Re: affectivity: feelings and emotions

John Konopak (jkonopak who-is-at ou.edu)
Wed, 25 Feb 1998 13:23:16 -0600 (CST)

At 03:26 PM 2/25/98 +0800, you wrote:
>Along this line, some interesting works regarding the role of rhythm in
>cross-cultural /teacher-student interactions:
>
>e.g., Scollon, 1981, Tempo, density and silence: Rhythms in ordinary talk.
>Fairbanks: University of Alaska, Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies.
> Barhhardt, C. 1982, Tuning-in: Athabaskan teachers and Athabaskan
>students. In R. Barnhardt (Ed.), Cross-cultural issues in Alaskan education
>(vol. 2). Fairbanks: Unviersity of Alaska, Centre for Cross-Cultural
>Studies (ERIC Document No. ED 232 814)
>
>Angel
>-------------
>Angel Lin
>City University of Hong Kong

I should also say see also Edward Hall's "The Dance of Life," (Anchor Books,
who-is-at 1982, passim, but esp. pp 168ff) in which he recounts work done with grad
students who built a "blind"--an "abandonned" car, if memory serves--near a
school playground (and obviously ran a certain risk of being apprehended for
illicit conduct) from which they taped and otherwise observed and recorded
the doings of children at play. Hall reports that from repeated analysis of
the data, the researcehrs were able to discern how one person, a girl, was
able to impose--though that isn't exactly the right word; p'raps "infect"
better describes the phenomenon, inasmuch as rhythm is a contagion, as
anyone with even a passing familiarity with a working pile-driver can
attest--the wholly discontinuous groups on the playground with her own
"rhythmiticity" simply because her sense of the "beat of life" was the most
evident and/or obvious, such that by the end of any period during which she
was on the playground all the other children with whom she was in contiguous
space and proximity were all "dancing" to her rhythms.

Anent this matter further, I noted from a bulk-mailed flyer that Howard
Gardener's scheme of multiple intelligences has expanded from seven to
eight, but that none (still) is primarily concerned with affect--as
differentiated from "intellectual" cognition, except insofar as spatial and
musical "intelligences" defy "purely" cognitive characterization in the ways
that this thread's understanding of affectivity would tease out, even when
they were not explicitly expressed. Surely, space and the sense of it as a
mode of understanding is not purely "cognitive," else we could not "feel"
lost in it or estranged by it, or alienated within it.
Fascinating discussion, btw.
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| John Konopak, EDUC/ILAC,820 VanVleet Oval,U.of OK.Norman,OK73019|
|E-mail: jkonopak who-is-at ou.edu; Fax: 4053254061; phone:4053251498 |
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