Structured Visions

With each new story is a different – but familiar – way of understanding how different types of social structure produce different types of individual. Mary's story, in last week's episode, illustrated the notion of the individual as a token of a particular, recognisable type: 'I was one of those…' This week we hear from Christina, who tells a story in two parts. The first part is about the economic downturn of her hometown, Awayville. The second part is about how she got out of there. In fact, she got out as soon as it was possible for her to leave:

I graduated from high school and moved out that night. I was packed before I went to graduation, and I graduated, and went to party and left. Like, that night.

Later she constructs a group of people, using the existential process there is and the definite determiner the, which signals that the listener will be able to figure out which group of people she's talking about:

There's always like the people who you just figure are gonna stay there forever.

With a new story – Christina's story about getting out of Awayville – we have a new image of how the individual relates to the community. In Christina's vision of the social world, the community is a group of nameless, indistinct people who will stay in Awayville forever. The individual is the one who separates herself from those people and that place.

The image of the individual here is the isolated individual, who has to rely upon her own resources to move away from a difficult economic situation. This story, from my point of view, is very similar to what has often been called 'the American dream': the idea that all Americans have the chance to 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps'. The idea, that Christina reflects here is something like:

It's up to me to change my own life.

The questions Christina's story raises for me, though, are these:

Who's changing the social structure that made your life so difficult in the first place?

How can we both be an individual and be contributing to the reshaping of the community or the social structure so that it isn't quite so oppressive and so difficult?

How can I be both an individual who is reliant upon my resources but is also fully supported by my community?

I also speak about different notions of the individual in so-called 'Western' and 'Eastern' cultures, and speak a bit about the difference between using kinship terms and given names when referring to family members. If you're interested, there are some illustrations of kinship terms in Korean in Alan Hyun-Oak Kim's chapter, 'Politeness in Korea' in Politeness in East Asia, edited by Dániel Z. Kádár and Sara Mills.

I tell more stories about my experiences in Strasbourg and American students doing their best to fit in. Often fitting in to aspects of French culture, and learning French, was made difficult because of how much they enjoyed being in the company of other English-language speakers. Thinking about them as a 'community of practice' – a term coined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in their book, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation – helps us to understand that better. Lave and Wenger say that you learn particular skills by being part of a community committed to a particular activity, like baking or playing basketball. The students joined together to engage in the practice of learning French and learning about French culture. If they'd come to France to learn to be bakers, it might have been easier to learn French, because learning French would have been just one aspect of a bigger picture: being part of the community of bakers.

'Communities of practice' explains a lot, and it has been used in quite a lot of sociolinguistic research (including the work by Penelope Eckert and Mary Bucholtz I discussed last week). The idea is that identity has more to do with doing particular things than with being a particular way. Some things it might not explain, though, such as what it felt like for Cheryl Harris's grandmother when she was passing as White in order to get a job that would support her family. It might not explain what I call

the wounding that happens when you feel like you're denying some aspect of yourself.

So I've decided to start exploring not just the models of community that scholars develop, but also the models of community that people come up with in their day to day conversations, even when they don't realise it. Take this conversation between Mary and Rachel:

Mary: I was like one of those like, I'm not gonna go outside because I'm gonna get my shoes dirty, y'know? ((laughs))

Rachel: You're still like that. ((laughs))

Mary: I am. ((laughs)) Ha ha ha, Rachel. Just cos I don't like trampling through the mud.

By using the demonstrative 'those', Mary is signalling that there is a category of people that she belongs to. Rather than telling us what qualities these people have, she acts them out for us by performing a little monologue about what they might say. She's describing herself as unique from the other people in her Strasbourg community. That is, she's different from them, but still recognisable, because she belongs to a category that others can understand. This act of dividing people into categories turns out to be a way of making it possible for Mary to be a unique individual in her community.

This raises some issues/questions for me. Some quotes from the episode:

There's a strange tension between being part of a group and being unique, that has to do with dividing people up and co-creating community.

This has started me thinking about the relationship between the individual and the group and the individual and the community and the way that communities construct the notion of the individual.

Do we have to divide everybody up in order to recognise them as individuals?

What types of community can we construct such that it is safe to be an individual?

More next week on co-creating community through conversation, and the relationship between the individual and the community.

Last week I said I hated social structure? I need an attitude adjustment. When is thinking about social structure fun for me? When we're imagining new ones: flower worlds, sock worlds, bubble words, underground worlds, for instance.

I discuss the work of two sociolinguists, Penelope Eckert and Mary Bucholtz, who did ethnographic work in the alien world of the American high school. Eckert's book, Language Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High analyses the links between class, gender and language in a high school in the Detroit area. Eckert describes a divide between 'jocks' and 'burnouts' and shows how the kids create meaningful categories according to the things they do, not just what social class they come from.

Bucholtz's article, '"Why be normal?": Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls' describes a group of self-proclaimed 'nerds' in another American high school. These girls, she explains, are constructing their own social category that subverts 'cool' identities.

I ask: how easy it is to subvert established social categories in a given social structure?

I ask: why are social categories – even subversive ones – based on acceptance/rejection? Can we imagine a social world where there's nothing but acceptance?

I decide to move from being an objective anthropologist to a regular person, with subjective experiences. I time travel back to being a kid at school myself, sitting in the school lunchroom staring down my shyness, my peers and … my peas. Eureka! I discover the value of creating a new story.

Linguistic description gets messy. The scientific description of language starts from the idea that no one variety is intrinsically better than any other variety, then why do linguists always only use the Standard to describe other varieties? Well, not every linguist. In her book, Talking that Talk, Geneva Smitherman upsets the apple cart by using African American Vernacular English (AAVE) forms in academic contexts.

I get called out of my scientific linguist mode when someone tells me I use the word 'like' a lot when I talk. Like, what? It turns out that the use of 'like' as a quotative has a particular function when you study it in relation to the structure of spoken narrative.

Grammatical structure, narrative structure – just the kind of structures I love. But the use of 'like' is often also studied in terms of its relation to aspects of social structure: which types of people are most likely to use it, and how it's likely to be judged.

When I start thinking about the links between grammatical structure and social structure, I'm no longer thrilled about being objective and descriptive. I start to ask myself a few questions:

Can I study social structure objectively? Can I simply describe social structure? Can I treat social structure as if it were beautiful, the way I understand linguistic structure to be? And the answer was no, actually. Social structure really pisses me off. I hate the way society is structured. I don't like the fact that society is structured according to a class system, or according to a race system or according to gender inequities. I don't want to simply describe that. I really wanna judge that!

And I also want to find alternatives. More on that next week.

What comes to mind when you hear the word 'grammar'? Red pen marks all over your assignments? Being told there's something wrong with the way you speak or write? A disgruntled feeling when you see a misplaced apostrophe?

My love of grammar has never been about recognising 'errors' in speech or writing. For me it's a fascination with the beauty of structure. When I was an undergraduate at Washington College I got to play with structure regularly as part of Bob Anderson's class in symbolic logic.* Then in a music class taught by Amzie Parcell, I had a moment of synaesthesia where logical structure become not just an intellectual experience, but also an auditory and emotional one.

My introduction to the study of linguistics was with John Lyons's book, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. I read the book as part of an MA in English Linguistics I did at the University of Strasbourg. I found Lyons's words on misconceptions about grammar particularly inspiring:

There are all sorts of social and nationalistic prejudices associated with language, and many popular misconceptions fostered by the distorted version of traditional grammar that is frequently taught in the schools. To free one's mind of these prejudices and misconceptions is indeed difficult; but it is both a necessary and a rewarding first step. (p. 2)

However, in spouting out my new ideas about freeing our minds of prejudices and misconceptions, I learned that the connection between people's views about language and their internalised social structures are more intimate than I'd realised.

If we admit there's an intimate connection between people's sense of social structure and their sense of grammatical structure, what will that then reveal? What alternatives to unjust social structures can we find?

* Here's Peter Suber's solution to the logic problem I remember from college. Isn't it beautiful? Delilah wore a ring on every finger and had a finger in every pie. (x)(y)[(Fxd · Ry) (Oyx] · (x)(y)[(Fxd · Py) Ixy]

In this episode I talk about the experience of internalising a judgmental, hierarchical social structure. In my case it was like living by the rules of Chutes and Ladders (Snakes and Ladders). Some arbitrary set of characteristics is graded on a scale of 1 to 100 and you find yourself landed on one of the numbered grids. What if 'whiteness' was the thing you were being graded on? (This is the question Cheryl Harris discusses in her article, 'Whiteness as property'.) What if it you were graded on your level of 'Americanness'? I talk about my feelings of not measuring up when I lived in France.

What does grammar have to do with any of this? I ask listeners to consider the difference between these three clauses, which come from a story that was told to me by an American student living in Strasbourg:

1. We are making a Christmas tree.
2. That is so American.
3. Jennifer is more American than me.

Clause 1 is an example of what in Systemic Functional Grammar is called a material process, realised by the verb phrase are making.

Clauses 2 and 3 are examples of relational processes, realised by the verb is.

Relational clauses sometimes put people on a Chutes and Ladders-type grid: they situate you, statically, in a particular social structure. (I am white. I am a lecturer. I am American.) In their most 'normal' form – that is, their unmarked form, they're in the simple past or the simple present. What happens if you were to use the present-in-present form (otherwise known as present continuous or present progressive)? I am being American. I am being white. Does that upset the Chutes and Ladders board?

Next week I'll talk more about these types of 'grammatical intervention'.

The book I mentioned, cited in Cheryl Harris's article, is Two Nations by Andrew Hacker.

The type of grammar I'm using is Systemic Functional Grammar, and my reference guide is Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar.

Welcome to the very first episode of the Structured Visions podcast! In this episode I look at aspects of racial injustice. I share some perspectives from my five-year-old self to show how certain logical structures enabled me to cope when I first noticed racial inequality. I talk more about what it means to understand racism, or any other form of social injustice, as structured. I invite listeners to start imagining new structures.

If we can start noticing social structures that lead to social injustice or are a result of social injustice, then we are also in a position to identify alternatives.

And I put forward this idea as a teaser:

The way we structure our worlds has its mirror in the grammatical structure of how we speak.

Tune in to the next episode to hear more about grammar and the structure of social worlds.

In this episode I mention Drs Kenneth and Mamie Clark's doll test and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's chapter in the book White Out, edited by Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva.