Back when I was an undergraduate research assistant for a political
anthropologist at UCSB I was encharged with researching political networks
and brokers in Latin America. There was a large literature on the role of
brokers and some very interesting stuff concerning boundary maintenance,
code switching, etc. in relation to brokerage and political power. Also a
lot about how the brokers were often catalysts of social change (e.g. the
Bolivian Revolution of 1952), a theme which ties into a long tradition and
that also seems to be not too far beneath the surface here with folks
talking about the changes that result from one activity system impinging on
another. But there seems to me to be a problem, the usual one, of finding
the source of change at the level of the communications and not at the level
of articulation of concrete activities: artefacts and objects.
I mention this because I have often had a feeling of deja vu when issues of
interacting activity systems are brought up. Insofar as activity systems
can be thought of as networks, there is a quite substantial literature on
social networks and cultural boundaries. I guess the problem would be that
activity systems really are defined in terms of a triad
subject-tool/artefact-object. Just as the discussion of motive meandered
all over the place as a consequence of the three or more meanings that were
being used, so the discussion of brokers, or spiders, or go-betweens, or
whatever else one wants to call such ROLES, seems to be playing rather
loosely with the underlying notion of activity system.
I don't think it at all useful to equate all social networks with activity
systems, and the utility of analyzing the articulation of activity systems
does not seem to consist so much in looking at the people maintaining
communications between them as when the object of one becomes the tool in
another (say when Inca mit'a labor is transformed into labor for producing
spanish silver). Often times, true, there is the need for translation
between the "norms" of one activity system and those of another in order to
establish the conditions for the articulation of activity systems (hence the
central role of the caciques and native nobilities in Spanish America and
throughout the colonial world). Again, this type of relation has been
studied quite a bit in political anthropology, especially insofar as it
relates to colonialism (a la Pierre-Phillippe Rey).
Bringing it back into the micro domains that contemporary activity theory
inhabits it would seem that the focus on the "object" to "artefact"
conversion would have primacy for analyzing the directions of change brought
about by the articulation of activity systems, even though such articulation
might require and be impossible without the normative translations between
the communities associated with the potentially integrated activity systems.
The example of the car-pool which afforded a communicative space but then
ended (the communication itself having little to do with its own existence)
provides a good example of the point I'm trying to make.
Paul H. Dillon
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