From Studyplace

These are notes I'm taking for Professor Varenne's class on the Dynamics of Family Interaction. I'm using it as an opportunity to play around with wikis and shared community knowledge. Please feel free to contribute to these notes or share your ideas about how it can be expanded, changed, improved.

Aaron Hung

Contents 1 Every day familial life: possibilities and consequences 1.1 Readings 1.2 Reading notes 1.2.1 Talk and real talk: The voices of silence and the voices of power in American family life. 1.3 Class notes

Every day familial life: possibilities and consequences

Readings

• Varenne, Hervé "Talk and real talk: The voices of silence and the voices of power in American family life." Cultural Anthropology 2: 369-394. 1987

Reading notes

Talk and real talk: The voices of silence and the voices of power in American family life.

• Boon: culture are the operations that make complex human phenomena communicable
• includes biological, social constraints, language of the contemporaries
• tries not to reduce multifaceted nature of Americans into "Americanism"
• look at "texts of everyday life"
• hard to do traditional ethnographies because informants are good at moving researchers towards "interpretation"
• participants transform earlier conversations of others around them in subsequent conversations
• we should become conscious of our own ordering activities
• dinner conversation shows "family at work"; different speakers have to find ways of performing, participating
• culture triumphs over function
• discourse is a "polyphonic" performance
• playback interview: informant "retells" what happens during the dinner talk; avoids psychological interpretation
• informant went through divorce two years after dinner talk conversation
• reinterviewing the informant, she also produced her "story" of the dinner talk and the overall marriage
• texts can be used to create new texts in different historical settings and purposes
• no text can explain "what really happened"
• Americans appear to be eager to "talk about what really happened"
• power of "America" lies in the intertextual order established between texts (p. 389)
• Bakhtin: we carry the voices of many people around with us
• we should not confuse our summaries with the pretexts of others

Class notes

Link to Professor Varenne's notes

• Transition notes
  • difficult to find out what families in poverty do
  • assumptions about suburban, middle-class families; more predictable (A: see Desperate Housewives)
  • different women who come in to claim that they are responsible for the child
  • bad multiculturalism: assumption that you can summarize cultures according to families
  • be careful not to generalize even when you meet people from the same "culture"
  • "radical ethnography": what is it that people do do in the privacy of their homes
  • most studies don't pay attention to the mundane details of family life
  • similar to educational research that often don't look at what actually happens in the classroom

• Family life
  • harder to study family life because it isn't institutionalized or stable the way classrooms are
  • Bateson: how family interactions associated with schizophrenia
  • writing field notes limited by attention span and observations missed
  • brain built to make sense, not to transcribe or record
  • on a more detailed level, cannot trust participants to tell you exactly what they did
  • when can you say that "nothing" happened last night
  • Searle's speech act theory: most action has to be performed linguistically
  • people improvising talk
  • using "us", "them", "thing" references; against Bernstein's assumption that upper class people don't use "restricted codes"
  • everyone in family tracking individual details
  • mother involved in every topic of conversation; acts as a "director"
  • analysis of talk interaction shows rhythmic timing between speakers
  • people who are talking to each other are in rhythm
  • Paul Byers: studied rhythm in dialogue, movement
  • couples got divorced later; can you hear it in their conversation?
  • how do you go from "talking" to "really talking"?
  • some kinds of talk are setting-specific
  • "real talk" is talk that is re-interpreted/re-analyzed
  • Robert Bellah: Civil religion; celebrating the "civil" types of religion; more unifying
  • Tocqueville: wrote about American democracy in 1830; made important predictions about future of democracy