Sibling sociality

Participation and apprenticeship across contexts

Authors

  • Marjorie Harness Goodwin University of California Los Angeles

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.28317

Keywords:

sibling interaction, family interaction, embodied talk in interaction, monitoring, directives

Abstract

This paper examines the embodied language practices through which siblings in two middle-class Los Angeles families structure their participation while apprenticing younger siblings into routine household chores, self-care and during care-taking activities. Siblings make use of a range of directive forms (including requests as well as imperatives) and participant frameworks drawn from their family, peer group and school cultures. Families build accountable actors and family cultures through the ways they choose to choreograph and monitor routine activity in the household, using both hierarchical or more inclusive frameworks. Data are drawn from the video archive of UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families.

Author Biography

  • Marjorie Harness Goodwin, University of California Los Angeles

    Marjorie Harness Goodwin is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. Her work investigates how talk is used to build social organization, focusing on the family and peer group. Her books include He-Said-She-Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children and The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status and Exclusion, studies that combine long-term ethnography with conversation analysis. Recent work investigates how intimate affiliative human sociality in the family is accomplished through the intertwining of interacting bodies.

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Published

2017-06-15

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Goodwin, M. H. (2017). Sibling sociality: Participation and apprenticeship across contexts. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 1(1), 4-29. https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.28317

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