Not-knowing as membership knowledge. The mediation of sociocultural facts through storytelling

Membership in a community is critically constituted through local sociocultural knowledge and participation in valued practices. Conversely, novice or outsider status is associated with limited local knowledge and participation. However, these standard associations do not always bear out in interaction. Previous research examines how "foreigners" display themselves as knowledgeable in the local culture and as competent participants in local practices, and how the local co-participants align themselves to such displays (see e.g., Suzuki, 2009). In the data analyzed for this study, the association of membership and epistemic status is turned on its head. In dinner table talk between a first- (L1) and second-language (L2) speaker of Icelandic about bakery products and their names, the L1 speaker claims that competent adult Icelanders (1) do not know the names of bakery products and (2) bakery customers normatively use a combination of demonstrative pronouns and pointing gestures to make purchase requests. The speaker seconds the factuality of these claims through a story about a breaching experiment in a bakery and a personal experience story about a bread purchase gone awry. The epistemic status of "not-knowing" (Heritage, 2012) and the use of other strategies are discursively transformed from predicates associated with the category of novice or outsider to that of competent member.