Episode 6: I was one of the those: uniqueness and community

I tell more stories about my experiences in Strasbourg and American students doing their best to fit in. Often fitting in to aspects of French culture, and learning French, was made difficult because of how much they enjoyed being in the company of other English-language speakers. Thinking about them as a ‘community of practice’ – a term coined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in their book, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation – helps us to understand that better. Lave and Wenger say that you learn particular skills by being part of a community committed to a particular activity, like baking or playing basketball. The students joined together to engage in the practice of learning French and learning about French culture. If they’d come to France to learn to be bakers, it might have been easier to learn French, because learning French would have been just one aspect of a bigger picture: being part of the community of bakers.

‘Communities of practice’ explains a lot, and it has been used in quite a lot of sociolinguistic research (including the work by Penelope Eckert and Mary Bucholtz I discussed last week). The idea is that identity has more to do with doing particular things than with being a particular way. Some things it might not explain, though, such as what it felt like for Cheryl Harris’s grandmother when she was passing as White in order to get a job that would support her family. It might not explain what I call

the wounding that happens when you feel like you’re denying some aspect of yourself.

So I’ve decided to start exploring not just the models of community that scholars develop, but also the models of community that people come up with in their day to day conversations, even when they don’t realise it. Take this conversation between Mary and Rachel:

Mary: I was like one of those like, I’m not gonna go outside because I’m gonna get my shoes dirty, y’know? ((laughs))

Rachel: You’re still like that. ((laughs))

Mary: I am. ((laughs)) Ha ha ha, Rachel. Just cos I don’t like trampling through the mud.

By using the demonstrative ‘those’, Mary is signalling that there is a category of people that she belongs to. Rather than telling us what qualities these people have, she acts them out for us by performing a little monologue about what they might say. She’s describing herself as unique from the other people in her Strasbourg community. That is, she’s different from them, but still recognisable, because she belongs to a category that others can understand. This act of dividing people into categories turns out to be a way of making it possible for Mary to be a unique individual in her community.

This raises some issues/questions for me. Some quotes from the episode:

There’s a strange tension between being part of a group and being unique, that has to do with dividing people up and co-creating community.

This has started me thinking about the relationship between the individual and the group and the individual and the community and the way that communities construct the notion of the individual.

Do we have to divide everybody up in order to recognise them as individuals?

What types of community can we construct such that it is safe to be an individual?

More next week on co-creating community through conversation, and the relationship between the individual and the community.