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The Dissertation Committee for Holly Anne Ogren Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: BENDING THE “RULES”: STRATEGIC LANGUAGE USE IN ROLE AND STATUS NEGOTIATION AMONG WOMEN IN A RURAL NORTHEASTERN JAPANESE COMMUNITY Committee: Elizabeth Keating, Supervisor Joel Sherzer, Supervisor Pauline Turner Strong Jurgen Streeck Miyako Inoue Bending the “rules”: Strategic language use in role and status negotiation among women in a rural Northeastern Japanese community by Holly Anne Ogren, B.A., M.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August, 2002 Dedication In loving service to HH Tamal Krishna Goswami Srila Gurudeva, who passed from this world on March 15, 2002. Acknowledgements Many people have contributed to the successful completion of this work, and I gratefully acknowledge their support and assistance. First and foremost gratitude goes to my parents and family, who have encouraged and supported me along the way. Also to my spiritual master, His Holiness Tamal Krishna Goswami Srila Gurudeva, who started this journey with me in 1995. Without his loving support and guidance, this work would not have been possible. I would also like to extend a special thanks to my committee members, who formed a well-integrated team that provided me with the support and pressure necessary to complete my Ph.D. In particular I wish to acknowledge Elizabeth Keating and Joel Sherzer, who have worked with me since I started my graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin. I have benefited greatly from their insights into and critiques of my work throughout my graduate career, and am fortunate to have had the chance to work with them. Miyako Inoue has provided both dissertation and “big-picture” career advice over the past two years, and for that I am most thankful. I am grateful to Polly Strong for her attention to me both as a budding scholar and a person whose life extends beyond the realm of academic concerns. Jurgen Streeck provided a welcome perspective from outside the discipline of Anthropology in the strictest sense, and I always looked forward to hearing his thoughts on developing my work. Jeff Kaplan worked closely with me over the past year and a half behind the scenes, and now is the time to ask him to come forward and “take a bow”. At the University of Texas, I benefited greatly from readings and critiques on early drafts by Alice Chu, Elaine Chun, Pete Haney, Sandya Hewamanne, and Chantal Tetreault. I was fortunate to have their friendship and support. Gergely Mohasci, Peter Siegenthaler, Cindi Sturtz, Yukako Sunaoshi, and Takashi Kobayashi all provided helpful input through introduction to scholarly sources, and in reading early drafts. I am thankful to have had their input at the early stages of this work. iv My colleagues in the Department of Languages and Literatures, and the Japanese Studies faculty at Earlham College have been wonderfully supportive of my completing my degree, and allowing me the flexibility and time needed to do so while teaching full-time. I am thankful to them and my students for reminding me of why I began graduate school in the first place. I am also thankful to all of my god brothers, god sisters, and other extended spiritual family members. The members of the Dallas ISKCON community - especially Nila Madhva and her family - have been especially supportive. Thanks also to friends who have supported me throughout my graduate career, especially Becky Sedam, Cris Wolf, and Ruth Mullen. Thank you for your long-standing friendship and support. To the people of Towa I must extend a special heartfelt “thank you,” for the love and support with which they have showered me. You have treated me as a member of the community since our first meeting in 1990, and I am fortunate to have been able to share some momentous times of my life with you. I hope that our relationship will continue for many years. The women at my research sites were all very helpful and accommodating, and I am most grateful for their help, without which this research would not have been possible. I was fortunate to have the support of the Towa Town Government, and would like to acknowledge the many large and small ways in which I was aided by that support. In particular I wish to thank the Lifelong Learning Division of the Board of Education, Rikizoh Aoki, Matsuo Obara, Mineo Odashima, Akira Sasaki, Yoshiko Sasaki, and Kikuko Yoshida for their help with practical matters related to my research, and for their moral support throughout my research and writing. The Aoki family, the Fujio family of Morioka, the Hayashi family, Yuhko Monma, the Odashima family, Atsuko Oikawa, Fumiko Ohishi, and Minako Yoshida all provided friendship and companionship. My time in Towa was greatly enriched by knowing you, and my research benefited from your native insights. Thanks also are due to Mayumi Chieda and Seiko Itoh for the long hours they contributed to transcribing the conversational material gathered for this research.. v All thanks goes to those who have worked with me in seeing this project to its completion, and particularly to the many people who have supported me since the beginning of my graduate career. Any mistakes in this work are mine. vi Bending the “rules”: Strategic language use in role and status negotiation among women in a rural Northeastern Japanese community Publication No._____________ Holly Anne Ogren, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2002 Supervisors: Elizabeth Keating and Joel Sherzer This dissertation focuses on shifts in women’s use of three sets of linguistic features – gender-marked language, speech levels (desu/-masu and plain), and a local language variety - in Japanese within naturally occurring conversational interactions as sites where speakers negotiate role and status. The analysis complicates previous models that limit research on women’s language usage in Japanese to a focus on gender-marked forms, by broadening the focus to women’s language use, rather than women’s use of “Japanese women’s language. It also contributes to work that argues for more fluid models of status and hierarchy by showing how speakers use linguistic resources to negotiate roles, including shifting status within the same interaction. The methodological approach integrates close analysis of particular interactions with background information on the participants and settings of these interactions, and is situated within the larger context of gender relations in contemporary rural Japan. The findings on speech level shifts attest that speakers shift levels both as a means of marking discourse shifts (e.g., when closing a topic) and for particular interactional ends (e.g., to vii make critiques). This aspect of the analysis also highlights the importance of including local language variety forms in interactional analysis, as these forms are an integral resource for speakers. In terms of gender-marked features, this dissertation demonstrates that women use feminine-marked features in interactionally effective ways, and that they make strategic use of masculine-marked features as well. Taken together, these findings suggest the need for a reconsideration of women’s language use in Japan, and a more complicated model of how role and status are created and modified by participants in interactions. This work also highlights the importance of future research that would examine regional ideologies about gender, and gender and language use, particularly in the face of current central-government programs aimed at promoting “gender equality”. viii Table of contents Chapter One: Framework and setting…………………………………………………1 Chapter Two: Analytical framework and field sites…………………………………31 Chapter Three: Activity-centered interactions…………………………………….…94 Chapter Four: Non-work interactions……………………………………………….156 Chapter Five: Conclusions……………………………………………………………198 Appendix A: Dialect summary……………………………………………………….207 Appendix B: Gender classifications for sentence-final forms (including IP)……...208 Appendix C: Dialectal forms in the data corpus…………………………………….210 Appendix D: Transcript conventions………...………………………………………213 Appendix E: Uninterrupted transcripts…………………………………………..…214 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...232 Vita……………………………………………………………………………………..243 ix CHAPTER ONE: Framework and setting FOCUS OF THE STUDY This work is fundamentally concerned with women’s positions in Japanese society. In examining language usage among women in a specific community, I am interested in evaluating how well current models for women and language use (in Japan and more generally) account for the language usage I found among my research participants. Specifically, I investigate how these models help us – or do not - understand how women organize themselves socially through language use. Because I follow scholars who view language as both a resource for and a product of social interaction (Duranti 1997; Schiffrin 1994), I am interested in how women work within the parameters of the Japanese language (the “grammar”), and draw on the resources available to them within the language to create particular stances; to define, revise, and negotiate particular relationships as reflected in language use. Implicit in this stance is the idea that participants in interactions are social actors with agency (cf. Ahearn 2001); actors who do not always follow the “rules,”

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