... your comments on my paper regarding, precisely, "curiosity" (this would only need to be two or three pages) got me to think further about the kind of "psychology" that would be compatible with the Durkheim through Garfinkel et al, and I wonder whether a psychology of whatever it is that we might label the category under which "curiosity" (and desire, fear, etc.) might fit. Once, in Chapter 8 of Successful Failure, I developed G.H. Mead's strictures on the 'I' in a way that, I realized later, was "criticized" by Louis Dumont in his last work contrasting France and Germany in their mutual relationship to the conversations about individualism in Europe as being "French"--that is, in starting with a substantive person that is not reduced to its encultured (indeed cultured) self. This makes Bourdieu, as well as most cultural anthropology in the U.S., "German" rather than "French." I guess I may want to stick to my "French" guns... [from a message to George Bond - ]
Dear colleagues,
In the spirit of our recent conversations (which I thoroughly enjoyed, and for which I am most thankful), I want to engage (thanks to Professor Bond for the word) further on Garfinkel and power.
The more I thought about it, and the more I convinced myself that G. has always been exploring issues of power and action in power. Consider the paper on degradation ceremonies which, as Jim has been pushing, really deal with (de)gradation as the shifting by people in power of the positionality of the subject (that is the object of the ceremony): when we received our Ph.D.'s our biographies were rewritten as people-who-would-receive a PhD from the beginning of time and for ever (if we used Lave's vocabulary we could say that the shift to "full" participation cannot happen without public acknowledgment of 'learning'--that this would be ritualized even in "modern" societies, through formal "examinations," "commencements," parties with family and friends, is really not surprising). Obviously, the paper about Agnes and passing is all about what people can do in situations of overwhelming (hegemonic?) power. Finally, even the papers on instructions and lines, can be rewritten as papers in the ongoing operation of power, and, perhaps even more ominously, in a world that could be modeled as lines within lines within lines, as papers in the details of our cooptation by the most dominant legitimate and not so legitimate powers of our own local exercises of power: disciplining someone into the mechanics of a post office line is also disciplining this person into the mechanics of state bureaucracies, and so on. I find all this infinitely more useful as guide for research, and as account of human activity, than Foucault's musing on wardens in the panopticon: it is Garfinkel (as a type) that can guide us to look at what wardens actually do, and what the watched themselves do. (and all this can be restated also as a major step from Foucault on "examinations" in a world of exams within exams within exams--each level amenable to observation and analysis, as evidenced by the work of conversational analysts in medical settings, and by the work of Alison understood as an analysis of the setting of settings that, together, make the world those who will be regraded as "hard-of-hearing" enter. [6/6/2005]
Dear Herve,
The conference was a delightful experience, and one that I have often hoped for and never experienced -- to be in a room where there seemed a general agreement that any moment of social order was a miracle, albeit a quite commonplace miracle. So I am still bemused by my own surprise when reflecting on the conference in hindsight to see so much agreement between the papers and so much metapragmatic discussion of disagreement and unease in people's responses to the papers and the overarching themes of the conference. After all, it would take more than simply a minor miracle to have more than three academics agree that they agree.
Irregardless of our recent ritual's metapragmatic questions of what unites us, I want to suggest an agreement, a unifying theme, that might entice publishers to be believe there will be readers. And I apologize if what I am about to say is the obvious. I am wondering if selling this volume as a new approach to thinking about small-scale change (and by small scale, I mean how contexts can be changed). One of the things that I found quite interesting about all of the papers is how the techniques for determining what causes change and when change happens was affected by a focus on telling instead of learning. Telling, I am realizing, is always our field interlocutors' comments on both how people should live and what the purported social order in which they live might be. So it is their comment both on what it might mean to act agentively, and what they understand it means to act reactively, in accordance with what they perceive to be how their social world is ordered. This means that people are constantly construing two axises of potential change in the moment of telling others what to do.
As analysts, it means that we no longer get to be arbiters of understanding when or why change has occured (which Portia kept insisting). We can only unpack how other people perceive both the possibility for change and its instantiations. And while it may mean that we (in the volume) are no longer in the business of knowing change when it happens, we are in the business of understanding what takes places in contexts to produce other people's experiences of change that seems to last over time. And this would be something that any idealistic reader of ethnographies of education might want to know.
I can put my suggestion in another way. I was thinking a lot during the conference about Roy Wagner's discussion of what anyone needs to know in order to believe that someone else has intentions (this is his article in Other Intentions). He says that you (person on the ground, not analyst) need to be able to have a mental map of what counts as spontaneous behavior and what counts as reactive behavior. And what I like about this division between the spontaneous and the reactive is that it moves us (analysts) away from thinking in terms of individual choice (and hence individual autonomy). What everyone in the conference was describing was how telling others what to do relied on this assumption that the people telling knew what could count as spontaneous or reactive behavior. They were constructing notions of the spontaneous in their telling. Thus they were constructing moments for transformations. And this is what the contributors to this conference have become adept at, observing how others prescribe spontaneous behavior, a prescription that the people prescribing hope will perdue until (perhaps) the behavior becomes reactive.
So this is why I think the whole volume is about change and transformation from a particularly helpful approach that avoids many of the pitfalls that scholars of social change get into. And I currently am intrigued by the title "Telling Transformation", but I have a penchant for alliteration in titles.
I hope this suggestion is appealing. By now you probably have thought of something more explicitly sexy for publishers other than -- we have an innovative approach to the question of how to teach change. But I thought I would suggest it, since I keep thinking and thinking about this.
Best wishes,
Ilana