Thanks a lot for your description of Russian relation between history and
culture:
> I have tried ( with mixed results) to capture the idea of culture as
> related to history by referring to culture as "history in the present"
> and it is in this form that I work on the levels problem that is
> the subject of current discussion.
Culture is slice of history -- this is very precise capturing Russian
(German?) approach! I think it is possible to find a good quote from Goethe
(sp? German poet, writer and philosopher at the end XVIII, beginning of XIX
century).
Eugene
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Cole [mailto:mcole@weber.ucsd.edu]
> Sent: Sunday, November 14, 1999 2:24 PM
> To: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: culture and CHAT
>
>
>
> Thanks greatly for you informative note, Eugene. The cultural/linguistic
> differences between Russian and English with respect to the absolutely
> central notion of culture are REALLY different and are an ongoing source
> of misunderstanding. The Russian concept is much closer to Kultur
> in the German tradition that culture in the American anthropological
> tradition.
>
> I have tried ( with mixed results) to capture the idea of culture as
> related to history by referring to culture as "history in the present"
> and it is in this form that I work on the levels problem that is
> the subject of current discussion.
>
> My own way of "rising to the concrete" of the abstraction of
> heterochronous
> levels is to ground it in the simultaneous study of microgenesis,
> ontogenesis, and "activity-setting-o-genesis" or "institutional history"
> in the afterschool activities. Paul (I think!) asked how we know which
> levels we are dealing with when, and tracking the instituionalized
> practices where members identify the levels as well as analysts and they
> agree is the method that seems to work for me.
>
> But relative to the Long duree discussion of history in recent notes,
> I am dealing with periods of only a few years. It sort of the
> "microgenesis"
> of history, and therefore, in one sense, clearly trivial. But I have
> developed a strong intuition that like microgenesis vis a vis ontogeny,
> the microhistorical changes I have been documenting have something to tell
> us about the larger time scales. Probably just an illusion, but
> an interesting
> one.
> mike