[Ethnocomm] Kristine Munoz lecture on Vimeo

[David Boromisza-Habashi]

Dear All,

In the spring, we had the great honor of welcoming Prof. Kristine Muñoz to our department here at CU-Boulder as our 17th Josephine B. Jones lecturer. She gave a fantastic talk titled "Friendship and Romance: Silence, Stories and Secrets in Four Cultures" which is now available online: https://vimeo.com/140580349 . She updated us on her thinking about the relationship between cultural/communal and relational codes and gave an inspiring workshop on the methodological aspects of her latest book, Transcribing Silence.

I am including the abstract of her talk below.

Enjoy!

Cheers, David

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Kristine L. Muñoz
Department of Communication Studies, University of Iowa

Friendship and Romance:  Silence, Stories and Secrets in Four Cultures

Why do some personal relationships thrive, making the partners healthier, more productive, and even live longer?  Why do other relationships founder, sometimes destroying the partners or the people around them despite every effort to make them work? Many of the usual answers to these questions center on psychological issues:  personality, family of origin issues, passive aggression, and so forth. I propose instead that cultural systems of norms, premises, and symbolic meanings play a greater role in relational health and happiness than most of us realize.  In Transcribing silence:  Culture, relationships and communication (Left Coast Press, 2014) I examined this idea in ethnographic narratives, both fiction and nonfiction.  In this talk I describe the ethnographic research in Spain, Colombia, the US and the UK from 1999-2013, that formed the basis both for that book and for a theory of personal relationships as codes of meaning embedded within cultural codes.  Culture provides resources for defining what constitutes friendship, romantic partnership, and other kinds of relationships.  Here I will focus on three prominent forms of communication through which relationships are interpreted and evaluated:  (a) silences, from microseconds through years and decades, that say more than any words could do; (b) stories that shape action into claims about people and their relationships as good or bad, important or unimportant, even meaningful or mysterious, to the members of a speech community and (c) secrets, the facts and stories around them that remain untold, at least temporarily and sometimes forever, in order to preserve both relationships and speech communities.


--
David Boromisza-Habashi, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication
College of Media, Communication and Information, University of Colorado Boulder
http://colorado.academia.edu/DavidBoromiszaHabashi

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