[Xmca-l] Re: kinship

Mon Jan 8 08:45:10 PST 2018

Thanks Greg. As I said, I'm less interested in whether or not I'm talking about perezhivanie, and more interested in having a viable understanding of how emotional experiences frame new experiences. Maybe they're the same, but since meta-experience is less ambiguous--it's simply the experience of experience, not necessarily trauma-oriented--it's a more useful way for me to talk about it. In fact, the earliest references came in relation to how positive feelings about writing help to frame new experiences with writing (for one writer) such that obstacles could be simply set aside and returned to later.

Smagorinsky, P., Daigle, E. A., O'Donnell-Allen, C., & Bynum, S. (2010). Bullshit in academic writing: A protocol analysis of a high school senior's process of interpreting Much Ado About Nothing. Research in the Teaching of English, 44, 368-405. Available at http://www.petersmagorinsky.net/About/PDF/RTE/RTE2010.pdf

That study didn't use either term, but both appear in:

Smagorinsky, P., & Daigle, E. A. (2012). The role of affect in students' writing for school. In E. L. Grigorenko, E. Mambrino & D. D. Preiss (Eds.), Writing: A mosaic of new perspectives (pp. 293-307). New York, NY: Psychology Press. Available at http://www.petersmagorinsky.net/About/PDF/Book Chapters/AffectInWriting_Grigorenko_Mambrino_Preiss_Writing.pdf

This is a hand-scan so word searches don't work. But here, I'm still in a tussle between perezhivanie and meta-experience, later abandoned.

Perhaps all this is of no interest to anyone but me, so apologies if I'm occupying bandwidth unnecessarily. My point is simply that looking for perezhivanie, to me, without agreement on what it is left me wondering why I was so indebted to the term instead of the represented construct, at least the one I was interested in, finally labeled as meta-experience. So I bailed on the term, much to my own satisfaction. 

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Greg Thompson
Sent: Monday, January 08, 2018 9:28 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: kinship

Peter,
The importance of ritual/ceremony offers another interesting way of linking anthropological/ethnographic research and human development. It seems that this has been done more explicitly in anthropology of children/development than has the family (which, of course, has implicitly been involved).
Van Gennep's classic work on rites of passage have thematized this, and many folks through the years have looked at the role of rituals in the development of children. What you point to and which has been less well developed are questions of the experience of the ritual for the participant. That's a concern that people are just now starting to turn towards and so far, the jury is out. Some argue for Durkheimian notions of collective effervescence - something that needs to be wedded to perezhivanie, I think -  and some arguing that the experiences are much more diffuse and less coordinated. But I do think this would be a very fruitful site of research for some XMCA-ite out there.
-greg

On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 4:28 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:

> I'm no expert here, but recently read Wendy James's The Ceremonial Animal:
> A New Portrait of Anthropology  (https://www.booktopia.com.au/
> the-ceremonial-animal-wendy-james/prod9780199263349.html) . The 
> ceremonial animal is the human, and this book focuses on ritual in 
> human life, which I would say has a profoundly emotional dimension.
>
> I've avoided perezhivanie discussions because it's become all things 
> to all people, so I've retreated to an alt-phrasing, meta-experience 
> (the experiencing of experience as a way to frame new experiences).
> Rituals/ceremonies re-enact prior rituals in ways that many people 
> find deeply emotional, often comforting. I am not religious, but know 
> that the singing of familiar hymns can be emotionally settling for 
> people experiencing grief, trauma, etc. (I know this from testimonies 
> of such people).
>
> Maybe this is perezhivanie, but I've stopped caring whether that's the 
> term for my conception, since I've found one that people don't hold up 
> to their orthodoxies when I use it in writing.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@ 
> mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Rod Parker-Rees
> Sent: Monday, January 08, 2018 4:19 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: kinship
>
> Greg,
>
> I can't pretend to be au fait with the developments in anthropology 
> around kinship and family (but I am interested) - the connection I see 
> between understandings of family/familiarity and the work of Vygotsky 
> is associated with what Sahlins appears to be saying about 'people who 
> are intrinsic to one another’s existence'. If the 'shape' of the 
> refractive lens which forms our perezhivanie is dependent on our 
> interactions with other people (and particularly in our first years) 
> then those people with whom we have most interactions (or perhaps most 
> formative kinds of interactions) will be familiar in the strongest 
> sense - 'mutual persons' who share and even inhabit our ways of 
> interacting with our environment - and particularly our social 
> environment. Our family are 'in our heads' in ways which other people 
> are not. Kinship links clearly matter because there must be some 
> chaining of this mutual influence (My mother's mother is in my head 
> because she is in my mother's head and my mother is in mine). 
> 'Blood-links'  or households may provide a convenient shorthand for 
> patterns of proximity and may therefore be built into languages but 
> the way the terms will then be used may get closer to reflecting how speakers feel about the different kinds of relationships they experience.
>
> All the best,
>
> Rod
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@ 
> mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Greg Thompson
> Sent: 08 January 2018 02:16
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: kinship
>
> apologies if this is a re-posting, but here is the text of the message 
> that accompanied the Sahlins text, just in case it didn't go through:
>
> Apologies if this is another trip round the mulberry bush (or the 
> maypole?), but this is a conversation that has, as one might imagine, 
> been quite a big deal in anthropology. Here's a quick and brief summary.
>
> Initially, "kinship" in anthropology was defined as the way that it 
> has traditionally been defined in European cultures - as based on 
> blood. (other forms are kinship, e.g., adoption, were seen as 
> derivative of the central trope of blood relation).
>
> Then along came a fellow by the name of David Schneider (I attached a 
> picture, cf. David and Martin's pictures of Malinowski). Although 
> Schneider couldn't write his way out of a paper bag, he conducted 
> field work on the Micronesian island of Yap and published a few books 
> on the subject that forever changed the way that anthropologists' think about kinship.
> Essentially, he challenged this blood-based notion of kinship by 
> showing how Yapese kinship formation is not blood-based (although 
> blood based relationships are still recognized, they do not hold the 
> same sense that a blood-based notion of "family" does).
>
> Following Schneider, the field of kinship studies spent a bit of time 
> in a relativistic malaise, shifting between those who stuck to the old 
> view of kinship and those who refused to use the concept at all.
>
> Then along came work that would eventually become what has come to be 
> known as "new kinship studies". This approach sought to recover the 
> concept of "kinship" without the concept of "kinship-as-blood". In the 
> view of new kinship studies, "kinship" is understood, as Rupert Stasch 
> has put it, as "intersubjective belonging" or "mutuality of being" 
> (mentioned in the Sahlins essay that is attached).
>
> New kinship studies have also turned their gaze back onto kinship in 
> European/Western/American culture (and indeed, Schneider's other big 
> book was titled American Kinship). These folks have noted that even in 
> these cultures, previously thought to be entirely blood-based, one can 
> find lots of slippage from a simple model of blood-based kinship. 
> Janet Carsten is a key figure in this regard and she looks at, among 
> other things, how technologies have changed kinship formation (think 
> test-tube babies and sperm extraction from deceased persons - fun stuff!).
>
> One of the best summaries of the new kinship studies is Marshall 
> Sahlin's essay What Kinship is? I have attached it here as it has a 
> wonderful collection of examples of how kinship is formed in various 
> places around the globe.
>
> I guess the more interesting question for this group is: what does 
> this have to do with Vygotsky/XMCA?
>
> -greg
>
> On Sun, Jan 7, 2018 at 7:15 PM, Greg Thompson 
> <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Martin,
> >
> > Not sure if things got garbled on the way into virtual XMCA-land, 
> > but in the end of my message about kinship studies in anthropology 
> > that accompanied the Sahlins (and which doesn't seem to appear in 
> > your reply - did the message come through with the attachment - 
> > usually it is the reverse!), I noted that Sahlins provides a nice 
> > summary of the new kinship studies that followed David Schneider.
> >
> > Does that help or were you looking for something else? (and, was the 
> > text of the message really missing entirely?) -greg 
> >
> > On Sun, Jan 7, 2018 at 6:44 PM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Greg, could you say a bit about why you sent this?
> >>
> >> Martin
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> > On Jan 7, 2018, at 7:07 PM, Greg Thompson 
> >> > <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com
> >> <mailto:greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > <image.png><Sahlins, Marshall - What is Kinship.pdf>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> > --
> > Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> > Assistant Professor
> > Department of Anthropology
> > 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> > Brigham Young University
> > Provo, UT 84602
> > WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
> > http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Anthropology
> 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> Brigham Young University
> Provo, UT 84602
> WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
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--
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson