Thanks for elucidating my concern with assumptions about the world as a
seamless whole, leaving levels of developmental organization solely or even
largely to the researcher's analytic processes. Concrete examples are
always illuminating.
On April 24th you wrote:
>I read this with an example in mind, namely one of the big Gesamtschulen
>(comprehensive schools, i.e. *not* one of the "stratified", traditional
>German schools: Gymnasium, Realschule, Hauptschule) in some of our federal
>states here. In the seventies, during and after Willi Brandt's
>chancellorship, many were founded as really *big* institutions, around
>a thousand students, in big concrete-and-glass buildings. Teachers then
>were young and enthusiastic. Nowadays, the buildings look dirty by them-
>selves, and because of so-called Vandalism, and lack of money. Many
>teachers turned into burnt-out cynics, a lot of violence is visible for
>the outside visitor.
>
>Now, if a research group comes and looks at the several levels
>of=00=00=00=00=00=00=08=BFegulation (including violent conflict) of this=
community of
>practice as if the researchers themselves were free to draw the
>boundaries between individuals, peer-groups, teacher/student coalitions,
>administration subgroups, age/class strata among students, then the
>researchers free themselves from the burden of looking at the
>boundaries as historically grounded, made by the people and artifacts
>themselves. Thereby, they also put themselves in a limbo, a precarious
>observation point with no real connection to the community under
>study.
This is not to back into a claim of levels of developmental organization
as some sort of positivist reality, but rather to acknowledge the recursive
relation between persons and society, and therefore by definition, between
research and "objects" of study. I am reminded of the writings of
anthropologists studying the caste system during and after the British Raj
in India ( Louis Dumont's piece titled "Homo Hierarchis" would be an
example of this). The caste system was initially less hierarchical and
fixed in nature, but became more so through the interpretive lens of
western anthropologists. This fed back to Indian society by way of
colonial ideology to create a caste structure in which the individual was
seen as having little agency or mobility. The reinterpretation of caste
was no less real as a lived existence than pre-colonial interpretations.
--King
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tml
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