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the strange and contingent nature of its categories seen from the outside. |
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Illegitimacy, then, is seeing those objects as would a strangereither as a naïf or by comparison with another frame of reference in which they exist. And this is not to be equated with an idealized notion of skill, but with membership. One does not have to be Isaac Stern to know fully and naturally what to do with a violin, where it belongs, and how to act around violins and violinists. But if you use a Stradivarius to swat a fly (but not as part of an artistic event!) you have clearly defined yourself as an outsider, in a way that a schoolchild practicing scales has not. |
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Membership can thus be described individually as the experience of encountering objects and increasingly being in a naturalized relationship with them. (Think of the experience of being at home, and how one settles down and relaxes when surrounded by utterly familiar objects; think of how demented one feels in the process of moving house.) |
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From the point of view of learning-as-membership and participation, then, the illegitimate stranger is a source of learning. Someone's illegitimacy appears as a series of interruptions to experience (Dewey 1916, 1929) or a lack of a naturalization trajectory. In a way, then, individual membership processes are about the resolution of interruptions (anomalies) posed by the tension between the ambiguous (outsider, naive, strange) and the naturalized (at home, taken-for-granted) categories for objects. Collectively, membership can be described as the processes of managing the tension between naturalized categories on the one hand and the degree of openness to immigration on the other. Harvey Sacks, in his extensive investigations into language and social life, notes that categories of membership form the basis of many of our judgments about ordinary action. "You can easily enough come to see that for any population of persons present there are available alternative sets of categories that can be used on them. That then poses for us an utterly central task in our descriptions; to have some way of providing which set of categories operate in some scenein the reporting of that scene or in its treatment as it is occurring" (1992, vol. 1, 116). Sacks draws attention to the ways in which being ordinary are not pregiven but are in fact a kind of joba job which asserts the nature of membership: |
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Whatever we may think about what it is to be an ordinary person in the world, an initial shift is not to think of an "ordinary person" as some person, but as somebody having as their job, as their constant preoccupation, doing |
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