Bachelors discourse analysis by james paul gee

Page 58 4 Cultural models

4.1 Bachelors

This chapter will focus exclusively on cultural models and their social and political implications. Cultural models are an important tool of inquiry because they mediate between the “micro” small level of interaction and the “macro’’ large level of institutions. They mediate between the local interactional work we do in carrying out the six building tasks discussed in Chapter 2 p. 12 and Discourses as they operate to create the complex patterns of institutions and cultures across societies and history. For example, when I was growing up, the Discourse of heterosexual romance i.e. enacting and being recognized as an acceptable “date” and potential partner and actual dating practices were mediated by a bevy of cultural models, one of which held that women brought “beauty” as their prime asset to a relationship and men brought “intelligence” and potential career success as their prime asset. This model has changed a good bit, and so too have both actual practices and various culturally specific and class-based Discourses of romance. The role of cultural models was first made clear in a classic paper by the linguist Charles Fillmore 1975. Fillmore used a deceptively simple example: the word “bachelor.” All of us think we know what the word “bachelor” means: like dictionaries e.g. Webster Handy College Dictionary 1972, we all think it means “an unmarried man.” Fillmore, however, asks questions like: Is the Pope a bachelor? Is a thrice-divorced man a bachelor? Is a young man who has been in an irreversible coma since childhood a bachelor? What about a eunuch? A committed gay man? An elderly senile gentleman who has never been married? The answer to all these questions is either “no” or “I’m not sure” as I have discovered by asking a variety of people. Why? After all, all these people are unmarried men. The reason why the answer to these questions is “no,” despite the fact that they all involve cases of clearly unmarried males, is that we actually use the word “bachelor” and any other word in relation to a largely Page 59 taken-for-granted “theory,” which in the last chapter, I called a “cultural model.” One way to look at cultural models is as images or storylines or descriptions of simplified worlds in which prototypical events unfold. They are our “first thoughts” or taken-for-granted assumptions about what is “typical’’ or “normal.” We will see below that when cultural models are brought to our attention, we can often acknowledge that they are really simplifications about the world, simplifications which leave out many complexities. But then, all theories, even theories in science, are simplifications useful for some purposes and not others. Unfortunately, the simplifications in cultural models can do harm by implanting in thought and action unfair, dismissive, or derogatory assumptions about other people. The most commonly used cultural model for the word “bachelor” is or used to be something like the following Fillmore 1975: Men marry women at a certain age; marriages last for life; and in such a world, a bachelor is a man who stays unmarried beyond the usual age, thereby becoming eminently marriageable. We know that this simplified world is not always true, but it is the one against which we use the word ‘bachelor’, that is, make choices about what other words are excluded as applicable or not, and make assumptions about what the relevant context is in a given case of using the word. Thus, the Pope is not a bachelor because he just isn’t in this simplified world, being someone who has vowed not to marry at any age. Nor are gay men, since they have chosen not to marry women. Cultural models often involve us in exclusions that are not at first obvious and which we are often unaware of making. In the case of “bachelor” we are actually excluding people like gay individuals and priests as “normal” men, and assuming that men come in two “normal” types: those who get married early and those who get married late. This assumption, of course, marginalizes people who do not want to get married or do not want to marry members of the opposite sex. It is part of the function of cultural models to set up what count as central, typical cases, and what count as marginal, non-typical cases. There is, of course, another exclusion that is made via the cultural model for “bachelor.” If men become “eminently marriageable” when they stay unmarried beyond the usual age, then this can only be because we have assumed that after that age there is a shortage of “desirable” men and a surplus of women who want them, women who aren’t “eminently marriageable,” or, at least, not as “eminently marriageable” as the men. Hence, we get the most common cultural model associated with “spinster.” Fillmore’s example raises another important point that further shows up the connection between cultural models and “politics.” Thanks to feminism, lots of people have become consciously aware of the cultural Page 60 model behind the word “bachelor.” Many have come to reject it, thereby either dropping the word or changing its meaning. For example, many people now use the word “bachelor” for unmarried women, thus, giving the word new situated meanings and applying it against a new cultural model. Other people use a word like ‘‘spinster” as a badge of honor and respect, once again creating new situated meanings and cultural models. The “bite” of Fillmore’s example is this: if any word in English seems to have a clear “definition,” it is a word like “bachelor.” But this word is not used in terms of a definition, but rather against a set of social and cultural assumptions that constitute a cultural model. If this is true of a word like “bachelor,” how much more likely is it to be true of words like “democracy,” “justice,” “intelligent,” or “literate,” for instance?

4.2 Videotapes in the mind