71
have families of their own, „even if those family members live locally and meet
relatively infrequently, their interaction will be to some degree different to that
shared in their home environment‟ (
ibid
: 562). This raises the question of
membership of a CofP that does not engage in regular, face-to-face interaction (see
Gee, 2005). While this is borne in mind, it is important to note that in the present
study, the siblings of both families have not yet left the family home. More
significantly, it can be seen that when CofP theorists mention the family, they do so
in passing with little in-depth application of the concept to the family. Therefore, in
order to further explore the family as a CofP, attention now turns to a consideration
of Wenger‟s (1998) three constitutive features of a CofP, and these are applied to the
context of family discourse.
Wenger (1998) outlines three criteria which must be met in order to talk of a group
as a CofP,
mutual engagement
,
joint enterprise
and
shared repertoire
, and all three
are readily applicable to the context of family discourse. Firstly, Wenger (
ibid
.)
maintains that there must be mutual engagement between community members. This
is interpreted by Meyerhoff (2002: 527) as suggesting that „members need to get
together in order to engage in their shared practices.‟ This mutual engagement
typically involves regular, face-to-face interaction – members
meet individually or in
small or large groups on a casual, intensive and comprehensive basis (Holmes and
Meyerhoff, 1999). According to Wenger (1998: 74), „for a family, [mutual
engagement] can be having dinner together, taking trips on weekends, or cleaning
the house on Saturdays.‟ Therefore, it seems that mutual engagement can take place
within the family regardless of whether or not they all live under the same roof; the
older siblings may return home to have dinner with their parents, for example.
Nevertheless, both families in this study routinely encounter one another
face-to-face
within the setting of the family home. They interact on a number of levels;
casually
as their paths cross at various points during their day-to-day contact,
intensively
, for
example when a parent and child discuss a problem and
comprehensively
when more
general issues such as work or school are explored around the dinner table.
However, Wenger (1998) claims that this regular engagement can be either
harmonious or conflictual and, therefore, a CofP is not necessarily created among a
group of
friends or allies, or indeed a functional family.
72
The second criterion is that the members of the CofP share a joint enterprise. This
concept has fast emerged as critical to the consideration of any CofP as it embodies
the „practice‟ element of the community. Paechter (2003a: 71) points out that „shared
practices are what holds these communities together, what makes them communities
of practice.‟ Meyerhoff (2002: 528) cautions that „linguists who wish to use the
notion of CofP in their analyses have to exercise caution and ensure that as
researchers they are not attempting to constitute “CofPs” for which a shared
enterprise is explanatorily vacant.‟ In relation to joint enterprise in the family,
Wenger (1998: 6) maintains that:
Families struggle to establish an habitable way of life. They develop their own
practices, routines, rituals, artifacts, symbols, conventions, stories, and histories.
Family members hate each other and they love each other; they agree and they
disagree. They do what it takes to keep going. Even when families fall apart, members
create ways of dealing with each other. Surviving together is an important enterprise,
whether surviving consists in the search for food and shelter, or in the quest for a
viable identity.
Therefore, the family are constantly engaged in the shared enterprise of „surviving
together‟ and creating an identity of „being a family‟ for one another. A return to
Eckert and McConnell-Ginet‟s (1992: 464) definition of the CofP cited above
indicates that the practices of a community consist of „ways of doing things, ways of
talking, beliefs, values, power relations‟. This can have a variety of different
meanings for each individual family. For example, for one family at the dinner table,
there may be particular seats assigned to particular family members, and to sit in the
seat not allocated to you would represent a „break‟ from practice. On the other hand,
another family may not have pre-assigned seats, and, indeed, may not eat dinner
together at all. In relation to the present study, one of the conversations recorded of
the settled family concerns the erection of their Christmas tree. During the
conversation an exchange about suitable decorations for the tree takes place which is
featured in extract (3.1):
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
