Nate,
I'd like to hear more about this idea.
>
> The argument has been made in Rose (1999) and Popkewitz's article on
> Vygotsky and Dewey that community is about "control", "governing". Both
come
> from a Foucaultian perspective in which community is seen formost as
> answering the liberal problematic of how to govern.
Marx associated forms of "community" with forms of property--primitive
territoriality, gattungwesen, being the origin, in hunting/gathering and
horticultural bands, follow through its individualtion in increasingly
nucleated families and reconstitution at the level of civil society;
variations in precapitalist formations where labor was never fully alienated
from communal relations of production and hence, never fully alienated from
the means of production as in, slavery and later, proletarianization. In
this picture, community refers to a culturally variable form of human
sociality that forms part of a more comprehensive system of human practices.
A common phrase up here in Humboldt County among the non-profit community
is: "weaving communities of communities". Engestrom really seemed to
provide a graphical frame within which to look at this notion. So many
activity systems of varying degrees of integration and contact, communities
of practice concerned with common activity systems.
The census bureau's use of references to local level community benefits to
motivate participation clearly illustrates ways in which "community" can be
rhetorically summoned but this process goes on all the time, everyday with
respect to one or another "community".
What can guide untangling that web so as to be able to use distinguish the
usage "community" has when talking of activity systems and the other usages
it receives whose references are not so clearly specified?
This problem has been bothering me because I'm preparing the evaluation
section of a federal grant application for network of neighborhood CTCs
housed at a variety of different sites (schools, teen clubs, arts centers
and an indian health center). The TOP people want to see evaluation feed
back within the project implementation itself and I'm proposing to use
activity systems analyses that will be fed back into the group, along the
lines of Engestrom's work in the health centers. Where I live there's an
effective population of about 60,000 and the term "community" resonates
really loudly from all sides of the political and cultural specturm. I
think that a more specific concept of community of practice (tied will be
quite useful because it will lead project participants to use the term with
reference to the way communities develop around practices, divisions of
labor, and rules that overlap in that complex totality, "community", that
everyone in the non-profit (and education?) community is trying to serve
through their different, particular activities.
Do you think a Foucauldian perspective on community be used for such
"reflexive" evaluation processes?
Paul H. Dillon
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