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

3. Inn Pursuit . . . of Christ: The Unevenness of Agency

c h a p t e r t h r e e Inn Pursuit . . . of Christ: The Unevenness of Agency The right to bestow names is a right which signifies that the namer has power. That said, it is not always the case that individuals who are given the right to bestow names are the most powerful in more general terms across society. —Valerie Alia, Names and Nunavut Though the argument thus far has been that residents of named houses are unanimous in their belief that house signs should be clever, are easier to remember than the house’s street address, and indicate activities within that can be summed up as “partying,” there are more subtle boundaries between groups of residents delimited by what they hope their signs will (or won’t) achieve vis-­ à-­ vis an onlooker. Interviews reveal that those residents who understand their signs to involve a sexual element dismiss its effects on onlookers. On the other hand, interviews conducted with residents of another set of named houses reveal that the residents use signs to indicate their Christian faith and to offer an invitation to the onlooker. The groups of residents identified by these boundaries are not equal in their ability to realize their goals of participation in Oxford’s world of signs. This realization requires analytic moves that engage with increasingly sophisticated understandings in folklore and linguistic anthropology of the ways that participants in an expressive practice can share certain understandings of the practice at the same time that only the goals of some will be realized. Thus agency, what Laura Ahearn 118 Hou se Sign s a n d Col l egi at e F u n defines as “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (2001c, 112), is distributed unevenly across residents such that only some of their signs express what they want them to. Webb Keane points out that an interpretive practice can expose its prac­ titioner to risk by virtue of the fact that she or he is embedded (and can become entangled) in larger fields of practice: “Language is both intimately bound up with the subjectivity of its speakers and consists of linguistic forms and pragmatic conventions not fully of their own making” (1997a, 676).1 The “hazards of representation,” in Keane’s terms (1997b), are involved when indexical connections between a house name and its residents’ Christian faith are subjected to the interpretive practices embodying the larger house sign community. While residents of houses with Christian signs have elaborate and passionate understandings of what they hope that their signs will achieve, their participation in Oxford’s world of signs subjects their signs to interpretations out of their control. Thus the conceptualization of agency requires attention to—but cannot be limited to—the ways that visual language is embedded in context and the ways that social actors engage with visual language through interpretive habits. Indeed, the concept of agency prompts questions about whose meaning-­ making activity is able to cross the boundaries of interpretive habits and whose is not. Folklore studies have shown how tradition (Handler and Linnekin 1984), nationalism (Abrahams 1993; Bauman 1993; Bendix 1992; Coe 1999; Herz­ feld 1982), authenticity (Bendix 1997; Stewart 1991), textuality (Bauman 1995; Bauman and Briggs 2003; Briggs 1993; Briggs and Bauman 1999), heritage (Kirshenblatt-­ Gimblett 1998), and notions of the local (Shuman 1993) have provided organizing tropes by which people, sometimes participating in power­ ful institutions such as states, museums, schools, and scholarly publishing, have constructed and attempted to control means of ethnographic representation and interpretation. In the words of Amy Shuman and Charles Briggs, “Folklore is always already (in Derrida’s terms) a politics of culture” (1993, 112). Indeed, the aforementioned scholars engage the notion of agency because they demonstrate the ways that habits of interpretation can selectively enable people to define, interpret, authorize, decry, discount, or forget some practice. Such processes are germane to practices that give social life to house signs. They emerge between residents’ reflections on their own motives of the display of signs and their notions about how onlookers interpret them. Within this dialectic, there exists the risk of having one’s motives subverted or the I n n Pu r su i t . . . of Ch r i st 119 luxury of having one’s motives realized. We have already seen the example of residents stating the ways in which house names should be interpreted while disregarding a great...