A provocative and eye-opening history of how we have studied and theorized social interaction.
In this ambitious, wide-ranging book, anthropologist Michael Lempert offers a conceptual history that explores how, why, and with what effects we have come to think of interactions as "scaled." Focusing on the sciences of interaction in midcentury America, Lempert traces how they harnessed diverse tools and media technologies, from dictation machines to 16mm film, to study communication "microscopically." In looking closely, many hoped to transform interaction: to improve efficiency, grow democracy, curb racism, and much else. Yet their descent into a microworld created troubles, with some critics charging that these scientists couldn't see the proverbial forest for the trees. Exploring talk therapy and group dynamics studies, social psychology and management science, conversation analysis, "micropolitics," and more, Lempert shows how scale became a defining problem across the behavioral sciences.
Ultimately, he argues, if we learn how our objects of study have been scaled in advance, we can better understand how we think and interact with them-and with each other-across disciplinary and ideological divides. Even as once-fierce debates over micro and macro have largely subsided, Lempert shows how scale lives on and continues to affect the ethics and politics of language and communication today.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"Remarkable in its scholarly range, Lempert's book traces a century of disputes about scale in the social sciences of language. The work is meticulous and vividly argued. It will be controversial, revealing recurrent, productive tensions across disciplines: psychiatry, small group research, feminist and anti-racist activism." * Susan Gal, University of Chicago * "Lempert has written an ingenious book: a microcosmic, interscalar history of the sciences of interaction, small talk, and conversation, which is full of delightful erudition. A philosophical reflection on the puzzles of scale-querying the small, the personal, and the micro at the largest of scales-across a century, in scientific labs and Freudian offices, behind one-way mirrors, and in consciousness-raising meetings. Small is beautiful once more." * Christopher M. Kelty, University of California, Los Angeles * "In his book, he examines the history of interaction from sociological, anthropological and linguistic perspectives across many subjects and scales - from small talk to microaggression." * Nature's "Books in Brief" *
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
The University of Chicago Press
Zielgruppe
Illustrationen
Maße
Höhe: 229 mm
Breite: 152 mm
Dicke: 25 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-226-83248-7 (9780226832487)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Michael Lempert is professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Discipline and Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery, coauthor of Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency, and coeditor of Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life.
Preface
1. Introduction: How Scale Broke the World
Part I. Fine-Grained Analysis
2. The Chattering Unconscious and the Tells of Talk
3. The First Five Minutes
4. The First Five Seconds
Part II. Small Groups
5. Rigorously, Manageably Small
6. Interaction Recorders
7. Interaction as a Liberal Technology
Part III. Micropolitics
8. The Interpersonal Gets Political
9. Interruption-and Male Supremacy
10. Tempest in the Transcript
11. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
