There have been differing stances on how essential membership knowledge is in doing EMCA (ethnomethodological conversation analysis) work, ranging from strict requirement of members’ knowledge and competence (Garfinkel 1967) to the argument of adequacy (and possible advantage) of cultural knowledge gained through field work (Hauser 2023; Moerman, 1988). In considering the relationship between members’ knowledge and conversation analysis, we present and consider two analytical pathways. First is the case where analyst works with a language for which she does not have any competence, but through the process of line-by-line analysis of interaction and with the help of the second author (a native speaker of that language), works her way through to the level where she gains an understanding of the interactional practices that reflect the culture of the larger community. The target phenomenon is person reference practices in Vietnamese and how it affects the local administration of turn-taking, and possibly self-other relations in interaction (Sidnell 2023). The second case is when the analyst starts with her own membership knowledge but arrives at the structure of meaning constructed by the participants through combined sequential and categorial analysis. The latter shows the role of members’ knowledge as a starting point, while the former presents a case where cultural knowledge becomes the arrival point through close sequential analysis.