Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

SITBB Vault: Coyote and Anansi Make Family Theory

It was fun to come across this post from my blog vault. First, it tickled me to think about how happy I was to have just recently passed my oral prelims. Reading this post brought that examination back to the forefront of my mind--reminding me how large it loomed to me at the time, but how do-able it turned out to be. Plus, it is satisfying to see how far I have come in a year and a half. In fact, I am glad that I was documenting my progress so that I can look back and make these types of observations months later. But the second fun aspect about re-reading this entry is noting how relevant it is for my current dissertation work. My qualitative research involves analyzing adoptive mothers' lay theories about genetics. (See my Research Notes posts for further information.) I do not make explicit use of a dialectical framework in my dissertation, but it is clear that such a view necessarily colors this work. This is because--unlike scientific theories--our lay, or "folk," theories often must allow for the concurrent presence of contradictory views. Science may strive for such things as coherence, mutual exclusivity, and lack of ambiguity. But the theories we use to live our daily lives do not generally have the luxury of arising from such lofty goals. Anyway, I hope this post is enjoyable for others to read during this semi-blackout period for new entries. If not, I offer a gift of this wonderful article that is very relevant to the topic at hand. I do not know how/why I did not mention this article when I posted this originally. I am just glad I can rectify it now: Family Theory Versus the Theories Families Live By. Kerry Daly (2003), Journal of Marriage and Family, 65, 771-784. (Originally posted January 13, 2005.)

During my stress-inducing, but successfully-passed (and -past!) oral preliminary exam I was asked a question that I have been thinking about a lot lately. It had to do with my use of a dialectical framework for one of my written prelim papers. Among other reasons, I embraced dialectics because I thought it would more accurately encompass the contradictions I found both in adoption literature about loss as well as in (potentially) the experiences of various members of the adoptive kinship network.

Well, the oral prelim question was something like: "Dialectics is not a very widely applied theory in family science; You say it was challenging for you to wrap your mind around it: How would you teach that conceptual framework to a classroom of undergraduates in our department?"

I can't recall the exact extemporaneous mumbu gumbo I was able to dish up. But regardless of my answer at the time, it's a good question--then and now.

The paper in which I originally included this dialectic frame I now have the task of deciding how to revise to resubmit for possible publication somewhere. Do I keep the dialectics in and more explicitly explain it? Do I extract only the most relevant aspect of dialectics--for me, how it addresses contradiction--and expand on that? Do I enlist dialectics ninjas in my paper--having my work use dialectics covertly without me identifying this use as dialectics specifically? Do I just jetison dialectics entirely?--Like, maybe it was useful for me to use it to get to my ideas, but it is now part of the historical process that does not belong in the final product...

This questioning involves this issue of explaining dialectics. How can I begin to imagine how I'd explain it to undergraduates in some future class when I can not yet figure out how to adequately explain it to professional academics serving as journal reviewers right now?

No worries, though: I came up with a possible start to an explanation. It involves my interest from a long time ago, when I taught little kids in "multicultural" classrooms and when I was a student of early childhood education in Boston. Back then I fell in love with trickster characters in world folktales. Most cultures seem to have such a figure. Before I even looked up "trikster" in Wikipedia, I thought immediately of Bugs Bunny as a contemporary US trickster figure--and there he was listed along with Anansi the spider (from African folktales) and coyote (from Native American tales)! I had also thought of Q, from ST:TNG--and he's listed, too. (As much as possible, though, I avoid outing myself as a Trekker-by-marriage so I hesitate to mention this reference!)

Anyway, it seems to me a trickster is a perfect metaphorical representation of much of what dialectical contradiction is all about: like how someone (or something, like a concept or cognition or attitude) can be multiple seemingly oppositional things simultaneously; like how a body of accumulated knowledge can sometimes reveal one set of conclusions (or one storyline) and other times reveal another, depending in part on when the research/story is being "told" and by whom; like how a dialectical contradiction can sometimes blur boundaries ("both/and") but other times insert a new boundary, in turn creating new categories (even new worlds...)

Something for me to reflect on, anyway, in my spare time. (I keep deleting the sarcastic quotation marks that keep magically appearing around those latter two words.)

Some miscellaneous-more on trickster figures, from Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde:

"The road that trickster travels is a spirit road as well as a road in fact. He is the adept who can move between heaven and earth, and between the living and the dead" (p. 6).

"Trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of life, making sure there is commerce" (p. 7).

"There are also cases in which trickster creates a boundary, or brings to the surface a distinction previously hidden from sight" (p. 7).

"Boundary creation and boundary crossing are related to one another, and the best way to describe trickster is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found,...always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms" (p. 7).

"The god of the threshold"--magnificent!

That'd be how my Family Theory 101 lecture about dialectics would begin: "Dialectics is the theory of the threshold."

Posted by perry032 at July 25, 2006 02:24 PM | TrackBack
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