Passing Mirrors: Subjectivity in a Midwestern Hair Salon

Abstract

Before I could begin the process of making cultural meanings visible through notes, on the page, to an audience and in Iowa, I first had to face the inner voice that told a realistic story about itself, its history, its power. This realization came early, on day one of what was intended to be a straightforward field study beginning in one particular place, a hair salon in rural Iowa, leading to a more extensive study involving other urban, community-based salons. Beginning in Iowa, I was to employ the most obvious and specific of ethnographic techniques available to a budding researcher, participant observation. My intentions were simple: to observe and, while doing so, to zero in on forms of talk that were characteristic of the African American cultural ethos to use in my dissertation. Ultimately, my greater goal became a comparative analysis between talk in community hair salons and the talk of users of African American English who make use of culturally relevant discourse in classrooms while reasoning about literature.Why a hair salon as a source for data? Hair salons for women, like barbershops for men, are traditionally places where co-constructed, community forms of talk-stories, personal narratives, jokes, folklore, and folktales-can be found. They are also sites in which these genres and African American English interactional norms are used as resources for the construction of arguments. This hypothesis is based on the contributions of linguists, sociocultural theorists, and anthropologists who have hypothesized that the genres of discourse and related communicative norms one might find in the hair salon typify norms across institutions in the black community, such as the traditional African American church, and literary and music genres such as jazz, hip-hop, and rap. Within the hair salon, I sought to identify the communicative characteristics and discourse structures, that is, interaction patterns, the role and structure of personal narratives, and other genres of talk drawn from the sociolinguistic literature on African American English discourses. Early on in this quest, however, I came to realize that every moment in one particular salon was informed not only by the literature before me but also by the subjective position of myself as the researcher, a key instrument in the research process. Every moment in "pursuit of indigenous meanings," according to Emerson and associates (1995:12), becomes a moment in the process of self-discovery. Through it, the Anthrupology & Education Quarterly 32(l):116-130. 116 Majors Passing Mirrors 117researcher comes to realize (1) that she is shaped by that which begins long before she ever even enters the field and (2) that she is altered by self-interrogations that persist long after mental pictures fade. What I discovered was that to this initial site I brought to my gaze my own "life history and personal experiences which directly affected the research" (Chiseri-Strater and Sunstein 1997). My stance as a researcher and my methodology for gathering data within the ...

Playing the Game and Paying the Price

“…I found a narrative framework useful in gaining a deeper understanding of the human mechanisms underlying educational outcomes (see, e.g., Delgado-Gaitan 1994, this issue;Hemmings 2000;Henry 1995;Hunter 1997;Li 2003;Majors 2001;Medina and Luna 2000;Phillion 2002aPhillion , 2002bQuiroz 2001;Villenas 2001;Watson 2001;Weis and Fine 1996). All transcripts were reviewed and emergent themes were identified (LeCompte and Schensul 1999:154-155).…”

Shoptalk: Teaching and Learning in an African American Hair Salon

“…Here, Darlene and the other participants of the audience, coconstruct the progression of the narrative. Furthermore, and more fully explored elsewhere (Majors, 2001b), such a narrative structure is unique in comparison to traditional models of narrative presented in most research with regard to discourse employed in both formal and informal learning contexts.…”

Lanita Jacobs-Huey, From the kitchen to the parlor: Language and becoming in African American women's hair care. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Pp. 194. Pb $24.95

“…Jacobs-Huey is one of small group of such authors (e.g., Banks 2000;Majors 2001Majors , 2003Majors , 2004Rooks 1996), whose research is acknowledged in this book. Others, like Harris 1998, whose scholarship is overlooked are also to be commended for taking up this topic.…”

“…Considering the significance, the symbolism, and the contested nature of African American hair, especially African American women's hair, it is surprising that it took such a long time for academics to undertake serious examinations of the topic. Jacobs-Huey is one of small group of such authors (e.g., Banks 2000; Majors 2001, 2003, 2004; Rooks 1996), whose research is acknowledged in this book. Others, like Harris 1998, whose scholarship is overlooked are also to be commended for taking up this topic.…”