Blog # 2
February 29, 2012

For centuries, parables and stories have stood for more than they tell. We are to learn from them by taking on their morals, comparing their plots with others we know, and projecting ourselves into them as characters, critics, or illustrators.
Words at work and play: Three decades in families and communities is a collection of stories about the intergenerational lives of families first introduced to readers in the 1983 volume, Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. There readers came to know families of Roadville and Trackton and to watch their children go off to newly desegregated schools. Now, in the sequel to that book, readers can see what these children have done with their lives and how they have fared as parents, workers, and citizens on the economic roller coaster that followed the early 1980s.
A question that readers will surely ask as early as chapter 2 of the book is “How did you choose the individual characters featured in the stories?” In Chapter 2, readers meet Jerome, a child that did not grow up in Trackton because his teenage mother gave him over as an infant to her older sister to raise. The sister moved to New York, died when Jerome was quite young, and he entered the foster care system there. I found him, quite by accident, years later in Chicago. Later chapters introduce other children from Roadville and Trackton and follow them across the years (and the geographical expanse of the USA) as they marry, have children, send them off to college, and watch them launch careers unimaginable to those who worked two or three decades earlier in the textile industry and agrarian world of the Piedmont Carolinas.
But why feature the particular characters who inhabit the stories of Word at work and play, readers will persist in asking. All ethnographies prompt readers to suspect that the individuals who star in these works are just that – exceptional sparkling cases. Therefore, from the earliest point of my decision to follow the lives of families as they scattered after textile manufacturing shrank in the Carolinas, I stuck with a consistent plan. To the extent possible, from my own data and those provided by family members, I coded features of each individual as each piece of data came in. Early in the 1980s, I developed a list of twenty-eight characteristics that guided my interpretation of data collected on each individual. By tracking data in this way, I was coming as close as possible to recording with a high level of objectivity how individuals matured across the years and what they took with them in their ways of being as they moved into adulthood. I recorded only what happened; I had no interest in recording what I might have thought should have happened. My goal was to ensure that the ultimate choices of characters emerged primarily from patterns revealed through the data and not from any inclination I had toward my own favorites. I wished to feature neither stars nor failures.
Over the years, it became evident to me that characteristics I coded clustered around three domains of behavior: (1) language and other symbol structuring in social interactional and sociotechnical activities; (2) curiosity, creativity, and manual dexterity in manipulation of tools and materials used in play and work; and (3) personal qualities of memory, self-management, empathy, moral reasoning, and responsiveness and responsibility. When I started in early 2000 to make the choice of individuals to be featured in the book, I winnowed down by statistical means the characters for whom I had the fullest data sets across these three domains. This process involved looking at the totals in each category of coding for each individual and selecting one character from each portion of the full spectrum. Once I did this, I decided that those selected had to reflect not only their standing as individuals but also the kinds of families that emerged over the three decades. Thus the book includes relatively stable families as well as those in which children lived lives of upheaval and chaos.
What does this process mean for the trust that readers can place in the characters’ stories? Central to this trust is not whether or not any one of the characters is “typical.” Instead, trust should come from a sense of familiarity, an “aha” sensation that lingers after the reading. “I know that character; ((s)he’s so much like Tanya down the street.” However, the fact that Tanya resembles an individual in the book does not necessarily indicate that she comes from the same kind of family circumstances that produced the book’s familiar character. Perhaps, but readers should jump to no fast and easy conclusions. As life (and this book) reveals again and again, children from the same family turn out to become quite different adults. Hence any story of an individual is just that: one story about one individual.
From collections of such stories, however, readers and listeners have for centuries taken away details, plots, and finalities with which to build their own sense of meaning. Some of us may turn meaning into morals or lessons, others move to judgment, while some cling to segments of stories as sources of comfort, caution, or provocation. Such is the case with Words at work and play. The book is sure to be controversial, because of this openness to interpretation about how individuals and families negotiate the dramatic turns of economic fortune that have marked the 21st century. These twists and turns have affected predictability for every organization and institution. The upheavals have been particularly felt by entities most involved with children and families and their well-being. Social welfare agencies, medical centers, schools and daycare programs, community centers, museums, and higher education institutions have had no choice but to try to respond thoughtfully and in an informed way to all that the 21st century’s severe economic turns of fortune have brought to housing, nutrition, childrearing, healthcare, and social interactional life within families.
Many details of daily existence within households are not easily seen in the rush of modern living. Most lie outside the full awareness of adults and children, for they just are. “That’s the way it is” has become the mantra of families. In Words at work and play, I have embedded characters in the unseen and seemingly insignificant details of everyday living. In doing so, I have tried to show the interdependence of the penetrating effects of habits of time, space, and communication on responsibility, empathy, and memory.
I am eager to hear from readers on the point of whether or not they see themselves or those they know within the stories of Jerome, Rebecca, Bernardo, and the other young people of the book. Let me know.