The Need for a More Inclusive Level of Analysis
Secondary artifacts such as cultural schemas and scripts are essential
components of the "cultural tool kit." They partake of both the ideal and the
material; they are materialized and idealized (reified) in the artifacts that mediate
peoples' joint activities. By that very fact of reification they are present as resources
both for the idiocyncratic interpretation that each person will have of their joint
activity and the constant reproduction of the coordination necessary to the reproduce
that activity.
However, it requires little reflection to realize that even when conceived of as
secondary artifacts, scripts and schemas are insufficient to account for thought and
action. Even under the most generous assumptions about mechanisms that link
object schemas together into hierarchies or event schemas into sequentially ordered
sets, such knowledge structures drastically under-determine what one should think or
how one should behave on any given occasion even assuming that one has acquired the
cultural model or script in question.
Every schema "leaves out an enormous amount and is a great simplification of
the potential visual, acoustic, sensory, and propositional information that could be
experienced ... (D'Andrade, 1990, p. 98)." Consequently, while culture is a source of
tools for action, the individual must still engage in a good deal of interpretation in
figuring out which schemas apply in what circumstances and how to implement them
in an effective manner. For example, a large, orange, striped, furry, leg with a cat-like
foot dangling from the shelf in our child's closet, is likely to evoke a different schema,
different emotions, and different actions than if we were to see a similar object right
beneath our hammock in a leanto in the middle of a Brazilian rain forest. Such
considerations lead to the unavoidable conclusion that in order to give an account of
culturally mediated thinking it is necessary to include in one's analysis not only a
specification of the artifact through which behavior is mediated, but the
circumstances in which the thinking occurs.
The Supra-individual Envelope of Development
These considerations lead us back to the essential point that all human
behavior must be understood relationally, in relation to "its context" as the expression
goes. But implementation of this insight has proven to be the source of continuing
disagreement and confusion. These difficulties are indexed by the varied vocabulary
used to speak about the "something more" that must be added to artifact mediation if
one is to give an account of the relationship between culture and mind. In the
previous paragraph I used the term, circumstances, as a common sense gloss on what
that something more might be. When we turn to technical discussions of this issue,
the relevant terms include environment, situation, context, practice, activity, and
many more. At issue here is a problem very similar to the one we encountered in
thinking about the relation of the material and ideal in artifacts. In that case
argument swirled around which comes first in shaping artifacts, materiality or
ideality. In this case the argument turns on one's answer to the question, which
comes first in human thought, the object (text) or its surround (context).
As Kenneth Burke remarked several decades ago, considerations of action and
context create inescapable ambiguity because the very notion of a substance (sub
stance) must include a reference to the thing's context "since that which supports or
underlies a thing would be a part of the thing's context. And a thing's context, being
outside or beyond the thing, would be something the thing is not (1945, p. 22)."
Faced with these complexities that have defeated so many others, I will not aspire to
a definitive treatment of context in this monograph. But I will aspire to
distinguishing between two principle different conceptions of context that divide
social scientists quite generally and to accumulate sufficient conceptual tools to act as
heuristics in guiding research on culture and development.
Situations and Contexts
Many years ago John Dewey (1938) proposed a relational theory of cognition
in which he used the term, situation in manner that leads naturally into a discussion
of context. He wrote:
What is designated by the word "situation" is not a single object or event or set
of objects and events. For we never experience nor form judgments about
objects and events in isolation, but only in connection with a contextual
whole.
This latter is what is called a "situation" (p. 66).
Dewey goes on to comment that psychologists are likely to treat situations in a
reductive fashion: "...by the very nature of the case the psychological treatment [of
experience] takes a singular object or event for the subject-matter of its analysis (p.
67)." But, he writes,
In actual experience, there is never any such isolated singular object or event;
an object or event is always a special part, phase, or aspect, of an environing
experienced world-- a situation (p. 67).
Isolating what is cognized from life circumstances is often fatally obstructive to
understanding cognition. It is such isolation (typical of experimental procedures in
psychological studies of cognition) Dewey argued, that gives rise to the illusion that
our knowledge of any object, be it "an orange, a rock, piece of gold, or whatever" is
knowledge of the object in isolation from the situation in which it is encountered.
Dewey's equation of situation with a contextual whole brings us consider the
concept of context, perhaps the most prevalent term used to index the circumstances of
behavior. Despite Dewey's prescient comments half a century ago, psychological
analysis of context has all too often fallen into the difficulties that Dewey had warned
about.
Context as "That Which Surrounds."
When we retreat to Webster's dictionary as a starting point for examining the
concept of context, we find crucial ambiguities that serve to obscure the errors to
which Dewey pointed. Context is defined as "the whole situation, background, or
environment relevant to a particular event..." and "environment" is defined as
"something that surrounds." "The whole situation" and "that which surrounds" are
mixed together in the same definition.
The notion of context as "that which surrounds" is often represented as a set of
concentric circles representing different "levels of context" (See Figure 5.2). The
psychologist's focus is ordinarily on the unit "in the middle," which may be referred to
as task or activity engaged in by individuals. When using the "surrounds"
interpretation of context, the psychologist seeks to understand how this task is
shaped by the broader levels of context.
[Insert Figure 5.2 about here]
This image is probably best known in connection with Bronfenbrenner's
(1979) monograph on the ecology of human development. He describes embedded
systems, starting with the microsystem at the core and proceeding outward through
meso- and exosystems, to the macrosystem. In applying the notion of context to
issues of education, Cole & Griffin (1987) took as the "unit in the middle" to be a
teacher-pupil exchange that was part of a lesson that was part of a classroom that was
part of school, that was part of a community.
The study of language is an important domain in which the promise and
problems of the idea of "layers of context" has been usefully applied (Bateson, 1972;
Jackobsen and Halle, 1956). A fundamental property of language is that its levels of
organization are mutually constituted; a phoneme exists as such only in combination
with other phonemes which make up a word. The word is the context of the
phoneme. But the word only exists as such--only "has meaning"--in the larger context
of the utterance, which again "has meaning" only in a relationship to a large unit of
discourse. Bateson summarizes this way of thinking in his remark that
This hierarchy of contexts within contexts is universal for the
communicational . . . aspect of phenomena and drives the scientist
always to seek explanation in the ever larger units (1972, p. 402).
Note that in this description there is no simple, temporal, ordering. "That
which surrounds" occurs before, after, and simultaneously with the "act/event" in
question. We cannot say sentences before we say words, nor words before
synthesizing phonemes in an appropriate way; rather, there is a complex temporal
interdependence among levels of context which motivates the notion that levels of
context constitute each other.
To take our example of the teacher-child exchange, it is easy to see such events
as "caused" by higher levels of context: a teacher give a lesson, which is shaped by the
classroom it is a part of, which in turn is shaped by the kind of school it is in, which
in turn is shaped by the community, etc.
While more inclusive levels of context may constrain lower levels, they do not
cause them in a uni-linear fashion. For the event "a lesson" to occur, the participants
must actively engage in a consensual process of "lesson making." Teachers often vary
considerably in the way they interpret the conventions of the school, and school
communities participate in the selection of the board of education. Without
forgetting for a moment that the power relations among participants "at different
levels of context" are often unequal, it is no less important when using the nested
contexts approach to take into account the fact that context creation is an actively
achieved, two-sided process (See Durante and Goodwin (1992), Lave (1993), and
McDermott (1993) for trenchant criticisms of context treated as the container of
objects and behaviors).
Context as "That Which Weaves Together".
In seeking uses of the term, context, which avoid the pitfalls of context as that
which surrounds, I have found it useful to return to the Latin root of the term,
contexere, which means "to weave together." A similar sense is given by the Oxford
English Dictionary which refers to context as "the connected whole that gives
coherence to its parts."
The frequency with which metaphors of weaving, threads, ropes, and the like
appear in conjunction with contextual approaches to human thinking is quite
striking. For example, the micro-sociologist, Ray Birdwhistell, said the following
about his conception of context:
I'll tell you what I like to think about: sometimes I like to think of a
rope. The fibers that make up the rope are discontinuous; when you
twist them together, you don't make them continuous, you make the
thread continuous. . . . even though it may look in a thread as though
each of those particles are going all through it, that isn't the case. That's
essentially the descriptive model. . . . Obviously, I am not talking about
the environment. I am not talking about inside and outside. I am
talking about the conditions of the system (quoted in McDermott,
1980, p. 14-15).
When context is thought of in this way, it can not be reduced to that which
surrounds. It is, rather, a qualitative relation between minimally two analytical entities
(threads), which are two moments in a single process. The boundaries between "task and
its context" are not clear-cut and static but ambiguous and dynamic. As a general rule,
that which is taken as object and that which is taken as that- which- surrounds- the-
object are constituted by the very act of naming them.
In light of my goal of studying artifacts and situations/ contexts in terms of
people's concrete activities, I was gratified to discover that there is an intimate
connection between context, interpreted as a process of weaving together and the notion
of an event. This connection is provided by Stephen Pepper in his analysis of
contextualism as a world view (what might currently be called a scientific paradigm).
Pepper (1942) suggests that the root metaphor underlying a contextualist world
view is the "historic event." By this
the contextualist does not mean primarily a past event, one that
is, so to speak, dead and has to be exhumed. He means the event
alive in its present. What we ordinarily mean by history, he says,
is an attempt to re-present events, to make them in some way
alive again... We may call [the event] an "act," if we like, and if
we take care of our use of the term. But it is not an act conceived
as alone or cut off that we mean; it is an act in and with its
setting, an act in its context (p.232).
An "act in its context" understood in terms of the weaving metaphor requires a
relational, interpretation of mind; objects and contexts arise together as part of a single
bio-social-cultural process of development.
Gregory Bateson (1972) highlights the way in which mind is constituted through
human activity involving cycles of transformations between "inside" and "outside" that
are very reminiscent of Pepper's writing. "Obviously," Bateson writes, "there are lots of
message pathways outside the skin, and these and the messages which they carry must
be included as a part of the mental system whenever they are relevant." (p. 458, emphases
added). He then proposed the following thought experiment:
Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap.
Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the hand of
the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the
stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick (p. 459)?
Bateson goes on to argue that such questions are nonsensical unless one is
committed to including in one's analysis not only the man and his stick, but his
purposes and the environment in which he finds himself. When the man sits down to
eat his lunch, "the context changes" and with it the stick's relation to mind is changed.
Now it is forks and knives that become relevant. In short, because what we call mind
works through artifacts it cannot be unconditionally bounded by the head nor even by
the body, but must be seen as distributed in the artifacts which are woven together
and which weave together individual human actions in concert with and as a part of the
permeable, changing, events of life. The relevant order of context will depend crucially
upon the tools through which one interacts with the world and these in turn depend
upon one's goals and other constraints on action. Similarly, relevant interpretation of
context for the analyst of behavior will depend upon the goals of the analysis. According
to this view of context, the combination of goals, tools, and setting (including other
people and what Lave, 1988, terms "arena") constitute simultaneously the context of
behavior and ways in which cognition can be said to be related to that context.
Activity and Practice
While context and situation continue to appear in discussions of culture in mind, in
recent years there has been increasing use of the terms activity and practice in their place.
In part this shift has resulted from dissatisfaction with the use of context in the reduced
form of an environment or cause (Lave, 1988; Zuckerman, 1993)