House Signs and Collegiate Fun: Sex, Race, and Faith in a College Town

Conclusion: Remarks on Cultural Production and Ethnography

c o n c l u s i o n Remarks on Cultural Production and Ethnography This book has focused largely on some of the ways in which college students at Miami University who display house signs in Oxford reflected on the phenomenon during interviews conducted by my students and me. Emergent from these reflections are general lessons about the production of language and culture, as well as the importance of ethnography in its exploration. We learned quickly, for example, that interpretation happens while people respond to ongoing activity, and their responses can reveal a great deal about the history of their disposition to that activity. House signs have emerged recently in the United States. Yet their relevance to collegiate fun brings to bear the deeper historical context of the wider institution. Indeed, house signs reveal that college students today are very much like their forebears in that having fun remains central to what is perceived to be a complete undergraduate experience. Signs also show that the means and modes of having fun have shifted drastically since a time when fewer students embodied the opposition between college men and outsiders. Historical shifts in the lives of college students come to the fore because when house signs are understood in relationship to earlier ways of having fun, they are peculiar. House signs do not represent all college students’ ideas about fun, however , because they rest on the resources of a specific social class and enrollment at a four-­ year institution where few students commute daily. House signs pick out a certain kind of student attending a certain kind of institution. 238 Hou se Sign s a n d Col l egi at e F u n One might qualify signs’ representation of fun by pointing out that students’ ways of entertaining themselves have changed along with increasingly complicated institutional distinctions in which they are involved. An ethnographic approach enables us to find different positions from which house signs emerge as meaningful. Some people, for example, look for values in house signs against the backdrop that there is little moral organization in students’ lives. My class, in contrast, started with the assumption that the messages displayed on house signs could reveal their significance, and we proceeded eagerly to sort the messages using various categories. As we talked with residents, we realized that neither values nor categories emerged as paramount . Rather, we learned that residents, some of whom had designed their signs, and others who kept using the ones displayed when they moved in, see convenience, cleverness, and a generalized indication of partying. Students living in named houses often had no idea why previous residents had given particular names to the rental houses. Even at this stage of ethnographic exploration, such insights show that ethnography constitutes a metacultural representation of culture that offers something new. No one, for example, was positioned to see in house signs all three possibilities of their interpretation: that they express college students ’ values, express categories important in the lives of college students, and embody the habits of interpretation common to named house residents themselves. By presenting all of these as possibilities, this study widens the frame of interpretation for those readers ensconced in one of the positions— or readers who began knowing little or nothing about house signs—such that multiple possibilities of cultural production are realized for the same phenomenon . Description—what is often assumed to be the mere recounting of what is there in space and time—can be creative depending on the listener or reader’s disposition to habits of description and events described. Because ethnography always ventures to bring together multiple dispositions, one can make the claim that ethnography is an inherently creative endeavor. Pointing out the ways in which ethnography can bring multiple interpretive positions forward simultaneously is not my only goal, however. If one were to consider this study to be a metacultural response to the cultural phenomenon of house signs, one might call it a critical one in addition to an exploratory one. By considering residents’ reflections on house signs during interviews, for example, I was able to piece together what residents understood signs to accomplish. Most often, residents understood house signs to accomplish little, but I have been able to make the case that the benign quality conclu sion 239 claimed for house signs is itself something that residents’ signs meet unevenly. Residents who see their house signs...