Here is the starting point of my discussion of artifacts.
The rest of the chapter, and the book in a way, hark back to
this and other sections of this chapter.
mike
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Chapter 5
Putting Culture in the Middle
(section missing here)
Artifacts: The Linchpin of Cultural Mediation
Ordinarily when one thinks of an artifact, a material object comes to mind.
Something manufactured by a human being. In anthropology, the study of artifacts is
sometimes considered part of the study of material culture, which is somehow
distinct from the study of human behavior and knowledge. According to this "artifact
as object" interpretation, it is easy to assimilate the concept of artifact into the
category of tool, in which case, nothing much is to be gained.
According to the view presented here, which bears a close affinity to the ideas
of John Dewey and also traces its genealogy back to Hegel and Marx, an artifact is an
aspect of the material world that has been modified over the history of its
incorporation in goal directed human action. By virtue of the changes wrought in the
process of their creation and use, artifacts are simultaneously ideal (conceptual) and
material. They are manufactured in the process of goal directed human actions. They
are ideal in that their material form has been shaped by their participation in the
interactions of which they were previously a part and which they mediate in the
present.
Defined in this manner, the properties of artifacts apply with equal force
whether one is considering language/speech or the more usually noted forms of
artifacts such as tables and knives which constitute material culture. What
differentiates the word "table" from an actual table is the relative prominence of their
material and ideal aspects and the kinds of coordinations they afford. No word exists
apart from its material instantiation (as a configuration of sound waves, hand
movements, writing, or neuronal activity), whereas every table embodies an order
imposed by thinking human beings.
The dual material-conceptual nature of artifacts discussed by the Russian
philosopher, Evald Ilyenkov (1977, 1979), who based his approach on that of Marx
and Hegel. In Ilyenkov's system, ideality results from "the transforming, form-creating, activity of social beings, their aim-mediated, sensuously objective activity"
(Quoted in Bakhurst, 1990, p. 182). From this perspective, the form of an artifact is
more than a purely physical form.
Rather, in being created as an embodiment of purpose and incorporated
into life activity in a certain way--being manufactured for a reason and
put into use - the natural object acquires a significance. This significance
is the "ideal form" of the object, a form that includes not a single atom
of the tangible physical substance that possess it (Bakhurst, 1990, p.
182).
Note that in this way of thinking, mediation through artifacts also applies
equally to objects and people. What differs in the two cases are the ways in which
ideality and materiality are fused among members of these two categories of being,
and the kinds of interactivity they can enter in to.
This view also asserts the primal unity of the material and the symbolic in
human cognition. This starting point is important because it provides a way of
dealing with the long standing debate in Anthropology and allied disciplines: Should
culture be located external to the individual, as the products of prior human activity
or should it be located internally as a pool of knowledge and beliefs? Both views
have a long history in Anthropology (Harkness, 1992). However, over the past 20
years or so, coincident with the cognitive revolution in psychology and the advent of
Chomskian linguistics, the study of culture as patterns of behavior and material
products appears to have given way to the tradition that considers culture to be
composed entirely of learned symbols and shared systems of meaning, e.g., the ideal
aspect of culture, that are located in the head.
The concept of artifacts as products of human history that are simultaneously
ideal and material offers a way out of this debate. At the same time, as I hope to
demonstrate, it provides a useful point of contact between cultural-historical
psychology and contemporary anthropological conceptions of culture in mind.