ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at two families and several sets of scenes requiring different types of organization, all open to different interpretations. Neither the Joe Kinney nor the Sheila Farrell was free from general cultural patterns that one qualifies as American. Both the Farrells and the Kinneys were literate in the broad sense that literacy was not a practical problem in either family. They could read what they needed to read to conduct the life to which they had been accustomed. Analytically, the ointment scene reveals the practical achievement of family life in the face of conversational indeterminacy. The School is a cultural fact, and so are the particular ways the Farrells and Kinneys handled intrusions into the performance of homework. Culture is absolutely real as constraint. But it is also absolutely not determining of what is to happen next in local and translocal history.
