Research and Publications
PROPOSAL
PART IV. INTELLECTUAL ORGANIZATION OF THE PROPOSED SLOAN/EMORY
CENTER
SIX RESEARCH NODES
- Ritual and cycles of life
- Social and Physiological Stress
- Food Consumption and Marketing
- Media Representations of the Family
- Family Narratives
- New and Emerging Forms of Myth and Ritual
As is clear from the preceding discussion, the topics of ritual
and myth in Ameri-can life are a rich field of inquiry, one that
stretches in many directions. So it is important to delimit the scope
of the research to be carried out in the proposed Emory/Sloan Center
to help guarantee that the center's work will be focused and
coherent.
We propose to steer a middle course between the single-project
approach to re-search and the relatively broadly-based funding of
many individual projects with weak links among them. We propose to
shape the research of the center by defining a set of research nodes
that will define the guidelines for funding projects. This approach
will promote the best mix of harnessing the diverse research
interests of Emory scholars and providing some common intellectual
foci that will shape publications and discourse within the
Center.
The research nodes represent the vision of Bradd Shore, the
Center's proposed Di-rector, in light of the research strengths and
interests of Emory scholars who indicated interest in research on
ritual and myth among middle-class working families. Several rounds
of proposals followed initial meetings with interested scholars.
Shore than spoke individually to prospective scholars helping them to
reconcile their own research interests and competencies with the
Center's own research agenda.
From the initial 20 faculty proposals, a smaller set was eventually arrived
at that had both intellectual significance in themselves and important
links with each other. Eventually these links were formulated as
the following set of research nodes that will organize the research
and discourse of the Emory/Sloan Center:
1. Ritual and cycles of life
Rituals, both personal and social, have a key role in shaping
lives by the day, the week, the month, the year and the lifetime.
This research will involve ethnographic stud-ies of selected families
in urban, suburban and small-town settings focusing on the
or-chestration of different kinds of rituals that shape the various
cycles in the lives of family members. Three distinctive sites of
ritual will be studied: the home, the workplace and community
institutions (clubs, sport's teams, schools, entertainment sites
etc.). The issues that will shape this research include:
- Time coordination, family schedules, and the influence of activity
schedules in ena-bling or discouraging collective activities among
family members.
- The distribution of family members' rituals among a. personal,
b. familial, c. com-munity-based (friends, neighbors, school,
church, voluntary associations) and d. workplace rituals.
- The complex relations between the isolating and integrating
functions of ritual. Ritual can provide personal meaning and structure
for an individual at the same time as it isolates that individual
from the rest of the family, or from colleagues or from wider
ties within the community. Family rituals can provide for a distinctive
family culture while at the same time separating families from
one another and from larger commu-nity associations.
- The role of ritual in enabling people to confront and deal with
important life-transitions and life-crises (like birth, death,
aging, career changes, illness, divorce).
2. Food consumption and marketing.
Few areas of life have as much ritual "lode" as food and eating. Food ritual
ranges from planting and harvest rites, to religious communion to
family meals, to the role of food in holidays, to personal eating
routines like dieting, and personal pathologies of eating like bingeing,
anorexia and bulimia. The ritual uses of food require an understanding
of the cultural and personal meanings of food, and of eating and
of the symbolic associations of food in advertising. Ritual uses
of food in our society are linked with technological and marketing
innovations. The microwave oven has produced a whole new genre of
microwaveable ready-to-heat foods, which have allowed for highly
individualized meals. Ready-to-eat foods and individual portions
have had important consequences for family mealtimes. They have
been a time and labor-saving convenience for time-starved working
women, but have also transformed family meals and eating patterns
in ways that are crying out to be documented and analyzed.
3. Social and physical stress as mediated by ritual.
Ritual appears to have important functions in response to stress.
For example, it has been hypothesized that ritual promotes a kind of
nervous system "tuning" by effect-ing the rapid alternation of
stimulation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.
On a more observable level, ritualized behavior is a common response
to crisis and disrupted routines (Shore 1990). We propose to study
the relationship between ritual and stress in two ways. Since it is
now possible to measure with some accuracy physiological markers of
social and biological stress (Worthman 1998; McDade 1996; Dressler
1991), it becomes possible to study the physiological effects of
social ritual. This requires developing measures to distinguish
between individuals and families in their elaboration of social
ritual, and correlating these patterns with physiological markers of
stress.
At a more behavioral level, middle-class families experience stress in their
per-ception of increasing danger to their security from various
forms of violence and social pathology (including drugs, suicide,
school violence, kidnapping and the like). Responses to these perceived
dangers include ritual and narrative, especially those associated
with organized religion.
4. Mass media and representations of the family
The American family is not just a social reality, but a mythic one as well.
Mass media, especially advertising, television sit-coms and soap
operas, films and plays both reflect Americans' changing images
of family life and contribute to how families are per-ceived. Films,
television and advertising are very power generators of modern myths
in American life (Greenfield 1984; Himmelstein 1984; Martin 1995;
Becker 1995). The Emory/Sloan Center will study the complex relations
between the actual experiences and structures of contemporary middle-class
family life and significant representations of the family in the
media.
5. Mass media as a source of new and emerging forms of ritual and myth.
This broad definition of media includes television, radio, print media, pop-music,
computer games, cellular phones, and the Internet.
6. Family narratives:
Bruner (1990) has proposed that human beings use story-telling to continually
make meaning in their lives and especially to make sense of "trouble."
He has documented the power of family narrative as a privileged
way in which families make meaning out of their lives and deal with
the endless conflicts to which family's are prone. Families have
their own myths about themselves in the form of family stories that
are generated within families through talk and then updated, transformed
and reproduced so that they become mini narrative traditions constituting
a basis for family culture (Varenne 1992; Myerhoff 1992; Blum-Kulka
1997). It is important to find out:
1. The extent to which such family narratives are being generated in middle
class working families;
2. Who the dominant storytellers and audiences are for these stories;
3. The content and themes of such narratives; and
4. What occasions are being used for this important function, especially in
light of the time-squeeze in people's lives and the problem of coordinated
schedules.
Core faculty research will focus on one or more of these Research
Nodes.
RESEARCH METHODS
Because of the variety of research projects to be supported by the Center,
no sin-gle research method will be understood as appropriate for
all of them. But there are a few generalizations that can be made
about our methodological approach to research.
1. The supported research will be largely primary and empirical. This means
that projects will study actual populations and cultural productions
(advertising, media events) rather than secondary or historical
sources.
2. The research will be qualitatively rich in that it will rely on detailed
case studies of families and individuals rather than broad surveys.
Where appropriate, surveys (such as questionnaires) will be used
to supplement the qualitative findings. In exceptional and meritorious
cases we are prepared to fund a survey-based research project if
that infor-mation will substantially complement some other qualitative
data that is being gathered. In most cases, however, purely quantitative
survey data will not be the primary data-base for Center research.
The one exception to this qualitative orientation is the study of
stress and ritualization, which by its very nature requires large
samples and quantitative analysis for its effectiveness.
3. The primary data for qualitative research on ritual and myth
are as follows:
a. Personal Observations (done by "shadowing" subjects in their
routines, and by participant-observation by researchers living with
their subjects.
b. Audio and Video Recordings of interviews, rituals and
story-telling
c. Intensive Interviewing
d. Content analysis of media productions, family narratives,
ritual performances and interview material
e. Diaries maintained by informants of personal and family
schedules
f. Blood samples for the measurement of physiological markers of
social and psy-chological stress
g. Participant-observation.
4. Research project designs will have to pay attention to relevant
dimensions of compari-son and control. The primary population our
research will study encompasses dual-career middle-class American
families in the Southeast. We will divide our samples among urban,
suburban and small-town populations because these variables will
probably have an important influence on the status of ritual and
narrative in family life.
The term "middle-class" is notoriously ambiguous, especially in
the United States where class categories are not well-defined. What
is considered by residents to be a "middle-class" standard of living
will vary dramatically by community, and will be rela-tive to the
overall wealth of the community.
For Center research, the populations will be selected largely by
"life-style" criteria (rather than by income-bracket or
self-identification). We will define "middle class" by educational
aspirations, in terms of any member of a family seriously aspiring to
or currently attending or having attended college. Because this
criterion does not adequately distinguish "middle-class" from
"upper-class" family we will use residence patterns to eliminate the
richest families, defining them as living in the top 20% (by value)
of dwellings. We shall use as a baseline average house values or
rents according to local real-estate figures. While these criteria
are relatively crude, they will probably produce for us the
populations we are interested in studying.
In order to understand the contribution of the dual-earner factor, it will
be impor-tant to study a small sub-sample of families that do not
fit this pattern, to establish suffi-cient control and contrast.
So each project will target a small number of control families where
there is a single-wage-earner. The same goes for the class variable,
and a small sample of families will be studied that are not middle-class.
These controls do not detract from the dual-earned middle-class
focus of our project. On the contrary, inclusion of these sub-samples
highlighting relevant dimensions of contrast is essential if we
are to learn what is distinctive to the lives and experiences of
dual-earner middle-class families.
GEOGRAPHIC FOCUS OF RESEARCH: THE SOUTHEAST
We initially considered conducting research in middle-class
communities throughout the United States in the interest of
collecting information that was reasonably nationally representative.
Given the scale and resources of the proposed center, however, it was
eventually decided that focusing the research regionally, on
communities through-out the Southeastern states, had far more
benefits than liabilities. National focus is possi-ble if a center is
committing its research to a single research project, where all
research efforts are aimed at building a common database.
Attempting to carry out multiple and diverse research throughout
the country cre-ates the inevitable problem of too many relevant
variables for too few projects to handle coherently. Instead, we have
opted for a center that funds a variety of different research
projects in a number of fields, subject to the constraints of (1) a
topical focus on one of our five research nodes and (2) a geographic
focus on the South. Our research will take place at a variety of
research sites selected to make sure we have urban, suburban and
small town life represented in our research samples.
The focus on the Southeast will mean that the findings from our
research will not necessarily be representative trends for the
country as a whole. The Southeast is gener-ally assumed to be more
conservative and more traditional than other parts of the country,
and one might expect biases in those directions from our research.
Limiting the research in this way will have the significant practical
advantages as well as enhance the coherence of research design. Doing
their research relatively close to work and home will give our
researchers frequent and inexpensive access to research sites. The
local focus of our research will dramatically limit travel time and
costs and permit frequent access to re-search sites. Moreover,
researchers with significant family and work obligations in At-lanta
will be able to better manage potentially competing obligations. We
expect that this decision will significantly enhance research
productivity and keep down costs, allowing us to support more
research projects.
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