[Xmca-l] Re: Activity Setting

Wed Aug 14 11:35:57 PDT 2013

Glad you are comfortable, Lubomir -- I wish I were!! Lots of ambiguities to
deal with. Providing
examples helps, but its time consuming.

On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 11:29 AM, Lubomir Savov Popov <lspopov@bgsu.edu>wrote:

> Thank you Mike,
>
> I appreciate your expertise about the term "activity setting" in respect
> to the writings of Vigotsky. Considering your knowledge of Vigotsky, I am
> very comfortable with this situation.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Lubomir
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:
> xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of mike cole
> Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2013 1:07 PM
> To: Andy Blunden; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Activity Setting
>
> All concerned with this thread.
>
> I am uncertain of anywhere that Vygotsky uses the term, "activity setting"
> and most of the time when he uses the term, it seems that he does so in a
> common sense way, not as a technical term. Examples from text with
> citations would help here.
>
> In our research in recent years we have worked with people who live in a
> subsidized housing project. When saying what we do to curious colleagues,
> we refer to "university- community partnerships/projects. But among
> ourselves, there is an ongoing discussion and considerable uneasiness in
> our promiscuous use of the term, community.
>
> One thing about Cliff and Roland's article that I found myself wondering
> about is their use of the term, community. Culture is quite explicitly
> defined. Why not community? My guess is that the polysemy noted for
> activity and culture will reign here too, but I am a neophyte looking for
> direction which is why this article is interesting to me. I have downloaded
> two articles from a special issue of J Community Psychology from a special
> issue in 1996 that take on the notion of "sense of community" which is
> traced back to Sarason in Nelson and Prilleltiensky's text on Community
> Psychology. If people are interested, email me directly.
>
> Concerning statements about culture, meaning, sense and understanding in
> the article an some of the comments here. The following kind of statement
> strikes me as ambiguous and potentially a source of misunderstanding, as
> reasonable as it appears (David's recent note is relevant here):
>
> "culture is concerned with questions of shared *social *meanings, that is,
> the various
>
> ways we make sense of the world."
> I believe that Vygotsky distinguished sense and meaning, with meaning
> being "the most stable pole" of sense. To reduce culture to stable meanings
> runs the danger of losing the idea of culture as a process. At the same
> time, the notion that any word in any language has a meaning entirely held
> in common by all members of the social group involved seems really
> doubtful. The term, "shared" could use some reflection in this regard.
>
> Reading with interest while dodging deadlines. :-) mike
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 11:03 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>
> > Overlapping is OK, but I am intrigued by the problem of the conditions
> > which give rise to failure of mutual understanding.
> >
> > Cliff, are you familiar with Jean Lave's book "Situated Learning"? In
> > that she looks at several different traditional systems of
> > apprenticeship. With the meat-trade apprentices, the masters assign
> > the apprentices to completely different, low-skill tasks, located in a
> > different space from where they do the high-skill, valued work of
> > their trade. This contrasts, obviously, with other forms of
> > apprenticeship which facilitate graduated introduction to the skilled
> > work, including lots of opportunity for observation and partial
> > participation. Her observations tend to support your thesis.
> >
> > On the other hand, there are plenty of examples in all kinds of
> > hierarchical institutions from school classrooms to line-management
> > organisations to the Church, the family and voluntary organisations,
> > where participation in the same activity is presaged on very unequal
> > power relations being normalised in the activity. Now I think that in
> > our discussion of slavery we agreed that even with such an extreme
> > imbalance of power, some kind of understanding of the other is
> > achieved by each party, but I don't know if this would really count as
> > what you call "intersubjectivity." Ask a victim of sexual abuse by
> Catholic priests.
> >
> > It seems to me that "shared" participation in an activity is a
> > precondition for attaining shared semantic, theoretical and practical
> > norms, but not sufficient. It also depends on the social positions
> > adopted by participants in the activity.
> >
> > Andy
> >
> >
> > carolmacdon@gmail.com wrote:
> >
> >> Cliff
> >> They share the concept of birthday party so for Andy that would count
> >> as shared meaning in a culture. Sure they see it differently but
> >> there is an overlap.
> >> Carol
> >> Sent via my BlackBerry from Vodacom - let your email find you!
> >>
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: "Cliff O'Donnell" <cliffo@hawaii.edu>
> >> Sender:
> >> xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.**edu<xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> >> Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 18:48:14 To: Andy Blunden<ablunden@mira.net>;
> >> eXtended Mind, Culture,
> >> Activity<xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.**edu<xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> >> >
> >> Reply-To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"
> >> <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> >> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Activity Setting
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> What I am left wondering about is your observation in the context of
> >>> the intervention in the American Indigenous community that "the
> >>> groups (adults on one hand and youth on the other) formed different
> >>> cultural communities." Is the "cultural" qualification to
> >>> "communities" the operative word in this surprising claim? I.e.,
> >>> they belong to the same community, but not the same "cultural
>  community"?
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>         They belong to, i.e. live in, the same town, but not the same
> >> cultural communities. They participate in mostly different activity
> >> settings and have developed different shared meanings. Even when they
> >> are participating in the same general activity, say a birthday party,
> >> they still group with their own youth/adults and often have a
> >> different shared meaning of the event (as when female youth see adult
> >> men becoming intoxicated at the party and expect sexual abuse to
>  follow).
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> It is quite the norm, isn't it, for such chisms to exist within
> >>> communities.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>         Yes, it is common for different groups to vary, sometimes
> >> dramatically, in the activity settings in which they participate.
> >> This  phenomena can then be useful as an indicator of different
> >> cultural  communities within the same town, high school, etc.
> >>
> >>         Cliff
> >>
> >> Clifford R. O'Donnell, Ph.D.
> >> Professor Emeritus
> >> Past-President, Society for Community Research and Action (APA
> >> Division
> >> 27)
> >>
> >> University of Hawai'i
> >> Department of Psychology
> >> 2530 Dole Street
> >> Honolulu, HI 96822
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> > --
> > ------------------------------**------------------------------**
> > ------------
> > *Andy Blunden*
> > Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
> > Book: http://www.brill.nl/concepts
> > http://marxists.academia.edu/**AndyBlunden<http://marxists.academia.ed
> > u/AndyBlunden>
> >
> >
>
>
>
>