[Xmca-l] Re: Leontyev's activities

[Antti Rajala]

On a second thought, maybe Goodwin addresses issues similar to personal
sense implicitly in his article. The perception of the defence attorney is
of course shaped by the personal sense stemming from his job of defending
the policemen, whereas the motivation implied by the jury members' job
shapes their perception differently.

Antti


On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 5:32 PM, Antti Rajala <ajrajala@gmail.com> wrote:

> Lubomir, thanks for suggesting symbolic interactionism as a frame of
> incorporating these ideas. Anna-Maija Puroila discusses the legacies of
> Goffman in her dissertation (in Finnish) and mentions that there are many
> competing and contested interpretation's of Goffman's work. Some say that
> his work was structuralist but more often he is associated with symbolic
> interactionism, ethnomethodology, or phenomenological sociology. Where
> would activity theory fit in among these?
>
> To me Goffman's student's Goodwin's ethno-methdological approach seems
> partly compatible with CHAT. In his paper, Action and embodiment within
> situated human interaction (2000), Goodwin writes:
>
> "This emphasis on cognition as a public, social process embedded within an
> historically
> shaped material world is quite consistent with both Vygotskian
> perspectives and
> recent work in the social and anthropological study of scientific and
> workplace practice
> ..., but adds to such perspectives an equally strong focus on the details
> of language
> use and conversational organization."
>
> Like Goodwin, I believe that this attention to details of language use and
> conversational organization, and to embodied interactions, in particular,
> can enrich CHAT analyses. After all, in many classical CHAT work, we mainly
> see analyses of spoken interaction. Greg, to me Goodwin's work on
> professional vision gives an elaborate account on the relationships between
> meanings and sensory fabric. In particular, in my case of students in a
> bird-watching field trip the way he analyzes expert-novice interaction is
> very valuable. I can, for example, see lots of highlighting on the part of
> the bird expert.
>
> Goodwin's focus on the practices of seeing seems to me very compatible
> with Leontiev's theorizing of sensory fabric as constituting and being
> constituted of action. Yet, in Goodwin's work the socio-emotional issues
> brought in with the Leontiev's personal sense - in line with what Larry has
> written - seems to be given less attention in Goodwin. I wonder whether
> Goodwin's approach contradicts Leontiev's approach that emphasizes such
> internal issues as goals and motives. In my understanding
> ethnomethdologists do not usually focus on goals and such.
>
> The Gothenburg center lead by Roger Säljö has explored ethnomethodological
> inspired aspects of Goffman in relation to their version of sociocultural
> perspective. See e.g the dissertation of Annika Lantz-Andersson:
> https://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/2077/19736/1/gupea_2077_19736_1.pdf
>
> Greg, Greeno has theorized the ways in which frames "create certain
> affordances that solicit various types of behavior (whether 'cognitive',
> 'emotional', or some other emically named type)." To my knowledge Greeno's
> work here focuses more on cognitive aspects and not that much on emotional
> aspects. He uses the notion of positioning in association with frames
> (which he relates to Goffman).  "This refers to ways in which an individual
> is
> entitled, expected, or perhaps obligated to participate in interactions of
> an activity system, such as a classroom or an experimental session
> involving interaction with a computer program." (see, A Theory Bite on
> Contextualizing, Framing, and Positioning: A Companion to Son and
> Goldstone, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07370000903014386)
>
> Greg wrote:
> "I might add to this that Goffman speaks of the way in which motivations
> are, to a certain extent, entailed by frames (yes, "to a certain extent" -
> this does not mean the frames determine them!). Thus, frames bring with
> them motivational relevancies as much as individuals do!"
>
> I wonder if this interplay between collective frames and individuals can
> be conceptualized with meaning and sense. Object of an activity is framed
> in terms of collectively shared meanings. Yet, each individual develops a
> personal relationship to the object, that is, a personal sense.
>
> By the way, thanks Mike for pointing out this overstatement of stability
> with respect to meanings. This has bothered me a lot, too. A colleague of
> mine even asserts that sense is never shared enough to become legitimately
> called a shared meaning in Vygotsky/Leontiev sense.
>
> Antti
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 3:01 AM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I agree, very clearly statements of the sense/meaning relation, along with
>> the Mandelshtam line, " I forgot the thought I wanted to say, and thought,
>> unembodied, returned to the hall of shadows."
>>
>> In the quote here, I think LSV is somewhat overstating the stability of
>> meaning across contexts; yes relative to the microgenetic processes of
>> sense making capturable with
>> modern technologies, but not totally "context independent." Even
>> dictionary
>> meanings change, as LSV was well aware from his interest in the history of
>> words in relation to their appearance in children's vocabularies in
>> ontogeny.
>>
>> Keeping the simultaneous relevance of several time scales in mind in these
>> discussions seems really important, as hard as it is to do.
>> mike
>>
>>
>>