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This paper explores the temporal horizons and hermeneutic contours of crisis as an analytic lens that affords a dialectical, processual view of intersubjective, socio-culturally mediated life worlds. I adopt a case study approach in interrogating the meaning-laden linkages and disjunctures that inform personal and political components of everyday family experience. With a focus on Japanese American life ways amidst a globalizing world context, the paper sheds light on children’s apprenticeship into culturally rooted dispositions that embody intergenerational, geopolitical vestiges of the World War II Japanese American internment. I draw upon ethnographically informed interviews and naturalistic video data collected by the Center on Everyday Lives of Families in tracing the transmission of socio-culturally informed values in crafting cultural identity and well-being amidst a Japanese American dual earner family residing in Los Angeles, California. A family dispute that sparks during a backyard basketball game provides a fulcrum that crystallizes valued lessons about proper embodied comportment, sportsmanship, and the display of affect. Focusing on these everyday moments and contexts of family life, I explore how cultural, affective, and socio-political meanings of stoicism are incorporated, negotiated, and reconfigured as embodied, intersubjectively shared orientations that encompass explicit and implicit communicative means. Further, I examine how these local, on-the-ground moments of family crisis involving the import and meanings of stoicism enact, and enfold, a cultural critique that moves along fissures in the everyday fabric of experience to embody and enjoin temporal horizons of past, present, and future. |
