Introduction

• The nature of families
• The culture of families: What 'we' do
• Making and unmaking families in America
• Family, culture and communication
• Observing actual families at work
• Making one's family life in America
• Writing one family's life in America

I - Family and Communication

1- A Half Hour of Family Life

• The people and the physical setting
• An evening's activities
• Ways of knowing
• The production of the texts
• The production of the first text
• Transcribing
• What to include
• What we did

2- The Making of an Analysis

• The production of analytic texts
• The place of the figures within the overall text
• Epilogue

3- The Construction of a Conversation: Talk and Topic

• He said "...," AND THEN she said "..."
• The identification of topics
• The emergence of conversational content
• The closet and the sink
• The culture of analytic statements

4- Ambiguities in the Analysis of Familial Communication: Power and Structure

• Interaction: War and cooperation
• Power as action in society
• Instances of family disagreements
• Tokens of aggravation
• A formal cultural analysis
• A formal theoretical analysis
• Behavior and structure

5- Parents and Their Children at Talk

• Talking with children
• Coherence, coherently
• "Mom!": the coherence of calls for attention
• " ": The coherence of silence
• A familial unison
• The gift: grammatical and interactional musical chairs
• The choice: Constructing the child
• Conversational accomplishment in families

II - The Culturing of Familial Life

6- The Culturing of Action

• Social fact and cultural pattern
• Culture: Pattern and identification

7- A Family's Social Organization and its 'Culture'

• The organization of a family's conversation
• Parental gifts: pencils and conversational turns
• Simple and elaborated systematics for turn-taking
• Rules for analysis
• Transitions
• The activities
• The actors
• Temporal organization
• The social organization of the actors
• The complex systematics for the organization of turn-taking among the Harveys

8- The Cultural Identification of a Family's Culture

• Culture and identification
• The culturing of family talk: From history to symbolic "normalcy"
• The Harveys in the United States
• The Harveys in America: Culturing culturings
• 'American child rearing patterns' as constructed
• The Harveys in America

9- Talk and Real Talk: Voices of Silence and Voices of Power

• The present in the future
• Seven texts
• A family at work: constructing the present (Text 1)
• Establishing the past: What happened (Text 2)
• (Re-)constructing the past: What "really" happened (?) (Texts 3 and 4)
• The structure of scholarly discourse analysis (Text 5)
• The concrete logic of intertextuality
• The construction of America (Text 6)

10- Conclusion

• From the local to the global and back again
• The expert: Cultural conditions and directed activity
• Sensitivity and cultural condition
• The responsibilities of practice
• Epilogue

References

Appendix A A Note on Pronominal Usage

Appendix B Transcription Conventions

Appendix C A Note on the Method Used to Time the Transcript

Appendix D Transcript of First Fifteen Minutes of Recording

• minute 1-4
• minute 8

Appendix E Rhythms of vocal sound (by Paul Byers)

Acknowledgments of previous publication

Figures

• Figure 1
• Figure 2
• Figure 3
• Figure 4
• Figure 6
• Figure 7

Acknowledgment

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Sound files and transcripts