters in different con-
texts? Which linguistic methods are appropriate for this kind of language research? Which theories of
language are most adequate for investigation of the ecological problematic?" (Alexander, 1993: 21)
Many writers involved in those proceedings acknowledged Michael Halliday's seminal contribution to
this developing field in his keynote address at AILA 1990 (Halliday, 1990). Ecolinguistics should
develop as a multiply focussed, multi-method programme. The strand we explore in the present paper
concerns the interface between what Eder (1996) has called 'professional knowledge' and 'practical
rationality' - where scientific knowledge, packaged for public consumption via the media institutions,
impinges on people's common understandings, and potentially on their behavioural choices. It illustrates
one possible response to Eder's call for a 'methodology for a discourse analysis of ecological communi-
cation' (1996: 167).
2 The interview schedule was jointly designed by Allan Bell, Janet Holmes, Justine Coupland and
Nikolas Coupland.
3 The New Zealand interviewer was Jen Hay; the Welsh interviewer was Pam Perkins. The New
Zealand interviews were transcribed by Ben Taylor, and the Welsh interviews by Pam Perkins and Jus-
tine Coupland.
702 J. Coupland et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721

fore in many ways comparable, although we do not report systematic, quantitative

differences between them in this paper.
All interviews were conducted on warm sunny days, on or very near to the beach,
and given the context of leisure and enjoyment, the interview was designed to be
brief and non-intrusive. The interview begins with questions which are intended to
be non-threatening, eliciting interviewees' views about how the weather affects their
leisure enjoyment and attitudes to the sun, and moves on to more personal questions
about sunbathing habits. To keep the schedule as brief as possible, and maximise our
chances of cooperation, the amount of personal, demographic information collected
about interviewees was minimal: one question eliciting information on which of sev-
eral broad age bands respondents belonged to. Using an informal quota sample
designed to provide a spread of age groups and a roughly even gender representa-
tion, the recordings provided a usable (fully audible and complete) sample of 75
Welsh interviewees and 61 New Zealand interviewees, reasonably evenly distributed
by age and gender, as outlined in Table 1.

Table 1
The interview sample

Wales New Zealand

F M F M

Under 30 16 10 11 10
30-50 16 12 l0 10
50+10 10 10 10 10

3. Consistency

Our analysis began from the observation that interviewees differed according to
the degree of consistency that their answers showed. That is, seen from the position
of health promotion agencies and their scientific sources, a reasonable degree of
awareness of the environmental issue (ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere) and
associated public risks (skin burning and possible melanomas from UVA and UVB
exposure) would be consistent with personal decisions to avoid over-exposure and a
decision to follow public prescriptions for 'sensible' sun use. Coupland and Coup-
land (1997) have characterised this cluster of values and priorities, as it is presented
in the UK newsprint media, as a discourse of 'ozone-melanoma'. To use the count-
able noun 'discourse' in this way is to suggest a pre-existent 'way of talking' about
sun use and environmental risk which encodes a specific set of values and priorities.
Although 'discourse' in this sense is an abstract notion, an ideological constellation,
it also implies that one will find regular textualised instances of that value system
within the community (as we found in the media texts which were the focus of the
earlier study). The 'ozone-melanoma' discourse derives from scientific research into
environmental change and bio-medical investigations of skin cancers and their
 J. Coupland et al. /Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721 703

avoidance. Its social dimension assumes a responsible public who are attuned to new
scientifically-based information and modify their lifestyles accordingly. Individual
action is constrained by scientific knowledge and is consistent with it.
Standing in opposition to this discourse is a discourse of 'sun-is-fun', which artic-
ulates the traditional and rather hedonistic values of seaside leisure, centring on bod-
ily exposure to the sun. We previously suggested there is also a third discourse,
which perpetuates the principle of body-exposure during leisure but refashions it in
a more contemporary guise. This is 'body culture' discourse, which promotes sun-
tanning as a more ascetic than hedonistic activity, and as a key element of body con-
sumerism - the packaging of physical identity that many commentators have con-
sidered to be a key component of contemporary youth culture in the West
(Featherstone, 1991; Shilling, 1993).
From this theoretical perspective, it was to be expected that some interviewees in
our data would display values which are not compliant with the health promotional
discourse, although their stances might well be equally 'consistent' in their own
terms. (It is a presupposition of using the term 'discourse' in the above sense that
there is a coherence and plausibility to any one formation, as evaluated by members
of a particular community.) A further probability was that some would display
aspects of more than one value system, and that their responses would reflect a dia-
logue between different ideological positions. The interviewers' questions encour-
aged them to examine the alignment of their attitudes, knowledge and behaviours in
relation to sun use, although there is of course no universal requirement for speakers
to remain within one single discourse or value system across the totality of their
responses. In the following sections we consider identifiably different stances, some
displaying internal ideological consistencies in terms of one or other of the discourse
formations discussed above, some revealing ideological conflict which therefore
needs to be 'managed' strategically.
As mentioned above, the great majority of our interviewees, both in Wales
(Tenby, henceforth tagged with a T) and New Zealand (Wellington, tagged with a
W), reported that the weather was indeed important to their enjoyment of their day
(Question 2). Responses to Question 4 ('Do you like being out in the sun a lot dur-
ing the holidays?') were much less uniform. They ranged from 'of course I do'
(WI4), 'absolutely' (W73), 'as much as possible' (T44), 'we do yeah we lo.ve the
sun' (T61), 'yeah well it's easier to do things innit when it's sunny' (T29), and
many other highly positive responses which implied the answer was self-evident.
Other interviewees said they no longer liked being in the sun although they used
to (W9, W23, W24, W66, W68, W72; T64) or said 'not really', or simply 'no'
(W77, W78; T11, T13, TI6, T19, T35, T37, T48, T53, T76, T78). Emphatically
negative responses, e.g. 'no I do not' (T01, T50, T52), were invariably accompa-
nied by an account, detailing interviewees' personal circumstances such as having
sensitive skin. It seems, then, that while people are generally agreed that the
weather defines an important dimension of their leisure enjoyment, 'being out in
the sun a lot' is a criterion that divides them, and this allowed us to anticipate
widely varying stances in responses to questions specifically addressing the theme
of tanning.
704 J. Coupland et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721

Question 6 was where tanning is directly foregrounded ('How important for you
is getting a tan?'). Positive responses to this question would, we presumed, need to
be respected in subsequent answers to Questions 7-9, 'Do you think there are any
problems to do with getting sunburnt or being in the sun?', 'What sort of advice
have you come across about sunbathing and tanning?' and 'What do you think of
this advice? How does it affect you? Do you follow that advice?'. This was the
point in the interview where personal preferences about sun exposure and body
styling would need to be reconciled with science-based knowledge (Question 7),
health-promotional awareness (Question 8) and strategic behaviours (Question 9).
There was a generally high level of awareness of the full range of components of
now-conventional sunburn avoidance advice, ranging from recommending no sun
exposure, through avoiding the sun at various times of day, through covering up to
varying degrees (protecting head, body, eyes), to using sunblocks and sunscreens
and knowing what burn-times are current in which localities at which times of the
day. But it was evident that this awareness did not predict or require only one pat-
tern of exposure behaviour or of discursive response. There was some evidence that
the two national groups had experienced different levels of exposure to media pub-
licity, at least in that the New Zealand interviewees used health-science terminology
more consistently than Welsh interviewees, and rehearsed a more comprehensive
range of protective strategies. 4 But the most striking basis along which the responses
pattern is not speaker's national affiliation or age (despite there being some age-
related and culturally-based patterns, which we comment on below). Rather, it is the
particular ideological stance and degree of compliance with the institutionally pre-
scribed discourse that a response, or part of a response, articulates. We now consider
these various stances.

4. Compliant safe avoidance

Some respondents constructed an identity of well-balanced, sensible, responsible

adults, motivated by safety and health rather than by body culture and hedonism.
Such responses operated within the discourse of 'ozone-melanoma', as previously
described. Compliant safe avoidance involved responding to Question 6 by saying
that a tan was not important, indicating awareness of the sunburn advice available
about tanning, describing this advice quite comprehensively and accurately, and
claiming to follow it. These accounts included avoiding exposure to direct sun, and
not attempting to get a tan, or specifically attempting n o t to get a tan.
At times, strong feelings were expressed, as in the case of one NZ woman in her
thirties (W39): 'when you see people sunbathing you think what dicks'. In this case,
the avoidance stance is expressed oppositionally, by deprecating others who 'fool-
ishly' indulge. The rationality of this response-type derives from a prioritising of
health over body culture, and long-term security over short-term gratification. Indi-

4 This specific contrast is the focus of current research by Chris Lane.

 J. Coupland et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721 705

viduals provided a range of reasons for adopting this position, showing that they had
internalised scientific/medical warnings about sunburn. The prototypical instance is
the response of a New Zealand pharmacist (W76), a male in his sixties, who had in
the past suffered from skin cancer himself, and who was familiar with sunburn
advice through being involved in dispensing it ('I'm a pharmacist so I give the
advice'). Avoidance here is cast as carrying a professional warrant, from a position
within the health/medicine institution.
Similarly, a respondent in the Wellington corpus identified herself as a hospital
worker and, from this subject position, with its professional authority, expressed a
strongly politically correct (PC) attitude towards sun exposure (W77, a woman in
her fifties):

(1) I work in a hospital and I see um men with melanoma cut out of their heads and
(.) young people you know so it probably makes me more aware of that because
I can see the consequences of it where other people can't 5

Other people in the New Zealand corpus (though none in the Welsh corpus) said
they had suffered from melanomas and cancers of various kinds (W16, W20, W23:
'now I'm having to go and get a some- couple of little things cut out so I know
exactly what the sun does to you', W24, W31 : 'I have to be really careful'), as well
as some in both sets of data who reported that they burnt easily (W45, T01 : 'I have
the sort of skin that I cannot sit out in the sun', T63) or who referred to the fact that
they had fair or sensitive skin (W47, W77; T05) or fair hair (T08, T43). Consistent
safe avoidance can therefore be broached from either an 'expert' or a 'potential vic-
tim' perspective.

5. C o m p l i a n t 'safe' use

A different form of discursive consistency, legitimising tanning in the knowledge

of health risks associated with sun use, can be achieved within a version of the 'body
culture' discourse, via the notion of 'safe tanning'. As we argued previously (Coup-
land and Coupland, 1997), 'safe tanning' is a technological solution to the idex)logi-

5
The following transcription conventions are used in presenting data extracts:
I interviewer
R respondent
underlined loud and/or clearly enunciated speech
continuous, latched speech across turns
[ overlapping speech
(.) slight pause
(2.0) pause of approximately 2 seconds
O
question function
((2 sylls.)) two syllables of inaudible speech
((perhaps)) insecurely identified form
(laughs) nonverbal behaviour or explanatory comment
omitted material
706 J. Coupland et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721

cal dilemma posed by the imperatives of body consumerism and health risks. In
expressing this stance, respondents generally reported that a tan was 'quite impor-
tant' or 'moderately important' to them, but they also indicated that they followed
advice about ways one could acquire a tan without burning, e.g. avoiding sun expo-
sure at certain times of day, restricting the total exposure time, or using sunscreen.
This stance accepts sun use as a constructive body project, with careful use of pro-
tective strategies proposed as off-setting the potential health risk of skin damage.
An example T09, a female in her thirties:

(2) if I said [a tan was] not important then I ' d be lying (.) I like to have a tan ... if
you don't want to cover up and you do want to get a tan use relevant creams so
that you do it gradual and not just get out there with nothing no cream on you
so that you burn ... that's what I ' d do

Note, however, how this account fleetingly gives voice to ozone-melanoma dis-
course (a tan being conceivably held to be 'not important'), but then rejects it, hint-
ing that the speaker does not find her stance fully defensible, but rather it is one that
she has defended to herself ('that's what I'd do'). Many accounts, particularly by
Wellingtonians, rehearsed the health advice commonly disseminated to tanners (e.g.
W34, W48, W49, W70, W71, W73, W82, and W65, who says: 'slip slop slap basi-
cally and always make sure you're covered up keep a hat on and always use sun-
screen yeah').
The extreme case of consistent safe tanning (and where 'safe' presumably does
not require the scare-quotes) is illustrated by the respondent who chose the safest tan
of all: the 'fake tan', while following sunburn advice precisely (W68, a woman in
her sixties): 'I used to lay out in the sun and get a tan but now I get one out of a bot-
tle ... [I] put a sunscreen on all the time'). But W68 is therefore not a (sun) 'user' in
the sense that others in this category are.

6. Self-excluding use

A third and more complex stance emerged when respondents reported that a tan
was of some importance to them, that they indulged in sun use, that they were famil-
iar with the sunburn advice, but that they did not follow it. This group tended to be
young (cf. Melia and Bulman's, 1995, finding that young adults are most liable to
excessive sun exposure). In relation to the two stances we have discussed above, this
value system seems inconsistent, even irrational. Yet speakers were able to present
an apparently rational account for their behaviour by presenting sun use as a matter
of personal preference, conditioned by personal circumstances. Differently from the
most radical non-compliant stance (below), this formulation does not reject institu-
tional advice, but distances speakers from it for some purportedly good reason.
T80, a male in his thirties, said: 'well it depends who you are don't it? you like it
or you don't like it (.) yeah if you don't like it you don't sit in it'. Others justified
lying in the sun despite the sunburn advice by claiming that sun-bathing was dan-
 ,I. Coupland et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721 707

gerous for others but not for them, 'cause I don't burn', as one NZ woman in her
twenties put it (W29). A New Zealand man also in his twenties (W33) reported 'I (.)
don't really have many problems with you know getting over-burnt and stuff so I
guess I don't really worry about it too much', which is a similar strategy to that
adopted by T22, a Welsh male in his twenties: 'my dad and myself are quite dark ...
and we don't burn easily you know'.
Whereas consistent 'safe' use rationalises continuing sun use through the con-
sumerised technology of 'protection' (barrier creams), the strategy of self-exclusion
finds non-technological, personal grounds for dismissing sunburn advice. No doubt
there is a degree of scientific plausibility in some of these personal accounts (dark
skin does not burn as quickly as fair), but some grounds are proposed for exception
which misrepresent health advice. Some people claimed that you only need protec-
tion if you are 'in the sun all day' (W21), which they claimed they were not intend-
ing to be. One New Zealand man in his sixties claimed not only that he had no prob-
lems with sunburn, but that a tan is necessary to stay cool (W25):

(3) I: is it important for you to get a tan?

R: oh yes yes you can't sit in the sun if you don't (laugh) not and keep cool
I: right (laugh) do you think that there are any problems to do with getting sun-
burnt or being in the sun?
R: (.) well I've never had any problems but no doubt some people do ...
I: have you read anything in the paper about sunburn problems?
R: I heard all about these what do they call them s suntan lotions and what
have you ... oh I've seen it ((about)) you know making sure ((if)) you go out
and get the sun use sunblock and what have you

His scepticism about sunburn advice, and perhaps specifically the efficacy of protec-
tion from commercial products, is reflected in his use of an epistemic modal device
- the end tag 'and what have you', signalling the speaker's dubiousness about adja-
cent lexical items (Dines, 1980; Meyerhoff, 1992). His phrase 'these what do they
call them' may mark a word-finding problem, but may also be a device to distance
himself from the necessity of using suntan lotions (cf. Holmes, 1986). Such tags are
to be found elsewhere in the data, more usually with reference to the health dangers
posed by burning: 'melanoma and all that sort of stuff', W48, W52; 'cancers and
stuff like that', W59, W63; 'cancer and things oh there's lots of different things',
T75. The interactional effect of these tags is ambiguous. They signal either a lack of
familiarity with ozone-melanoma discourse and health advice, or a strategic down-
playing of these issues for the speakers as individuals (see Holmes, 1995: 74ff.).

7. S e l f - e x c l u d i n g avoidance

Several older respondents indicated, at certain points in their responses, either that
they saw themselves as too old to be concerned with the body project of tanning or
that their knowledge of self-protection measures was more appropriately targeted at
708 J. Coupland et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721

their children or grandchildren. ('Children' in this context were reportedly as young

as in their twenties). Either way, their stances excepted them from those at-risk from
sun-exposure (see extracts 4 and 5), because the issue was represented as an issue for
other age-groups.

(4) (W66, male, in his sixties)

I: do you like being out in the sun a lot during the holidays?
R: ... the days of running round in just my swim togs all day are gone
(his partner, in her fifties)
R: the thing is that a lot of people go looking for the sun as well ((but)) you
know they would be a younger generation that would go looking for the sun
(.) whereas the old age group (1.0) ... tend to see the sun as a bonus towards
comfortable living

(5) (W82, a female of seventy)

I: how important for you is getting a tan?
R: (.) oh I don't worry about that today

Age, either developmentally for individuals ('the days ... are gone') or age-differ-
entiated behaviour ('the younger generation'), is the criterion projected as excepting
these speakers, not only from sun tanning but from traditional seaside leisure ('run-
ning round in just my swim togs all day'). This stance is self-disenfranchising and
arguably ageist (Coupland and Coupland, 1993, 1996; Coupland et al., 1991),
although it also opposes the 'comfort' of older people's leisure to the work or pro-
ject or 'worry' of young people's sun use (cf. Greer, 1991). On the other hand, older
people, and adults generally, may bear the responsibility of ensuring sunburn pro-
tection for the very young (extracts 6 and 7).

(6) (from T30, a female in her twenties)

it [sun use advice] does [affect me] in the case of having a baby particularly ...
you must make sure he's properly protected

(7) (from T62, a male in his forties)

I: how important for you is getting a tan?
R: ... we go on holiday abroad ... you look (.) and feel that little bit better with
a bit of colour yes the sun tan is essential I suppose
I: what would you say is the best advice about sunbathing and tanning?
R: we went to Spain in May and we covered her [his toddler daughter] in factor
25 ... she came back the same colour as she went

In respect of children, adults suggested there was no discretion in following sunburn

advice, and no exceptions were entertained in public statements about this.
 J. Coupland et al. / Journal ~f Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721 709

8. Mitigated body project tanning

As we have seen, it is not uncommon in the data for people to acknowledge that
a tan is important to them. Also, most accounts indicated that speakers knew that, for
health reasons, unprotected sun-bathing is no longer acceptable behaviour, and that
getting sunburnt involves health risks. Unlike the stance of 'safe' usage, however, a
formulation emerged where speakers did not resolve the resulting dilemma by
putting their trust in sunscreens and other protective measures. Given that intervie-
wees were visiting the beach on a sunny day, in some cases with inadequate sun pro-
tection, the interviewers' questions presented them with a face problem, which they
managed in a variety of different ways.
A recognised lapse of consistency in a speaker's talk is conventionally repaired by
the speaker him/herself (see Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks, 1977, on the preference
for self-repair in conversation). In our data, interviewees in this position often con-
structed a more viable positive face for themselves by providing a verbal account in
mitigation of their behaviour. At these moments, the various 'discourses' we referred
to earlier surfaced most visibly in the data. In order to negotiate stances amongst
competing discourses, speakers need to refer to these discourses and establish prior-
ities amongst them.
One strategy was for people to acknowledge that sun tanning was dangerous to
health, but to say that they personally considered that the aesthetic benefits of tan-
ning out-weighed the health risk. That is, they presented themselves as making rea-
soned, personal choices among value-systems. One New Zealand woman in her
twenties (W18), who accurately rehearsed the conventional discourse of sun advice
('slip slop slap ... the burn time') went on to emphasize that she prioritised a tanned
appearance: 'I look better with a tan I feel better with a tan my skin's definitely bet-
ter with a tan'. An older male informant (W62, in his sixties) also expressed this
position quite overtly: 'it's nice to see a a brown body ... they always look good'.
Defending this stance is still open to criticism from the received health advice posi-
tion, so a threat to face remains. But the speaker at least off-sets the face-threat of
attributed 'illogicality' or 'inconsistency' or simply 'ignorance'.
A further strategy was to adopt a pro-tanning stance, but to down-play the extent
of intended tanning. A New Zealand man in his thirties (W9) argued that 'a little bit'
of a tan was attractive, 'I mean not to look like a ghost but er n- not er the the leather
tan'. This stance was achieved in many other responses, in both national contexts,
with speakers commenting that they felt that people looked 'healthier' with a slight
tan or (particularly in the Welsh context) 'a bit of colour'. For example: 'it's nice to
get a bit of colour (.) in your face just because you tend to feel a bit more healthier'
(T37, male in his thirties); 'I don't sunbathe ... but if I picked up a nice bit of colour
you know but not so much a tan' (T40, female in her forties; and cf. T62 in extract
7, above).
Down-playing can be achieved at clause level too. Attenuating or mitigating epis-
temic particles (Holmes, 1982, 1984), such as 'just' or 'only' project sun use as of
little significance or of short duration, e.g. 'got half an hour to kill so we're just
soaking up some sun' ( W I 9 male, in his forties).
710 J. Coupland et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721

This commonplace hedging on the equating of health with sun-tan suggests a cul-
tural shift, especially in New Zealand, where even those people persuaded of the aes-
thetic and person-marketing benefits of tanning are now much less likely to endorse
'deep' or 'full' tanning. The cultural dialogue that underpins this shift surfaced pre-
cisely in interview W23, where a mother in her fifties living in New Zealand cor-
rected her daughter (who had been living in Britain and who claimed that a tan is
healthy) by saying 'it looks healthy yes but with that ray out there I'm s__Qoburnt'.
Some other interviewees enacted this disjunction within their own monologic state-
ments. W24, a male in his sixties, cited the point of view that there are health bene-
fits to be gained from exposure to the sun in that it improved skin or provided vita-
mins. But he then acknowledged the self-deception that this argument entails: 'you
kid yourself that it's er (.) good for you so far as um (.) oh certain vitamins are con-
cerned I suppose you know (well) (.) less likely to get colds and that'.
The simplest account to offer, in a public setting, is that of the momentary lapse.
Some respondents suggested that they usually took avoidance or protection precau-
tions, but that their behaviour on the day of the interview happened to be excep-
tional. This is the strategy used by the speaker in extract 8, a male in his twenties
(W64) who had rehearsed sun protection advice (mentioning sunscreen and hats) just
previously.

(8) I: and do you follow the advice yourself as well?

R: er yeah yeah usually I put some on I haven't this morning though I must
admit

Here again the force of response shifts from projected compliance to non-compli-
ance as the utterance proceeds, with the stance of non-compliance acknowledged and
retrospectively mitigated by two adverbial elements ('though' and 'I must admit').
Similarly, W75 (a woman in her thirties) told the interviewer that advice she was
aware of included wearing twenty-plus factor sunscreen and covering up, but she
went on: 'except today I haven't got anything on my shoulders - we just had our
lunches sitting in the sun (laughter)'. Her laughter fills the same discursive slot as
W64's 'I must admit', and both speakers, at these moments, address the inadequacy
of their discourse of exceptions. Nevertheless, offering a weak account seemed to be
preferred to offering none. Interviewees appeared to derive (or rather, appeared to be
seeking to derive) face-threat mitigation from suggesting that their sun use behaviour
could easily have been otherwise: W75 (a female in her thirties) suggested that she
and her companion had not intended to be at the beach so close to midday: 'mind
you we were supposed to be down here at four not at two'; a woman in her forties
(W79) indicated that she would have put sunscreen on if she was going to be in the
sun for a long time: 'like if it was gonna be a couple of hours or something I would'.
There is a confessional quality to one woman's account of her momentary lapse;
T27 (in her thirties) had, like almost all others in the sample, indicated awareness of
the dangers of skin cancer and the need to use 'sun lotion', but she continued: 'well
s I haven't (.) I've left mine in the car to be honest with you ... I've left it to be hon-
est with you I do but I haven't got it with me today'.
 .I. Coupland et al. /,lournal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721 711

9. Effortless tanning

In discussing tanning as an element of body culture and as a somewhat narcissis-

tic body project, we have assumed that, for many people, tanning is a valued out-
come of the wilful activity of exposing bodies to the sun. This commitment has been
evident, although with varying degrees of explicitness, in data examples in the pre-
vious section. However, there is a stance which denies that the speaker tans wilfully,
implying that, for them, acquiring a tan is an unlooked-for side effect from indulging
in outdoor activities (either work, sport or other leisure). These individuals could say
that they 'just picked up' a tan, implying that they were absolved from potential
accusations of irresponsible behaviour: 'a tan's just something that a happens during
the summer months' (W50 male, twenties). W44, W59, W62, W69, W74 make sim-
ilar claims. For example, W59 (a female, under twenty) said: 'I just seem to get a tan
by being outside just playing sport'. The nominalised 'tan', grammaticalised as out-
come in object-position after 'get' or 'pick up' (verbs which have affected objects
rather than full agents in subject-position) captures what we mean by 'effortless' in
the title of this section.
It is interesting to examine this type of account for any implicit endorsement of tan-
ning outcomes. T40 (a woman in her forties) denied both sunbathing and the desire
for a tan but her statement was: 'I don't sunbathe (.) ... but if I picked up a nice bit of
colour you know but not so much a tan I'm not really fussed about a tan you know'.
The phrase 'a nice bit of colour' returns here (see the previous section), proposing a
distinction between skin colour-change and tanning, where will/agency and responsi-
bility presumably attach to tanning but not to skin colour-change. Colour-change is a
'natural' process, and the implied argument is that individuals cannot be blamed for
'nature's effects' on them. But this neutrality is undermined by people's professed
liking of the 'natural' outcomes, as in the expression 'a nice bit of colour'.
Similarly in extract 9, W14 admires herself, and in turn solicits admiration (read-
ily supplied by her friend, who speaks the second turn), for the ease with which she
has acquired a change in skin colour.

(9) R: I only get in the sun once a month (1.0) that's it (.) you know
R: and look at that
R: (1.0) mm ((I syll)) (laugh) impressive

As we argued early in the paper, public health pre- and proscriptions assert and
assume a responsible public, who are expected to acknowledge that they are indeed
agents in the management of their sun exposure. Claims about effortless and inci-
dental tanning resist ozone-melanoma discourse in the crucial dimensions of agency
and responsibility. They make it appear that known sunburn advice is not really
salient for them, because tanning is not their avowed personal project. But those who
demonstrably value the 'incidental' effects of skin colour-change present themselves
as unanticipated beneficiaries - people in receipt of 'windfall' positive face (appear-
ance) gains. This leaves their rhetorical stance somewhat suspect, and their actual
degrees of agency and responsibility open to question.
712 J. Coupland et al. /Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721

10. Hedonistic, non-compliant tanning

A number of responses in the sample echoed the standard sunburn advice quite
accurately, with respondents then indicating either that they didn't follow it or that
they followed it only in some limited respects (e.g. WI4, W26, W52, W78, and T9,
T10, T19, T24, T32, T37, T49, T50, T58, T74). T50 (a male in his twenties) men-
tioned using 'high factor cream' as an element of good advice, but then undermined
it by advocating using oil in its place, in the dedicated pursuit of getting 'a good tan'.

(10) I: what would you say is the best advice about sunbathing and tanning?
R: plenty of er high factor cream in the hot first few days ... and then just build
down slowly I'd have thought if you want to get a good tan
I: right (.) what do you think of that advice? do you follow it? does it affect
you?
R: when we go abroad it does the first couple of days then we use oil after the
cream like for the second week

Many respondents expressed an anti-PC, hedonistic approach to sun tanning. The

responses in this group included all those who recognised the dangers of sunbathing,
but said quite explicitly that a tan was important, and that, while they were aware of
the sunburn advice, they did not follow it. While their behaviour conflicts with sun-
burn advice, their stance finds its discursive coherence in 'body culture' discourse,
which gives priority to short-term aesthetic and social gains over longer-term health
risks.
Traces of discourse conflict are apparent, but only minimally. Some respondents'
expressions of their priorities were marked with humour, implying possible embar-
rassment or an apologetic orientation. Some suggested they had been 'caught out', or
had 'failed' a test. Extracts 11-13 illustrate this pattern. Extract 11 is from a woman
in her twenties (W27); extract 12 is from a man in his twenties (W54); extract 13 is
from a woman in her thirties (T70). In all three, the laughter appears to reflect
embarrassment and the tone is, however superficially, apologetic.

(11) I: do you take precautions against the sun?

R: (laughs at length) I'd be lying if I said yes (laugh) oh ((heck)) I'm not wear-
ing any now

(12) I: what sort of advice have you come across about sunbathing and tanning
R: (1.0) just just wear a hat wear wear a s t shirt and that sort of stuff
I: mhm and do you follow that advice
R: not really (laughs)

(13) I: what would you say is the best advice about sunbathing and tanning?
R: not to stay out too long
I: right ok (.) and what do you think of this advice do you follow it?
R: (laughs) I can't say that because I've been out in it all day actually (laughs)
 J. Coupland et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721 713

The functioning of laughter is significant but ambiguous in these extracts. To

laugh in the context of describing one's behaviour as counter-normative or counter-
institutional is not necessarily to apologise for this behaviour, although it does mark
the fact of its being counter-normative. There is the further possibility that these
speakers are portraying the normative stance as having no serious implications for
them. They may even be projecting their amusement at not following institutional
prescriptions, which could have some positive ingroup value for them, as (predomi-
nantly) young adults.
Others respondents (W51, W54, W67, and T4, T22, T56, T57, T70, T80: eight of
these are in their twenties or younger, two in their thirties and one in his fifties)
reported their pro-tanning stance unqualified, as this example from W51, a New
Zealand male under twenty demonstrates:

(14) I: okay (.) do you think there are any problems to do with getting sunburnt or
being in the sun?
R: yeah (.) I suppose there's the melanoma and stuff but I never use sunblock
I: (.) right (.) okay so what sort of advice have you come across about sun-
bathing and tanning?
R: oh everyone always tells me to put sunblock on and that but I never do

One Wellington woman in her twenties (W14), who took an aggressively anti-PC
position throughout the interview, explained that she happened to have cream on
because her son had spilt it and she had mopped up the excess by putting it on her-
s e l l but she commented that she normally wouldn't wear protective sunscreen. Oth-
ers commented that they simply enjoyed lying in the sun.
'Hedonism' may seem too strong as a category label for this group, although it
does capture the positivity of their pro-sun stance. But a 'resistance' component is
also involved (exemplified above and in the following section), in young adults' bel-
ligerent, anti-PC stance. Extracts 11-14 all involve young adult respondents com-
menting explicitly on the fact that they do not follow known advice from institu-
tional sources. Although we have not tried to quantify age-cohorts' differing stances
in this paper, inter-generational differences are sometimes acknowledged in the
responses themselves, as in the following two extracts from middle-aged respon-
dents. The first is from W73, a male in his forties; the second is from W77, a woman
in her fifties.

(15) er the trouble is that it's such a long term thing that (.) you know it's only going
to be s really showing up in twenty thirty years from now ... that's the scary
part I think (.) we don't know what we're really doing to ourselves or at least
our kids are pretty good at covering up now

(16) just don't do it ... I've seen people who've spent their lives sunbathing and now
they're about my age and their skin's s__.oowrinkled and ... I can describe it if
you've ever seen tripe that's what it's er like ... but I think the young people
today still think brown is beautiful
714 J. Coupland et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721

11. Stance negotiation

In grouping speakers' response formulations in the way we have in previous sec-

tions, we have consciously set out to identify relatively homogeneous ideological
stances which allow us to generalise about our data. We feel that identifying these
stances or pragmatic formulations may be useful to other researchers wishing to
work in similar domains of risk where complex social responses are made. On the
other hand, we have indicated where internally coherent ideological positions, or dis-
courses, impinge on or conflict with one another, and how these tensions can be seen
to be operative in the text of individuals' responses.
In this section we further emphasise the negotiative qualities that individual inter-
viewees' responses often show. Many people's responses involved them in quite rad-
ical on-line negotiation of the issues raised by the questions we asked, confronted by
the need to project versions of their beliefs in these brief, public interactions. Two
particular cases will serve to illustrate this point, one from a young woman from the
Tenby corpus and one from a young man from the Wellington corpus. They are most
striking for their overall ambivalence, although each, in its own way, further illus-
trates the triumph of ongoing body culture imperatives over scientific health and
safety advice. The first extract below illustrates the negotiation of a perspective on
sun use based on a very slight knowledge base. The second illustrates a well-
informed person negotiating the representation of a complex set of moral and politi-
cal imperatives in on-line talk.

(17) (from T04, a female under 20)

I: how important for you is getting a tan?
R: it is important cos I like to have a tan ... loads of other people my friends
are (.) I ' m gonna have a better tan than you this year innit you know
(laughs) things like that
I: are you aware of any problems to do with getting sunburnt or being in the
sun?
R: yeah I burn really easy my face I get blisters ... I had blisters on my nose
they've only just gone
I: so what would you say is the best advice about sunbathing and tanning?
R: er if you're going to sunbathe don't stay out too long ... and try not to (.)
get just one certain part of your body brown ... if you're going to sunbathe
try to get all your body or you'll burn up ...
I: do you follow that advice?
R: no (laughs) ...
(asked later if she has seen anything in recent print media about sunburn problems)
R: it was in a girl's magazine it said something about (.) if your shadow's big-
ger than you it's alright to sunbathe something like that or is it the other
way round? tell by your shadow if it's safe or not

For this person, at this point, tanning was clearly desirable as a body project for her
peer-group, where achieving a tan became not only a topic of group talk but also a
 J. Coupland et al. /,lournal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721 715

focus of peer competition. Competition hinges not only on achieving a tan but on the
depth of skin colour-change, and she explicitly uses a grammatical comparative ('a
better tan'). She recognised and had personal experience of problems associated with
sun use ('blisters'), but interpreted 'problems' as relating to her own burning ('I burn
really easily') rather than as a broad, pervasive problem for community health. The
implication is that, in a cost-benefit analysis, personal discomfort was the price to be
paid for the admiration to be earned once the tan is achieved. Her summary of the 'best
advice about sunbathing and tanning' is variably accurate, in relation to actual advice
given. By those standards, her idea about browning 'all your body' rather than 'one
certain part' is confused and conjures an unfortunate cooking or roasting metaphor,
and images of the tanning competitor rotating regularly under the burning sun.
Her answer to the later question, about media sources on the topic of sunburn
problems, is again uncertain, although even a full understanding and endorsement of
standard advice would conflict with her commitment to 'this year"s (very short
term) goals in her group's body project competition. Later (beyond the transcribed
extract), she did mention skin cancer in answer to Question 11, but throughout her
interview notions of risk and danger had no apparent personal salience for her. Her
short laugh after she admits not following the sunburn advice gives only the slight-
est hint that she might have felt her stance was naive or questionable.
This interviewee was unusually unaware of the content of health advice and her
stance is difficult to incorporate into any of the previously introduced types. She did
not exclude herself from the at-risk group, nor did she offer any specific account for
her pro-tanning stance. For her, tanning was a taken-for-granted good, with specific,
local associated problems, and she did not appear to feel that she needed to engage
with the political and moral issues that, for most respondents, lay behind the ques-
tions posed. The position that she negotiated during the interview was not, in this
sense, a consolidated one; it was not ideological.
The second example, from a knowledgeable young male from the New Zealand
corpus, is a complex metacommentary on the irresistible seduction of the body-pro-
ject, the guilt engendered by 'brown is beautiful' values, and the difficulty of recon-
ciling beliefs and behaviours. To this extent, the extract is a paradigmatic instance of
the complex negotiation of personal and social priorities in one domain of political
correctness.

(18) (from W60, a male in his twenties)

I: okay (.) how important for you is getting a tan?
R: (1.0) um ((I)) hate to say it but it's very important to me
I: yeah in what way? I mean why?
R: um I always feel that (.) it's terrible to say but most people look better when
they're tanned
I: oh okay (1.0) and do you th
[
R: I'm failing terribly I'm sure (laughs)
I: do you think there are any problems to do with getting sunburnt or being in
the sun?
716 J. Coupland et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721

R: yeah yeah (.) um melanoma's bad

I: right
R: ((I)) try and take care but (1.0) it's a risk
I: (.) so what sort of advice have you come across about sunbathing and tan-
ning?
R: (.) really I know that you shouldn't do it that much and you should use
maximum s er sunscreens and cover up and all that
I: mhm and do you follow that advice?
R: (.) um not as often as I should

The speaker repeatedly foregrounds the conflictual nature of his discourses. In his
answers he observes his own behaviours and opinions, reflexively, and evaluates
them: 'I hate to say it'; 'I always feel that it's terrible to say'; ' I ' m failing terribly
I ' m sure [laughter]'; 'really I know that you shouldn't'; 'not as often as I should'.
He portrays his opinions and behaviour choices about sun use as existing in a moral
climate where they are available for debate and censure. This is no doubt a more
accurate representation of public discourse in the New Zealand than in the Welsh
cultural context (e.g. in terms of daily TV and radio broadcasting of burn-time infor-
mation, regular reporting of the ozone hole problem and saturated coverage of can-
cer risks). But the general policy dialogue, and the more specific dialogue between
reports and evaluations of reports, is being enacted within this speaker's own
answers.
He presents himself as a sun user with a commitment to the body project on the
grounds of personal appearance ('it's very important to m e ' ; 'most people look bet-
ter when they're tanned'). He is well aware of the dangers of sun exposure, and
therefore of his sun use as being a risky compromise 'I try and take care but it's a
risk'. He is prepared to give full credence to ozone-melanoma discourse. This is
implied in the discourse marker 'really' ('really ! know that you shouldn't do it that
much and you should use maximum s- er sunscreens and cover up and all that'), con-
trasting what he knows to be wise with what he feels to be desirable, and in modals
expressing unfulfilled safety imperatives 'shouldn't' and 'should'. But his choice is
to reject these imperatives in favour of the body project, and he mitigates the con-
flict, although only very slightly, through 'that much' and 'and all that' (as previ-
ously discussed). For this person, the dilemmatic nature of sun use discourses
remains unresolved. His answers do not establish one rhetorical position, unless it is
a position of ambivalence.

12. Overview

We have illustrated a number of alternative responses to the reconciliation of

favourable attitudes to tanning with awareness of the health risks associated with sun
exposure. In the data, some people adopted positions on tanning which reflected
great familiarity with ozone-melanoma discourse and which suggested that their
views had been brought into alignment with current medical advice. They endorsed
 .I. Coupland et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721 717

an ideology which prioritises long-term health over short-term, fashionable body

project goals. Others, articulating stances which filled out a large number of sub-cat-
egories, although indicating awareness of that advice, implied in their responses that
they subscribed to different values: body-display culture over health, hedonism or
enjoyment over responsiveness to scientific facts. Some of these stances involved
flatly rejecting the health institution's priorities. Others deployed strategies (various
different strategic discourses of exception) for reconciling speakers' personal priori-
ties and behaviours with the received advice, and these were more or less convinc-
ing to varying degrees. Some people's responses suggested they did not engage with
sun use as an ideological issue; others were wholly engaged with it as an on-going
dilemma which they could not resolve.
It is important to bear in mind the social circumstances under which our data were
gathered. Our schedule of questions was not delivered to interviewees in an ideolog-
ical vacuum. It is plausible that early questions were heard to be asked in a
'social/recreational' frame, which induced the consistently positive answers agreeing
that the weather is important for a good seaside break. Later questions, about prob-
lems of sun use, could more readily have been heard in a 'social problems' or a
'health' frame. Even later questions about personal sun use policies could have pro-
posed a 'moral' frame. To some extent, then, discursive conflict is already enshrined
in the questioning strategies, even though interpretive frames need to be co-con-
structed by listeners as well as questioners, and the data are therefore not in any sim-
ple sense 'invalidated' by these considerations.
In fact, we feel sure that the discursive positions and conflicts that interviewees
reflected in their answers do have currency beyond the context of the interviews we
conducted. This is not at all to say that individual speakers' internally held beliefs
and priorities were exactly as they represent them to strangers in interviews. We
have no reason to believe that speakers either were or were not reporting their
stances truthfully and comprehensively, and this is one reason for not having
invested energy in coding and counting particular groups' responses. It may be safer
to assume that beliefs and priorities are n e v e r held in pure, decontextualised forms in
people's heads, outside of the realm of discursive social action (see Potter and
Wetherell, 1987). On the other hand, the discursive formations in terms of which
answers were constructed do lay out the dimensions of the moral debate particularly
clearly. If there are generalisations to be found about age-based or community-based
differences, distributional studies could usefully be built around these stances or the
dimensions underlying them, which define the range of popular orientations to the
sun use issue.
Also, whatever the actual distribution of beliefs, in support of or hostile to public
health policy, a qualitative analysis has allowed us to model the complexity of the
moral issue as it impinges on people's lives. Our data suggest that health promo-
tional campaigns have been successful, in the sense of raising people's knowledge
thresholds about skin cancer risks and about how to avoid health problems. Almost
all respondents could rehearse some key elements of the standard advice. (This
appears to be more true of New Zealand than of Wales, but we have not at this stage
reported data to support this claim in detail.) But even with high awareness levels,
718 J. Coupland et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-72 l

the interview data show that there are systematic forces at work which qualify,
undermine and in some cases actively resist the dominant health promotional dis-
course. Even without a quantitative analysis, it is equally clear that a large majority
of people interviewed in both communities expressed favourable attitudes in favour
of sun tanning, and that many of them can offer coherent accounts in defence of
these views despite their awareness of risks. The coherence of their positions is,
however, only accountable within specific value systems, and not often within the
scientific-medical-institutional system. This finding, again, should be of value to
health promotional campaigns and medical researchers (cf. Bennett et al., 1991 ; Hill
et al., 1993; Marks and Hill, 1992; Melia and Bulman, 1995)
Discursive conflict in talk about sun use is partly a problem of integrating new
information with existing values and traditions. For at least the last fifty years
(arguably, since Douglas Fairbanks inaugurated skin tanning and Hollywood pro-
moted it as a fashionable practice), the dominant discourse in this area has centred
on the principle that 'brown is beautiful'. People who have conventionally regarded
a tan as a desirable goal to be worked towards, as a means of enhancing attractive-
ness and of looking healthy, now have to come to terms with a new and contradic-
tory position expressed by health experts - tanning is bad for skin and promotes
'premature ageing' (Coupland and Coupland, 1997); tanned skin is undesirable and
unattractive; sun exposure is dangerous and even naive. This cultural shift in
progress presents real challenges to our cognitive and conceptual frameworks. For
some people in our sample, first-hand experience (e.g. severe burning episodes or
skin cancer) had warranted the institutional discourse. For others, the attraction of a
tan had declined for reasons other than health; body project imperatives were per-
ceived by some to have declined with chronological age. Interestingly, then, this is
one social change where older people may find themselves leading the new ideolog-
ical wave, even though denying older people a stake in body culture may constitute
a further sort of undesirable disenfranchisement.
The beach interview data we have presented here suggests that many people in the
southern and northern hemispheres are still struggling with this conceptual problem,
and have not yet satisfactorily resolved it. But if they have not, this is not merely
because they have not had enough time to assimilate new information, or enough
exposure to health campaigns. The interview data have revealed that there is a highly
active, contemporary discourse which still dominates people's rationalising of the
ozone-cancer-sun issue and their practical responses to it. Body culture, especially
among young people in consumerist late-modern societies, is a demonstrably potent
force and has surfaced as such in very many of our interviews. The trend in devel-
oped societies to increased leisure time and the unremitting promotion of appearance
and physical identity as the main focus for consumerist youth culture are formidable
adversaries for a discourse of protection from and avoidance of the sun.
We have seen how the personal responsibility implied by the institution's dis-
course is recognised by older adults more readily than by young adults. Doing youth
may, for some, itself mean avoiding 'sensible, rational behaviour', or redefining
rationality from within an alternative value system, centred on 'acceptable risk'
(Beck, 1995), short term gains and social comparisons within the peer group. But
 J. Coupland et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1998) 699-721 719

even those y o u n g p e o p l e who do n o t set t h e m s e l v e s against institutional prescrip-

tions for their o w n sake, those who a r e e n g a g e d with the institution's priorities and
take them seriously (people like the y o u n g N e w Z e a l a n d m a l e in extract 18), find
b o d y culture discourse sufficiently seductive as a c o n t e m p o r a r y force to deflect them
from f o l l o w i n g k n o w n health advice.
It w o u l d be trite to c l a i m that an e x p l o r a t o r y analysis o f the s o , that we have con-
ducted can help resolve the d i l e m m a s we have illustrated. W e have tried to suppress
our own ideological positions in conducting the study to avoid colouring our repre-
sentations o f r e s p o n d e n t s ' positions, although this is never entirely possible in inter-
pretive w o r k o f this sort. There is clearly a pressing health p r o b l e m to be r e s o l v e d
here, and it m a y be that a better understanding o f discursive resistance to sun use
advice will help health c o m m u n i c a t o r s devise m o r e influential c a m p a i g n s and help
educators break d o w n that resistance, e s p e c i a l l y a m o n g y o u n g people. This is an out-
c o m e we hope to have m a d e m o r e likely. At the same time, it should be clear that we
b e l i e v e that the o p p o s i n g discourses are d e e p l y influential. T h e y i m p i n g e on us as
well as on the interviewees whose opinions we have analysed.

Appendix A: The interview schedule

Interviewee number ... M/F

1. Excuse me. Are you on holiday here? I'm doing a survey for Victoria University/the Uni-
versity of Wales in Cardiff. Do you mind if I ask (one of) you a few questions about your
holiday ?
2. How important is the weather to enjoying your day?
3. Does it matter if it's sunny or not? Why is that?
4. Do you like being out in the sun a lot during the holidays?
5. (If yes) Why? What do you like about being in the sun?
6. How important for you is getting a tan?
7. Do you think there are any problems to do with getting sunburnt or being in the sun?
8. What sort of advice have you come across about sunbathing and tanning?
9. What do you think of this advice? How does it affect you? Do you follow that advice?
(If person has children:) Do you take any special steps to protect the kids from rite sun?
10. Do you know exactly what makes skin burn in the sun?
11. Do you think sunburn is more of a problem nowadays than it used to be?
12. (If yes) Do you know the cause of that? (Probe)
13. Which newspapers have you read in the last month or so?
14. And which magazines?
15. Have you read anything in them about sunburn problems?
16. What about on radio or TV?
17. Which of these age-bands do you come into?
under 20 twenties thirties forties fifties sixties seventies
18. [Make notes on appearance - e.g. tan, hats, parasols, suncream, dress]
720 J. Coupland et al. /Journal of Pragmatics 30 (l 998) 699-721

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Justine Coupland is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Language and Communication Research, Uni-
versity of Cardiff. Her research interests are in social interaction, discourse and lifespan issues and talk
in medical contexts. She has published widely in the areas of interactional and gerontological sociolin-
guistics, discourse and identity, and communicative ritual. Her books include Language, society and the
eldeHy (Blackwell, with Nikolas Coupland and Howard Giles) and Contexts of accommodation (Cam-
bridge, with the same co-editors). She is currently preparing an edited volume for Addison Wesley
Longman on Small talk.

Janet Holmes holds a personal Chair in Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, where she
teaches sociolinguistics. She is Director of the recently completed Wellington Corpus of Spoken New
Zealand English, and currently directs a project on Language in the Workplace. Her publications include
An introduction to sociolinguistics; the first book of sociolinguistic and pragmatic articles on New
Zealand English, New Zealand ways of speaking English, co-edited with Allan Bell; and a book on lan-
guage and gender, Women, men and politeness. She has published on a wide range of topics including
New Zealand English, language and gender, pragmatic particles, compliments, apologies and narrative.

Nikolas Coupland is Professor and Director of the Cardiff Centre for Language and Communication
Research, and co-editor (with Allan Bell) of the Journal of Sociolinguistics. He has published eleven
books on various aspects of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, including Language. Contexts and
consequences (Open University Press, with Howard Giles) and Multiple goals in discourse (Multilin-
gual Matters, with Karen Tracy). He is currently editing proceedings of two of the Cardiff Round Tables
in Language and Communication, Sociolinguistics and social theory (Longman, with Christopher Can-
dlin and Srikant Sarangi) and The soeiolinguisties of metalanguage (with Adam Jaworski and Darek
Galasinski).