David, I think it's not so much the merits or demerits of an article
as the
monthly discussion paper's role at xmca. I think of the discussion
paper as
a piece to hold our shared attention, accessible to all and for all
interested to comment on, not about what could have been, as it,
like all
research work, has its constraints, but, like a museum display, to
make
visible our own different takes, yet another way to share (“I didn’t
know
you also…”), to reaffirm, to envision “what could be”, etc. But how
one
feels about something does matter (neutral feelings usually means less
speaking and acting), especially when there are other means to be
members of
a community. On the other hand, the sponataneous tends to be
irregular,
although not a problem at xmca. (I seem to be switching positions
back and
forth)
I have been thinking how less praise is linked to collectivistic
cultures. I
speak from personal experiences. I’m a Chinese and Chinese culture is
characterized as collectivistic. When I first came over to North
America, as
an adult, I was struck by the amount of praise parents and teachers
lavish
on children, as well as how much parents and adults talk to babies and
toddlers, among other things. Gradually, the unfamiliar becomes
familiar. My
own experience of growing up at home, back in Taiwan, is that my
parents did
not hug me and my siblings much at all (all my aunts and uncles did
the
same, but my grandfather always hugged and kissed his grandchildren;
I still
recall complaining to him about his beard). But children growing up
in such
homes know that their parents love them because there are many ways
to show
love. My mom loves me every time when she cooks the food I like; my
dad
shows his love for me when he asks me to dress warmly. Chinese may
get or
give less praise, but we know it IS praise when parents do not say
anything
upon reading a report card of straight A’s. That’s a high school
student put
it to me; she knew her parents were pleased. Good grades are
expected and
both children and parents know. Overt praise among Chinese people,
based on
my personal experience and immigrants in Canada that I have
experienced at
that time, is not necessary because of shared expectations. I guess
it would
be the same with behavior. Someone I know told a story, which
happened many
years ago when she first arrived in New York from China. The host
family
picked her up at the airport in the evening and asked her if she
would like
something to eat before going to bed. She thanked her host and
declined. She
was expecting a second offer and ready to accept that. But the
second offer
never was made. Of course, the host family did not know the Chinese
code for
being a host. That was some years ago when I talked to some other
immigrant
Chinese about parental expectations. I don’t know the newer
generation and
how much parenting practices has changed or not. I can’t judge
fairly my own
parenting practices.
In the example of expectations understood between and among parties,
I think
it is not so much “less praise” as to how praise is expressed, via
body
language or because there is less perceived need (due to shared, tacit
understanding). But I’m not sure if “less praise” means “more
criticism”,
which Gratier et al. seem to place on the same plane. Looking at
personal
experiences on the speculated mechanism of “less praise”, I would
think
that, if a parent frowns while reading a report card, it is an
expression of
criticism and there shouldn’t be different patterns of occurrences.
But then
again we are human and we probably let out our anger when shared
expectations aren’t met than to withhold praise, at least openly,
when good
results come in. It appears that Gratier et al. refer to a different
way of
conceptualizing praise and criticism. They write, “one element in the
‘collectivistic’ worldview is a dispreference for praise, which
makes one
child stand out” (p. 297). This implies that praise or criticism is
given in
public or at least there is an audience or potential audience. There
is a
saying, a nail that sticks out gets pushed down (as opposed to “a
squeaky
wheel gets oiled”). I can’t sort out what this means to me at the
moment.
But my question is that, if praise makes one child stand out, wouldn’t
criticism also do? If so, we should expect to see less criticism in
collectivistic culture, but the authors expected it in the opposite
direction. I’m thinking why people in collectivistic societies might
be
fearless of making their young stand out with criticism. The only
thing I
could think of now is a Chinese tradition to name one’s children
humbly so
as not to invoke anger from gods or something. But I think it is
more a
tradition of the past and applies to private names family members
used for
their youngsters. Most Chinese names I know are grand sounding! Like
“Beautiful flowers” or “Righteous Way.” There are some exceptions; One
neighbor of mine formally named her daughter “Dian Dian”, which
means Dot
Dot. But that may suggest more fondness than fear of standing out.
For me, Jay's article, Across the Scales of Time: Artifacts,
Activities, and
Meanings in Ecosocial Systems, inspires “what could be”. The parts
of the
article on the adabatic and heterochrony principles are a bit
difficult for
me (at first at least), but the rest is a treat! I was thinking of
how it
would apply to young immigrant children in Gratier et al. and
methodological
considerations as I read it. I like very much Jay’s view on page
288: “we
still tend to define our objects of study in such a way that a single
researcher could in principle come to understand them. This appears
to be a
contradiction in the case of ecosocial systems. The longest timescale
processes that characterize such systems are almost certainly longer
than a
human lifetime. We cannot study such a system from more than a few
of the
many viewpoints within it, and we honestly do not expect all these
views to
fit consistently together. We need at least a team to conduct such a
study,
one as diverse or nearly so as the system under study, and along the
same
dimensions of difference. And we need a self-sustaining institution
that
will last long enough to observe major historical change in the
system. ‘It
takes a village’ to study a village.”
(correction of phrases, errors, and misinterpretation is welcome)
How to
study longer-term processes and patterns (longer than one lifetime) in
shorter-term processes? The individualism-collectivism is a framework
Gratier et al. use; topdown frameworks (perhaps having been
developed from
bottom up) can be useful but, as lived through individuals with
different
variations, they are evolving, albeit probably at snail pace in a
vast land..
Jay's envisioning of a self-sustaining institution, perhaps global
in nature
(a future plan for LCHC perhaps?), would help track longer- or
shorter-term
processes across different timescales. As carriers of longer-term
processess, how would the Latino children in Gratier et al.
interpret the
teacher’s, say, verbal or nonverbal signs of praise and criticism,
intended
by the teacher or not? How would this interpretation relate to their
own
perceptions and practices around their parents’ praise or criticism?
How do
researchers invite children to reflect on what they have just
experienced?
What emergent processes and patterns in the classrooms where different
worlds come into contact? As I think about these, I see that
researchers in
the future would write with less finality of their interpretation
(even when
interpretations of participants are incorporated) if they intend
their work
to continue living, so to speak. Perhaps let the data speak for
themselves
more. Perhaps more built-in design to allow the data to be compared
with
research of similar nature in databanks for future researchers to
mine the
data.
Yuan
On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 10:25 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
>wrote:
Mike, I think that the answer (to the temporary lull in the
discussion of
the Gratier et al article) is of course all of the below: final
exams, end
of quarter, and a certain amount of delicacy over an article that
at least
some of us see as deeply problematic (see Jay's comments,
especially).
I often think it's more useful to bring whatever discussion we are
currently having (e.g. bodies and artifacts, emotion and cognition)
around
to the article at hand rather than vice versa.
Some of our most successful and fruitful discussions have (alas for
me!)
also been some of our most general.
This is partly thanks to the very articulate and ardent
philosophers on the
list, but it's also because general means inclusive,
transdisciplinary, a
party to which every party's invited except the bouncer.
Now it seems to me that the Gratier et al. article really does have a
bearing on both the "bodies and artefacts" thread and the "emotion
and
cognition" one. As I already said, I think the "bodies and artefacts"
connection is INTONATION and STRESS: this is the way that gesture
really
"goes underground" in language, and so I think that Gratier et al
(and also
Wolff-Michael Roth) are right to look at it in all its spectrographic
splendor. But the level of detail we get that way has to somehow be
harnessed to a more macrogenetic perspective to do much good.
This time I have a comment on the "emotion and cognition" thread. In
Chapter Two of Thinking and Speech, Vygotsky spends a LOT of time
quoting
Bleuler. I've just been reading Bleuler's book on autism in the
library.
Vygotsky likes him because of his rejection of the over-extended
content of
the autistic function (actually, as we shall see, an over-extended
conception of the reality function)..
We can see, even if Bleuler cannot, the beginnings of Hegelian triad
describing the emergence of higher EMOTIONAL functions. The first,
relatively unmediated response, to reality is an instance of the
reality
function, but it is based on perception and sensation. Here the
James-Lange
formula that we feel sad because we perceive ourselves crying or we
feel
frightened because we feel the sensations of our body running away
from a
bear may be a useful metaphor (except for the obvious homunculus
problem it
raises), or at least a catchy inversion of the individual
subjectivist view
of the genesis of affect.
From this primal, biological response a second, more fully
psychological
response is born. As Bleuler points out, it requires a relatively
complex
response, because it involves the recollection of sensation, and even
turning away from the immediate sources of sensation. This is the
autistic
function proper, and it is not genetically primary. When this
response
becomes linked to itself, rather than to objective events, we get
“irrealist” logic, the pleasure principle, the associative links of
dreams
which Vygotsky refuses to call “symbolic”.
Finally, there is a third response, which is “realistic” in the
sense that
it is oriented towards an objective state of affairs existing
between people
rather than within them. Yet it is mediated, by recollection and
reflection,
and above all by language. Here is where we must look for higher
affective
functions, culturally mediated emotions, and conceptually based
aesthetics.
This third response is also where we need to look to find the basis
of a
Spinozan—a socialist—ethics; like the second response, it considers
human
pleasure and the satisfaction of desire to be a positive good. But
like the
first response, it is objective, in the sense that it is not
individualistic
but socially shared through and through. Bleuler, a biologically
oriented
psychologist, cannot get us this far. But Vygotsky can!
When I read Gratier et al. I am impressed by how many of the
descriptions
of the Bridging Cultures Classroom contain descriptions of positive
affect,
and how many of the non-Bridging Cultures Classroom are rather
negative.
But of course a good class cannot simply be a chain of what Wolff-
Michael
calls emotionally positive valences; some such chains are going to
be at the
lowest level of physical response (e.g. the satisfaction of desire,
such as
when kids get treats in class) and a good many more are going to be
at the
level Bleuler is calling autistic; the chain of "one positive
valence after
another" that we often see as a substitute for plot in children's
literature
and a substitute for a script in kids' movies.
So we need more than glowing descriptions in order to see what
experienced
teachers see at a glance: the difference between a good show and a
good
class! One of my grads is working on this right now; the idea is to
test the
positive valence of particular topics in a conversation by counting
the
number of times they get brought up voluntarily by one child and
continued
by others.
We initially thought we would use this technique just to find out
who the
kids wanted to talk about: did they want to talk about the
characters in the
textbook, or about their teacher an their classmates? Surprisingly,
they
often chose the textbook characters, and they were particularly
interested
in...the TEACHER character. In their chat about real people, they
also
prefer the teacher as a topic. Perhaps this is part of OUR culture,
though!
While writing this, though, a problem occurred to me. The topics
that get
the most "hits" and which run the longest in classroom
conversations really
represent two rather contradictory things: the ability to stimulate
interventions from the most voluble participants, and the ability to
generalize to the interests of the greatest possible number. On
xmca, of
course, that means topics of a certain generality and abstractness.
In our
classroom data, though, that tends to mean the teacher.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Sun, 12/13/09, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Sunday, December 13, 2009, 8:38 AM
My apologies for posting the les treilles paper twice. it did not
show on
my
screen. As "recompense" here is a review of a book that
promotes the idea of "bio-cultural co-constructivism" without
mention of
Vygotsky anywhere. Perhaps, as a result, it leads some of its
adherents
into
some (in my opinion) inappropriate reduction of culture to "the
environment," thereby opening up a very old, very stinky, can of
worms.
Question: Many people on XMCA voted to discuss the
"Tacit Communicative Style and Cultural Attunement in Classroom
Interaction"<
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content%7Edb=all
%7Econtent=a915635308
article,
but very few have followed David's lead in discussing it directly.
Is it because of final exam time on both a quarter and semester
system in
the US? Or voting as a prelude to spectatorship? Where are those
voters?
mike
On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 7:20 AM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
wrote:
The book description came through, Larry. Attached is the most
recent
Fonagy article i could find that appeared general. His work looks
very
interesting, thanks. I have not read it yet, but that fact that
Gergeley
is
a co-author indicates that issues of intentionality are involved
and I am
very curious to see if the effects you talk about are connected with
changes
at 9months. First guess, it would fit with Tomasello and Vygotsky,
but if
it
fits with Trevarthan and primary intersubjectivity it will be a
suprise..
We'll see.
A brief paper on this topic I wrote for an audience for whom the
idea
that
culture mediates human activity was a novelty, and that there is a
two
way
relation between "natural" and "cultural" is also attached.
thanks a lot for the pointer.
mike
On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 10:10 PM, Larry Purss <lpurss@shaw.ca>
wrote:
Vera
I sent an attachment through CHAT but I don't think it went
through.
Fonagy and three other authors wrote the book "Affect regulation,
Mentalization, and the Development of the Self.
It is an extension of Bowlby's and Winnicott's approach (He works
at the
same Tavistock institute in London) and its interweaving with his
understanding of Hegel and intersubjectivity theory.
The summary of infant studies from a relational framework is
excellent..
Some of the "clinical" approaches in the second half of the book
may be
critqued.
Also I wonder how feminist scholars may critique the focus on
"mothers"?
However the detail (though sometimes overwhelming) is
systematically
presented and builds a coherent perspective on the centrality of
relational
processes to the development of subjectivity.
Larry
----- Original Message -----
From: Vera Steiner <vygotsky@unm.edu>
Date: Saturday, December 12, 2009 8:04 pm
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Hi Larry,
I would be interested in a link to Fonagy's recent publications.
I am
related to him and am doubly curious about his work.
Thanks, Vera
----- Original Message -----
From: "Larry Purss" <lpurss@shaw.ca>
To: <ablunden@mira.net>; "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"
<xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Saturday, December 12, 2009 8:51 PM
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts
Andy
I believe the reason we are cautious about brain research is it
usually
implies "biology" as foundational to being human. The
reason I mention
Fonagy and others exploring the foundational premises of infant
development
is they are starting from intersubjectivity as prior to
subjectivity and it
is only within relational contexts that a sense of subjectivity
arises or
emerges. They are using brain research to support this
relational paradigm.
Larry
----- Original Message -----
From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
Date: Saturday, December 12, 2009 7:28 pm
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Larry,
In my first forrays into this discussion on emotion, I found
myself introducing talk of physiological observations in a
way I would never have thought of doing in relation to
cognition. After reading about the 300 years of reflections
on the physiology of emotion in Vygotsky's article, I was
left asking myself: why? Why do I think it is important to
investigate the physiology of emotion, while I hold such a
low opinion of the place of physiological investigations in
understanding the normal process of cognition.
Consciousness is the outcome of the intersection of two
objective processes: human physiology and human behaviour.
This is equally true of both emotion and cognition.
While the marketing, military and medial industries are
spending billions of dollars on neurological investigations,
I would think that CHAT people would be interested in
questions like the role of emotion in learning, behaviour,
addicition, the formation of social bonds, and so on,
investigating such questions with dual stimulation type
experiments, with artifacts that are more or less affect-laden.
Andy
Larry Purss wrote:
Mike
Your comment that this leaves us only at the starting gate of
understanding how bodies can be "written on" points to the
research and reflection on the relation of changes in the brain
mediated by culture.
One area of research that is exploring how the brain is
changed via mediation is intersubjective infant developmental
studies that are mapping physiological changes in one person's
brain that "mirrors" similar physiological brain
changes being generated during the activity of the
other person. Fonagy is doing research in this area
and has written a detailed summary of the research in this area.
His term for this intersubjective process is "mentalization".
Larry
----- Original Message -----
From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Date: Saturday, December 12, 2009 12:19 pm
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
I do not have all this sorted out by a long shot, but my own
way
of thinking
about the issue is that humans are hybrids, really complex
one's. Their
brains have LITERALLY been shaped by prior genrations of
mediation of
activity through material artifacts, their brains (and often
other parts of
the bodies) cannot operate normally without inclusion of
artifacts, they can
be "written on" as jay points out.
The problem is that this leaves us only at the starting gate
for
furtherdevelopment of this point of view. I found that
experimental study I sent
around sort of interest in this regard, even though it
provides
such sketchy
detail and assumes so much about its cultural content and
organization. The
developmental implications, which in our current discussion
would mean, the
organization of hybridity during ontogeny, which in turn has
implicationsfor the cognition/emotion
discussion.
mike
On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 5:36 PM, Jay Lemke
<jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote:
One of the ways I have found useful to think about the body
in
relation to
semiotic mediation is to see the body as, among other
things,
a semiotic
artifact.
What I mean by semiotic artifact is a material object or
substrate that can
be written on and read from, much like a printed page or an
architectural> drawing. Written on, in the general semiotic
sense, not necessarily in
words, but in signs of some kind: meaningful features that
can
be "read" or
made sense of by people (or nonhumans, but that's another
story) in that our
meaning-mediated world, and our actions that respond to
that world
(including by trying to change or re-create it or just
imagine
it in some
new way), are affected by our encounter with the features of
the semiotic
object, according to some community interpretive practices,
with our own
individual variations on them.
At a very obvious level, bodies can be dressed up in signs:
hair styles,
tans, cosmetics. And this can be taken to a more
"artifactual"
form with
dress, or a more physiological form with, say, body-
building.
From tattoos
to ripped abs is a small shift when we are thinking about
the
body as a
writable/readable object. If we want to get still more
physiological, and
think not only about reading other people's bodies, but
reading our own,
then the proprioceptive feelings we sense within out bodies
can be
considered signs as well, whether exhilaration or nausea,
strength or
weakness, etc. The meaning of these feelings is certainly
culturally>>> mediated. They are physiological phenomena, but
they are also
meaningful> cultural phenomena, with value judgements
attached,
with intertexts in
literature, etc.
And we can deliberately write to our most physiological
states, e.g. with
drugs, to produce feelings that have cultural meanings and
values for us,
whether of calm or elation, energy or hallucination. And to
a
considerable> extent, our modifications of our body
physiology
can be "read" by others,
just as can our made physiques, tattoos, or hair styles.
So I would say that the body mediates our sense of the world
and ourselves
and other people in at least two ways: directly through
physiology, as with
hormonal responses, sensory modalities of perception, bodily
affordances and
dis-affordances ("handicaps" for example), etc. AND also in
these other,
clearly semiotic and cultural ways, as a semiotic artifact,
as
well as with
the cultural overlays of meaning that lie over and color the
meanings and
responses to all the direct physiological mediations.
I do not, however, know what being wooden on a rainy day
feels
like to a
chair.
JAY.
Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke> <
http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke> <
http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>
Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093
On Dec 7, 2009, at 4:14 AM, Mabel Encinas wrote:
Ok. You have a point. Then, lets start thinking from an
embodied approach
:)
Let's accept that the body is an artifact. What is then the
difference>> between a chair and the body. Both are yes,
"products of human art", as you
express it. However, only in the process (practice) there
seem to be a
difference. Both are material and ideal (the body is not
separated from the
mind; the chair, this one here that I feel is made of cloth
and a cushioned
material, plastic, metal, and involves the ideal that a
designer and workers
in a factory transformed so people could seat on). What is
the difference?
Mabel
Date: Mon, 7 Dec 2009 22:53:40 +1100
From: ablunden@mira.net
To: liliamabel@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts
Well, the body is the body is the body. The reason the
question arises for me is when we make generalisations in
which things like person, artefact, consciousness, concept,
action, and so on, figure, where does the body fit in? My
response was that even though it is obviously unique in many
ways, it falls into the same category as artefacts.
My questions to you are: what harm is done? why is anything
ignored? And, what is the body if it is not a material
product of human art, used by human beings?
Andy
Mabel Encinas wrote:
Is this way being fruitful? That is why I do not like to
consider the
body as an artifact. Did not cognitive pscyhology do
that?
(Bruner, Acts
of Meaning). Then intentions and all the teleological
aspects are so
much ignored...
Mabel
Date: Mon, 7 Dec 2009 20:21:09 +1100
From: ablunden@mira.net
To: liliamabel@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts
Sure. But the body has been constructed like a living
machine - the various artefacts that you use
(especially but
not only language and images) are "internalized" in some
way. So one (external) artefact is replaced by another
(internal) artefact. Yes?
Andy
Mabel Encinas wrote:
However, sometimes practices do not involve other
artefact
than the body (some practices are directed to the
body),
and that was
why I was talking about the limit of thinking about the
body as
artefact... is that a limit? That is why I mentioned
the
body as "the
raw material". I was thinking for example practices
linked to
meditation
and the like, for example, among many others.
Mabel
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