Episode 5: Kill Your Peas and Other Stories from Alien Worlds

Last week I said I hated social structure? I need an attitude adjustment. When is thinking about social structure fun for me? When we’re imagining new ones: flower worlds, sock worlds, bubble words, underground worlds, for instance.

I discuss the work of two sociolinguists, Penelope Eckert and Mary Bucholtz, who did ethnographic work in the alien world of the American high school. Eckert’s book, Language Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High analyses the links between class, gender and language in a high school in the Detroit area. Eckert describes a divide between ‘jocks’ and ‘burnouts’ and shows how the kids create meaningful categories according to the things they do, not just what social class they come from.

Bucholtz’s article, ‘“Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls’ describes a group of self-proclaimed ‘nerds’ in another American high school. These girls, she explains, are constructing their own social category that subverts ‘cool’ identities.

I ask: how easy it is to subvert established social categories in a given social structure?

I ask: why are social categories – even subversive ones – based on acceptance/rejection? Can we imagine a social world where there’s nothing but acceptance?

I decide to move from being an objective anthropologist to a regular person, with subjective experiences. I time travel back to being a kid at school myself, sitting in the school lunchroom staring down my shyness, my peers and … my peas. Eureka! I discover the value of creating a new story.

Download Kill Your Peas and Other Stories from Alien Worlds.