Abstract
The chapter expands the new vocabulary of an anthropology of learning by scrutinizing the processes transforming geometrical placements to mattering matter. The chapter introduces two of four ways ethnographers learn to share cultural markers as resources with their ethnographic subjects. Cultural learning processes entail first of all learning through social designations, where word meaning is pointed out by reactions. Secondly, cultural learning processes may take place through practice-based learning, when ethnographers engage in the same activities that engages others. (The remaining aspects of cultural learning processes – culture contrast and scalar learning – are discussed in subsequent chapters.) Through these learning processes, collective connections are aligned and alignments become sediment. New frictions are formed in this forceful dust bunny of connections.
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Notes
- 1.
Some, like Gibson, might claim that sharedness comes from the objects themselves in the world: they afford particular experiences. A dress affords dressing up; a chair affords sitting on it. A clock affords seeing what time it is. From a practice-based learning perspective, this might be true, but from the perspective of a collective consciousness, we must learn word meanings from other human beings. Gibson was inspired by Brentano, who also mentioned that our consciousness has direction and valence. Consciousness has directionality which stems from human engagements. It is not a mental process, but a collective consciousness distributed in practiced places.
- 2.
Though other anthropologists have been very influential in the field (notably Jean Lave, Dorothy Holland, Ed Hutchins and Ray McDermott), few (if any) in the analytical field of cultural–historical activity theory have attempted a connection between Vygotsky’s basic framework and analytical fields like postphenomenology or material feminism, which I have tried out over the years (e.g. Hasse and Hojer 2008; Hasse 2008). As argued throughout this book, I believe that this kind of diffracted reading across analytical fields brings us closer to an understanding of human practice in the empirical field.
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Hasse, C. (2015). Social Designation of Cultural Markers. In: An Anthropology of Learning. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9606-4_5
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