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1、Ceremonial Meta-narrative in the Application for Aid to Families with Dependent ChildrenA Pentadic AnalysisBeth JorgensenIn a previous article entitled “What If They Have No Boots?: Meta-narrative and Ceremony in 20th Century Welfare Rhetoric and Policy,” I identified three meta-narratives which vie
2、 for dominance in the rhetoric of U.S. welfare policythe choice meta-narrative, the victim meta-narrative, and the moral meta-narrative. The choice meta-narrative characterizes long-term welfare use . . . as a series of reasoned choices in the light of available options (Bane and Ellwood, 1994, p. 6
3、9). Proponents of this model therefore tentatively conclude that reasonable income and lifestyle choices must be expanded and that people in poverty must be given incentive to choose options other than welfare. By contrast, the victim meta-narrative emphasizes the welfare recipients lack of choice o
4、r perception thereof. Proponents tentatively conclude that, beyond expanded choices, people in poverty may need mental and social rehabilitation to overcome damages inflicted upon them by individuals or by cultural discrimination. As both these models define the welfare recipient as ascribing to cul
5、tural norms, they stand in contrast to the moral meta-narrative, which explicitly defines the welfare recipient as deficient in common cultural values or abilities. Although left-wing advocates of such models envision a incompetence subculture while right wing advocates envision a subculture of immo
6、rality or amorality, it is worth noting that both meta-narratives define the welfare recipient as other.” Thus leftist moral meta-narratives may be distinguished from the victim meta-narrative by virtue of the focus upon the individual rather than upon socio-economic conditions. Upon this, I argued
7、that the history of welfare policy has been underscored by the moral meta-narrative, which has been driven by racist, sexist, and moralist assumptions not generalizable to poor individuals. I also raised concern that this meta-narrative serves as am implicit ceremony of “labeling,” which may decreas
8、e public compassion for people in poverty as well as influence the behavior of poor individuals in such a way as to justify the meta-narrative.While labeling theory was first applied to the causes of criminal recidivism, it has also been applied to alcoholism, mental retardation, mental illness, and
9、 sexual deviance. Tannenbaum (1938) sums up the theory as follows:The process of making the criminal is a process of tagging, defining, identifying, segregating, describing, emphasizing, making conscious and self-conscious; it becomes a way of stimulating, suggesting, emphasizing, and evoking the ve
10、ry traits that are complained of. The person becomes the thing he is described as being. Nor does it matter whether the valuation is made by those who would punish or reform. (p. 19)If labeling theory applies to individuals on welfare, as I have argued it does, these meta-narratives may not only per
11、petuate a stereotypical image of people in poverty as deviant from cultural norms, they may increase the likelihood of such deviance among poor individuals. Thus I suggested that future research should examine the ways in which these labeling meta-narratives may be directly disseminated to relief ap
12、plicants through the rhetoric of administrative texts and practices. In the following, I examine one such text, the application for the Iowa Family Reinvestment Program (FRP), a 22-page document designed primarily to ensure that benefits reach only those applicants who are eligible for assistance un
13、der a complex and strict set of guidelines. Pentadic AnalysisPentadic analysis, or dramatism, developed by Kenneth Burke, is a method of recoding a text into a meta-narrative containing five basic elementsagent, act, agency, scene, and purposewhich correspond to the basic components of dramaactor, a
14、ct, prop, scene, and motivation. By comparing the hierarchical relationship of the elements of a given statement of any length, the analyst can interpret the implicit role and importance of each in the perception of the author(s). According to Burke (1945), the dominance of any element or the ratio
15、between two dominant elements can reveal underlying assumptions, or motives, in the text (p. xv). The elements of the pentad can be defined as follows: Agent initiates the meta-narrative act. To serve as agent, the subject of a sentence must have volition. Act is distinguished from pure motion by vo
16、lition. Therefore, the meta-narrative act may or may not be represented by the main verb of the sentence. Agency may be the recipient of an act or the medium through which an act is carried out. Scene defines the background against which the act takes place. This may be a physical setting, i.e., the
17、 Human Services office, or a set of circumstances, i.e., unemployment. Purpose represents the implicit reason for an act, rather than the cause. For example, the purpose of I denied the recipients application is likely to be to prevent error or fraud rather than because she didnt provide proper info
18、rmation. It is also differentiated from motive in that it is internal to the meta-narrative rather than an application of the meta-narrative; it is generally more explicit than motive; and it does not necessarily carry the ideological import of motive. Figure 1 illustrates the way in which the ratio
19、n of elements in a given analysis may reveal the motive of the writer or speaker.Original I (agent) spanked (act) Jorgen (agency).” Statement In this simple statement, the pentadic elements are fairly clear, producing an act-agency ratio. Act dominates because the focus is upon what happened to Jorg
20、en. However, in a child abuse trial the statement would likely be revised in a manner similar to the following: Revised I (agent) spanked (act) Jorgen (scene) with my hand Statement(agency). Because another agency has been introduced, Jorgen, or more accurately his bottom, becomes the scene against
21、which the act takes place. The consequent ratio is agency-act, perhaps revealing a motive on the part of the speaker to demonstrate that she used a defensible means of corporal punishment. Figure 1Pentadic RatioAn excellent example of this method is David Lings (1989) analysis of Ted Kennedys addres
22、s to the people of Massachusetts regarding the car accident at Chappaquiddick in which Mary Jo Kopechne was drown. According to Ling, Kennedys speech was dominated by the scene the night of the accident as opposed to his act on that night. For example, Kennedy emphasized the conditions of the road a
23、nd the bridge, describing the road as unlit and the bridge as narrow with no guard rails and built on a left angle to the road. Kennedy, the agent in this analysis, described his act as a response to this scene, which effectively subordinated the importance of his behavior to conditions beyond his c
24、ontrol. Ling argues from this analysis that Kennedys motive was to diminish his personal responsibility for Kopechnes death. For the purposes of this analysis, motive correlates to the meta-narratives as in Figure 2:Choice Meta-narrative: pragmatics and objectivityVictim Meta-narrative: social and e
25、conomic equality Moral Meta-narrative: punishment and disincentiveFigure 2Motives of the Meta-narrativesThe potential assignment of each element of the pentad must also be defined. For example, given that the agent must have volition, assignment of this element is restricted to the Department of Hum
26、an Services, the FRP applicant, and perhaps a third party which may be termed victimizer. The “victimizer” may be a particular individual, such as an absent father or may be a phenomenon of mass culture such as a dominant cultural ideology or a socio-economic system. Likewise, agency, that is the re
27、cipient of the act or the tool by which the act is carried out, may also be defined as DHS, the FRP applicant, or a third party. With this in mind, the FRP application and other documentation tools are attributed to DHS in its official capacity. To clarify, it is helpful to think of the agency as an
28、alogous to the object of the verb although grammatically this is not always the case.Because the act and the agent are inextricably linked, definitions of act must correspond to the appropriate definition of agent. The agent-act relationship is correspondingly defined within each meta-narrative as i
29、n Figure 3:ActChoice Victim Moral Meta-narrativeMeta-narrative Meta-narrativeAgent DHS NeutralityNurturance Punishment Client ChoiceDesperation Dishonesty 3rd party Indifference Victimization FairnessFigure 3Act and Agent in the Meta-narrativesLikewise, the scene corresponds narratively with the act
30、. That is, the scene against which acts take place can be defined respectively as greed, need, and choice. For instance, in the moral meta-narrative, the client (agent) is dishonest (act) because she wants a better lifestyle than she is willing to work for (scene). Contrastively, in the victim meta-
31、narrative, the scene is defined by the implicit meta-narrative of DHS (agent) rescuing (act) a family in poverty (scene). By contrast, the choice meta-narrative argues that the client (agent) is choosing (act) from a variety of lifestyle choices (scene), leaving DHS to be defined as the agency which
32、 enables the act of choice.Purpose may be defined correspondingly as follows:Eligibility and Compliance correspond to the moral meta-narrative in which the goal is to exclude the “undeserving” and to coerce continued cooperation, honesty, and self-revelation from successful applicants.Expediency and
33、 Thoroughness correspond to the victim meta-narrative in which the goal is to offer the greatest amount of relief as quickly as possible and for as long as needed with maximum dignity and future independence.Efficiency corresponds to the choice meta-narrative in which the goal is immediately pragmat
34、ic-for DHS this means rapid, standardized processing, for the client this means choosing among options she believes will balance immediate need against future need or aspirations. The above definitions will be used throughout my analyses of the current rhetorical models of poverty and the FRP applic
35、ation.The dominance of any element of the pentad from sentence to sentence may provide an overall picture of the drama within the FRP application. With this in mind, I have made the following assumptions:Agent dominance likely indicates that the focus is on the personal attributes of the client, suc
36、h as honesty, and is likely to correspond with the moral meta-narrative. It is not likely to correspond with the victim meta-narrative because the victim meta-narrative places more focus on economic and social conditions (scene) rather than on the behavior of either the applicant or the “victimizer”
37、 (act). Nor is it likely to correspond with the choice meta-narrative because the choice meta-narrative places more emphasis on economic options (scene) available to a variety of essentially equal agents.Likewise, act dominance is likely to focus on the client, again corresponding to the moral meta-
38、narrative. That is, under this model the following questions might be askedHave you revealed all your assets? Who lives with you other than your children? Do you know who is the father of your child? Hence, act dominance is unlikely to correspond with the victim or choice meta-narratives for reasons
39、 corresponding to agent dominance.Agency dominance serves to render potential agents passive. That is, given that the agency is a medium through which or upon which the act functions, an agency dominance may indicate neutrality of the text or may serve to render acts within the text latent.Scene dom
40、inance is likely to indicate A) that the personal circumstances of the family are the most important; or B) that the applicants status in the general culture figures most prominently. The former corresponds with the victim meta-narrative in which the purpose is relief of need from desperate circumst
41、ances and the latter corresponds with the choice meta-narrative in which the scene is a culture rife with choice. Further clarification of scene requires definition of agent and act.The dominance of purpose, in contrast to the other elements, is not so easy to conjecture because it is intrinsically
42、dependent upon the definitions of agent and act. For example, the purposes eligibility and compliance focus on the honesty of the client while the purposes of expediency and thoroughness correspond to the concerns of DHS.However, before attempting an analysis of the bureaucratic text, it will be cla
43、rifying to understand the ways in which the pentadic ratios manifest in each model meta-narrative. Meta-narratives of the ModelsIn contrast to the implicit meta-narrative of a dense bureaucratic text like the FRP application, the meta-narratives of the models are rather explicit. Indeed, the models
44、often depend on explicit meta-narratives for argumentative appeal. For example, the victim meta-narrative tends to depict the welfare recipient against a background of unavoidable poverty resulting from sexism or an abusive ex-husband. Like formal texts, these model meta-narratives can be pentadical
45、ly defined as in Figures 4 through 6. The choice meta-narrative (Figure 4), most closely corresponds with a pragmatic and morally neutral model as outlined above.Agentthe FRP applicantActchoiceAgencythe Department of Human ServicesScenea variety of income and lifestyle choices, including employment,
46、 remarriage, continued marriage, childbirth, FRP, etc.Purposeindividual freedom and lifestyle preferenceRatio - Scene/ActFigure 4The Choice Meta-narrativeAlthough the applicant is granted volitional choice in this scenario, the dominant element is the scenea fair culture in which everyone has an equ
47、al opportunity for success, victimization, or failure. This model is strikingly nonevaluative in that the purpose is positive and upholds the cultural paradigm of the United States as a land of equal opportunity.The moral meta-narrative, despite the difference between rightist (immorality) and lefti
48、st (incompetence) models, can be consistently diagrammed as in Figures 5 and 6. Note that in each the dominant element is the act.Agentthe FRP applicant; the poorActimmorality; laziness; dishonestyAgencythe Department of Human ServicesScenea pathological subculture underlying fair opportunity in the general culturePurposepersonal gainRatio - Act/SceneFigure 5The Moral Meta-narrative (Immorality)Agentthe FRP a
