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

[David Kellogg]

Yes, I got that. I have read a lot of your work on projects, as well as
Mike's on the Fifth Dimension and after school activities. But the word
"context" has the word "text" in it, not the word "project" or "activity".
And "text" pertains to my own work.

Let me be a hardcore linguist for a moment: it's interesting in its own
right, and I think you will see it's not entirely irrelevant to the
question at hand. The word "that" begins with a voiced inter-dental sound,
which is often spelt "th" in English ('this', "that', 'these', 'those',
'there', 'then' and of course the most common word in any length of English
text, 'the'). If you put your hands over your ears when you say them, you
will feel and hear vocal cord vibration. There are also a lot of words in
English with unvoiced interdentals like "thick', "thin", "thought", and
"three". If you put your hands over your ears or put a hand on your throat
when you say them, you will not feel any buzz.

Now, does this phonological difference relate in any systematic way to
context? I think you can see that it does. The words that begin with voiced
inter-dental sounds are all deictic: they are used to point, to indicate,
to refer exophorically to the context of situation ("That on that") or
endophorically (anaphorically or cataphorically) to co-text (e.g. "That is
what I meant"). That is what Vygotsky meant by "sense". But the words that
begin with unvoiced interdental sounds are not deictic in this way: they
refer symbolically to dictionary definitions (or concepts). That is what
Vygotsky meant by "signification".

Of course, both types of meaning involve contexts: a dictionary is as much
a context as a supermarket. But Vygotsky teaches us that they are different
kinds of contexts and they entail developmentally different kinds of
meanings. Bronfrenbrenner distinguished his contexts by scale (and also,
crucially, by the degree to which the child participates in the context).
Malinowski distinguished a context of situation, which includes all that we
need to make sense of a particular instance of text, from a context of
culture, which includes all that we need to make sense of the whole
language system. In both cases, the context is bounded, and in both cases
it is bounded by text. In fact, the relationship between situation and
culture is exactly the same as the relationship between language and text:
a situation is an instance of culture, and a text is an instance of
language. For that matter, weather is an instance of climate.

Consider the "project" of writing a novel, Andy. In this situation, what is
really important is not the room you are sitting in or the window you
are looking out of or even the country you are living in. In this
situation, what is important is the imaginary context which is created by
the text you are generating. The relationship between text and context
seems to be almost reversed, and yet it is largely the same. The reason why
nothing essential changes is the same as the reason why "context" can
describe both exophoric and endophoric relations equally well. It is
because context does not mean a material situational setting for a project
or for an activity; it is rather an abstraction from a language or an
instance of language, i.e. a text.




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 Fri, Feb 2, 2018 at 9:07 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> I can't follow your message at all, David, but perhaps a few
> words of explanation will help.
>
> Faced with, for example, a design experiment like 5thD, of
> course, the project leaders and researchers are aware of the
> importance of the context of the project and know that the
> success or early failure of the project will depend on
> events coming out of an unbounded context (s well as the
> resilience and self-sufficiency of the project). The problem
> is (1) how to conceptualise this unbounded context. (2) If
> you want to use the method of analysis by units, you ask
> yourself what is the relation between a unit of analysis and
> the context of the research. But (2) answers (1).
>
> (2) In designing the project you will analyse the unbounded
> context by means of analysis by units; specifically, you
> would understand that the world is made up of projects.
> These projects can be conceptualised as *mediating*
> elements, because the project which forms the subject matter
> of the research has *collaborative relationships* with a
> range of projects (the university, the local council, etc,
> etc.) and these projects, when you add all of them up, are
> the world. Still unbounded, but by means of analysis by
> units you have an approach. The context is analysed in terms
> of its units, projects, and those projects with which the
> subject project collaborates are the mediating elements and
> are in focus. No guarantee, but a start.
>
> So (1) the context is not *included* in the "unit of
> analysis" but is subject to analysis by units itself. The
> world is not a subordinate part of one of its units.
>
> This is in fact how Mike approached the problem.
>
> Andy
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 2/02/2018 8:25 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
> > 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
> > <http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full>
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 10:39 AM, Andy Blunden
> > <ablunden@mira.net <mailto: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
> >     <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
> >>
> >>     ------------------------------------------------------------
> >>
> >
> >
>
>