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Article Excerpt
While teaching an undergraduate class in intercultural communication, I showed a clip from the movie The Joy Luck Club (based upon the novel by Amy Tan, 1989) when Waverly brings her white, "American" boyfriend, Rich, to her family's home for dinner. Rich's performance during the meal is a disaster: he violates every conceivable norm of etiquette for a Chinese family dinner. I wanted to demonstrate how the rules of culture can often be foregrounded when a "stranger" (Gudykunst & Kim, 1997), such as Rich, enters a foreign culture and unwittingly violates that culture's unwritten rules (see Hall, 1976). In the ensuing discussion my students identified a number of cultural norms that Rich violated--norms which I had also identified. However, one student, who grew up in Hong Kong, noticed one norm which I had overlooked: she said that Rich addressed his girlfriend's mother (his future mother-in-law) by her first name; this, she explained, was Rich's most egregious cultural blunder.
I narrate this anecdote for three reasons: (1) it illustrates that in Chinese communities there is a patterned way to address one's kin; (2) associated with kinship address is a meaning system, or folk theory (also called ethnotheory, see Harkness & Super, 1996): there are right and wrong ways to address one's kin; and (3) the features of the cultural practice of kinship address and its associated folk theory can become foregrounded by its participants during moments when a novice, such as the "American" Rich, are unable or perhaps unwilling to perform the practice. Researchers of intercultural communication often take advantage of such moments as they may reveal what are otherwise hidden cultural practices and beliefs (see Bluedorn, 1998; Hall, 1976). But intercultural encounters are not the only time when cultural practices and beliefs may be foregrounded. As Hall (1976) explains, parent-child interactions are also another key moment: one of the "situations that expose[s] culture's hidden structure [is] when one is raising the young and is forced to explain things" (p. 222).
This study looks closely at encounters between novices and more experienced members who practice Chinese kinship address. The goals of this study are twofold: (1) to understand how novices are socialized into the daily, routine practice of kinship address; and (2) to understand the meanings or folk theory that more experienced members associate with this practice. Researchers in the field of language socialization have long been interested in investigating both the process by which children are socialized into cultural practices and the meanings that are associated with such practices (e.g., Kulick, 1992; Miller & Hoogstra, 1992; Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). The present study follows from this approach as it presents data that show both how this cultural practice is enacted in a community in Taiwan, and the meanings these participants link to this practice. But before presenting the data I first review studies in two related fields, personal address and kinship studies, which help to conceptualize the present study.
Previous Research on Personal Address
Studies of personal address follow from the work of Brown and Gilman (1960), who first investigated pronominal address systems in several European languages, such as tu and vous in French. They proposed an elegant system to explain the use of these pronouns, claiming that usage is determined by two factors: power and solidarity. In symmetrical relations people use the more familiar pronouns, but in asymmetrical the inferior addresses the superior with the formal, and the superior can address the inferior using either the formal or informal pronouns. Subsequent research, however, has faulted this theory for appearing too deterministic and supposing a pre-existing cultural system from which speaking practices are built. Speakers appear to use address terms to negotiate or transform a cultural system (see Fitch, 1991; Morford, 1997); speakers can use terms of address in creative and non-literal ways such as metaphor, joking, irony, and deception (Fitch, 1991); finally speakers can apply their own personal meaning when using terms of personal address, one which differs from the conventional interpretation (Sequeira, 1993).
Studies of personal address have shown that in addition to pronominal forms, there exist a number of other categories of address terms and that the use of these forms indexes and constructs cultural beliefs. For example, Fitch (1998) claims that there are five categories of address terms: second-person pronouns, proper names, kinship terms, titles, and nicknames and adjectival terms. She demonstrates that the kinship term, Madre, or mother, can be studied as it is used to index and negotiate a variety of relationships among participants in Columbia (Fitch, 1991). Likewise, in China the title, tongzhi, or comrade, has been studied as it reveals how a title indexes China's changing social structure (Fang & Heng, 1983; Scotton & Zhu, 1983).
In sum, recent studies of personal address show that it is a much broader field than first envisioned by Brown and Gilman (1960), and that it is a fruitful field for communication studies as it indexes how notions of the nature of persons and relationships can be socially and strategically constructed (Fitch, 1991; Morford, 1997).
Previous Research on Kinship
A second line of research that illumines the present study is studies of kinship, with particular attention to studies of Chinese kinship. For many decades anthropologists included the study of kinship as one of their key tools for understanding local cultures. However, as explained by Carsten (2000), interest in kinship among anthropologists waned in the 1970s and 1980s. The prevailing view among anthropologists was that kinship is a fact of life rooted in the biological composition of the tribe of family. (One notable exception is found in Schneider's (1968/ 1980) classic study of American kinship where he claims that kinship should be studied as a "cultural system" or "system of symbols.") Given such a static notion of kinship, anthropologists focused their attention upon other phenomena, such as gender, which they studied as socially constructed, not biologically pre-ordained. But recent years have witnessed a shift among some anthropologists who have found that kinship, too, is socially constructed, and that it can be studied as a process constructed through everyday practice.
Stafford's (2000) study of patterns of Chinese kinship illustrates the newer approach to kinship studies. Based upon fieldwork conducted in communities in northeastern China and southern Taiwan, he claims that ties of family and community are constructed on a continuum from most formal to least formal, and that these ties are associated with the terms of yang (to care for or nurture) and laiwang (to have relations). He critiques kinship studies of Chinese contexts which see kinship in terms of patriliny, but ignore both less formal relationships and the importance of women in kinship relationships. That is, he challenges studies, such as Gao's (1996), that assume that Chinese kinship is rigid and non-incorporative--wary of and resistant of outsiders--his data suggest instead that kinship is fluid and creatively incorporative. A similar claim is made by Li (1999) in his study of kinship in Tianjin, China. He
discusses the phenomenon of "iron brothers and sisters" or the newly emergent process of creating fictive kin. Such ties have become popular in recent years partly due to the migration of people from the countryside to urban centers--where nuclear families are more the norm--and due to the one-child policy. That is, there exists in Tianjin a continuum of kinship bonds ranging from close to less close, bonds that are constructed by participants, not rooted in biology but in the social order of the community, much like that described by Stafford (2000).
Finally, Chen's (1999) study of the mother and daughter-in-law relationship deserves attention. From her interviews of 12 dyads in Taipei, Taiwan, she finds a range of descriptions of the relationship, ranging from bonds as close as a mother and daughter, to bonds distant and strained. She also reports on a practice called "greeting," one which appears to be much the same as the one focused on in this study.
Greeting seems to be a big issue to most of the mothers-in-law even though most of the daughters-in-law did not pay attention to this. A mother-in-law-said, "When my relatives or friends came to our house, she [my daughter-in-law] greeted them. I was very happy about that." Other mothers-in-law had similar reactions to the greeting behavior from the daughters-in-law." (p. 66)
Chen reports the positive evaluation one mother-in-law gave to her daughter-in-law's practice of greeting her neighbors: "All my children and daughters-in-law are very filial. My neighbors always tell me that my daughter-in-law is very polite because she always greets them whenever she meets them. I feel very proud from the neighbors' praising" (p. 66) That is, the practice of "greeting" one's neighbors is judged by this mother-in-law and her neighbors to index what it means to be polite, and hence is a praiseworthy act.
In sum, recent studies of kinship, especially Chinese kinship, reveal that kinship ties are constructed and that they vary on a continuum from very close to less close. Li's (1999) and Chen's (1999) studies lend evidence that these ties are indexed by kinship terms used among both kin and fictive kin. Chen (1999), furthermore, indicates that participants positively evaluate the use of these terms.
The present study is guided by these recent studies of both personal address and kinship: it looks at kinship address not as a practice that is rooted in biology, or determined by a pre-existing cultural system, but rather as a cultural practice that both indexes interpersonal relations and creatively constructs kinship ties. The study follows from the dual aims of language socialization to investigate how novices are socialized into cultural practices by everyday, routine enactments of a practice, and the desire to uncover the folk theories that participants say support these practices. The data presented in this study will look at both the enactments and folk theories associated with kinship address.
Methods
This study is based upon two periods of fieldwork conducted over two months in 1998 and another two months in 1999. It involved participant-observation and 67 interviews with a total of 78 participants, including mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers, in Chhan-chng, a small community in central Taiwan (discussed below). In this community our primary goal was to uncover local meanings from the participants' point of view (Geertz, 1973). The current paper is based on a subset of 40 interviews, 17 conducted...
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