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 Infancy and language acquisition: Learning, participation and the children's struggle as they play and resist 1.1 Readings 1.2 Reading notes 1.2.1 Families, education and the State in America. 1.3 Class notes

[edit] Infancy and language acquisition: Learning, participation and the children's struggle as they play and resist

[edit] Readings

• Varenne, Hervé "Families, education and the State in America." New York: IUME, Teachers College, Columbia University (pp. 6-37)

[edit] Reading notes

[edit] Families, education and the State in America.

• Introduction
  • who are the relevant actors: parents, teachers, government?
  • A: what about the child him/herself?
  • families are powerful actors
  • most children go home to a "family" of some kind after school
  • we should start thinking that:
    • families represent a plurality of institutions; too diverse for generalizations
    • families are not weakening; they may be gaining strength in non-obvious ways
    • educators have limited power
  • research on parental involvement often assume that parents are ignorant
  • parents will always find ways of exerting that influence to fight for their children
  • (A: a "back" button would help in the navigation)

• Part I - Social Reproduction, Education, and the Family
  • Parsons: families have become functionless
  • Bumpass: families are shrinking in importance; exist for reasons of "intimacy"
  • families place their children in particular communities; are powerful forces of social reproduction
  • The psychodynamics of family life
    • media representations show happiness as dependent on coming home to a warm family life
    • Parsons describes instrumental functions (material support) and expressive functions (emotional support)
    • State intervenes when these cannot be provided
    • research also look at adult identity as the result of interactions with parents during childhood and maintained later by relationships (spousal)
    • many research also look at factors that lead to the "best" family (e.g. presence of biological father, availability of reading material, etc.)
  • The psychodynamics of social success
    • sociological interest in how some organizations of family can lead to personality breakdown and hence conflict in society
    • assumption that good mental health is required for a good society
    • Moynihan: senator who argued that poor Black families are unstable
    • others have described "cultures of poverty"
  • The sociodynamics of everyday life in families
    • personal relationships are affected by larger society but is flexible and self-correcting
    • "a bad society makes everyday life difficult for many and trigger the social processes which make families necessary and eventually strengthen their influence"
    • movement of activities such as food consumption from home to industry; also daycare, preschool, etc.
    • children spend vacations with families; create their own families afterwards
    • "family" defined as any social arrangements where a group of people take care of children
    • State intervenes when these isn't such an arrangement but not interested in specific organization within the family
  • The place of families in social reproduction
    • rise of industrialism shifted functions that used to be done at home to more specialized institutions; but parents still control who, which, and where to go for these functions
    • parental income will restrain which places they can go to
    • policies and programs try to break parental control; result of parents manipulating structure of schooling through politics
    • subset of middle class (intellectual elites) have large influence over school pedagogy and curriculum
    • learning not dependent on innate merit; some family environments help
    • the more prestigious the school the more it will have to fail good students
    • higher education credentials now needed for certain jobs
    • interpretations of school discourse:
      • Marxist: attempt to maintain class interests
      • liberal: byproduct of reforms not fully thought through
      • conservative: proper byproduct because education means bending one’s spirit
    • family background cannot be ignored when understanding success in school
    • Bernstein
      • representing British tradition
      • suggested that certain modes of speaking might be better adjusted to schooling
      • some middle class children more prepared than those in the working class
    • Heath
      • representing American tradition; influenced by cultural anthropology and personality theory
      • children encultured by parents into “ways of speaking” while teachers encultured in other ways
    • Bourdieu
      • representing French tradition
      • habitus: dispositions inculcated in early life
      • people continue to believe in the system that failed them
      • middle class use schooling to their advantage and working class are unaware of this
    • critique:
      • overdetermining of early socialization
      • socialization not a mechanical or automatic process
      • relations between families and schools are complex and cannot be explained by socialization theories
      • assumption that, by the time child enters school, their language and personality are fixed
      • later studies in anthropology, linguistics, etc. show that people continue to evolve and transform themselves
      • adults continually correct children, hence educating them in some way
    • poor find ways of refusing games of the school
    • organization of schooling more influential in creating differences than innate abilities

• Part II - Family Processes in the United States
  • effective family larger than the traditional nuclear family
  • marriage is work; creates dependencies among people in the household
  • Small households and the American nuclear family
    • statistics often describe the shrinking of family sizes but these numbers are problematic
    • numbers also don't describe quality of relationships within
    • traditional nuclear family become focus of media representations, greeting cards, etc.
    • 'A: although these days, you get "non-conventional" families as sitcoms too, e.g. Two and a half men, Three's company, these are albeit rare and one might argue they exist as "exceptions to the rule"
    • nuclear family concept influences housing policies
    • Supreme Court ruling transforms families into a type of social contract
  • The social construction of local familial patterns
    • reporting that "nothing" was done last night at home is not to say that nothing was done, but that nothing currently exists in the current model to describe them
    • common focus on families had been regarding mental health
    • family interactions can be source for stress and psychological trauma
    • Bateson looked at short intervals of interaction to show how people communicate and construct what is important in their everyday life
    • ethnomethodology: interaction is a work-in-process and is constitutve of the world of the participants
    • families have to be continually maintained and constructed, and as children grow up to form their own families, they build them under new conditions, with new tools, etc.
    • interaction builds new tools, creates new histories
    • there are variation among groups; difficult to explain variations through broad demographic traits
  • The family beyond individual households
    • LS: "families are not the building blocks of society, they are temporary resting places"
    • families are transitory
    • parents can influence who children marry through influencing where and who they grow up with
    • families maintain links with other households, even if they are devalued
    • families may not really be "weakening"; not using links not the same as not having those links to use
    • more research needed to understand how households are connected
  • Interrelationships among families
    • unrelated families (e.g. nannies) are linked as well
    • Boon: motherhood susceptible to transformation
    • macrosociological views of societies need to be reinterpreted through familial views
    • A: interestingly, I'm just starting to watch the Showtime series The Tudors, which tells the story of Henry VIII (with a slightly more modern touch, much like Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette); it is interesting to see the political and personal machinations of families being such a crucial part of his monarch's history

[edit] Class notes

Link to Professor Varenne's notes

• Transition notes
  • "what is revolting" is not crosscultural
  • is it a repulsion or a rule?
  • degree of prohibited sex/marriage has increased due to sexual harassment laws (e.g. people you work with, student/teachers, etc.)
  • anthropology: what counts as "evidence"; they is an empirical world
  • need to consider the status of the evidence
  • anthropologists feel that you can use one counter-evidence to disprove a particular theory
  • cannot use probability; hypothetical deductive (and not empirical)
  • culture discredits both nature and nurture argument
  • people were at some point able to transform their nature and nurture
  • culture produces conditions for us that we may be unaware of
  • State specifies conditions in which they can intervene in families
  • mothers expect nannies to "love" their children
• Schooling
  • major task of adolescents not about sex but about getting into college
  • parents want to control their adolescents to make sure they are prepared for college
  • idea that adolescents have "freedom" because they can have sex
  • parents move to places and control what kinds of people their children can meet
  • people have strong tendencies of becoming versions of their parents
  • cross-class marriages are rare
  • people thought that schools are supposed to create a level playing field; if there are problems, it is a "technical problem"
  • 1960s studies: school success related to family background; will always skew policies
  • in 1950s, few sociologists were interested in studying schooling
  • Bourdieu: provided explanation of how schooling creates social reproduction
  • Foucault: modern state organized to discipline and punish
  • mobility: most mobility happens during period of economic growth, where middle/upper class expands and recruits others; very little downward mobility
  • Bourdieu: schooling system is arbitrary; it doesn't have to be that way; content of curriculum is arbitrary
  • e.g. pre-med courses have nothing to do with medicine as a form of gatekeeping
  • méconnaissance: all of us are fooled by the arbitariness of the system
  • some argue that some parents understand system better than others (e.g. Jews, Asians) while others misunderstand it
  • cultural difference model: people have different cultures; students can achieve success if teachers try to draw on the students' cultural backgrounds
  • upper middle class using disability law; have found out that if child is "disabled", child can get extra help
  • V: parents do understand schooling; poor support public schools as a way of reducing upper class privilege; upper class had used to fight public schools, until they found ways of manipulating the system
• Parenting
  • what you inherit from parents: names, property, status, financial and cultural capital
  • how land gets passed on differ across cultures
  • argument that cultural capital is related to financial capital?
  • idea that democracy that will diminish the importance of inheritance and emphasize the importance of individual merit
  • institutionalization of public schooling is a violent act, especially when it was first enforced
  • French government sent police to enforce mass schooling
  • controlling sexuality becomes less about social reproduction because of changes in inheritance
  • parents may want daughters to marry man with property; needed to ensure daughters were virgins, and hence control of sexuality
• Marriage
  • dowries: give by groom's parents to bride's parents
  • American traditional wedding: bride's family pays for the wedding
  • divide resources equally among children; dowries was a form of early inheritance
  • dowry could be schooling; woman could work; degree was the investment
  • dowries are really expensive for parents; belongs to wife even though under husband's name
  • A: Reminds me of the movie Father of the Bride
  • parents' investment in schooling can be related to dowry and future status