I can see the usefulness of studying ecosocial systems from the timescale
perspective you suggest (N-1->N<- N+1) quite clearly. However, I have a few
questions that spring from what I see as a conceptual disjunction between
the two questions you ask at the beginning, and the metaphors you put
forward for explaining their salience.
First, I will ask the question that brought me to perceive the disjunction:
You ask: "how do moments add up to lives?" What I find to be an equally
perplexing question that leads in a different direction is: how are lives
(social and individual) broken into (discreet) moments? ie, what is the
processes by lives are "regulated", temporally speaking?
The answer would seem to lie in the activities of "the village(rs)".
Village life provides the temporal metaphors, measurements, and meanings
that say how temporality is divided in the village: years, days, seasons,
nanoseconds, harvests, 10^-12 sec, etc.
A further implication of your temporal divisions is that the time-span for,
say, language change appears to be fixed and regular. Is this the case, or
am I reading you incorrectly here? Wouldn't media changes affect this (cf.
Vowel shift in 16th century england) - other ruptures would affect other
temporalities, no?
An interesting ecosocial case study might be Berlin. After 10 years of the
wall coming down, there appears to still be a clear division between the
two "cultures". This split, from an extremely united Germany into two
almost as equally divided ones took a mere 40 years to "create".
Anyway, I digress.
What the paper seems to do is adduce an ontological understanding of
identity(ies) based on a bottom-up hierarchy of processes which is mediated
by various boundary objects from "slower" (higher-order?) processes, from
one or more levels higher (e.g the generational sword). The second section,
"the village", seems to be a processual epistemological model mediated by
the ontology of the village: knowledge of the village is made by the nature
of the village's doings/beings. In your model, the nature of being is
explained "bottom-up" (SN-x --> N); the nature of knowing is mediated
"top-down" (N<-- SN+x). Is this what you are saying, or have I misread you?
(I don't mean the bottom --> top literally; it can be seen (n)either way).
I suppose what I'm asking is whether you are explaining the same phenomena
in two entirely different ways. If so, are both necessary to explain
learning? If not - ie if the phenomena that you are explaining _are_
different - then what is the "mechanism" (sorry, I can't think of another
word at this late hour) that joins the two processes/models conceptually?
Regards,
Phil
Phil Graham
p.graham who-is-at qut.edu.au
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html