Celebrating Arthur P. Bochner’s Life
Work:
An Introduction
William
K. Rawlins
Dear
Reader,
I hope this special partial issue of
the American Communication Journal finds you well. We are (re)collecting
for you here an array of writings first performed publicly on Friday evening,
November 22, 2002, at the National Communication Association convention panel
honoring the life work and influence of Arthur Bochner. As a fellow reader of this journal, I assume
that you are familiar with Art’s unique voice and scholarship (Bochner 1976,
1981, 1984, 1985, 1994, 2000, 2001, 2002).
But I would like you to picture a typical drab convention hotel meeting
room -- transformed by an overflowing gathering of more than 200 people who
have been touched and challenged by Art’s repeated invitations to integrate
their lives and scholarship, to experiment with multiple modes and forms of
writing, and in doing so to connect and learn with others. People hug and greet each other warmly,
candles burn brightly at the podium, and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” purrs
from a boom box. It doesn’t feel like
business-as-usual in the academy, and well it shouldn’t.
Art Bochner has devoted many years
of his career as a teacher, writer, and editor to cultivating alternatives to
narrow-minded images of inquiry and the well-lived scholarly life, as well as
to breaking down the barriers separating humanistic, literary, and social
scientific writing. It should come as no
surprise then that the authors who first appeared at the panel now ecstatically
embody such diversity in their attempts to recognize Art’s impacts upon their
own lives and work.
Sarah Amira De La Garza,
who organized the panel (and lit the candles), draws upon her Aztec heritage
and sensibilities in appreciating Art Bochner’s role as an “anti-mentor”
throughout her career as an ethnographer.
During the telling of her story, Amira presented Art with an obsidian
blade, whose mysteries and cultural symbolism she poetically invokes in
characterizing his contributions to ethnographic inquiry in the field of
communication.
Next, as a longtime friend and
graduate student of Art Bochner’s dating back to the mid-1970s, I provide some background readings on earlier periods
of his intellectual evolution. In my
personal chronicle I survey some critical and conceptual spadework that Art
performed in preparing the communication field to take interpretive and
qualitative work seriously.
Douglas Flemons, a practicing family
therapist as well as professor, composes a keen juxtaposition of the
Batesonian “Rules of Thumb” for developing insights about social life that Art
published twenty-some years ago in a tribute to Gregory Bateson (1981), and
Douglas’s own “Bochnerian rules of thumb,” which insightfully depict Art’s
current convictions about meaningful social inquiry. Douglas’s essay is playful and fetching, and
the layers of puns, personal revelation, and Zen-infused meditations throughout
the piece dramatize the multiple meanings and vantage points distinguishing
work that diligently pursues the elusive wonders of everyday life.
As a recent graduate student of Art’s, Lisa Tillmann-Healy’s free verse poem
actively reflects his liberating injunctions to experiment with forms of
writing and living inquiry about human communication. I think you will find her poem embodies an
engaging invitation to make instructive connections among the panoramic array
of works, ideas and experiences she alludes to, presupposes, and poetically
exposes. Meanwhile, Lisa provides a
useful bibliography to guide such exploration.
Christine Kiesinger’s tribute to
Art enacts her learning and growing with him in yet another way. Hers is a deeply personal and disclosive
rendering. At the same time it dialogically blends and juxtaposes writing in
the third, first, and second persons, and through these voices registers and
invokes multiple presences and perspectives in depicting her transformative
moments with Art.
Laurel Richardson allows us to read
over her shoulder as she shares with us a series of emails between her and Art
concerning the possibilities of her participating in this panel. This exchange blossoms into an extended
letter from Laurel to Art, which celebrates his grappling with beneficial ways
of living one’s later years in the academy and salutes their mutual recognition
of writing as becoming-in-the-world-with-others.
It’s a pleasure to note for you that
this panel began with music and literally burst into song with its last
participant. Eric Eisenberg is a friend of Art’s and
a colleague and co-author from his own first days as an assistant
professor. Amidst enthusiastic response
from the audience, he accompanied himself on guitar and serenaded Art with a
song he wrote especially for the occasion.
A recently recorded version by Eric and the lyrics and chords are
provided here for your own enjoyment and participation.
The collection closes with
reflections spontaneously offered at the original session and developed further
by Art Bochner
specifically for this special partial issue.
Art briefly recollects here his own growth as a person and inquirer in
and through his relationships with friends, teachers and students. He speaks of scholarship as an involving way
of life, and the ethical, emotional and spiritual calls to create memories and
shared senses of belonging in the academy.
In
short, the scholarly gathering re-presented and performed anew here isn't
merely an epideictic tribute to Art Bochner.
Rather it embodies an intriguing and coherent engagement with diverse
ideas concerning ethnographic and qualitative inquiry that Art has stood for
and fostered across his career.
Thought-provoking and substantive, it is touching, joyful and heartfelt,
and in some cases argumentative - - like Art's work has been. These writing, reading, and singing
performances weave together and self-organize into a compelling meta-narrative
dramatizing the evolution and continual unfolding of an important and ethical
inquirer, writer, and teacher about the human conditions involved in studying
the human condition.
Thanks
for reading, viewing and listening.
Thrive,
Bill Rawlins
References
Bochner,
A. P. (1976). Conceptual frontiers in the study of communication in families:
An introduction to the literature. Human
Communication Research, 2, 381‑397.
Bochner, A. P. (1981). Forming warm ideas. In C. Wilder & J. Weakland (Eds.), Rigor and imagination (pp. 65-81). New York: Praeger.
Bochner,
A. P. (1984). The functions of communication in interpersonal bonding. In C. Arnold & J. Bowers (eds.), The Handbook of Rhetoric and Communication
(pp. 544-621). New York: Allyn and
Bacon.
Bochner,
A. P. (1985). Perspectives on inquiry: Representation, conversation, and
reflection. In M. L. Knapp & G. R.
Miller (Eds.) Handbook of interpersonal communication (pp. 3-58). Beverly
Hills, CA: Sage.
Bochner,
A. P. (1994). Perspectives on inquiry II: Theories and stories. In M. L. Knapp & G. R. Miller
(Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (2nd ed.) (pp. 21-41).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Bochner, A. P. (2000). Criteria against
ourselves. Qualitative Inquiry, 6,
266-272.
Bochner,
A. P. (2001). Narrative’s virtues. Qualitative
Inquiry, 7, 131-157.
Bochner, A.
P. (2002). Love survives. Qualitative Inquiry, 8, 161-169.