This paper addresses the roles of taping and tapes in the arenas of academic Conversation
and Discourse Analysis, and in a recent American trial of therapists which constituted a
major development in the Recovered Memory/False Memory debate. Our argument is that
two seemingly opposed features of the practice of hearing tapes—tape fetishism and
professional hearing—are in fact interdependent. By tape fetishism we mean the treatment
of the tape as a direct and evidential record of a past event, and thus as a quasi-magical …