Abstract
This chapter draws on a comparative study of the reading and writing activities of young people in Brazil and Germany. Identifying both reading and writing as potential ways of young people creating a sense of themselves, rather than merely activities that are associated with the normative expectations of schools; data discussed here shows how these activities operate as resources for personal becoming. By using Spinoza ’s categories of freemen (sic), tyrant, slave, and priest to interrogate the accounts of themselves and their reading and writing given by the young people in both cultural environments, the chapter demonstrates a novel way of looking across cultures to tease out differences as well as similarities. The analysis raises questions about how these differences might be traced back to societal processes. These categories therefore both allow a nuanced reading of the young people’s accounts and raise some fundamental questions for comparative studies about (i) how particular cultures function a media to produce free men, tyrants, slaves, and priests?—and (ii) what mechanisms enable this? The chapter concludes with a short reflection on how Hedegaard’s work on institutional practices motive orientation within institutional settings may help address aspects of these questions.
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Notes
- 1.
This project was jointly carried out by a Brazilian group under the direction of Maria Teresa Freitas (University of Juiz de Fora) and by a German group under my direction at the University of Siegen in 1998 and 1999.
- 2.
Benjamin (1969) presented a theoretical conception on this issue in his essay on the “Programm eines Proletarischen Kindertheaters” (“Plan for a Proletarian Children’s Theater”).
- 3.
As Sheldon H. White pointed out in his foreword to M. Cole Cultural Psychology (1996): “In the formation of a human culture across historical time, cultural mediation produces a mode of developmental change in which the activities of prior generations are cumulated in the present as the specifically human part of the environment. The social world influences the individual not only through the agency of flesh and blood people, who converse, communicate , model or persuade, but through the social practices and objects unseen people have built up in the world around the individual. There are the prescribed forms of social interaction: routines, schemas, scripts, games, rituals, cultural forms. There are the manufactured objects that silently impregnate the future of the world with human intelligence: words , maps, television sets, subway stations” (XIV).
- 4.
Yet, at the same time, our project was committed to Lurija’s conception of a romantic science. The task was to reconstruct the individual case as a cosmos in which the universal appears in the concrete in a specific way (cf. Lurija 1983: 190).
- 5.
There is an intimate implicit connection between the slave and the tyrant which Spinoza illustrates with the concrete example of the monarchy in his “Theological-Political Treatise”: “But if, in despotic statecraft, the supreme and essential mystery be to hoodwink the subjects, and to mask the fear, which keeps them down, with the specious garb of religion, so that men may fight as bravely for slavery as for safety, and count it not shame but highest honour to risk their blood and their lives for the vainglory of a tyrant; yet in a free state no more mischievous expedient could be planned or attempted” (Foreword).
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Fichtner, B. (2019). Reading and Writing as a Cultural Praxis of Youth. In: Edwards, A., Fleer, M., Bøttcher, L. (eds) Cultural-Historical Approaches to Studying Learning and Development. Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research, vol 6. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_19
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