Once upon a time, during my first two decades at Teachers College (in the department of, at first, Home & Family Life later reconstituted as Family & Community Education), I was addressed as “[FIRST NAME]” by colleagues and students alike. Twenty years, as I entered the programs in anthropology, I was addressed, like all my colleagues, as “Professor [LAST NAME].” In neither case did I have much of a choice (except to use these practices, changes and stabilities, to think further about poetry and constraints, culture and power—as well as resistance (“oddity,” “ignorance,” “agency”?).
Here is everything that led Durkheim to write about “social facts” that are also “total” (as Mauss developed it) as well as “immortal”(as Garfinkel later put it). Wondering about naming practices must lead to something like what Durkheim, Mauss, Garfinkel (and many others) proposed since what might appear as only “habit” (if not habitus, or water for the fish) is accompanied by complex discourses that are triggered at any time when some challenge the practice (or ignore it).
The recent interest in language “ideologies” that is discourses about what language to use, how to do it, write it, etc., belongs to the same concerns.
Continue reading Change and order in American modes of address and modes of reference
