How often do you get asked that question? How does it make you feel to be asked? When did the question first start making sense to you?
This episode explores the ways that pronoun usage has shifted over time to reflect new ways of thinking about the relationship between self and society. We’ll draw upon Brown and Gilman’s seminal essay, ‘The pronouns of power and solidarity’. And we’ll go back to Girl Scout camp in the early eighties, which is where my real education in pronouns began.
What images or memories does this question conjure for you?
Also, what are your aims? (Don’t answer that. This is not a self-help podcast.)
When I ask my undergraduate students to articulate the aims for their entrepreneurial projects, I hope and pray they won’t ask me mine. Not because I don’t have one. Here it is (don’t tell anyone): To honour the sacred spaces where new ideas emerge.
The word ‘sacred’ sounds a little hokey or New Agey to my ears, but I can’t think of a better word.
Episode 80 explores the sociological phenomenon of sacredness. We discuss the importance of the sacred and profane dichotomy in Durkheim’s theory of religion. We draw upon Goffman to posit that uttering profanities might be part of a sacred ritual of drawing boundaries around self and other. And we explore the mysterious ways that language creates sacred spaces where new ideas emerge.
This could be a tricky question, for lots of reasons. People may not understand your faith. People may not understand how your faith is connected to your culture. People may not understand why you aren’t part of a religion. Maybe your experiences of religion have been traumatic in some way.
To make this topic a little more light-hearted, it might be best to start with a different question.
What’s your most embarrassing religious moment?
Here’s mine: I accidentally became a born-again Christian at the age of 12.
In this episode we explore my hapless conversion in more detail. We gain some perspective from a book called The elementary forms of religious life, written by French sociologist Emile Durkheim.
In Durkheim’s analysis of what’s at the root of all religions, he draws these conclusions:
When people worship, they’re connecting with something bigger than themselves
This ‘bigger thing’ is society
Without society people would not experience themselves as people; they’d have no sense of who they were in the world
These conclusions are a little hard to swallow, particularly because we live in a moment where we’re right to be critical of society and the roles it establishes for us. Especially as these roles are carved out of endemic structural injustices.
But why do human beings need to actively connect with something bigger than themselves? It seems to me we’re already connected to something bigger than us—the natural world.
When I imagine the natural world as a conscious entity—and it’s one of the themes I love to explore in my fiction—it makes me feel like I am already part of a bigger picture.
This is true for me even though I feel separate from the natural world, even though I feel my experience is limited by the constraints of my language and my society.
The idea I most like to play with in my fiction is that the human experience of separation from the natural world is not a flaw, but a design principle.
I explore this notion in most recent story, ‘First words’, which is available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com. I intended the ‘Seer’ character to be an agent of the natural world, creating language to produce the experience of separation, the concept of the self.
The idea is that those of us who believe we inhabit selves (e.g. human beings!) are the routes by which the Earth itself experiences new ideas.
Intrigued? Would you like some more ideas about on how to tap into these insights on language and the self? Check out my free course, ‘Writing through the Lens of Language’: bit.ly/lensoflanguage
Have you ever repeated a word over and over again to yourself to experience the dissolution of its meaning? What if you were to do that with the word ‘me’? When I was a little kid, repeating the word ‘me’ became a doorway to a world where I was freed from the self that language had created. It was trippy.
In this episode we’ll discuss the role of language in creating, dissolving and protecting selves.
In my academic research I analyse transcripts of conversations to identify the shape of the social structures that emerges from people talking about everyday experiences. I look for grammatical patterns, asking these questions:
What ‘selves’ are constructed here?
What is the shape of the social structure here?
What are the possibilities for transformation here?*
One transformative possibility that has emerged from this type of analysis is that selves need to be protected. Can language protect them?
Think about the work you own name does in constructing your social self. But an anthropological look at naming systems makes it clear that names are less about protecting selfhood, and more about establishing someone’s place in a social structure. Even the seemingly ordinary principle that there are girls’ names for girls and boys’ names for boys, for instance, lets us know that we live in a culture that positions us in a binary gender structure.
Having an established place in a social structure is not the same as knowing that your self is protected, revered, cherished. In my short story, ‘The Greenhouse’, I explore the idea that everything in the natural world has its own blueprint. – its chemical makeup, its DNA signature, etc. Everything in the natural world has something you could call a ‘name’. Or even a ‘self’.
The ‘selves’ are in relationship with each other – molecules combine to form new molecules, membranes form that allow life to emerge
What if the earth were to grant to one of its species the ability to play with these relationship-forming tools?
What if human beings were offered a device to do creativity in exactly the same way the earth does creativity?
Well so far, such a device has created social structures that produce division, hierarchy and exclusion. But there’s hope to be found in the etymology of the word ‘culture’.
Culture is what we cultivate.
Language is what we use to cultivate.
To make a more welcoming social structure, let’s cultivate selves that felt safe and protected, that are crucibles for creation. Let’s use language to form linguistic membranes around selves, create spaces for new experiences, feelings, thoughts and ideas to emerge.
*You can listen to me talk about this in more detail in Episode 58, which is a recording of the talk I gave at Sheffield Hallam University in 2017 in honour of Professor Sara Mills’s retirement. For an even more detailed version, have a look at my book, Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds.
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Structured Visions 