I Won’t Kill Jimmy, but I’ll Kill that Fly: Rapport as a Structure of Social Interaction

• In Event: 4376 - Meaning-Making through the Lens of Cultural Cognition

Abstract

Contested social settings—environments which feature nonexistent, highly troubled, or unsettled cultural orders—offer scholars a premier empirical context within which to track the possibilities and material stakes of cultural change and reproduction. Synthesizing theories of cultural practice (Swidler 1986; Bourdieu 1977), group-level culture (Fine 1979; Eliasoph and Lichternman 2003), and shared affect (Durkheim 1915; Collins 2004), we develop an analytic framework in which we leverage evidence of shared positive affect—rapport—to trace the emergence of coherent cultural orders in micro, initially-contested social settings. Then, in an empirical demonstration featuring data from eight focus groups, we find that, even in new and temporary idiocultural settings, various combinations of actors’ imported cultural frames, meanings, as well as idiosyncratic local events make possible the emergence of regimes of group-level rapport. This rapport serves as an affective signal, to participants and observers alike, the terms of the emergent cultural order in the setting, creating and reinforcing real social barriers with potentially real social stakes. We end with a discussion of how scholars may leverage our analytic framework to trace the material effects of cultural change and reproduction in the future.

Authors

• Ethan W. Johnson, University of Minnesota

• Penny Edgell, University of Minnesota

• Kathleen E. Hull, University of Minnesota