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Summary
Provides a communication theory of identity. Shows how listening to communication in cultural scenes can help reveal how deeply identity is situated in various communicative practices. "This is a mature voice of an accomplished scholar at its best: well informed, empirically grounded, open-minded, probing, and jumping between specifics and larger questions of general importance. I like the diversity of 'scenes' combined with the continual interest in what it means to be a self or person in contemporary American life. Carbaugh's studies will not end these discussions, but they clearly add to them--deliberately playing on words, I might say that they add clarity to them." --W. Barnett Pearce, Loyola University Chicago
Theories of identity have been built largely upon biological, psychological, sociological, and anthropological grounds. Missing from each of these, yet of potential relevance to them all, is a community theory of identity such as the one developed here. Situating Selves presents studies of five American scenes, focusing on the ways social identities are communicatively crafted. Based on 15 years of fieldwork, the book presents fine-grained analyses of the playful self during sporting events (with special attention given to crowd activities at college basketball games), the working self in a television company, the marital self in weddings and marriages, the gendered self in television "talk shows," and conflicted selves during a community's hotly contested land-use controversy.
Carbaugh shows how listening to communication in cultural scenes like these can help reveal how deeply identity is situated in various communicative practices. These include a ritual of play, symbolic allusions to different classes of people, a diversity in the forms of names used upon marriage, the play between genders and gender-neutral language, and the relationship between language, nature, community, and politics. Concluding commentary links the studies to the contemporary American scene, and shows how the focus on communication can integrate into community living both shared and separate identities. Emerging from these studies is a view of communication as not only a situated expression of selves in American scenes, but also an active contributor in constituting those very identities and scenes.
Donal Carbaugh is Professor of Communication and Faculty Affiliate in American Indian Studies, American Studies, and Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Talking American and editor of Cultural Communication and Intercultural Contact.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
PART 1 AN ACADEMIC AND SOCIAL SCENE
Introduction: A Scene of Scholarly Conversation
Chapter 1 Social Identities as Communication
PART 2 FIVE AMERICAN SCENES
Scene One: Public Leisure
Chapter 2 The Playful Self: Being a Fan at College Basketball Games
Scene Two: Work
Chapter 3 The Working Self: Making Television and Tension between Workers
Chapter 4 Unifying Workers through "the Product": An Epitomizing Symbol
Scene Three:Weddings and Marriage
Chapter 5 The Marital Self: Styles of Names Used upon Marriage
Chapter 6 Social Uses of Marital Names:Ethnography and Conversation Analysis
Scene Four: Gender and the "Talk Show"
Chapter 7 The Gendered Self and "The Individual": A Vacillating Form of Identity Talk in the "Talk Show"
Chapter 8 Cultural Agents, Social Identities, and Positioning: A Theoretical Interlude
Scene Five: A Community's Land-Use Controversy
Chapter 9 Decisions and Conflicting Selves:Dramatic Depictions of a Natural Environment
Chapter 10 Dueling Identities: In Search of Common Political Ground
PART 3 CONCLUSION
Chapter 11 Social Identities, American Community, and the Communal Function
Appendix Some Parts of One Ethnographer's Interpretive Kit
