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of the newcomer to the community largely revolves around the nature of the relationship with the objects and not, counterintuitively, directly with the people. This sort of directness only exists hypotheticallythere is always mediation by some sort of object. Acceptance or legitimacy derives from the familiarity of action mediated by member objects. |
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But familiarity is a fairly sloppy word. Here it is not meant instrumentally, as in proficiency, but relationally, as a measure of taken-for-grantedness. (An inept programmer can still be a member of the community of practice of computer specialists, albeit a low status one in that he or she takes for granted the objects to be used.) A better way to describe the trajectory of an object in a community is as one of naturalization. Naturalization means stripping away the contingencies of an object's creation and its situated nature. A naturalized object has lost its anthropological strangeness. It is in that narrow sense desituatedmembers have forgotten the local nature of the object's meaning or the actions that go into maintaining and recreating its meaning.
51 We no longer think much about the miracle of plugging a light into a socket and obtaining illumination, and we must make an effort of anthropological imagination to remind ourselves of contexts in which it is still not naturalized. |
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Objects become natural in a particular community of practice over a long period of time. (See Latour's (1987) arguments in Science in Action for a good discussion of this.) Objects exist, with respect to a community, along a trajectory of naturalization. This trajectory has elements of both ambiguity and duration. It is not predetermined whether an object will ever become naturalized, or how long it will remain so; rather, practice-activity is required to make it so and keep it so. The more naturalized an object becomes, the more unquestioning the relationship of the community to it; the more invisible the contingent and historical circumstances of its birth, the more it sinks into the community's routinely forgotten memory.52 Light switches, for instance, are ordinary parts of modern life. Almost all people living in the industrialized world know about light bulbs and electricity, even if they live without it, and switches and plugs are naturalized objects in most communities of practice. People do not think twice about their nature, only about whether or not they can find them when needed. Commodity and infrastructural technologies are often naturalized in this way. In a sense they become a form of collective forgetting, or naturalization, of the contingent, messy work they replace. We wrote |
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