From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale
From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale
by Michael Lempert
University of Chicago Press, 2024
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-0-226-83248-7
Paper: 978-0-226-83250-0
eISBN: 978-0-226-83249-4 (all)
About the Book
A provocative and eye-opening history of how we have studied and theorized social interaction.
In this ambitious, wide-ranging book, anthropologist Michael Lempert offers a conceptual history that explores how, why, and with what effects we have come to think of interactions as “scaled.” Focusing on the sciences of interaction in midcentury America, Lempert traces how they harnessed diverse tools and media technologies, from dictation machines to 16mm film, to study communication “microscopically.” In looking closely, many hoped to transform interaction: to improve efficiency, grow democracy, curb racism, and much else. Yet their descent into a microworld created troubles, with some critics charging that these scientists couldn’t see the proverbial forest for the trees. Exploring talk therapy and group dynamics studies, social psychology and management science, conversation analysis, “micropolitics,” and more, Lempert shows how scale became a defining problem across the behavioral sciences.
Ultimately, he argues, if we learn how our objects of study have been scaled in advance, we can better understand how we think and interact with them—and with each other—across disciplinary and ideological divides. Even as once-fierce debates over micro and macro have largely subsided, Lempert shows how scale lives on and continues to affect the ethics and politics of language and communication today.
In this ambitious, wide-ranging book, anthropologist Michael Lempert offers a conceptual history that explores how, why, and with what effects we have come to think of interactions as “scaled.” Focusing on the sciences of interaction in midcentury America, Lempert traces how they harnessed diverse tools and media technologies, from dictation machines to 16mm film, to study communication “microscopically.” In looking closely, many hoped to transform interaction: to improve efficiency, grow democracy, curb racism, and much else. Yet their descent into a microworld created troubles, with some critics charging that these scientists couldn’t see the proverbial forest for the trees. Exploring talk therapy and group dynamics studies, social psychology and management science, conversation analysis, “micropolitics,” and more, Lempert shows how scale became a defining problem across the behavioral sciences.
Ultimately, he argues, if we learn how our objects of study have been scaled in advance, we can better understand how we think and interact with them—and with each other—across disciplinary and ideological divides. Even as once-fierce debates over micro and macro have largely subsided, Lempert shows how scale lives on and continues to affect the ethics and politics of language and communication today.
About the Author
Michael Lempert is professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Discipline and Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery, coauthor of Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency, and coeditor of Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life.
Reviews
“Remarkable in its scholarly range, Lempert’s book traces a century of disputes about scale in the social sciences of language. The work is meticulous and vividly argued. It will be controversial, revealing recurrent, productive tensions across disciplines: psychiatry, small group research, feminist and anti-racist activism.”
— Susan Gal, University of Chicago“Lempert has written an ingenious book: a microcosmic, interscalar history of the sciences of interaction, small talk, and conversation, which is full of delightful erudition. A philosophical reflection on the puzzles of scale—querying the small, the personal, and the micro at the largest of scales—across a century, in scientific labs and Freudian offices, behind one-way mirrors, and in consciousness-raising meetings. Small is beautiful once more.”
— Christopher M. Kelty, University of California, Los Angeles"In his book, he examines the history of interaction from sociological, anthropological and linguistic perspectives across many subjects and scales — from small talk to microaggression."
— Nature’s “Books in Brief”
Tags
Linguistics, Rhetoric, Cultural & Social, Language Arts & Disciplines, Anthropology, Social Science, History
Open Access Information
License: CC BY-NC-ND
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