important issues for ourunderstanding of visual communication. It directs our attention towards theidea of an ‘active spectator’ who constitutes the sense and significance ofobjects and artefacts

"fluid reality" ofthe households, the changes in household composition, residence,jobs, and social relations; it is within this fluidity that the experiencesof families must be understood.

Most of the hundreds of gender-marked terms the students used desig-nate problematic types of men and women-problematic in relation to the taken-for-granted progress orilliilvfemale relations posited by the cultural model.

As a cultural system, and one that no one is born into, this entire figured world of AA is new to neophytes.

It is a landscape of objectified (materially and percepti-bly expressed) meanings, joint activities, and structures of privilege and influence-all partly contingent upon and partly independent of other figured worlds, the interconnections among figured worlds, and larger societal and trans-societal forces. Figured worlds in their conceptual dimensions supply the ccmtexts of meaning for actions, cultural produc-tions, performances, disputes, fo;:'the understandings that people come to make of themselves, and for the capabilities that people develop to direct their own behavior in these worlds.l9 Materially, figured worlds are manifest and practices; the idioms of the world realize selves and others in and everyday perform-ances that constantiate relative positions of influence and prestige. Fig-ured worlds provide the contexts of meaning and action in which social positions and social relationships are named and conducted. They also provide the loci in which people fashion senses of self-that is, develop identities.

By "figured world," then, we mean a socially and culturally con-structed realm of interpretation in which particular characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others. Each is a simplified world populated by a set of agents (in the world of romance: attractive women, boyfriends, lovers, fiances) who engage in a limited range of meaningful acts or changes of state (flirting with, falling in love with, dumping, having sex with) as moved by a specific set of forces (attractiveness, love, lust). 3