Language, Stereotype and Social Differentiation in the Tri-Co

This project was collectively developed and carried out by the students in Anth B246: Fieldwork in Linguistic Anthropology (Spring 2024) and advised by Professor Amanda Weidman. Thanks to Willa Bywater, Joey Driscoll, Maddie Ingoglia, Iris Kim, Sophia Kearns, Roma Sarathy, and Jared Saef for all your hard work and perceptive analysis.

METHODS

Observation

Initially, the class engaged in several weeks of observation, focusing on any instance (overheard or observed in public/group social situations) where language seemed to be enabling a process of social differentiation or where a college-based stereotype or identity was being invoked. Here are some examples:

A discussion of the use of the “Haverbro” character as an archetype in the annual Greek Play at Bryn Mawr sparked a discussion of the differences between “Haverbros” and “Villanova boys” who are a “special breed” of frat boys.

My Bryn Mawr friend got asked at the Haverford dining center if they were from Bryn Mawr. They were wearing a hoodie and pants. “Nothing distinctly gay about me,” they said, recalling the incident.

Overheard in dining hall: “The internship will probably go to some pretentious Swat student.”

Interviews

Each member of the class conducted two interviews. Some were one-on-one, but most were group interviews with 3 or more participants. The interactions in these groups proved to be an especially fruitful site for observing how social distinctions and stereotypes were invoked.

Interview Questions:

Please describe your level of involvement with the other two schools. Do you participate in any interschool clubs or academic departments?

Do you consider yourself primarily a [BMC/HC/SC] student, or a Bi-co or Tri-co student?

Did you apply to more than one school in the Tri-co? What made you choose the one you currently attend? Do you fit in?

Can you tell which school someone goes to without asking them? Why/how? What gives it away? Can people tell which school you go to?

What kind of person can you only find at [BMC/HC/SC]?

What kind of person in your eyes is the “average” or “typical” [BMC/HC/SC] student? How do they dress/talk/act?

Do you have friends who go to other schools in the Tri-co? Would you consider them to be “average” or “typical” for their school?

Initially the class was more focused on “keywords” and referential aspects of language (eg. the occurrence and meaning of different widely used terms such as “Haverbro” or “Bryn Mawr girlie”). Our interest quickly expanded beyond the scope of other studies (see Vilkin, 2020 and Kim & Slepyan, 2017) to explore the ways that meaning was produced in interaction, through implication, irony, and sometimes hesitation or silence. This meant paying close attention not just to what was said in observed instances or interviews, but to how it was said, by whom, and to whom. Each student audio-recorded their interviews, produced detailed notes of the content of the interviews, and made a detailed ethnographic transcription of selected parts of the interviews. The interviewees’ identities were kept confidential and not revealed in any notes, transcripts or written analysis prepared by the student researchers. Additionally, the student researchers in the class repeatedly affirmed that the goal was to focus on recognized social categories and stereotypes and to understand what their interviewees considered to be true, regardless of their own views.

Transcription

Ethnographic transcriptions in linguistic anthropology provide much more information and detail than simply the words that were uttered. They are created to capture and illustrate prosodical dynamics such as pauses, rhythm of speech, pitch, volume, and tone; and dynamics of interaction such as hesitation, hedging, non-verbal utterances, interruption, etc.

In addition to these kinds of details, in analyzing the interviews, we also looked for:

how interviewees positioned themselves within the worlds they were describing and created a sense of in-group and out-group identity through the use of deictic words like “here,” “there,” and pronouns (us, them, you, we, she/they, etc)

generalizations associating a school with certain characteristic and keywords describing socially recognized types; and especially the interactional contexts in which these were uttered

when a stereotype was invoked, how did the speaker position themself in relation to it (e.g. being invested in the stereotype/believing it to be true, vs. distancing themself from it)?

Here are two transcripts produced by students for this project:

Transcript 1

Transcript 2

GENERAL FINDINGS
excerpted from student observations & analysis

Dynamics and Rules of Discourse

When invoking stereotypes, speakers used hedging, hesitation, self-correction, and other devices to distance themselves from the stereotypes.

There seemed to be a level of cognitive dissonance amongst our interviewees, where they believe that stereotyping is not an accurate way of understanding people but continue to hold and voice stereotypical views. One interviewee began multiple utterances with very general terms before correcting herself with caveats. The tone of her voice would change as she switched between these two perspectives. Another student felt both that it should not be possible to differentiate between Tri-Co students, and that she had evidence that it was possible. She seemed to struggle to reconcile these two viewpoints, announcing that she was “just spewing bullshit” before speaking at length about the differences in photo-selection between Instagram posts of students at the three schools.

There seemed to be a strong sense within this speech community of who is allowed to say what kinds of things.

My classmates noted that queer women were the most likely to generalize about social groups, as well as to talk down about other women specifically. The social climate seems to allow only for self-deprecation and “punching up”– that is, criticizing the groups one is a part of, or ones which have more power than the speaker’s in the broader social environment (i.e. outside of the Tri-Co). Thus, it is acceptable for queer women to generalize about and criticize straight women, and for straight women to criticize men, but not the other way around. Students in the Tri-Co are not accepting of criticism of groups “lower” in status than the speaker. We can see this in specific examples, for example, when the male interviewee designates the other participant, a queer woman, as the one to speak about lesbians, despite clearly holding an opinion himself.

Gender and Other Distinctions

The term “Haverbro” was widely used.

Athlete status is the division that came up the most in our interviews. One term especially: “Haverbro,” which describes a male Haverford athlete who exhibits typical masculine or “fratlike” behavior. This term appeared in almost every interview and is one of the only examples within the Tri-Co of a labeled social type unique to our environment. Other social types are indexed by specific behaviors and ways of dress, but these are not as enregistered as “Haverbro,” which appears to be the only labeled type. Other labels like “nerd” and “NARP” (non-athletic regular person) all came from outside the Tri-Co community, adapting pre-existing or pre-enregistered roles.

Among my peer circles and communities – primarily non-student-athletes and composed of straight and queer BIPOC and white queer and trans students – “Haverbro” is widely “enregistered” as a labeled type that displays a general set of agreed-upon phenotypical and behavioral traits (white straight man, athlete, bro) and is encoded with derogation. However, during an interview with a group of men from the Haverford Varsity Soccer team, it was revealed that they had never even heard the term. After we described the application of the term, they came to the consensus that they see this archetype as more fitting for the Haverford Men’s Lacrosse team. These men positioned themselves outside of this term as a way of differentiating themselves from a derogatory white male archetype associated with structural power and misogynist violence.

The distinction between types of women (Bryn Mawr vs. Haverford) seemed highly salient.

We explored the enregisterment of social types, especially looking at the type of a “Bryn Mawr girl,” a label that is sometimes used to refer to someone who attends Bryn Mawr. In the case of my interviewees, they never used the phrase “Bryn Mawr girl” while answering my questions, but they did have an idea of a specific Bryn Mawr student. As a response to my question if you could tell what school in the Tri-Co someone goes to without asking, two interviewees discussed the “individuality complex” that Bryn Mawr students have, especially in regards to fashion choices, but only after discussing the way that Haverford students physically look and act differently than Bryn Mawr students. In their comparison of the women specifically, there seems to be a feeling that Bryn Mawr students lack something that Haverford students give off with their outward appearance, or vice versa. This feeling, in combination with perceived outfit styles, encodes the stereotype of a “Bryn Mawr girl,” in the opinion of the interviewees, so much so that later in the interview, one acted mock accusatory towards the other to check whether or not they were acting within the norms for the social type.

An interviewee talked about the typical Bryn Mawr student in terms of their styles of hair and clothing, and specifically mentioned others’ perceptions of Bryn Mawr as a “gay cult.” The conception of Bryn Mawr as associated with the humanities and queerness was contrasted by both interviewees with their association of Haverford with “jocks” and “athletics,” in alignment with the typified “Haverbro” stereotype. They attributed this distinction to the “culture” of Bryn Mawr which draws the “sort of person who is attracted to a school with a patron Greek goddess.”

Stigma and Reclaiming Stereotypes

Queerphobic/misogynistic language is mobilized for different purposes.

It seems that the social differentiations drawn between the colleges of the Tri-Co are linked linguistically and socially to gender and sexuality identity divides, and that these differentiations are sometimes made through the usage of negative stereotypes connotated to gender or sexuality, even when invoked by members of the group they are used against.

AFAB (assigned female at birth) students at Haverford and Swarthmore interviewed for this project (including AFAB straight and queer women and AFAB non-binary students) seemed much more free to employ misogynist and generally derogatory language in discussing Bryn Mawr students (in both intentional and humorous manners). These students employed such language as either (a) a means of social differentiation stemming from and extending patriarchal power structures or (b) a form of misogynist and queerphobic trope reclamation, especially for AFAB queer individuals. For instance, during my small group interview with AFAB non-binary students from Haverford, they repeatedly employed language with misogynist undertones about Bryn Mawr students’ behavior in the classroom, likely with the intention of differentiating themselves, as an AFAB queer person, from Bryn Mawr students, who are largely associated at Haverford with being overtly queer. On the other hand, another student researcher in the course observed AFAB queer students using similar language in a group interview she conducted but through the lens of admiration.

Stereotypes and Race

Student researchers observed that race was implicated in the stereotypes.

The schools’ archetypes are encoded with whiteness. Because whiteness operates within Western spheres as “the default/unmarked category,” it often goes unsaid or remains implied in most white Tri-Co students’ discussions of others at the Tri-Co institutions. However, for BIPOC students (particularly Black and Brown), who experience marginalization, isolation, and structural inequity at each of the Tri-Co PWIs, whiteness operates as a much more marked category. For instance, one interviewee, a Brown LatinX woman, described the typical Bryn Mawr student as a “white girl with a dress” with dyed hair, big/noticeable boots, a scarf in their hair, and with stickers on their laptop. By explicitly marking whiteness, she sought to point out the dominant demographic of the school and did so as a possible way of distancing herself, as a straight cisgender woman, from this queer female archetype.

The social differences we observed being elaborated were based on those which are not politically relevant, since the schools attempt to distance themselves from gender-, race-, and sexuality-based discrimination. This is not to say that such discrimination does not exist in the Tri-Co, but because of the vigilant attention to limiting it, obvious exhibitions like group-labeling are not tolerated. This is also affected by the cultural homogeneity of the schools, and especially of our interviewees. All our interviews were held in English. During our research, we observed that all the school-based stereotypes are encoded with whiteness and framed around the white student. I believe that this is because distinction between the three schools is primarily done by white students. If we were to continue this project, I would push strongly for us to interview multilingual students and more students of color, to investigate whether for them, different social distinctions are at the forefront of discussion.

ANALYSIS

The complex ethnographic situation here can be contextualized at different levels: historical shifts in the identities of the three colleges and their relationship to each other; the prestige economy of higher education; and race, gender, and class dynamics at the societal level.

Bryn Mawr and Haverford were formerly each single sex, with Bryn Mawr as the “sister” college and Haverford as the “brother college.” Haverford became co-ed in 1980, shifting the gender balance in the bi-co and complicating the formerly highly gendered ways in which the two schools were imagined to be related to each other (eg. as brother and sister, or as heterosexual romantic partners). In recent years, students in the Bryn Mawr community have moved away from two gendered terms that were formerly central to the college’s identity: “women’s college” and “Mawrtyr.” Many students at Bryn Mawr do not necessarily identify as women and prefer the term “historically women’s college.” “Mawrtyr,” which used to be a common term of self-reference at Bryn Mawr evoking the archetype of a student who has given up all pleasures and “martyred” herself to the cause of her studies, is regarded as outdated and no longer used. At the same time, Swarthmore, geographically slightly farther away, has become more integrated into the “Tri-College” community academically and socially in the last fifteen years.

All three colleges are thoroughly imbricated within the ideology of liberal arts branding, emphasizing their campuses as harmonious and diverse communities of learning in which the distinctions and prejudices of the outer world should ideally fall away. However, like higher education institutions everywhere, they are also sites for the reproduction of forms of privilege and discrimination based on race, gender, and socioeconomic class. As participants within the U.S. higher education market, these colleges also face pressure to distinguish themselves based on forms of value such as selectivity/national ratings, academic rigor, diversity, “uniqueness,” etc. These distinctions are reflected and refracted in the stereotyping and social distinctions we observed being invoked.

At the general societal level, we can see certain kinds of cultural work being done around race and gender in this context. The social differentiations and stereotypes observed, framed around and encoding whiteness, can be regarded as doing the racio-cultural work of parsing (dividing up and categorizing) different kinds of whiteness, in a context where race has become a required topic of discussion but remains difficult to talk about.

Similarly, we could ask what kind of gender work is being done here, as Bryn Mawr and Haverford move away from the heteronormative and cis-normative ways in which their identities and relationship to each other were formerly imagined. How are gendered stereotypes being created, reinforced, or possibly subverted? Gender and sexuality are encoded in two of the most salient socially recognized archetypes in the Tri-Co: the “Haverbro” and the “queer girl.” Our research revealed how other attributes are lined up with these archetypes: “normal”ness vs. “quirky”ness; athlete vs. non-athlete; and of course, straightness vs. gayness. While of course not everyone conforms to one of these archetypes, we can see them as anchor points that help form a social imaginary in which individuals locate themselves by alignment or contrast.

BROADER APPLICATION

In analyzing interview and observational data for this project, we made use of, and expanded upon, some foundational concepts and tenets of linguistic anthropology.

Orders of Indexicality. Indexicality refers to the capacity of language to “point to” social types, identities, and stereotypes and therefore produce some status, stance, or identity for the speaker using that language. Distinct from reference, which is the capacity of language to convey information, indexicality focuses not just on what is said, but how (eg. in a particular style of speaking, tone of voice) and in what context. Primary indexicality points to the immediate interactive situation (as when an interviewee complains about Bryn Mawr students being weird or overly talkative, in order to assert their own difference from that type and to build solidarity with the interviewer by creating an us-them dynamic). Secondary indexicality points outward, more distantly, to widely recognized social types or stereotypes (here, the gendered stereotype of the overly talkative woman).
Enregisterment of social types. Linguistic anthropologists use the term “enregisterment” to describe a process of solidification by which a collection of attributes becomes a widely recognized and labeled “type.” The social types we heard being invoked can be thought of along a spectrum, ranging from not completely solidified (like “queer girl”) to extremely solidified and stereotyped (like “Haverbro). Paying attention to enregisterment gives us a sense of how different terms and labels come into or fall out of use, or shift in their meaning.
Social categories are not given, but discursively produced. “Discourse” includes all kinds of talk: conversations, interactions, gossip, rumor, online and social media posts. We found it helpful to compare our study with other linguistic anthropologists’ exploration of how social categories and identities are enacted through language. Interestingly, many of these studies were done in high school contexts, for example: Jonathan Rosa’s study of Puerto Rican and Mexican students in a Chicago high school, and Penelope Eckert’s study of sociolinguistic variation in relation to “jock” and “burnout” identities in a midwestern high school.
Language-based practices drive social differentiation. Who knows and uses which categories/stereotypes? (eg. who uses the term “Haverbro” and who does not?) Who engages in what kinds of language practices? What “norms of interaction” govern different “speech communities” or “spheres of practice” within a given ethnographic context? (For example, we could see gossip, complaining about others, and “cancel culture” as language-based practices and norms of interaction). Our research illustrates how language does not just describe differences between groups or identities, but how language-based practices in fact help to create them.