I'm not sure what CHAT-like is. It would seem that as a theory of human
activity, CAHT might be able to account for the diverse strategies that
have arisen in a culture. Imposing values on those strategies is something
that people in a group may choose to do, and the theory may account for
that too, if it were made more explicit about such things. I suppose
unpacking more the categories of rules and community and their
interrelations in Yrjo's model would help. One could then understand the
interplay of values that are shared and not shared among participants in
their interaction dynamics. What I am concerned with is ascribing detailed
cultural values to the theory per se, or selecting one ensemble of
strategies (i.e wizardry) as as exemplary of the theory. Doing so does not
seem to follow from the historical development of CHAT, nor from its
structure. A critical question too is that if CHAT is a theory in which
the investigator's value system is built in to its structure, then how can
it be used to describe cultures other than the investigators, without major
distortions of the target cultures value system? What do you think?
Bill Barowy, Associate Professor,
Lesley University, 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
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