Culture, Identity, and Asian American Teens: A School District Conference Panel Discussion

This paper analyzes a school district conference panel discussion to illustrate how " culture " is an interactionally emergent construct and " identity " is performatively achieved through struggles to position the self and other in socially meaningful ways. In the interaction between the panel of Asian American teens and the audience of teachers, advisors, and administrators , the term " culture " emerges as two distinct constructs. This is accomplished, in part, through emergent poetic and indexical patterning which shape categories and trajectories of personae to which speech event participants are recruited. The analysis shows how the first schema invokes culture as " historical transmission " and questions the positioning of the teen panel as authentic recipients of this transmittable essence. The second schema invokes culture as " emblem of ethnic differentiation " and allows teens to raise concerns about their own ethnic recognizability in American society. This paper argues that these two schemas of culture are not merely static essences, but dynamically linked to distinct participation frameworks which achieve particular performative effects. Introduction A school district conference constitutes a type of public sphere in which individuals customarily meet and engage in discussions of common interest. The workshops that take place therein provide fruitful sites for investigating how public sphere discourses " fashion specific personae and, by their very nature, bring these personae into circulation before a large audience " (Agha 1999:4). Indeed, these discourses potentially have great impact on an individual or group's " culture " and " identity ". But how exactly do we go about investigating the inter-relations among discourse, culture and identity? This paper attempts to address this question through a linguistic anthropological approach to discourse analysis which investigates how presupposed cultural categories are mapped onto, or transformed into, that which emerges distinctively 66 WORKING PAPERS IN EDUCATIONAL LINGUISTICS through the details of the interaction. Thus, we must look to the microsociological order of language use. This paper analyzes a school district conference panel discussion to illustrate how " culture " is an interactionally emergent construct and " identity " is performatively achieved through struggles to position the self and other in socially meaningful ways. In the interaction between the panel of Asian American teens and the audience of teachers, advisors, and administrators , the term " culture " emerges as two distinct constructs. This is accomplished , in part, through emergent poetic and indexical …