The “thin culture” of self-help

Joseph Reagle

Our question(s)

  1. How ought we understand self-help readers?
    • as interpretive community?
    • as oppositional readers?
  2. or, as ambivalent consumers of “thin” culture?

Thick and thin

Clifford Geertz

Clifford Geertz

An “interpretive anthropologist” who studied cultural practices such as cock-fighting, religion, and kinship and advocated for “thick description.”

man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, [and] I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. (Geertz 1973, p. 5)

😉

Geertz borrowed Ryle’s concept of “thick description” and metaphor of winking.

To say someone winked is a “thin” description; to describe its meaning and symbolic import is “thick.” (Geertz 1973, p. 6)

(😉 is also “polysemous” or “multivalent”)

Ethnography

Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of’) a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior. (Geertz 1973, p. 10)

Interpretive community

Radway and Lindholf

In Lindholf’s (1988) “interpretive community,” readers construct the boundaries of genres using shared interpretive conventions.

Radway (1991) argued readers interpret romances differently than professional cultural critics: texts can mean different things to different people. She claimed her readers were an “interpretative community.”

Lichterman

Interpretative community

Lichterman disagrees with describing people who don’t know each other as a community.

It is debatable whether a concept originally applied to a literary establishment is as useful when applied to a loose network of readers. (Lichterman 1992, p. 425)

eg of an interpretative community?

“Thin culture” instead

readers’ shared understanding of the words and concepts put forth in these books can be read and adopted loosely, tentatively, sometimes interchangeably, without enduring conviction. (Lichterman 1992, p. 426)

I name this culture ‘thin’ because it does not support a deep commitment from readers. Over a period of years, some readers do dive repeatedly into self-help reading, but they discover and rediscover that it is not such a long way from surface to bottom. (Lichterman 1992, p. 427)

Readers’ openness?

  • little discernment between good or poor self-help books
  • looked for practical reasons: being more effective or assertive, or going through the stages of dating or divorce
  • had difficulty summarizing even general themes, though they might recall particular concept when prompted
  • looked favorably upon the genre; had periods of heavy, light, or no reading
  • appreciated self-help as mass-market commodities with repetitive and simplistic messages (Lichterman 1992, p. 428-430)

Readers’ motives?

  • had an “ambivalence toward organized, traditional religious denominations”;
  • valued “finding words for feelings or vague ideas” (e.g., risk, dependence, anger, assertiveness, love, and co-dependence)
  • kept up with the flood of new, legitimate insights on human development
  • looking for “authoritative validation for their feelings”
  • willing to “wink figuratively at themselves” when they note the repetitive or simplistic writing as they look for “nuggets.” (Lichterman 1992, pp. 431-433)

Patricia, Janet, and Hal??

What were some of the specific values, motives, and interpretations these readers shared?

Patricia?

  • an independent thinker using these as “how-to” vs “self-help”
  • juxtaposes with the Bible and social tradition relative to 1960s and 70s “anything goes”
  • left Catholicism because of its stance on women
  • found useful terms and psychological stage theories
  • returns to pop-psychology even if ultimately unsatisfying
  • better than the frameworks of traditional religion or a hedonistic anti-ethic of the 1960s and 70s (Lichterman 1992, pp. 434-436)

Janet

  • wanted words to attach to her feelings, especially as her husband was going through a midlife crisis
  • she was thrown by Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique, prompting her to readjust her feelings and self-concept, but has not become radical
  • relative to other authoritative frameworks of stern Lutheranism and Betty Friedan’s feminism (Lichterman 1992, pp. 436-438)

Hal

  • critical of materialistic values and also suspicious of new age spiritualism, though he belongs to a meditation group
  • seeks words for feelings and experiences and is looking to position his sense of selfhood in society in which notions of material progress are bankrupt and new guru-spiritualities are disturbing (Lichterman 1992, pp. 438-440)

egs of other places we see thin culture?

  • paid lecture attendance and self-improvement TV (Lichterman 1992, p. 443)
  • TED talks

Lichterman’s conclusion

(He had probably not read Grodin, which was published just the year before.)

What did you think?

Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Summary

ex. reading self-help classics

In a group identify:

Peck

Conclusion

Wrap up

Write a simple multiple choice question for one of the following:

Review

Share you multiple-choice question from last class.