Claudia Strauss

Analyzing Discourse for Cultural Complexity

There is no one right way to perform a cultural analysis of interviews and other discourse. What you choose to look at depends on your research questions. My research questions have been, “What political-economic ideologies and cultural understandings are powerful for people in the United States?” and “How do people internalize public culture, especially conflicting sets of cultural messages?” I have used a mixture of methods— some already existing, others that I made up—to answer these questions.

Cultural standing in expression of opinion

This article explores an underappreciated pragmatic constraint on the expression of opinions: When expressing an opinion on a topic that has been previously discussed, a speaker should correctly indicate the cultural standing of that view in the relevant opinion community. This Bakhtinian approach to discourse analysis is contrasted with conversation analysis, politeness theory (Brown & Levinson 1987), and analysis of epistemic modality. Finally, indicators of four points on the cultural standing continuum (highly controversial, debatable, common opinion, and taken for granted) are illustrated with examples from American English usage. (Opinion display, discourse analysis, argumentation, hedges, modality, welfare discourse)* “. . . Prose discourse—in any of its forms, quotidian, rhetorical, scholarly—cannot fail to be oriented toward the ‘already uttered,’ the ‘already known,’ the ‘common opinion’ and so forth.” Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel” (1981:279)

Blaming for Columbine: Conceptions of Agency in the Contemporary United States

Modern Westerners are supposed to embrace a notion of unfettered personal agency. An analysis of public commentary (interviews, editorials, and online message boards) in the United States about the Columbine school shootings shows that the voluntarist cultural model of persons as autonomous agents, while certainly very important, is just one of a number of cultural models Americans use to explain human action and has particular political and interpersonal uses. We might think that conceptions as basic as those of personhood and agency would be hegemonic: both singular and internalized as unexamined, taken‐for‐granted assumptions. In some contexts, voluntarist ideas about agency are taken for granted, but in others they are promoted quite deliberately. A particularly interesting phenomenon in the United States at this time is the presence of a discourse that may be called defensive voluntarism, an explicit, argumentative version of voluntarism invoked to combat other widely circulating views of behavior. The very need for emphatic pronouncement betrays speakers’ awareness that voluntarism needs to be defended. These findings point to the need for a person‐and‐context‐centered approach to social discourses instead of one that assumes discourses to be constitutive.

Is Empathy Gendered and, If So, Why? An Approach from Feminist Psychological Anthropology

Difference feminists have argued that women have special virtues. One such virtue would seem to be empathy, which has three main components: imaginative projection, awareness of the others emotions, and concern. Empathy is closely related to identification. Psychological research and the authors own study of womens and mens talk about poverty and welfare use in the United States demonstrate womens greater empathic concern. However, some cross-cultural research shows greater sex differences in empathy in the United States than elsewhere. This combination of findings (women tend to demonstrate greater empathic concern, but this typical difference varies cross-culturally) requires a complex biocultural explanation, drawing on cognitive, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories. Explanation, and not just description, is a prerequisite for change.

A cognitive theory of cultural meaning: Two properties of culture

In this chapter we consider the two properties of culture that draw us most fully into a consideration of the individual who bears and acquires culture, properties that hence require the most complex psychological arguments about the way in which culture is internalized. Durability in the individual Some beliefs, values and other cultural understandings that people have stay with them a long time, sometimes their whole lives. Culture theories that focus on public forms of culture at the expense of the understandings people acquire from those public forms naturally have a hard time explaining the durability that schemas can have in individuals. If the world of messages surrounding us is rapidly changing and we are constructed by these discourses, why are our understandings not rapidly changing as well? On the other hand, how can a model that explains durability likewise account for peoples obvious ability to adapt to change? Answering these questions will require the longest discussion in part II. This discussion entails a consideration of how the world is organized to ensure that the same associations will be made repeatedly. Explaining durability also leads to recognition of the role of emotional arousal in making some schemas durable, including some learned very early in life. And it invites us to discuss in some detail how teaching achieves its end of making learning durable.

Engaged by the Spectacle of Protest: How Bystanders Became Invested in Occupy Wall Street

Do uninvolved bystanders care about political protest? If so, how do they become psychologically engaged? Some theories of bystander publics emphasize their disinterest in politics; others stress their potential to be recruited through a resonant framing. Strauss shows that neither model explains the unemployed Californians she interviewed about the Occupy movement. Their positive or negative sentiments drew upon differing, affectively imbued cultural schemas that filled out sketchy media reports of Occupy’s message and tactics. Psychological investment in the Occupy movement also depended upon the identities, beliefs, and memories in individuals’ personal semantic networks, as Strauss illustrates by contrasting the outlooks of two working-class African American men, one of whom distrusted and the other of whom believed in the American political system.

Lost in NSM Translation

My commentary poses two questions for Wierzbicka: one about her semantic theory, the other about her theory of emotions.

The Complexity of Culture in Persons

Public culture both creates and depends upon encultured minds. Nonetheless, culture in persons is not simply a mirror of public culture. In this chapter, Strauss draws upon research with Americans from diverse socioeconomic and racial groups to argue that culture in persons is complex. There are six reasons for this complexity: (1) People may internalize conflicting schemas; (2) differing schemas create divergent interpretations of shared experiences; (3) actors’ views are shaped by their self-image, emotion triggers, and motivations; (4) meanings are not the same as schemas; (5) beliefs are internalized in different ways (explicit or implicit, evoking conscious assent or creating an automatic, out-of-awareness association); and (6) beliefs vary in their meta-recognition as being cultural. Thus, cultural models (Holland and Quinn in Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 3–40,1987) and “the native’s point of view” (Geertz in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. Basic Books, New York, 1983; Malinowski in Argonauts of the Western Pacific. E.P. Dutton, New York, 1961) take different forms. Anthropologists should not be reluctant to acknowledge that culture is both inside and outside persons (cf. Handler in Am. Anthropol. 106: 488–494, 2004) if they recognize these complexities.

Introduction: The Person in Politics and Culture

Drawing together psychological anthropology and the study of political subjectivity, Friedman and Strauss explore how politics becomes part of who we are. Tracing an arc from theories of culture to theories of subjectivity, the chapter argues for the special value of a person-centered research approach that will allow theories of political subjectivity to be built up from the individual. This chapter examines a number of critical questions that are explored throughout this volume: What is the role of emotions in politics? How are political messages taken up by the public? What are the subjective consequences of conflicting political discourses? How do people’s identities relate to politics? What are the subjectivities of political bystanders? How do people become politically active? How do we explain populist politics?

A cognitive theory of cultural meaning: Schema theory and connectionism

We have said that meanings are based on cultural schemas, schemas that have come to be shared among people who have had similar socially mediated experiences. What are schemas? To illustrate what schemas are and how they work, imagine two television commercials for different brands of beer. In one, the scene is a party filled with attractive and well-mannered men and women in their late twenties or early thirties. The other ad features potbellied lumberjacks joking loudly. You, the viewer, immediately make some assumptions about these people. You might assume that the first group of people are middle-to-upper-middle class, probably college educated, while the second are probably not college educated. Based on these assumptions, you have some guesses about the kinds of beer they are touting: a somewhat more expensive brand in the first commercial than in the second. The very words we used to describe these commercials probably led you to some further assumptions. You no doubt assumed that the lumberjacks were men. You may even have a picture of what clothing they were wearing (flannel shirts and pants held up with suspenders). Even if you did not arrive at these particular assumptions, surely you had some interpretations – some meanings – that were not contained in the information we gave you. On what basis did you arrive at your interpretations? The description we gave elicited your schemas for lumberjacks, for class differences, for beers or for consumer items, generally, and for television commercials.