Image above: Finger's Cafe in my birth town of Maiden, NC. This eventually became Campbell's Drug Store, with the soda counter left intact all the way up to the 1970's. I heard many a local yokel conversation in this place when I was very young, and had many a soda-fountain vanilla Coke and box of rock candy at the counter!
Kathleen Stewart's book has many interesting points of entry--this makes it difficult to select just one point to pursue in this week's blog entry. I decided to take as my focus the concept that dominates the opening pages of the second chapter in the book; that is, the idea of a "doubly occupied space."
In the chapter in which this idea is thoughtfully laid out, Stewart ruminates on, among other things, the way in which location can both explain and complicate how we perceive individuals and the lives that they live in those spaces. What is ironic in this section is that the chapter itself (and, it could be said, the entire book as well) invokes a sort of doubled space for our particular class, in that we can see the connections to familiar theoretical writers covered this semester, such as the references to de Certeau on page 42. This follows on the heels of similar familiar critical references in the first chapter, such as Babcock, Rosaldo, Benjamin and Bourdieu. I find it interesting how the connection of the personal space of our current course here at UofA creates its own sort of doubling when complicated by a text that invokes many of the voices that have brought us to this point in the semester. I don't know that any of these observations adds anything of particular substance to our discussion--but it's a point of conflation that I personally find compelling and that appeals greatly to the sociologist in me, and is therefore worth noting.
The second "doubled space" that caught my attention this week is much more personal--the way in which Stewart's book so poignantly captures the lingo of generations that may soon be gone forever. In particular, the conversations transcribed in Chapter 5 were a lovely trip down memory lane. In my grandparents' generation in Southern/near-Southern states such as the Carolinas, the Virginias, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, particular generations have recognizable dialects, colloquialisms, and other unique aspects of verbal communication. It's a way of speaking that is fast disappearing in the populous, less remote areas of these states, as the minimally educated generations of the past give way to successive generations composed of increasingly better educated, more cosmopolitan residents. One can still hear expressions such as "called me back up again" and "he took off," but more and more this happens in fairly self-contained settings, such as when seeing family or old friends, or when speaking to elderly generations or people who live in economically deprived areas, and people often use a more formal register of language when speaking in business, work, or school settings. I find these changes to be bittersweet. On the one hand, they demonstrate that Southerners are experiencing great gains in education, opportunities, and the like. Yet, they also mean that some of the characteristics that so define this region of the country are fast fading away, taking with them some of those elements of Southern culture that make this region uniquely "home" to those of us who grew up there.
A third thing came to mind as I was reading Chapter 5. Stewart turns a considerable amount of focus onto an interesting analysis of the manner in which the body is "embed[ded] [ . . . ] in a poetics of daily pains, eccentric markings, and momumental peculiarities that open onto the space of a social imaginary" (132). She goes on to state that, "They describe the body as an "other" that can be seen, felt, and encountered. The body, like the hills, becomes a collection of places that [ . . . ] take on a life of their own" (132). I find this a particularly insightful observation on Stewart's part. All this weekend, I've been noticing how this plays out in conversations that took place on Facebook between me and a particular friend from back home on the east coast, and I realized how accurate Stewart's observation is and how applicable this is, not just to the coal country of West Virginia, but also to more urbanized Southeastern locations such as the Carolinas, Tennessee and Georgia. I began charting some of these "bodyisms" in my Facebook encounters this weekend. Some of the terms that cropped up (many of which appear in some form or other in Stewart's chapter)included:
"cancer couldn't (which sounds like 'puddin' if this person says it aloud) get ahold of her"
"tried to grab me a nap, but that same old cough was workin' on me"
"workin' on a headache"
"I laid there after that coughing fit and like to never get back up"
This last one was so close to the one in the book that it made me laugh out loud. You'll notice the form of several of the key words are different than the sample in the book, such as "like" instead of "liked," and the present/future tense "get" back up, as opposed to "got back up." These little differences are common as you move from location to location, with particular broad geographical areas developing slightly different wording for roughly the same phrases and ideas. I'm sure linguists could make much of this, but for my own purposes it simply serves to locate self and others; local, "just down the road," and locations "at a right piece" (a.k.a., relatively distant).
All of this reminds me intensely of Francois Lyotard's concepts of paralogic discourse (or, to use a postmodern Gerald Vizenor term, those things that deny metanarrative). In this sense, there is and cannot be any one definable "communication" or system of meaning. Instead, there are multiple discourses, multiple meanings, and those things which make for effective communication are best found in the willingness of communicants to accept differences in communication and meaning, to embrace "paralogical discourse." This is a space in which meanings are doubled, tripled, redoubled, and sometimes abandoned altogether, yet a space in which communication can and does always take place on some level.
Connie
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