Growning Together and Growing Apart; Learning, Living, and Doing in Contemporary Families

Spring 2006 MARIAL Colloquium Series

Wednesday, January 18, 4-6 p.m.

Jeffry John Stein

(Writer, producer, educator)

"Slaying the father" and Other Paradigms of Growth in Movies About American Families

Using concepts from his recently published book, Life, Myth and the American Family Unreeling: The Spiritual Significance of Movies for the 20 th Century, Jeffry John Stein will explore the “slaying the father” path of personal, familial, and societal transformation. He will discuss this theme as it is integrated in exceptional feature films with the socio-mythic gauntlet to cosmo-mythic salvation and the being/becoming paradox of growth.  To illustrate, Stein will show clips from such films as Our Town, Rebel Without a Cause, Pleasantville, and American Beauty.

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Wednesday, February 9, 4-6 p.m.

Mary Jo Neitz

(Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, University of Missouri)

Bringing up Witches: Dilemmas of Religious Socialization in Pagan Families

This talk will examine a number of issues facing pagan individuals with children. Professor Neitz uses primarily ethnographic data from two different networks of witches, one an explicitly feminist network of women-only groups, and the other, a geographically based network of groups with both men and women.

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Wednesday, March 8, 4-6 p.m.

John Hawkins

(Professor of Anthropology, Brigham Young University)

Getting Real in Military and Mormon Families: Metaphor and Ritual in the Affirmation of Reality in Family Life

Drawing on the work of such social theorists as Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and James Frazier, John Hawkins will open for discussion the proposition that ritual (preferably sacred but also performatively secular) constitutes a -- if not the -- major mechanism for defining the family and affirming its reality.  Through a comparison of ritual-based Mormon family practice with ritual-disrupted military family practice, he will argue that through ritual-based repetition and metaphor-based evaluation, family becomes both known to exist and valued.

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Wednesday, March 22, 4-6 p.m.

Deborah Tannen

(University Professor and Professor of Linguistics, Georgetown University)

Borrowed Identities: Ventriloquizing in Family Interaction

Based on a Sloan-supported research project in which families tape-recorded their own conversations at home and at work for a week, Deborah Tannen examines examples in which family members communicate to each other by speaking in the voice of another family member or pet. For example, when a mother chastises her four-year-old son by speaking in a high-pitched register as the family's pet dogs: "We're naughty but not as naughty as Jason." This is an example of "ventriloquizing" insofar as the mother speaks as the dogs; Dr. Tannen is interested in the range of ways that family members communicate with each other by taking on others' identities.

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Wednesday April 5, 4-6 p.m.

Kathryn S. March

(Professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Asian Studies, Cornell University; "Evolving Family" research project team member)

Global Families: Understanding Wage Migration From Nepal

In this presentation, Dr. March will reflect on 30 years of anthropological research based in the small mountain community of Mhanegang. In 1975, a negligible percentage of the population of Mhanegang had ever migrated out to work; by 2005, almost 15 percent were working outside of the village, notably in Southeast Asia and the Persian Gulf. A generation ago, every household in this community was organized for subsistence agriculture; marriage, inheritance, family, work, and tradition conceptualized the community as an integral whole, with a known past and knowable future.

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Wednesday April 12, 4-6 p.m.

Arlene Skolnick

(Institue of Human Development, University of California in Berkeley, Consultant to the Families and Work Institute)

Domestic Manners of the Americans: Etiquette Books and the Remaking of Middle Class Morality

Dr. Skolnick will argue that Americans are not nearly as polarized on “family values” as they have been portrayed in the media since the 2004 election. Rather, as she will show, there is strong evidence that a quiet majority of Americans have long been ready to reconcile traditional family norms with more modern, post-industrial values such as gender equality and tolerance for diversity. Public opinion data reveals this new morality along with a good deal of ambivalence and anxiety about family and gender change. But the voice of the mainstream moderate majority is rarely heard. This talk will focus on how recent editions of Emily Post and other etiquette books articulate and defend the post-industrial shift in mainstream family ideologies and practices. In addition, Dr. Skolnick will elaborate on and advance a model of family change by

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Wednesday April 26, 4-6 p.m.

Susan Linn

(Associate Director of the Media Center of the Judge Baker Children's Center; Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School)

Consuming Kids: The Corporate Takeover of Childhood

A psychologist and award-winning producer, writer, and puppeteer, Susan Linn has written extensively about the effects of media and commercial marketing on children. Her recently published book, Consuming Kids, was praised in publications as diverse as The Wall Street Journal and Mother Jones. Dr. Linn is a co-founder of the national coalition Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, and in 2000 she was appointed to the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Advertising to Children.

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DIRECTIONS TO THE MARIAL CENTER