Two terms

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Had a great dinner with Debbie N last night in SF, including discussion of a wide range of topics.

Over the course of the evening, she introduced me to two words I hadn't seen before; somehow these seem more appropriate for my main blog than for my word blog, so I'm gonna post 'em here.

First: integry: "the kind of work women do in keeping communities together," as Joanna Russ puts it, as cited by Liz H. Liz further quotes Russ as adding: "the sort of thing Rosalind Coward has called 'social facilitation.'" Russ got the term from Jesse Bernard, who adapted it from Kenneth Boulding; if I'm understanding Liz's entry right, Boulding used it to talk about the work of community-building in general, and Bernard focused it specifically on the work women do.

While I was trying to remember the word just now, I happened across a semi-related paper from 2002: "Community Effort in Online Groups: Who Does the Work and Why?" (PDF), by Brian Butler, Lee Sproull, Sara Kiesler, and Robert Kraut, of assorted universities. I've only glanced over the paper, but it looks interesting. There appears to be no discussion of gender beyond a mention in passing that "there was no significant demographic difference across the respondent subsamples." (When looking at gender, income, etc.)

I'm tempted to say that the work of online community building is more visible as work, more explicitly work, than the work of in-person community building, but I'm not sure about that. Bears further thought.

In a separate part of the conversation, Debbie and I were talking about the kinds of work and the kinds of workers that/who are invisible in the sense that most of us don't even know those jobs exist. I didn't realize it at the time, but I think that's connected in some interesting ways to the kinds of work that we see but don't recognize as work.

The other word Debbie taught me was intersubjectivity. I got the impression that, loosely, it had to do with recognizing another person as being a subject rather than an object, but I may've misunderstood. The Wikipedia article's definitions focus on somewhat different aspects; for example, one definition refers to the "shared meanings constructed by people in their interactions with each other and used as an everyday resource to interpret the meaning of elements of social and cultural life." I get the impression that the term is used somewhat differently in other fields, though, and it sounds like there is a thread through some of the uses having to do with recognizing the subjective meanings and experiences of others; if any of y'all know more about that, might be worth expanding the Wikipedia article.

(Later in the Wikipedia article, it uses the word "eualent," which sounded neat, but on further investigation I suspect it's a typo.)

3 Responses to “Two terms”

  1. betsy

    i have objections to these two words. integry is not very pronounceable (i can’t figure out where the stress goes, which has a lot of influence on what happens to those vowels), and the first time i saw debbie using intersubjectivity, i read and reread and reread and was unable to tell from context if it was something i would be for or against.

    i am all for the concepts, as you explain them here, but the thing that makes them useful concepts is whether or not they get talked about, and whether or not they get talked about depends on how easy they are to talk about, and if the word for one of them is unpronounceable and the word for the other is not definable from context (although i suspect that part of this is because i tend to talk about actors rather than subjects) by a reasonably smart person who thought she had an okay but not great grounding in theory then it makes me wave my arms in frustration because i can’t see how it’s going to get talked about.

    [waves arms in frustration]

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  2. jere7my

    I’d expect “eualent” to mean “good-winged” or “beautiful-winged.”

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  3. Anonymous

    That was a great dinner! And it’s not like the learning only went one way.

    Betsy, I say “integry” as if it was “integer” with the two last letters changed. And of course it looks hard to pronounce, because no one says it. If we talk about it, it will get easy to pronounce.

    I don’t like “intersubjectivity,” It’s clunky and academic-sounding. I just like what I think it means (which is different than what Jed reports from Wikipedia).

    I found it in The WisCon Chronicles, Volume Two, in the essay by Tom La Farge, “Multimindedness.” La Farge says. “We engage with one another intersubjectively. I can stand in your shoes, position myself within your structure of experience, to identify with your point of view. What animals use might better be called “interobjectivity,” in seeing another animal possibly as an object (of hunger or sexual need) but more importantly as objective: a gesture in which a reality is o be read. Interobjectivity presupposes a sharing of the conditions of the world and erases point of view.”

    This isn’t quite as I described it to Jed, but the effect is the same: viewing each other as independent subjects rather than objects.

    (I think you’re referring to my mention of it on the “Good Ally” panel on Monday morning at WisCon. Having been not-quite-recovered from the norovirus, I’m not at all surprised that I didn’t make sense.)

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