Dominant Group Studies – AMERICAN CULTURAL INSULARITY

People who speak languages of bigger more dominant and powerful groups are nearly always at a power advantage in terms of the global linguistic configuration of power. [Image Credit: Louise Mézel, Babbel.Com]

Few things are as central to human social being, identity and interaction as language (Fairclough, 2001; Lupyan, 2015). Language shapes the ways that we perceive of and understand “reality” (Morand, 2000; Sapir, 1981). Indeed, “reality” is itself a human concept that we encode via the so-called signifier “reality” in order to describe something “out there” and assign it meaning so that we can begin to make sense of that thing.

Without language of some kind – with language here broadly defined to include all forms of signed and spoken language, including facial expressions, etc., we humans would have no way to communicate with each other about this thing we call “reality.”

Most human beings – probably nearly all – spend vast amounts of their day thinking, and, for the most part, they are thinking in language – talking to themselves and to others endlessly, and internally, in a near endless loop of internal talk and speech (Vygotsky, 1984).

Not only can we not collectively and socially refer to, and communicate about, something called “reality” without some sort of language, we can’t really make sense of the world in which we live, both the natural and social world, without language. We are constantly in the act of naming and categorizing things. We use these names and categories to create meaning and we share our meaning(s) via the stories that we tell to ourselves and others about ourselves and about others as well as about the “objective” natural world (Geertz, 1973).

Continue reading “Building a theory of language and its role in human social reality — and in American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC)”

Dominant Group Studies (DGS) and Dominant Cultural Group Theory propose that we focus critical and empirical attention on the ways in which Dominant Cultural Groups (DCGs), most notably, culturally and linguistically and educationally and racially privileged Americans, are both especially insular and also comparatively arrogant vis-a-vis their own dominant culture and relatively ignorant vis-a-vis the culture of so-called “others.” [Image Credit: theinclusionsolution.me]

American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) also draws upon a new theory I am developing called Dominant Cultural Group Theory (DCGT). I situate this theory within the broader domain of what I call Dominant Group Studies (DGS).

I am not the first to have put forward a proposal for Dominant Group Theory, though, to the best of my knowledge, I am the first to call for a field of study called Dominant Group Studies. Within the fields of media and communication studies and theory, Razzante & Orbe (2018) have recently begun to develop a Dominant Group Theory (DGT). Razzante and Orbe (2018) focus on how “dominant group members communicate with co-cultural group members within oppressive structures,” and therefore zero in primarily on communication with not much focus on culture and language. In contrast, I am much more interested in, and DCGT is much more focused on, the dynamics of power vis-à-vis the production and consumption of popular culture and the specific role that language, e.g. English as a nationally and globally dominant language for particular dominant groups inside the United States, play in terms of the (lack of) empowerment and ability of non-dominant groups to alter dominant groups’ comparative stranglehold on (global) cultural production and consumption.

Razzante’s and Orbe’s (2018) “five premises” of DGT are useful in terms of articulating a critical version of Dominant Cultural Group Theory (DCGT), which at heart, is a normative critical theory. These five premises are:

In each society, a hierarchy exists that privileges certain groups of people: in the United States these groups include cisgender men, European Americans, Christians, heterosexuals, the able-bodied, native English speakers (emphasis = my own), and those from the middle and upper classes;
Others—trans persons, women, people of color, Muslims, LGBT persons, people with disabilities, non-native English speakers, and those from a lower class—are marginalized as co-cultural group members;
Although representing a widely diverse array of lived experiences, dominant group members will share a similar societal position that provides them with societal advantages compared to their co-cultural group counterparts;
While dominant group members share an advantaged position in society, their lived experiences—like their co-cultural counterparts—reflect a diversity of perspectives that resist essentialist understanding; and
On the basis of varying levels of privilege, dominant group members occupy positions of power that are used in their negotiation of traditionally dominant communication systems.

Continue reading “ACIC and Dominant Group Studies and Dominant Cultural Group Theory”