If I didn't know you better, Andy, I could take your opening sentence
to be a declaration of your adherence to idealism.
That aside, for sure prolepsis is involved. It is central to the
imagined futures of valued life ways, that are then embodied in the
larger structures of our everyday involvement in activities.
Culturally mediated time is non-linear. Whence our second nature.
mike
On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 5:15 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
Yes greg, kinship is an ideal, a cultural construct, necessary for
the maintenance of certain kinds of project. In cultures where
primogeniture prevailed (Jane Austen's England, Japan, for
example), if the eldest son was a ne'er-do-well, the head of the
household would adopt a young man from another family and simply
declare him eldest son. Just as today, couples seek to adopt in
order to realise their commitment to project their own life
project into future generations (prolepsis?). There are many forms.
Andy
Greg Thompson wrote:
Yes, this idea of projects works very nicely for capturing the
mutual imbrications of persons in one another's lives.
But I'm still caught up on "voluntary associations" vis a vis
kinship. My "beef" here is with the idea of historical
discontinuity of primitive vs. modern systems. I think there
always were "voluntary association" as you put it, and perhaps
the major difference is one of scale.
Consider this passage from Marshall Sahlins on kinship:
"On the Alaskan North Slope, the Iñupiat will name children
and sometimes adults after dead persons, thus making them
members of their namesakes’ families. Over a lifetime,
reports Barbara Bodenhorn (2000: 137), an Iñupiat may acquire
four or five such names and families, although those who
bestow the names were not necessarily related before, and in
any case they are never the birth parents. Begetters, begone:
natal bonds have virtually no determining force in Iñupiat
kinship. Kinship statuses are not set by the begetters of
persons but by their namers. Indeed, it is the child who
chooses the characteristics of birth, including where he or
she will be born and of what sex.""
Thus, kinship itself can be a "voluntary association" that
holds different groups together. Exogamous affinal kinship
relationships make the point still more clearly - kinship is
always a "voluntary association" and one that holds groups
together in projects by virtue of imputing a sameness of
substance.
Today it seems that the modes of establishing a sameness of
substance are making all kinds of inter-relations possible
that were previously unthinkable. Creating bonds by marital
relations are rather limiting in terms of bond-forming since
marriages typically involve small numbers of persons -
notwithstanding polygynous and polyandrous marriages - which
increase the numbers of connections only slightly. Those
numbers are miniscule in comparison to the bonds that are
formed by modern statehood and nationality.
Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities provides a nice
case study of the kinds of projects that you speak of, Andy,
and with respect to the emergence of "nationality". In
Anderson's narrative, states are formed by the process of
nationalization of a language and, critically, by the creation
of a national press. Collective projects (the basis for
imagined communities such as a "state") thus are implied by
collective representations of happenings in the world.
But the situation has been transformed still more by recent
developments.
Today a student in Brazil can watch a video of the tazing (or
pepper-spraying) of a student or bunch of students in
California and feel a kind of shared substance - that she and
I share some essential substance of commitment to a cause or
oppression by a dominant power. It would seem that this
creates whole new possible forms of
kinship/nationalism/solidarity. A step towards conditions in
which workers of the world might begin to see their common
situation?
maybe that's taking things too far.
-greg
On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 7:16 AM, Andy Blunden
<ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>>> wrote:
And as Mike sketched a few days ago, what an amazing little
country Finland is!!
The point is that in order to understand an object (such
as the
unique nature of Finland, or the upsurge in Brazil) - complex,
dynamic entities - we need *units* which are themselves
processes
of development. For example, I don't believe we can
understand a
nation state as a collection of *social groups* (eg ethnic, or
economic, etc.), but rather as a process made up of many other
distinct processes of development, i.e., projects, which
interact
with one another.
Formally speaking, the "systems of activity" which Yrjo
introduced
are indeed processes of development; but "project" is much
more
explicitly so. Further, we individuals apprehend these
units (be
they "systems of activity" or "projects") as *concepts*,
and the
rules, norms, community, division of labour, etc. etc.,
*flow from
the concept* as does the *ever-changing conception of the
*object*. If objects (and community, norms, etc.),
pre-exist an
activity, then we don't have Activity Theory at all, we
have some
variety of structuralism of functionalism.
So it is important to begin from the project, each of
which is a
particular instance of a concept, and all the elements (norms,
tools, etc.) of the project flow from its concept and the
conditions in which it is developing.
So for example, I don't think it is appropriate to
conceive the
social movements, voluntary associations, protests, political
conflicts and alliances of 20th century Finland as
"systems" or
"institutions." They are projects, projects which constructed
modern Finland, and which indeed, one day, become
"systems", but
never irreversibly. The institutions which are the products of
social movements, protests, and so on (projects) are never
irreversibly reified as "fields" or "figured worlds" or
"pratico-inerts" or "structures" or any of the other
renderings of
the social fabric as composed of dead and lacking in
teleological
content.
Andy
Rauno Huttunen wrote:
Hello,
Similar things happened in Finland too. See article by
professor Martti Siisiäinen: Social Movements, Voluntary
Associations and Cycles of Protest in Finland 1905-91
(Scandinavian Political Studies, Bind 15, 1992).
https://tidsskrift.dk/index.php/scandinavian_political_studies/article/view/13149/25059
Rauno
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<mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
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[xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
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<mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
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Andy Blunden [ablunden@mira.net
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net>>]
puolesta
Lähetetty: 26. kesäkuuta 2013 3:30
Kopio: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Aihe: Re: [xmca] Re: Knotworking (ex: Double stimulation?)
But to make a distinction is not necessarily to set up a
dichotomy.
In Australian social history the appearance of voluntary
associations n
the 19th century (mostly trade union-type
organisations, but
also sports
and recreation, mutual-aid of various kinds, and later
political parties
and groups) was a significant development, which meant
people
regularly
travelling long distances to stitch together the
fabric of the
emerging
nation. In the US, the parallel role was played, I
believe, to
a great
extent, also by Protestant sects, who pioneered the
building
of new
bonds of sociability and trust across great distances.
These New World projects constructed a new kind of civil
society and the
basis for modernity. According to Hegel for example,
modernity is
characterised by the eclipse of family as the chief
bond and
political
force in a state, by voluntary associations, such as
professional
associations or regional community organisations,
where people of
differing traditions construct new modern conditions of
collaboration.
But of course, the family and the state both remain in
place!
Andy
Greg Thompson wrote:
Yes, Andy, I think the anthropological notion of
kinship
captures your
point that not all biological relatives are "kin".
Anthropologist
David Schneider, for example, points out how
kinship is
really just
the Aristotelian notion of "identity", and that
"kinship" is
fundamentally a matter of sameness of substance. Thus,
political and
religious affiliations are, in his view, systems
of kinship.
Seems like the same would be true of so-called
"voluntary
association"
(scare quotes because of skepticism of notions of
voluntary and the
assumptions it makes about us as subjects). Any
voluntary
association
worth its salt will surely have this sense of shared
substance (and
with regard to the making of this shared substance,
Durkheim is
essential - but that's a different story for a
different
time!). And
don't most of these organizations have some sense of
kinship built
into their relational terms, whether "brother" or
"brotherhood" or
"family" or whatever?
-greg
On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 6:47 PM, Andy Blunden
<ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>>
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net>>>> wrote:
Yes, there is no doubt that the commitment
many people
have to
continuing the work of their parents and even
ancestors, and their
investment in their children, evidences a
project, an
archetypal
project in fact. "Voluntary associations" are
historically a
relatively recent invention, prior to which
kinship
was possibly
the most significant project in human life. Of
course,
it is not
always the case that a kinship relation always
indicates the
relevance of the concept of "project" - I have
cousins
whom I have
never met and to whom I have no commitment
whatsoever.
Andy
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Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
883 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
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