If I cannot provoke others, then I must provoke myself...
Reading Jim's presentation of the intriguing sequence of exemplars of
people's appropriation of national history, and his analysis of how
characteristic features of their narratives could be seen as tactical
rather than strategic -- as features of narratives told "on the territory
of Another" (this way of phrasing it actually subsumes both the tactics of
resistance employed in quite different ways by the Estonians and by the
American students, and the tactics of 5th grade kids moving in the
territory of school and educational research -- is this a Zone of Proximal
Development?)
=2E.. anyway, reading MaA I was minded to hijack this figure and apply it to
>>sociocultural & cultural-historical scholars moving in the disciplinary
>>territory of psychology.
=46or one thing it was this feeling I had when reading Mind as Action, that
the text wasn't talking to me, I was just an overhearer -- the text was
like moving under the monitoring eyes of Disciplinary Psychology, and
coming to its topics from a direction influenced by that terrain. While I
come from... out of the woods?
Then it is of course not just Jim's book. On a qualitative methods list I'm
lurking on there has just been another little round of methods anxiety in
which one of the participants noted that in discussing "interjudge
reliability" as much time (or more) was spent explaining how we DON'T use
the term, than what we do. Made me think of the unofficial Estonian
history, consisting of counterclaims to the official history. In this case
qualitativists spend time making counterclaims on turf staked out by
objectivist epistemology.
I was at this same complex of what can a SC-CH-AT psychology be ON ITS OWN
TURF just a few weeks ago, in the context of a brief visit to Mike's
Cultural Psychology. By the way, I think Mike's description of his own path
(with a little help from friends and circumstances) out of the territory of
mainstream research psychology was a very helpful Exodus. I asked then,
too, for "the book after the book" -- because I'm so curious to read it
(and not ready to write it!) Now, as this book isn't there yet, I wouldn't
mind going back to Ch2 of Mind as Action again, now that I have seen what
kind of whole it is a part of.
So I'm curious if anybody else has any queries on the assumptions and
terminology of Ch2?
Eva