Bloody Sociology...

Hey! So i've finally gotten around to posting a comment on someone elses blog, which is rather exciting. This week i have chosen to victimize Emily Wickham here, so be sure to check that out if you happen to be called Matt and are marking me on this :D

I've also realize that my name may not be mentioned on this blog at any point, which would be super awkward. So hi Matt, it's Connie! You know, the linguistics one? Remembering now? Cool, I'm glad we settled that. 

OK! So we've realised that i'm rubbish at posting comments, apparently they like dissapearing into the ether never to be found again. So I'll just stick it here, and you can go read Emilys post before this next bit so you know what im wittering about.

I wouldn’t go as far to say that Australian culture has morphed the word ‘bloody’ from a negative into a positive. Obviously it has become less negative in terms of offensiveness in comparison to how it’s perceived by other English speaking cultures (perhaps to a Brit, poor young Ronald’s hatred of spiders would be significantly greater than an Australian would perceive it). However in terms of meaning I think it definitely still retains a negative value in many circumstances (e.g. “You bloody fools” or “I bloody well hate them”. I like the way Wierzbicka sorted bloody into either ‘bloody1’ and ‘bloody2’, the first pertaining to its use as a negative word, and the second pertaining to its use as a neutral word, not, as you say, a positive. Of course the overall impact of an utterance containing bloody2 can be positive, though that impact generally comes from the words surrounding bloody2, which are merely intensified through its use, for example: “Hermione, you’re bloody marvellous!” It’s obviously a positive statement, however bloody is just acting as an intensifier for the positive adjective ‘marvellous’, and in itself doesn’t actually contain any positive qualities, but rather means she is ‘truly’ or ‘really’ marvellous.

As you say, bloody is definitely a marker of Australian cultural identity, and Wierzbicka believes that this use of bloody as meaning something truly or genuinely possesses some kind of quality is definitely an indicator of this. She says it probably developed from the harshness of the Australian landscape for early pioneers and farmers out in the back of nowhere, who relied on others around them and thus really needed to be able to trust them and know that they had a ‘fighting spirit’ and were serious in taking necessary actions. So the use of bloody in phrases such as “I’ll kick his bloody teeth in”, bloody would act as a marker of sincerity and a meaning to take action. Personally I’m not all that sure about this idea, but it’s certainly interesting and something to think about.

 

Decoding the Code

In this weeks reading Wieder examines the operation of the ‘convict code’ within a half-way house. He begins by outlining the maxims of the code, which focus on the importance of loyalty between residents, and state that this loyalty should be expressed by helping and sharing with others, not taking advantage of the others, not being too friendly with or trusting of the staff, and above all not snitching. Any breaching of these maxims will be met with negative sanctions, ranging from labelling (e.g. kiss-ass or snitch) or exclusion from the group, to much more severe sanctions including abuse, violence, and occasionally death, depending on the severity of the breach. This code helps to reinforce the residents community, and exclude ‘the other’, such as staff, general outsiders and those residents who do not conform with the code.

An understanding of the code also allows others to interpret and make sense of the actions of residents by “placing it in the context of a pattern” rather than just trying to interpret them in relation to the immediate events and context of the actions. This is particularly useful for the staff who worked in the halfway-house, as they could appropriately judge how to react to certain types of behaviour, what behaviour meant, how to best go about getting a positive outcome from a resident, and when attempts by staff to, for example, obtain information or action would prove fruitless and a waste of staff time. It allows staff to rationalise resident actions and connect them to a likely objective, thus allowing them to understand the structure of their environment and perform effectively in it.

Of course codes are not just restricted to deviant groups such as convicts or the environments which they create and inhabit, but are applicable to all people, roles and contexts. For example the code of conduct for a restaurant would be very different to that of a family barbecue, and the code for a teacher in a classroom would be very different to that of a bouncer in a nightclub. In every scenario there are spoken and unspoken codes guiding what behaviours are appropriate and which ones are deserving of negative sanctions, and the severity of these sanctions. They allow the interactants to generate some level of understanding of their context, and to rationalise the behaviour of others, often even when they are in a totally alien situation.

Referencce: Wieder, D. L 1974, 'Telling the Code' in R. Turner (ed.) Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings, Penguin Educations, Harmondsworth, pp. 144-172

Ethnomethodology with Garfinkle

So last weeks topic (yes, i'm a tad behind, i've had a slightly hectic past week but normality will resume shortly, i assure you) was Ethnomethodology Part one. This posting will focus on the Heritage reading which analysed Garfinkles work on ethnomethodology and his zaaaaany experiements about the way people interact and how these interactions actually work instead of just falling apart instantly (it was also really long and quite dull. I am not a fan of Heritage).

Before we get into discussing anything, it should be mentioned that ethnomethodology translates pretty much into 'people methods', or, more specifically, the methods people use to successfully act and interact with others. So Garfinkle takes the Micro approach to ethnomethodology, which revolves around the theory that social interactants use 'recipe knowledge' to figure out how to act and interact in different contexts. To clarify the term 'recipe knowledge', i take it to refer to how recipes arent like rules; they don't have to be followed exactly and can be changed and improvised for your gluten intollerant friend, or just used loosely as an inspiration. This contrasts with the Macro approach which suggests that people interact and act due to rules of conduct that are imposed upon them by some big silly invisible man in the sky who nobody can actually find, and without these rules nobody would have any idea what to do and would just run around willy nilly trying to lick peoples shoulders when they want to greet them and then wonder why they just had their nose broken by their neighbour.

Along with 'recipie knowledge', we can begin to understand how people interact with people and their environment by understanding the Documentary of Interpretation theory. This basically states that we interpret people, interactions and other lovely things using prior experience with similar things/contexts as well as assumed shared knowledge. In other words, even if we've never encountered a specific thing before, we attribute some kind of sense or meaning to it from other encounters that are sort of similar, and we can have a conversation with someone using pronouns, other reffering words and generally being not 100% specific (which was found in one of those zany experiments is actually kinda impossible) because of an assumption that each understands what the other means, and each has similar past experiences with that sort of context.

Garfinkle seemed to have a lot of fun just generally messing with peoples heads. He conducted a series of breaching experiments, where he got a bunch of people to act slightly wierd in conversations or games and such and recorded how the subjects reacted to these breaches in normal conduct. He was quite surprised by how quickly interactions could deteriorate when conversational norms based on assumed knowledge were breached, and the viciousness of some of the responses to the breaches suggests how threatened people can feel when people act in unexpected ways, or question the conduct 'recipe'. Garfinkle also found through his experiments that, even in a scenario conducted in an entirely senseless manner, the subjects of the experiments were subconsciously compelled to interpret the interaction in some way, and attribute some kind of sense to the event, even if that sense ran along the lines of "he/she is insane".

Wow. This is way longer than i expected. Brevity obviously isnt my strong point.

Reference: Heritage, J. . 1984, 'The morality of cognition', in Garfinkle and Ethnomethodology, Plity Press, Cambridge, pp 75-102

Presentation fo Self with Goffman

It's time for the week 6 summary posting thingy! Yay! So yeah, heres a really lazy phlegm-addled summary of 'Performances' from Goffmans The Presentation of Self in Everyday life. Enjoy, or skip over entirely because its dreadfully dull. Your choice :)

Goffman believes that presentation of self can be seen as a form of dramatic performance. Depending on the context, we play different ‘roles’ in order to convey our self as possessing particular characteristics. The performer may or may not believe they possess the characteristics of the role they are playing (those who don’t Goffman calls cynics), however it is important that the audience believes the performance for both their own benefit and the benefit of the performer.

The part of performance that is somewhat fixed and stable and acts to define the situation Goffman labels as the ‘Front’. This consists of the setting and the personal front. The Setting consists of the space the performance takes place in, the props used, and general background objects. The performance cannot start until the performer is in this space, and generally ends once they leave it (although on some occasions the setting follows the performers, such as in a funeral procession.) The Personal Front consists of items identified with the performer themselves, and follow them regardless of setting. Some of these items are fixed (age, sex, ethnicity), and some are mobile (fashion choice, status, facial expression, etc.).

Personal Front can be divided into Appearance and Manner (similar to Demeanor and Deference), and the audience will expect there to be some consistency between these two aspects of the Personal Front, and in order to successfully maintain the image portrayed the performer must be careful not to damage these expectations of consistency. Although there are infinite combinations of performers, audience, settings and roles, there are not infinite variations of ‘front’; rather, there is a multitude of pre-established fronts that the performer can knowingly or unknowingly choose from. This makes the task of the audience (correctly interpreting the role) far easier as, instead of having to individually interpret each new performance as a new role, and subconsciously determine how to respond to these roles, they can rely on pre-established broad categories and, using past experiences, fit the role performed into on of these.