[Xmca-l] Re: "Context" or Object of activity

[David Kellogg]

The late Leo van Lier, who more or less single-handedly created an
"ecological applied linguistics" after he moved to the USA from Peru, used
to tell a story about getting his eldest child, a boy who grew up speaking
Spanish and Quechua, to speak an English sentence. Children who do not know
what language can be easily trained to repeat meaningless phrases out of
context (I have a lot of data on this), but children who already speak one
language tend to be quite careful about speaking a new one (and they seem
to be particularly careful about who gets to hear what language). So the
boy refused to speak any English at all for a full year. One day Leo was in
a supermarket buying breakfast cereal, and the boy was riding in the
shopping cart. They passed another cart with another child and exaclty the
same brand of breakfast cereal. The boy pointed to the other cart and then
to their own and distinctly said "That...on that".

I don't see how the context of "that" is unbounded, Andy. Yes, the cereal
in question bears my name, but no, the relationship is not close, or not
close enough to do me any good, as my father used to say over breakfast.
But I don't see why I cannot draw a boundary between the breakfast cereal
and my own name (as Bronfenbrenner does) and say that the box and the cart
are part of the context of situation and the name and the Road to Wellville
are not. To say that "context" in this situation is an "unbounded
abstraction" is like saying that today's weather is an unbounded
abstraction. Weather, like any other context of situation, is a
context bounded by text. One of the boundaries that text places on context
is distinguishing a context of situation from a context of culture. That,
as I understand it, is the distinction between a micro-context and a
macro-context, to use Bronfenbrenner's labels. Or, if you like, the
distinction between weather and climate.



David Kellogg

Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'

Free e-print available (for a short time only) at

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full


On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 10:39 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> As Mike has pointed out on numerous occasions the "context" of even the
> most modest project or action by an individual, may turn out to be a
> geopolitical/historical event. There is no boundary which can be draw such
> that 'nothing outside this boundary counts as context'. So, when a theorist
> refers to 'context', either they have privileged God-like prescience or
> they mean by "context" the entire, unbounded totality of events in the
> world during or prior to this action. So to refer to this unbounded
> totality with the term "context" and join it to either the research subject
> or within the "unit of analysis" is to utilise an "unbounded abstraction."
>
>
> The issue raised here is not whether analysis is impossible of course, but
> simply, what is the appropriate methodology for researching unbounded
> totalities?
>
>
> Andy
> ------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 1/02/2018 12:09 PM, Alfredo Jornet Gil wrote:
>
> ....
>
>
> That said, I am very sympathetic to the idea that "context", if it
> is external in the sense of arbitrary, does not add much to our
> understanding. But Andy, how does your point about "unbounded abstraction"
> connect to this?
>
>
> Alfredo
> ------------------------------
>
>
>