I like the sound of tranformative appropriation, but I'm not sure of all of
its implications. You could make the argument (as a student in one of my
seminars did) that it is the person who is being appropriated (into the
culture). Although I sometimes use this terminology too, I wonder if
appropriation, even transformative, doesn't play too closely upon
underlying models of an individual, external things, and ownership.
An alternative concept might relate to the anti-cartesian position that
Hartman (in the posting from the Dewey list) noted:
>Dewey, I think, reconstructs "correspondence" pragmatically by
> emphasizing its active, processual nature. Correspondence is not
>mere copying. It is more like getting in tune with.
I've been thinking lately of notions like alignment, attunement, resonance,
and coordination. Hutchin's argument for rethinking mediation and
internalization in terms of coordination and propagation/distribution of
structure and Andrew Pickering's notion of reciprocal attunement in
scientific and technological practice--_Mangle of Practice_--have been
helpful. What I'm thinking of is a dynamic notion of reciprocal
(multi-way) and transformative attunement that doesn't erase the person but
also doesn't isolate the person from historical streams of activity.
Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign