Re: Psychologist as field ethnographer
Charles Bazerman (bazerman who-is-at humanitas.ucsb.edu)
Mon, 7 Sep 1998 20:46:51 -0700 (PDT)
The attempt to imagine what a psychology beginning in everyday activity
might look like seems to me (a non-psychologist concerned with the
everyday practice of writing--a practice that is regularly associated with
thinking by people of a wide range of intellectual and ideological
commitments) to already have many natural experiments to go by--namely the
attempts of practitioners, pedagogues, researchers and theoreticians of
everyday practices to try to articulate the cognitive and affective
component of their practices. For examples, writers, teachers of writing,
researchers of writing, and theoreticians of writing have for several
centuries been trying to make sense of thinking occuring in the course of
writing and in the course of engaging with texts one or others have
written. There are similar accounts to be explored of affect and cognition
in people concerned with the practice of mathematics, law, tennis,
intimacy, wisdom, painting, carpentry, social organization--the list is
diverse as human activity, for almost all human activities become
refelected on some time or another by someone. Some of these accounts
might be misguided or half-blind or quixotic. But the do provide some
interesting starting points for psychologists trying to step out of
psychology's self-made bare room. Isn't this one of the messages Vera has
been implicitly preaching for more than a few years?
Chuck
On Mon, 7 Sep 1998, Mike Cole wrote:
> Eva--
>
> Concerning the question of what becomes of psychology if one
> begins from an analysis of everyday activity: Note that my primary
> departmental identification is Communication. Concerning the issues
> themselves and choices involved, and the plausibility of it all--
> for that we would need to return to reading through cult psych.,
> mike
>
>