In Words at work and play Shirley Brice Heath continues and follows upon earlier reporting from what has been a long-term program of inquiry concerning the development of literacy practices and ways of speaking—research that was first published in book length form in her widely read monograph, Ways with words (Heath Reference Heath1983). That volume was an ethnographic account of children's language and literacy socialization at home and at school in the early 1970s in four neighboring communities in the Piedmont Carolinas—two middle class communities, one white and one African American, and two working class communities. In one of the working class communities, Trackton, members were African American. In the other working class community, Roadville, members were white.
In this new book Heath recounts what has happened since the 1970s with three hundred families from Trackton and Roadville, as she has followed them over the past thirty years and across three successive generations. The book documents how childhood, family life, and language and literacy practices have changed over time and across space, as families from Trackton and Roadville left the Piedmont in the wake of economic changes and of consequences of the Civil Rights movement.
Special focus throughout Words at work and play is on successive generations within three families from Trackton and three from Roadville. All of these families moved to major metropolitan areas—Atlanta, New York, and Chicago—with some persons within the larger set of three hundred individuals moving all the way to the West Coast. Intergenerational stories of families are told through a combination of narrative vignettes and interview quotes, together with transcribed excerpts from audiotapes of family interaction and of young people's interactions with their peers. Heath engaged some of the young people as ethnographers of their own experience, audiotaping themselves, keeping journal accounts of their daily rounds, and documenting their language use. She also replayed audiotapes made in the earliest years of her fieldwork as a way of stimulating reflection by her informants on how family interaction and everyday experience back then was similar to or different from what it was presently. In some chapters and in appendices the author discusses her methods in following families across three generations, and she comments on long-term ethnography as history, as biography, and as autobiography.
A major theme of the book concerns young people's participation, with influential guidance by older peers and adults outside their families, in various informal education settings. Heath calls these guides “intimate strangers.” Interests, language practices, and identity construction that are found in those mentored settings often became a foundation for professional formation and choice-making in later life. Another major theme concerns the changing nature of childhood—the daily experience of growing up was very different for the second and third generation children in the study than it had been in Roadville and Trackton thirty years previously. Childhood became much more scheduled, and technology had changed everyday experience—from differences in crib toys to routine use of computers and smartphones and participation in social media.
The book manifests the analytic power of time depth in social research. Synchronic ethnography, classically based on one or two years worth of participant-observational fieldwork, has been criticized as being too static—presenting a picture of social action ungrounded in time flow—within seamlessly interconnected and free standing whole social worlds, action that is effortless and unchanging, outside the weight of history. Words at work and play shows social action and language use as fundamentally embedded in time, with the grittiness, struggle, and necessity of choice-making within circumstances of limited information that lived history entails. Within such situations of continual “satisficing,” persons and their cultural practices are seen to be continually changing, with life outcomes always uncertain.
The book also shows us the importance of space and place, both geographic and social. For the past thirty years people from Roadville and Trackton have been on the move, as employment possibilities evaporated and it became necessary to leave the Piedmont in order to find work and educational opportunity. Change came on the move, as lives were no longer continuously local. And change came as well through individuals developing distinctive personal sociolinguistic repertoires, analogous to linguistic idiolects, as a result of participation in differing social spaces and varying situations within a daily round. Some daily rounds included settings in which “intimate strangers” were influential; other daily rounds did not. Some daily rounds involved crossing language boundaries; other daily rounds did not. Heath's documentation of individual lives shows powerfully that who we have become, culturally and linguistically, is profoundly a matter of where we have shown up—which scenes we have participated in within our daily rounds. (One is reminded of Leopold Bloom's single day, as its multivocality was recounted in James Joyce's Ulysses.)
All of this is very consistent with the perspective on cultural learning that comes from neo-Vygotskyan “activity theory” (Lave & Wenger Reference Lave and Wenger1991) and with recent emphasis on variability in personal cultural repertoires (Gutiérrez & Rogoff Reference Gutiérrez and Rogoff2003). What Heath shows us also echoes an insight from one of her mentors, Ward Goodenough, who published a prescient article with the title “Multiculturalism as the normal human experience” (Goodenough Reference Goodenough1976). He noted that even in small-scale traditional societies there are subtle differences in language practices and other cultural practices from one household to the next. (Thus cultural and linguistic variability has been experienced by all children, not just by children in modern societies.) It follows that personal sociolinguistic repertoires should not ever be considered as unitary, since they are developed through participation in multiple and differing local communities of discourse practice. This message, and a sense of its importance, comes through loud and clear in Words at work and play.
Finally, the book presents a somewhat hopeful picture of change over time. The temporal breadth of this research reminds us that the acquisition of repertoires of literacy practices and speaking practices is not simply something that happens in childhood. It is a life-course endeavor. Writing as an ethnographer, social historian, and sociolinguist, Heath has produced something more than just another account of victims crushed by oppressive conditions, helplessly enmeshed in processes of destructive cultural reproduction. Words at work and play reports some tragic events, and it shows people making mistakes as well as being pushed around. But this book also shows us bedrock human capacities for agency and innovation, for resilience and adaptive success in confronting new circumstances. In various ways, many of those who left Trackton and Roadville, and even more persons from among the next generation, found entry points into more “mainstream” channels of employment and education. These lifelong projects were accomplished, as were the lifelong developments of personal repertoires of language and literacy practices, not in the absence of difficulties but within them.
As the author states in her epilogue, “Anthropologists have been accused of representing an essential linearity about generations across time. That is not the case for the individuals whose stories are told here. They follow few lines or paths that might have been predicted for them. Instead they have worked and played in spots of time and place; theirs are dotted rather than straight lines. All indications are that these dotted lines will continue to go in many directions and will have beginnings and endings along the way, spinning out into webs of differing proportion, strength, and connection” (166).
