Course Concepts in Action: Social Class
To further analyze the concept of frames, I will use one of my interviews as a case study to discuss the role of social class in frames.
Before reading this post, I recommend to the reader that you read the interview labeled 'Emma Joella Tennant' under the meet the people section of this blog.
To perform this analysis, I will be drawing on secondary interviews/conversations with my interviewees and long-term observational fieldwork to connect the primary interviews to this additional conceptual element, in this case, the concept being social class. Long-term observational fieldwork, in this case, refers to the observations I have had pertaining to the conversations I have had over months/years with these individuals about relevant concepts, which I ran by them before citing and analyzing. This section of the blog aims to take an interesting conversation and give it a deeper focus.
Before this analysis, I would also like to recognize and emphasize the founding intellectual tenants surrounding the concept of lingual frames, which I have and continue to reference within this blog:
Course References for frames:
In this blog, I will be referring to Frames, as defined by Alexander Dent, as "A structure of expectations for the production and reception of discourse"(Week 3, class 2).
Also relevant to the breakdown of frames is the Dell Hymes acronym 'SPEAKING,' which I utilized to form my interview questions. SPEAKING refers to setting, participants, ends, acts, key, instrumentalities, norms, and genres (Week 3, class 2).
Michael Agar also identifies a term central to this blog which he labels as 'rich points', which can be otherwise understood as points in language/discourse that diverge from the expectations of that frame (Agar, Language Shock, Speech Acts 141-143). This concept was an important part of my conversations with interviewees because identifying rich points were important to me in order to understand the intricacies and relevance of language.
To explore the relationship between social class and language frames, I have chosen Emma Jo's story. Her experience in the south uniquely situates her to give us a deeper understanding of how social class shapes language, but also how language shapes how social class is perceived.
Funny enough, Right after my initial interview with Emma Jo for this project, an article was posted by the GW Hatchet, discussing classism at GW regarding its rhetoric around the south and southern students. Seeing as Emma Jo is from the south and one of my good friends, it naturally came up in conversation between us. What she had to say about this issue will be my guiding light throughout this analysis.
Social class is as defined by Alexander Dent, is "a social grouping organized hierarchically in relation to other social groupings"(Week 7, Class 1). This typically is broken down into upper, middle, and lower classes which are defined by income (Week 7, Class 1). What is interesting about social class and language is that people often feel comfortable categorizing people into a particular social class, depending on someone's manner of speaking. In Raymond Smith's piece about anthropology and social class, he points us to look at cultural processes and ideologies to understand how people make these distinctions (Discussion 10/13). Smith specifically discusses how people often neglect to consider the long-term ramifications of the history of the capitalist system on people situated in the south (specifically the literal southern hemisphere) and how often this left them out of systems of power; Smith notes that "control of communication allows the managers of ideology to lay down the categories through which reality is to be perceived", and in this situation, it is often in the interest of those with the power to shape language and communication to paint the language of southerners as less intelligent, thus placing them in lower social classes (Smith 482).
This controlled narrative of social classes is not an experience that Emma Jo is a stranger to; Often, she herself has been treated with less respect in academic spaces such as at GW because she is from the south, and on occasion, this aspect of her identity is evident. Due to the fact that she does not present a strong southern accent, she has often found herself in situations where people feel comfortable speaking on the south with a tone of inferiority. These situations have shaped her to mask her language and that southern aspect of her identity so that she feels respected on an intellectual level; the way she discusses it implies that sometimes it is easier to hide that aspect of yourself and have people respect you than it is to let that part of yourself show and people make false assumptions about you.
This experience shows how incredibly powerful language and how it is presented can be in terms of social class. Something as simple as having or using a southern accent and the associated intonations or sayings can be enough in some spaces to categorize someone into a lower social class. This is not an accident but rather a result of well-maintained social expectations that have largely been upheld by the standards of the language accepted by wealthy and elite people who benefit from the misrepresentation of people who cannot fit these standards.
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