Social Acts, Class and the Construction of Personhood in Indian Families

Abstract

The study demonstrates how a "language as mechanism" perspective can be employed in understanding the ways in which Hindi speaking Indian caregivers use language to create diverse conceptions of personhood within their culture. The present study focuses on both spontaneous and structured interactions between 24 Hindi speaking caregivers and their children, equally distributed across three social classes, residing in New Delhi, India. In particular, the study examines: 1) the kinds of social acts Hindi speaking Indian caregivers use in their everyday communicative routines with their children when talking about persons, and 2) within culture variations based on social class groupings. Transcripts of the 30 minutes long interactions of each family were made. A multi-level coding scheme was developed to examine caregivers' speech in terms of social acts (declaratives and directives) and the frequency of person references. Distributional analyses examined the proportion of person references, and class-based patterns of cooccurrence between particular social acts and person references. The discussion explores the ways in which caregivers within a single culture use language to talk about varying notions of the person world.