Dynamics of Family Interaction: Courtship in love
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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.
Contents |
[edit] Infancy and language acquisition: Learning, participation and the children's struggle as they play and resist
[edit] Readings
- Canaan, Joice "Why a 'slut' is a 'slut': Cautionary tales of middle-class teenage girls' morality." in Symbolizing America, ed. by H. Varenne, 184-208. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. s1986.
- Holland, Dorothy, and Debra Skinner "The cultural models behind Americans' talk about gender types," in Cultural models in language and thought, ed. by D. Holland and N. Quinn, 78-111. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1987
[edit] Reading notes
[edit] Canaan Joyce: Why a 'slut' is a 'slut': Cautionary tales of middle-class teenage girls' morality
[edit] Holland, Dorothy, and Debra Skinner: "The cultural models behind Americans' talk about gender types
[edit] Class notes
Link to Professor Varenne's notes
- Transition notes
- culture not in people's heads but in the arrangements of relationships; located in a time and space
- is there a "best" way for human development? learning? education?
- Adolescence
- what troubles occur in the way Americans organize adolescence?
- puberty is "so big" that every culture will have some way of managing the shift from child to adolescence/adult
- maturity today gets pushed back (e.g. graduation, college, etc.)
- children now stay at home longer now than it was possible in the past
- invention of "teenager": 13-19; an arbitrary artifact
- Holland and Skinner
- studied women; at which point in college do women shift to "female careers"; shift occurs in sophomore and junior year
- correlations show that female students in high school start doing more poorly in math
- what is, in a cultural sense, "universally acknowledged"? (Austen)
- cognitive anthropology: looking at words used and putting them on a matrix to map out relations
- dangers of gender analysis
- positioning your friends and managing your self's position
- within each gender, you can be a multiplicity of persons
- Canaan
- few social scientific studies on love
- often uses euphemisms, such as attractiveness, etc. even though "love" is everywhere in America
- David Synder: first anthropologist to write about love
- "love" in English and "amour" in French used differently
- indexicality: things you don't mention but point to; things you don't specific explicitly
- possible to have one-night stands and not be called a "slut"
- A: discussion reminds me of Annie Hall, when Annie asks Woody Allen if he loves her, and he uses all distorted forms of the word "love" as more potent forms of "love"
- Melissa represents girls who are confused by dating situation and what can happen within it
- hard for boys and girls who cannot get dates
- many cultures don't date; emergence of dating?
- A: now I am reminded of the movie American Graffiti
- in the past it was harder to meet people and many married best friend's brother/sister
- cliques in American high schools do not seem to have changed when comparing the discourse and representations in movies (e.g. Heathers, Mean Girls)
- dating as a "game"?
- A: reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Elaine says she's met a guy who "doesn't play games" and Seinfeld says "Then how do you know if you're winning or losing?"
- Other readings
- Portia Sabin (forthcoming) On Sentimental Education among College Students
- friends in small groups; friendly in larger groups
