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7 - The Co-development of Identity, Agency, and Lived Worlds
- Edited by Jonathan Tudge, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, Michael J. Shanahan, Pennsylvania State University, Jaan Valsiner, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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- Book:
- Comparisons in Human Development
- Published online:
- 04 May 2010
- Print publication:
- 28 November 1996, pp 193-221
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Summary
Within the discipline of anthropology, the concept of culture has undergone a major revision. The notion of culture as a homogeneous, bounded entity has been replaced by a notion of cultures as heterogeneous and unbounded, contested and emergent. The former perspective, sometimes labeled “objectivist,” has given way to a “practice” view of culture. In the paradigms that predate practice theory, especially structuralism and structural functionalism, the important analyses were those that happened after the culture had been analytically segregated, so to speak, from the flow of daily life. The point was to understand culture as a system, separable and significant unto itself. A whole generation of criticism has led practice theorists to take a different direction. These theorists no longer seek an abstract and generative model of culture, postulated to “underlie” social action. The point instead is to understand collective meaning systems as situated in social action, education and individual development as they occur in practice, and linguistic forms as they are used in performance In the older paradigms, one started with moments of cultural production, episodes of the joint production of conversation, incidents of practice, and episodes of performance only because they were the convenient, observable points of entry to the important objects of study; practice theorists start from and stay with these moments because they are where human life happens. They are the sites where social formations, cultures, mental states, and languages exist.
4 - Prestige and intimacy
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- By Dorothy Holland, University of North Carolina, Debra Skinner, University of North Carolina
- Edited by Dorothy Holland, Naomi Quinn
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- Book:
- Cultural Models in Language and Thought
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 30 January 1987, pp 78-111
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Summary
“ … I can't believe we're talking about this!”
Margaret, an informant in a study of college-age women, said this in the midst of a “talking diary” interview. Earlier, the interviewer had limited herself to questions that a friend or new acquaintance might ask: What's been happening since I talked to you last? How are your classes going? Who is this Alice that you're talking about? When did you join volleyball club? Then, at a point in the interview, Margaret began to describe a skit about “jocks,” “frat guys,” “Susie Sororities,” and other campus types. For a time, Margaret answered the interviewer's questions about the different types and how they could be identified and then interrupted herself:
Margaret: … I can't believe we're talking about this!
Interviewer: Why?
Margaret: I don't know. You just don't sit around talking about it that much with anybody. It's just kind of there.
Interviewer: So it's not the sort of thing you'd sit around in your dorm room and talk about to your roommates?
Margaret: No, you allude to it more than anything else.
Interviewer: What do you mean, allude?
Margaret: You know, little things, like, “Oh, you're wearing your add-a-beads today.” Things like that.
Interviewer: And that's all you have to say?
Margaret: Yeah, it's understood.
As might be expected, our participant–observation and interview data from a group of college-age Americans shows such types to be a conventional way of talking about other people.