Reading :: Our Towns

Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America
By James Fallows and Deborah Fallows

I confess that I did not read this whole book. It's well and engagingly written, but it's also a popular book, with lots of emphasis on stories, which I found not to be dense enough. So I found myself reading the introduction, then a couple of the chapters, then skipping ahead to the end. 

The setup is that the Fallows spent five years traveling across the US in a single-prop plane, visiting dozens of towns. They present a chapter on each town, grouped by year, yielding a total of 35 chapters. Since the towns ranged from Pittsburgh to the American Prairie Reserve in Montana, they describe quite a range. And each chapter is described in narrative format: We arrived under these conditions, talked to these people, read these things in the town library, learned these things about this town. 

Individually, the chapters were interesting. But I quickly became bored because I was not actually interested in the individual towns -- I was interested in how the insights built into something larger. The Introduction didn't give me a strong idea of where the book was going, so after the sixth chapter, I skipped to the last two: "What We Saw and What We Learned" and "10 1/2 Signs of Civic Success."

In "What We Saw and What We Learned," the Fallows reflect on the imprints of the past and identify three unpredictable elements that "can show us what to anticipate and what to seize on right now": (1) "the national shock that galvanizes effort," such as how we reacted to Sputnik; (2) "the ability of political power to control strictly economic forces," as when the New Deal realigned the relationship between public and economic forces; and "fertile experimentation with new approaches and possibilities," as when the states were conceived as laboratories of democracy (pp.398-399). 

In "10 1/2 Signs of Civic Success," the Fallows say that "these things were true of the cities large or small that were working best":

1. "People work together on practical local possibilities, rather than allowing bitter disagreements about national politics to keep them apart" (p.402)
2. "You can pick out the local patriots" (p.402)
3. "The phrase 'public-private partnership' refers to something real" (p.402)
4. "People know the civic story" (p.403)
5. "They have downtowns" (p.404)
6. "They are near a research university" (p.404)
7. "They have, and care about, a community college" (p.405)
8. "They have distinct, innovative schools" (p.406)
9. "They make themselves open" (p.406)
10. "They have big plans" (p.407)

And the final half-criterion? "A city on the way back will have at least one craft brewery, maybe more, and probably some small distilleries, too" (p.407). They attribute this characteristic to the fact that "A town that has them also has a certain type of entrepreneur, and a critical mass of young (except for me) customers" (p.408; the "me" here is James Fallows). 

That's the book. If you're interested in what makes a town work, but you're not interested in an academic text, this book will give you insights and plenty of stories. Personally, I found myself skimming a little and then skipping to the end -- reading just a few accounts of town visits helped me to contextualize the claims at the end. 

Reading :: The Domestication of the Savage Mind

The Domestication of the Savage Mind
By Jack Goody

I had some concerns about the title of this book, but these were quickly addressed: Goody takes issue with the primitive-advanced dichotomy that anthropologists and sociologists of the past have adopted, a dichotomy that has primed scholars to examine current relations aside from the social system in which they have developed (p.2). Along these lines, he critiques Levi-Strauss' The Savage Mind for its ahistorical unity (p.4) and urges us to think in terms of more specific criteria—with one starting point being the acquisition of language (p.9). 

He further charges that sociology and anthropology tend to neglect technical changes: Durkheim steered clear of material culture, while Weber moved emphasis from production to ideology (pp.10-11). Goody, on the other hand, locates differences not in the mind but in the mechanics of communicative acts (p.12). Specifically, he is interested in "non-speech uses of language in writing,"such as "tables, lists, formulae and recipes" (p.17). 

In Chapter 2, Goody takes up intellectual behavior in preliterate societies. For Durkheim, he notes, the highest intellectual activity was social (p.21); Durkheim was interested in "society" and wanted to attribute everything to it (p.22). 

In Chapter 3, Goody turns to literacy. He argues that culture is a series of communicative acts (p.37) and thus writing, specifically alphabetical literacy, give oral communication a more permanent form, allowing it to be scrutinized (p.37). This also allowed orthodoxy to become ascendant. 

Chapters 4 and 5 are about tables and lists, respectively. Unfortunately, we don't get deeply into either, at least in the sense I was expecting. He does argue that writing doesn't just duplicate speech, it changes the nature of language use (p.76). In particular, the list rarely appears in oral discourse (p.80). Goody identifies seven distinct senses of "list, " including retrospective (e.g., kings or events; p.80), plan (e.g., shopping list; p.80), and lexical (e.g., inventory; p.80). Lists are processed differently from oral speech or from other writing (p.81). The list "relies on discontinuity," "depends on physical placement," "can be read in different directions," "has a clear-cut beginning and a precise end," and "encourages the ordering of the items" (p.81). The boundaries in particular make categories more visible and abstract (p.81). Writing allows one to re-sort items by different criteria, and in comparison to highly contextualized oral information, it can be simplified and abstract (p.87). Writing, he says, sharpens categories but also questions the nature of the classes (p.102). 

Chapter 6 shifts to the question of formulas,. As with tables and lists, "the formalisation of writing flouts the flexibility of speech, and it does so in a manner that is both distorting and generative" (p.112). By "formulae," he means "fixed statements of relationships in abstract form" (p.112), and he means them broadly, in the sense of formalized types of communication such as epics. (We might put genre under this category as well; cf. p.120.) Among other things, Goody claims here that rhetoric relies on "the deliberate analysis ... that writing makes possible" (p.114), an argument that aligns with Olson's. Quoting Ong, Goody argues that rhetoric is an art developed by a literate culture to formalize oral communication skills that structure thought (p.116). 

Overall, I found this to be an exciting and generative read. Most of the ideas are not new to me, but Goody does a great job of drawing them together and relating them to anthropological and archaeological insights into writing. If you're interested in writing as it structures how we encounter and make sense of the world, definitely pick this book up.

Reading :: On Task

On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done
By David Badre

Another short review. I picked up this book on Kindle to get a better handle on what cognitive neuroscience has to say about tasks. The book is readable, full of examples and research summaries pitched to a general audience. But at the same time, I found it a little frustrating, since it tries to balance between the author's deep specialist knowledge and the general audience register. That is a tricky balance to keep, and it's hard for an author to figure out (for instance) how much detail is enough, how much explanation is needed at a given stage, and how much repetition to bring across chapters. I don't think the balance was quite right here, but to be fair, the book was Finalist for the PROSE Award in Popular Science and Mathematics, Association of American Publishers—so take what I say with a grain of salt. 

In any case, parts of the book are fascinating. Badre notes that we still don't have a good explanation of how people orchestrate even a fairly simple task, such as making a cup of coffee (p.1). The brain must generate and track plans and link goals with actions, AKA cognitive control or executive functions (and the author acknowledges that these are slightly different in the specialist literature, p.2). "Cognitive control processes live in the murky spaces between knowledge and action," he adds (p.3). 

In subsequent chapters, Badre discusses the evolutionary origins of human cognitive control; stability and flexibility; hierarchies; multitasking; the tricky question of stopping (i.e., finishing or abandoning a task); and how cognitive control changes over the lifespan. Among other things, Badre notes that our memories are really geared more toward making successful future predictions rather than recording the past; that our cognitive abilities decline after 30, with a sharp decline after 65, and that this sharp decline is probably due to the fact that we compensate failing cognitive functions with other cognitive functions until we can no longer compensate adequately; and that problems that were traditionally framed as inhibition problems are more likely deficits in motivation.

Overall, the book is a really interesting look at what cognitive neuroscience has to say about how we perform tasks. At the same time, it tends to get a bit into the weeds, limiting its clear application to our own lives. Still, I expect that I'll revisit it as I continue thinking about what makes people productive.

Reading :: Startup Communities

Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City
By Brad Feld

Here's another brief review. Brad Feld uses Boulder, Colorado's startup community as an extended example of how to build and maintain a healthy startup community. Through vivid stories, he discusses the principles of a vibrant startup community, the participants such a community needs, its leadership, its classical problems, and the relationships such a community needs with universities, government, and other community members.

The book is just under 190 pages, but it's a quick read -- I read it in one (long) sitting, but it's really written to be consumed in short bites. Like some other books I recently reviewed, it has a lot of illustrative stories, so it's not a dense read (for good or ill). But it does a good job of crystallizing the deep experience Feld has with building, maintaining, and elevating startup communities. If that's your interest, definitely pick it up. And if your interest is more specific -- such as starting a company, participating in a university-industry partnership, or visiting an incubator -- you'll find the book useful as well. 

Reading :: Small-Town America

Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future
By Robert Wuthnow

Just a quick review. 

In this readable, public-facing book, Robert Wuthnow draws lessons about small-town America based on surveys and interviews he and his graduate students have collected across his career. Based on this work, he paints a picture of who lives in small towns, how they view them, how they develop bonds with each other, how they make sense of work, leadership, faith, and morality, and how they view their futures. 

Along the way, Wuthnow illustrates his points with vivid details and stories. The result is well illustrated and often gripping. But I confess that as I read this book and others like it, I became impatient -- I want my information to be more dense so I can move faster!

Still, the book does a great job of exploring these aspects of small towns and both comparing and contrasting different communities. I think it would be even better if these small towns were contrasted more effectively in terms of region, industry, or other differentiating factors. But it's a solid read and I recommend it if you're interested in how small towns work.

Reading :: The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society

The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society
By Jack Goody

I've been meaning to pick up Jack Goody for a long time—really, since I was in my MA program—but didn't really get motivated until recently, when seeing citations in Comaroff and Comaroff. Now I wish I hadn't waited so long. Goody, a social anthropologist, uses his fieldwork in West Africa as well as literature from the Ancient Near East to better understand how writing impacts human societies. 

In Chapter One, he argues that only literary religions can be religions of conversion (p.5) because conversion itself is a function of the boundaries that the written word defines (p.10). In written communication,

1. codes extend outside boundaries to all the faithful
2. written statements must be abstracted from situations to the universal (pp.12-13)

Thus religions of the book impose restrictions on literacy and control over education. Later, this power is assumed by the state (p.17—cf. Vygotsky and Luria's Uzbek expedition). The development of bureaucracy widened the gap between church and state (p.19).

In Chapter Two, Goody explores "the part played by economic activities in the origin of the first complete writing systems" (p.45). He draws on Schmandt-Besserat's account of the development of writing in the Middle East, noting that writing functions as communication at a distance, but also as a means to distance oneself from communication (p.50). And he notes that "writing encourages a non-syntactical use of language that renders it especially adapted to the purposes of accounting that are so characteristic of Aegean Linear B" (p.54). In enabling administrators to more precisely forecast needs, writing resulted in the penetration of the State into domestic life (p.63). "The nature of writing means that each activity is transformed in significant ways by its introduction" (p.67). And he concludes the chapter by claiming that neo-colonialism was successful in societies that did not have a strong written tradition that could stand up to written cultures (p.86).

In Chapter Three, he asks: "how do regimes with writing differ from those without?" (p.87). He argues that "The segregation of administrative activities in a specific organization, the bureaucracy ... is critically dependent, in this extended form, on the capacity for writing to communicate at a distance, to store information in files, and to tend to depersonalize interaction" (pp.89-90). Literate bureaucracy provides a "consolidating factor in state-building" (p.112). 

We'll leave it there. But if you are interested in thinking through the relationships among literacy and organization, this book is a must-read.

Reading :: Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume Two: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier

Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier
By John L. and Jean Comaroff

I just reviewed Volume One, in which (I just noticed) the order of the authors was reversed. Volume One explored the early encounter between British missionaries and the Southern Tswana in South Africa; this volume explores the later colonial world, as "these processes worked themselves out over the much longer run" (p.7). 

In this volume, they make seven claims about colonialism:

1. Colonialism was a process in political economy and culture. (p.19)
2. Colonialism effected changes via informal rather than formal agents of empire. (p.21)
3. Colonialism remade the colonizers as much as the colonized. (p.22)
4. The categories of "colonizers" and "colonized" are not just polar; each category should be internally differentiated. (p.24)
5. Still, colonizers and colonized are represented as poles, a feature that is intrinsic to colonialism. (p.25)
6. Non-Western societies were complex and fluid, and their workings had a direct effect on colonial encounter; the old view of these societies as "closed," "traditional," or "unchanging" is inaccurate. (p.27)
7. "Colonialism was founded on a series of discontinuities and contradictions." (p.27)

These come together in the authors' central argument: that "colonial encounters everywhere consisted in a complex dialectic: a dialectic, mediated by social differences and cultural distinctions, that transformed everyone and everything caught up in it, if not in the same way" (p.28).

Much of the rest of the Introduction involves the authors taking their critics to task—the critics who argued with their Volume One. As an outsider to the discussion, I was entertained. The rest of the book is densely argued, drawing from archives to explore the forms of agency and resistance in this dialectical encounter.

Like Volume One, Volume Two is tough sledding for nonspecialists. But if you have an interest in colonialism and post-colonialism, agency, or just culture, definitely take a look.

Reading :: Of Revelation and Revolution Volume One: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa

Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa
By Jean and John Comaroff

In this thick volume, two anthropologists examine the early phases of British missionary work in South Africa, among the Southern Tswana (1820-1920). Specifically, they are interested in "a plurality of 'cultures'—that is, of 'systems' of symbols, values, and meanings which are reified and objectified in the course of colonization itself" (p.28). They see colonization as a dialectic in which British missionaries and colonizers introduced changes, the Tswana had their own ripostes, and the two cultures became objectified in relation to each other (p.206). That is, the British were changed in this process just as the Tswana were. 

The Comaroffs argue that the Tswana had agency and participated in the dialectic—colonization didn't just happen to them, it was a process of mutual struggle. But at the same time, the Comaroffs are not arguing that the dialectic was equal or that the Tswana chose to be colonized. Rather, they want to disrupt the idea of colonization as a unidirectional imposition of culture, By examining how Christianity (which has a history of malleability—think about how Samhain was transformed into All Hallow's Eve) was sloppily repackaged in terms of Tswana theology, or how colonists began to adopt Tswana architecture and clothing, they examine larger questions of culture and power.

The book is much more complex than I can delve into in a quick review, so I'll end by saying: If you are interested in issues of culture, colonization, and power, it's definitely worth a read. However, nonspecialists may find it to be tough going. 

Reading :: Strangers in their own Land

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
By Arlie Russell Hochschild

In this National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestseller, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes the result of her five years of fieldwork around Lake Charles, Louisiana. As she explains in the Preface, she was alarmed by the hostility between the American Right and Left. "I had some understanding of the liberal left camp, I thought, but what was happening on the right?" (p.xi). Specifically, she wanted to understand the Right's "deep story," or what narrative the Right emotionally felt to be true (p.xi), so she reached out across a wall of empathy (p.5), using a contact in the Lakes Charles area to make contacts in the community and conduct long interviews with residents. These interviews focused on environmental issues, partly because they affect everyone, partly because the Lake Charles area had encountered severe environmental issues as a result of decades of sloppy regulation of the petroleum and chemical industries. 

Based on these interviews, she put together a "deep story," a story that she presented to her informants to see if they thought it accurately reflected their emotional experience. In this story, they are in line for the American Dream, waiting patiently, working hard. But the line seems to have stopped moving, and they see someone—is that President Obama?—letting people cut in line! (Ch.9—she does much better at telling this story than I do at summarizing it). Her informants, she says, all agreed that this story reflected their experience and explained their anger at the Left, which they perceived as putting classes of people and even protected animals in front of their interests. (To my mind, it sounded like the informants saw themselves as the brother of the Prodigal Son. When the Prodigal Son came home, his father celebrated him and threw a party. The brother, who had been faithful and steady, wanted to know why he had never been given a party.)

So Hochschild has accomplished her mission to understand the anger and mourning on the American Right. She has made explicit this deep story. My main criticism is that she doesn't contrast this with the (a?) deep story on the Left. Perhaps she felt like this deep story was beyond her fieldwork, or she thought that most readers would be on the Left and didn't need that story explained. But without such an explanation, readers may be left with the impression that the Right has a story—a fairy tale of grievance—while the Left sees cold hard reality. But Hochschild makes clear that the Left is not objective: "I don't believe we understand anyone's politics, right or left, without it. For we all have a deep story" (p.135). Can the Left really understand the Right, or their dynamic, without better understanding itself?

Still, it's a strong book and can teach us a lot about the rise of Trump (see the Afterword) as well as the Right's COVID response. If you're on the Left and interested in compassionately understanding the Right—or if you're on the Right and interested in how a sociologist on the Left thinks you tick—definitely pick it up.

Reading :: Learning SQL

Learning SQL: Master SQL Fundamentals
By Alan Beaulieu

Just a quick review for this book, which is the first book I have ever been interested enough to pull from a Little Free Library in my neighborhood. The book was published in 2005. I started using MySQL for research databases in 2001 – wow, 20 years ago. Fortunately, MySQL has changed very little in that time, so it's still useful!

Yes, I can get everything I need from online sources, but this book explains the concepts clearly and simply. If you're interested in SQL, it's worth a read—especially for the price I got it.

(Long time, no see)

In fact, my last book review was in late May. I haven't given up on the blog, I have just been buried in other commitments—research, service, and teaching have all been busy this year.

However, I have been reading, and my bookshelf is starting to sag under the weight of the unreviewed books (metaphorically, of course). I owe at least 9 reviews, which I hope to start posting soon.

In the meantime, I just ordered half a dozen more books—mostly in rural sociology. It's part of a story you'll be reading about if you follow along with my upcoming publications over the next 18-24 months. 

(no more comments)

 Okay, for a while now, the only comments I have been getting are comment spam. So I'm going to shut them off. My apologies to those of you who may be thinking about commenting -- hit me up on Twitter instead!

Reading :: Writing as Material Practice

Writing as Material Practice
Edited by Kathryn E. Piquette and Ruth D. Whitehouse

I ran into this 2013 collection in 2019. It's a free download, so I dropped it into Google Drive, and finally got to it -- er. maybe early 2021? It's a blur.

In any case, it grew out of a 2009 archaeology conference focused on understanding writing as material practice. I'm not an archaeologist by any means, but I'm very interested in understanding the material practice of writing as it developed, so I approached this collection as an interested outsider.

In Piquette and Whitehouse's "Introduction: Developing an approach to writing as material practice," they explain the book's focus: "This book grapples with the issue of writing and related graphical modes as forms of material culture. The diverse case studies are unified and underpinned by the notion that writing is fundamentally material — that it is preceded by and constituted through the material practices of human practitioners" (p.1). They add that "The term ‘material’ is conceptualised in variable ways in the volume’s chapters, but overall it refers to the stuff on which writing appears, and for additive techniques that which physically constitutes written marks" (p.3). 

The examples come from different places and times. For instance, in "The Twisting Paths of Recall: Khipu (Andean cord notation) as artifact," Frank Salomon discusses how "Khipu had a brief, spectacularly productive heyday as the official medium of the Inka state (established some time during the 15th century ce until 1532 ce)" (p.15) -- lucidly describing how they work, noting that they are actually pre-Inca (p.21) and possibly trace back to 1000 BCE (p.22), and describing their use into the colonial era at least up to 1600 CE (p.22). In fact, colonists first relied on them, then accepted them in courts, then required them (p.23). They are still used in some Andean areas. Salomon adds that "Inka administration itself relied on widespread khipu competence available throughout rural society, and not on a restricted clique of experts" -- but "I argue that khipus functioned as operational devices or simulators, and not as fixed texts" (p.30). 

What does that mean? In contemporary usage, "It acts as a visual image symbolizing all the data (knot) which will be resolved (unknotted) at the assembly. At the end of the meeting, the khipu is not re-cabled but rather carried to its home unbound, signaling the resolution of data" (p.32). And importantly, these khipu are not read alone, but together (p.35). 

Another interesting chapter was "Saving on Clay: The Linear B practice of cutting tablets" by Helena Tomas, in which the author investigates how clay tablets in the Aegean Bronze Age show signs of being cut down to save on materials. "Although many types of clay sealings were used for recording this administrative business, the clay tablet is the most prominent document type in Linear A and Linear B, whereas in Cretan Hieroglyphic it is present only in small quantities" (p.176). But they were not trying to save on clay per se: "since clay is not a particularly scarce substance

in Greece, saving was probably not the main motivation behind the practice of cutting tablets. A more likely aim appears to be a reduction of the size of tablets, and consequently of their weight, in order to economise on the space needed for their storage (for the maximum of one year, as numerous studies have shown)" (p.180). For most tablets, all we know for sure is that they were usually not stored on the ground floor. The exception tells us a lot: the "Archives Complex of Pylos, thanks to its placement on the ground floor. Here more than 1000 tablets were stored, probably on wooden shelves ... . The small size of the two archive-rooms and the construction of the shelves, possibly not fit for a heavy load, may have required strict removal of superfluous clay on tablets" (p.180). And: "The transport of tablets within the palace may have also required removal of unused clay. It has been suggested that tablets were transported in wicker baskets on top of which clay labels were pressed. These labels had no string that would attach them to the baskets, but were simply pressed against them while the clay was still moist, so traces of wickerwork are visible on their backs" (p.180). 

The author also notes incisions across some tablets and speculates that these were where tablets could be snapped in half (p.183). 

Other chapters are intriguing too. For instance, in "Straight, Crooked and Joined-up Writing: An early Mediterranean view," Alan Johnston considers "the extent to which writing surfaces, rather than other considerations, may be seen to have influenced the appearance of text in the early centuries of alphabetic writing in the Mediterranean world" (p.193). And in "Written Greek but Drawn Egyptian: Script changes in a bilingual dream papyrus," Stephen Kidd describes an account that switches between two writing systems: this case "helps one to begin to think of language in more material terms, and language-shifts not as purely cerebral events, but as events interconnected with physical practices and the memories of such practices. For the Greco-Egyptian of Ptolemaios’ day, the processes of writing Greek and Egyptian were highly different — while Greek was ‘written’, Egyptian was ‘painted’ — and so Ptolemaios, in his language shift, was not just choosing between two different languages, but between what were usually two very different practices of writing" (p.245). 

Again, I'm no archaeologist, so I can't provide a good evaluation of this work. But the collection makes fascinating reading. If you are also interested in the materiality of writing, definitely take a look. 

Reading :: Becoming Human

Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny
By Michael Tomasello

Recently I reviewed Tomasello's earlier book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. This present book comes a couple of decades later (2019) and is a capstone on Tomasello's work as Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (1998-2018) as well as his previous work. In this research, he compared how humans develop during the first seven years of life, comparing them with other primates (chimpanzees and bonobos). Rather than focusing on evolution, he focused on development, and the results suggest eight developmental pathways that differentiate us from other primates: "social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity" (from the blurb on the back of the book). In all of these, other primates have rudimentary abilities, but our capacity for shared intentionality transforms these abilities into our uniquely human characteristics of cognition and sociality.

In Chapter 1, Tomasello says he is working within a neo-Vygotskian framework: "uniquely human forms of cognition and sociality emerge in human ontogeny through, and only through, species-unique forms of sociocultural activity." It is neo-Vygotskian because it places "human sociocultural activity within the framework of modern evolutionary theory," thus "seeking to identify the ways in which humans are biologically prepared for engaging in their unique forms of sociocultural activity" (pp.6-7). In doing so, he develops an ontogenetic account that "invokes three sets of processes that together construct particular developmental pathways": 

1. "the ontogeny of human cognitive and social uniqueness is structured by the maturation of children's capacities for shared intentionality," starting with "joint intentionality at around nine months of age" and leading to "the emergence of collective intentionality at around three years of age" (p.8)
2. "children's unique experiences, especially their sociocultural experiences," including two crucial ones: "interactions with knowledgeable and authoritative adults, who provide key experiences relevant to the transmitive dimension of culture" and "interactions with coequal peers, who constitute especially challenging partners for social and mental coordination in collaboration and communication, thus providing key experiences relevant to the coordinative dimension of culture" (p.8)
3. "humans' various forms of self-regulation" (p.8): following Vygotsky's Mind in Society, Tomasello claims that "many aspects of human cognitive and social uniqueness result from the special ways in which children attempt to executively self-regulate their thoughts and actions not just individually, as do many primates, but also socially through thir constant monitoring of the perspectives and evaluations of social partners on the self" (pp.8-9). He notes that "Again age three is key" because "before age three, children's executive regulation is individual, as other primates'," but "after age three, children begin to socially self-monitor their communicative attempts to see if they are comprehensible and rational to others, and they begin to socially self-monitor the impression they are making on others so as to maintain their cooperative identity in the group"  and they "also *collaboratively* self-regulate their cooperative interactions with others" (p.9). Thus they can make both joint commitments with others and implicit collective commitments to group norms (p.9). 

In Chapter 2, "Evolutionary Foundations," Tomasello reviews some of the things we know about human evolution. Based on his comparison of humans and other primates, he postulates what we know about the last common ancestor (LCA):

Cognition: He discusses the fact that great apes possess "an understanding of others as intentional agents," probably "developed in the context of [competitive] foraging" (p.12), but they do not possess "humanlike skills of shared intentionality, such as the ability to participate in the thinking of others through joint attention, conventional communication, and pedagogy" (p.13). 

Sociality: "cooperation was grounded in competition," such as when hunting, in which each primate must "take account of the actions and intentions of others" in order to compete to capture the game (p.13). 

Executive regulation: Although the LCA "likely had the ability to self-monitor their own actions and thinking," like other primates, they likely did not "monitor their actions and thinking based on the perspectives and evaluations of others in their social group" (p.14)

Collaboration and joint intentionality: Tomasello gives an evolutionary history here, the upshot of which is that around 400,000 years ago, early humans, probably *Homo heidelbergensis*, "began obtaining the majority of their food through more active collaboration; indeed, the collaboration became obligate" and thus humans were more urgently interdependent (p.15). That meant "strong and active social selection (West-Eberhard 1979) for cooperatively competent and motivated individuals" (p.15). That yielded a "radically new psychological process," which was "joint intentionality based on joint agency .... The creation of a joint agent - while each partner maintains her own individual role and perspective at the same time -- created a completely new human psychology, spawning new forms of both cognition and sociality" (p.15). 

Cognition: These new skills "created a new kind of agent, one in which two distinct individuals, in a sense, perceived and understood the world together while still not losing their own individual perspectives" (p.16). This "created a shared conceptual world" and thus "the pragmatic infrastructure upon which early humans' new skills of cooperative communication could be built" (p.16). These included "socially recursive inferences -- in which the individual conceptually embeds one intentional or mental state within another," yielding "joint intentionality" in which partners could form "a joint goal with joint attention" and thus "perspectival cognitive representations and socially recursive inferences" (pp.16-17).  

Sociality: These humans "were socially selected for collaborative foraging" and thus "had strong cooperative motives" including cooperative goals, sympathy, cooperative rationality leading to a sense of fairness, and "role-specific ideals (for example, in hunting antelopes the chaser must do *x*, and the spearer must do *y*)" (p.17; cf. Leontiev). 

Modern human culture and collective intentionality: Small-scale collaborative foraging was destabilized by "competition with other human groups," leading to a "more tightly knit social group," and increasing population size," leading to "so-called tribal organization" in which smaller social groups split off from larger ones but still shared a "culture," thus necessitating ways to recognize others from one's cultural group (pp.18-19). These led to marking group identity through conforming to social structure, meaning that conventions became critical to survival (p.19). 

Cognition: "The cognitive skills needed for functioning in a cultural group were not just skills of joint intentionality but skills of collective intentionality" (p.19), meaning that individuals could share "common cultural ground" with others they had not met as well as the collective perspective ("a kind of 'objective' perspective, independent of any individual" -- fortified by institutions such as marriages; p.19). Combine those cognitive skills with language and you get arguing cooperatively (i.e., deliberation, although Tomasello doesn't use that term). Individuals assumed an objective view and argued about beliefs and actions, and "by engaging in this process individuals' thinking became organized in a much wider and more reason-based 'web of beliefs,' structured by the group's normative standards of rationality" (p.20). 

Skipping forward to modern humans: "humans' specialized social-cognitive skills are not things added onto the end of ontogeny in adulthood, but rather they emerge relatively early -- sometime before two-and-a-half years of age," and "all other aspects of human cognitive and social development are built on this unique foundation, leading to unique outcomes" (p.28). 

To understand how this ability interacts with skills that vary across human societies (such as riding a bicycle or reading a book), Tomasello draws on Vygotsky's basic distinction between natural skills (developing "through maturationally structured individual learning") and cultural skills ("via imitative learning from others in the culture via adult instruction") (p.34). Thus he presents a typology of learning:

1. individual learning
2. observational learning
3. pedagogical or instructed learning
4. social co-construction (pp.34-35)

Importantly, in addition to interacting with culturally more advanced individuals such as adults -- Vygotsky's emphasis -- children also learn from interacting with peers. This interaction "who are no more knowledgeable or powerful than they are ... engenders perspective-taking, dialogic thinking, and reciprocity" (p.35). 

In terms of executive self-regulation, children learn normative self-government, which entails self-regulation on the basis of cultural structures or norms (p.38). 

In Chapter 3, "Social Cognition," one insight we learn is that "of all 200+ species of nonhuman primates only humans have highly visible sclera that basically advertise the direction of their eye gaze to others" (p.51)! These sclera thus facilitate joint attention. 

In Chapter 4, "Communication," Tomasello asserts that in ontogeny, children acquire cultural heritage by conforming to expectations around them. One avenue is through grammar: grammar constraints symbolize events from a particular perspective (p.92; cf. Bakhtin). Tomasello also notes that executive self-regulation of discourse yields discursive negotiation (e.g., repairs), and after some experience, children "begin to self-monitor and anticipate when their listener may have difficulties," meaning that "they have internalized the dialogic process and used it to executively self-regulate" (p.122). 

This question of internalization is taken up in Chapter 5, "Cultural Learning." Tomasello argues that "internalization is nothing other than role-reversal imitation used in a flexible way: the child imitates others directing her behavior or, alternatively, imitates herself teaching others, with herself substituted as learner" (p.153). 

In Chapter 6, "Cooperative Thinking," Tomasello notes that "reasons and justifications serve to connect beliefs causally and logically and, in the end, to ground them in the culture's rational norms" (p.161). And as mentioned earlier, "when the more coordinative dimension of cognition is the issue, of special importance are interactions with peers of equal status, to whom the child does not defer," because "the equal status enables them to engage in a true dialogue in which either individual's point of view may potentially prevail, based not on power but on reason" (p.166). 

There's more, much more to this fascinating book, but I'll stop there. If you are at all interested in the questions of social cognition, cooperation, and what makes us human, I highly recommend this book.

Reading :: The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition

The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition
By Michael Tomasello

This is a really fantastic, dense book and I'm sorry it took me so long to get to it. Tomasello is a cognitive psychologist who has spent a lot of time investigating differences in the developmental cognition of humans vs. other primates. He is neo-Vygotskian in outlook, but draws more broadly on cognitive and anthropological literature to better understand a basic puzzle: human evolution in itself has not given us the time to evolve cognitive tools, complex symbolic systems, and complex social organizations or institutions (p.2). 

So how did we? The only answer, he says, is social or cultural transmission (p.4), which produces the so-called "ratchet effect" in which people learn, adopt, and adapt modifications from each other (p.5). For other species, the problem isn't invention but stabilization, i.e., learning others' innovations and applying them oneself (p.5). Only humans, he says, understand conspecifics as intentional agents like themselves, thus engaging in cultural learning (p.6). Because they do, they can apply existing cognitive skills (ex: for dealing with space, time, and quantities) to develop "culturally-based skills with a social-collective dimension" (p.7—readers of this blog will recognize Vygotsky's basic distinction between lower and higher mental functions, a distinction that Tomaselli references later). Human children, enmeshed in a cultural world, learn linguistic and other communicative symbols (p.8), something that allows them to adopt multiple perspectives and free themselves from immediate perception (p.9). 

In this book, then, Tomasello presupposes basic cognitive skills, then (like Vygotsky) focuses on how they were transformed evolutionarily, historically, and ontogenetically (p.11). 

To do this, he first discusses biological and cultural inheritance in Chapter 2. Interestingly, only primates understand external social relations (p.17), but nonhuman primates do not understand the world in intentional and causal terms (p.19). To understand how humans inherit culturally, he rejects the innate-vs.-learned dichotomy in favor of Vygotsky's dichotomy of individual (or "natural") and cultural lines of development, with the latter concerning "those things the organism knows and learns that are derived from acts in which it attempts to see the world through the perspective of other persons (including perspectives embodied in artifacts)" (p.51). Here, cultural inheritance involves "intentional phenomena in which one organism adopts another's behavior or perspective on some third entity" (p.52). But the individual and cultural lines of development "become inextricably intertwined early in human development, and virtually every cognitive act of children after a certain age incorporates elements of both" (p.52). 

Part of what makes the cultural line of development work is that we have a biologically inherited ability to understand others as agents, leading to uniquely human forms of cultural inheritance (p.78). We can learn the intentional affordances of artifacts, i.e., what X is supposed to be used for (p.84)—and we can decouple intentional affordances, leading to play and creativity (p.85). Tomasello notes that infants are cultural beings—but at 9 months, they begin understanding others as "intentional agents like themselves," opening up "a whole new world of intersubjectively shared reality" (p.91). 

Moving on to language. Tomasello says that sounds become language when the child understands that there's an intention (p.101). And children who receive heavy scaffolding and joint focus with adults tend to develop a large vocabulary earlier (p.117). What distinguishes linguistic symbols from other forms of communication used by other animal species, in fact, is their perspectival nature (p.123). In discussing how external representations become "internal, individual representations," Tomasello name-checks Vygotsky's notion of internalization, but concedes differences based on our greater understanding now (p.125). 

Later, Tomasello emphasizes again that "social and cultural processes during ontogeny do not create basic cognitive skills. What they do is turn basic cognitive skills into extremely complex and sophisticated cognitive skills" — leading children to reorganize their information about the world, "construe the world in terms of the categories and perspectives and relational analogies embodied in [their] language," and "perhaps" apply these cognitive skills to "other domains such as mathematics" (p.189). 

There's more to this book, much more. I highly recommend it and I know I'll be returning to it.

Reading :: Case Study Research Methods

Case Study Research Methods
By Bill Gillham

I picked up this slim book at the used bookstore a month or two ago. Published in 2000, this book sells for $95 new, but you can pick a used copy up right now for a low $12. If you're interested in case study methodology, maybe you should do that—this 106-page book is a really excellent overview.

The book covers the basics of case study research, the relationship between evidence and theory, the literature review and its relationship to the case, the major data collection techniques (observations, interviews, artifacts), and even writing the research report. Each chapter is well structured, clearly written, and highly organized. We get examples, but we are not inundated with them. 

In fact, the book is really lucid in a way that methodology texts often aren't. Gillham covers everything from what qualitative research is good for, to what makes a case, to why "objective" (i.e., quantitative) research isn't enough to answer some questions, to the recursive relationship among research concerns, questions, and cases, to guidance for avoiding the trap of seeing what you expect in the data. And he does all of this with plain language and examples that (I think) a first-year college student could easily follow. That prose contrasts starkly with much of the guidance we get on qualitative research and theory-building, which tends to be abstract, abtruse, or heavily based on advanced theoretical literature. To be honest, I am not sure I realized how difficult some of these texts were until I read this one.

Not to gush, but I really like this book. If you are interested in getting into case study methodology—and certainly if you can pick this book up for $12!—take a look.

Reading :: Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana

Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter Between the Lodagaa and the 'World on Paper'
By Sean Hawkins

I picked up this book after seeing it being cited in the dissertation of one of our recently graduated PhD students, Stephen Dadugblor. (Stephen's dissertation is great, by the way.) To develop his argument, Stephen drew on this history of how the "world of experience" (here, the Lodagaa of Northern Ghana) encountered "the world on paper" (the writing regimes of colonialism) between 1890 and 1990. 

Hawkins draws on a diverse array of literature to understand writing and especially colonial writing. This literature includes names familiar to writing studies, such as Olson and Goody. Hawkins notes that, like Christianity and Islam, colonialism is a religion of the book (p.14), and to deal with the court systems, the LoDagaa (who did not possess laws) had to adopt foreign concepts from literate categories of social representation (p.31). 

For instance, the late 19th century colonialist regime had certain assumptions about people, including that they formed distinct tribes with powerful chiefs, and thus the regime attempted to install and maintain friendly chieftainships. These late 19th-early 20th century chiefs had a "near-monopoly of knowledge of writing" (p.122) that "allowed them to solidify their positions as intermediaries between the world on paper and those of farmers and migrant laborers" (p.123). Only in 1917 was a school established, and it was only for developing a governing class of chiefs (p.123). The role of chiefs was solidified by the postcolonial period (p.129). 

This latter point is an important theme running through the book. Later, the author discusses the concept of the family and notes the confusion that bishops, missionaries, and colonialist courts had in understanding family arrangements. Westerners assumed that marriage was a universal institution, yet the LoDagaa had a more fluid family arrangement that did match these expectations. Courts thus ruled on family disputes using a baseline set of expectations that the LoDagaa initially did not share, but had to adapt to. In one example, a bishop characterized "traditional Dagaare society," but Hawkins notes that "It was not the society of the past, but contemporary LoDagaa culture, that the bishop was describing," specifically a colonized version that was enforced by the courts (p.285).

In his conclusion, Hawkins references the example that I have been thinking about: Luria's expeditions to Uzbekistan. Here, he notes that unschooled Uzbeks interpreted shapes as real objects (ex: a circle would be called a plate or the Moon), while schooled ones described them as "geometric symbols, as things abstracted from the world of experience" (p.323). Similarly, "Because the words (conceptual language) used to represent the LoDagaa on paper were not generative of their practices or experiences, the use of writing as a medium of representation has resulted in a series of misrepresentations" (p.323).

And that's where I'll end this review. Like many histories, this book is long, dense, and detailed—but it's also intriguing and full of lessons for those of us who want to understand writing as a cultural practice. I recommend it!

Readings :: The Sociological Imagination

The Sociological Imagination
By C. Wright Mills

The link goes to a later version; my version of this 1959 classic is dated 1967. It's part of a used book haul I collected during the pandemic. 

To be honest, I get nervous when reading these classics. They are usually outside my field (I'm not a sociologist) and although I sometimes see them cited, they were not covered in my undergraduate or graduate classes and are not a big part of the conversation in my discipline. So please regard these notes as an outsider trying to figure out how this classic relates to writing studies in 2021.

How does it relate? The book actually reminds me of the framework essays and books that were trendy in the 1980s and 1990s in writing studies as we tried to figure out our field. In these essays, the author usually sets up three or four camps in which they* can divide the field, then compares, contrasts, and critiques each camp. In many cases, the author implies allegiance with the last camp discussed.

* NOTE: I'm trying to use they for indeterminate pronouns since this practice has been recently sanctioned. In previous book reviews, I have typically alternated singular pronouns (she/he) or pluralized the noun.

Here, Mills notes the issue that people are facing "nowadays" (i.e., 1959) in which the more aware we are of other locales, ambitions, and threats, the more trapped we feel. The individual and social must be understood together, he says, but we usually don't understand them that way (p.3). People need to be able to use information to sum up what is happening in the world and in themselves, and this is what he terms the "sociological imagination" (p.5). But to do this, we need sociological theory, and those who use it have been asked three kinds of questions:

• What is the structure of the society as a whole?
• Where does it stand in human history?
• Who prevails in this society? (pp.6-7)

To address these questions, he attempts to define the meaning of social sciences for the "cultural tasks of our time" (p.18). He detects three tendencies in classical sociology:

• theory of history
• systematic theory of the nature of man [sic] and society
• empirical studies of social facts and problems (p.23)

He addressed the first under "Grand Theory" (Ch.2). Among other things, he addresses the basic question of power: who decides the social arrangements under which we live (p.40)? He specifically looks at three dominant orders:

• economic 
• political
• military

which are coordinated in totalitarian countries (p.46). 

In Chapter 3, he discusses "abstracted empiricism," in which (he complains) investigators collect a sample of people, interview them, reduce the interviews to statistics based on scales, and yield public opinion (p.50). One problem with this approach is that the methodology determines a narrow range of questions to investigate (p.55). Abstract empiricism is not the same as the concrete behavior of people, and it favors problems of milieux rather than structure (p.61) as well as reducing social realities to psychological variables (p.63). That is, it assumes that the fundamental source of information is individuals, and thus understands the institutional structure of the society through individuals (p.67). In contrast, he argues for a sociological method that has general relevance and is logically connected (p.73). 

In Chapter 4, he discusses types of practicality. Here, he mentions that "classical economics has been the major ideology of capitalism as a system of power," but is "fruitfully misunderstood," just as "the work of Marx is used by Soviet publicists today" (p.82). In Chapter 5, "The Bureaucratic Ethos," he adds that "work in modern industry is work within a hierarchy: there is a line of authority and hence, from the under-side, a line of obedience," and "a great deal of work is semi-routine," meaning stereotyped work. Put these two together and "it becomes evident that work in a modern factory involves discipline" and thus "the factor of power, so coyly handled by human relations experts, is thus central to an adequate understanding of problems of morale" (p.93). 

In Chapter 7, he concludes that "what social science is properly about is the human variety, which consists of all the social worlds in which men [sic] have lived, are living, and might live" (p.132). 

In Chapter 9, he argues that freedom is "the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them—and then, the opportunity to choose" and thus freedom requires a broad role for human reason (p.174). 

Okay, I think that's enough Mills. Not being enmeshed in mid-20th century sociology, I am sure I have not caught everything Mills threw at me. But I did find this broad, discipline-wide discussion of different lines of thought to be interesting and useful. If you're interested in these sorts of discussions, pick this book up.

Readings :: Eating in Theory

Eating in Theory
By Annemarie Mol

I loved Annemarie Mol's first book, The Body Multiple, in which she asked the question "what is atherosclerosis" and concluded that it was not just found or discovered but enacted, and necessarily enacted differently by different actors in different specialties. That book was transformative for me, and I still refer to it a lot. Her second book, The Logic of Care, was not as transformative, but still solid. So I had high hopes when picking up this book.

How is it? Honestly, just okay for me. 

Whereas Mol's other two books focused on fairly bounded questions and settings, this one is more generally about eating (and metabolic engagement more generally) as a different way to think about agency. She notes and agrees with the posthumanist critique of human agency as exceptional, but she notes that "agency" and "subjectivity" are both grounded in humanism and then applied to nonhumans. But "robbing 'the human' of his [sic] exceptionalism by spreading out his [sic] particular traits over the rest of the world is not enough" (p.3). Her solution is:

What if we were to stop celebrating 'the human's' cognitive reflections about the world, and take our cues instead from human metabolic engagements with the world? Or, to put it differently: What if our theoretical repertoires were to take inspiration not from thinking but from eating? (p.3)

(The word "inspiration" is based on breathing in, so we have a bit of a mixed metaphor here, but let's go with it.)

Her approach is to tell stories about eating (and excreting) that do not lead to theoretical conclusions about eating, but rather about "being, doing, knowing, and relating" (p.5). In practice, she conducts fieldwork—well, really, it sounds like she visits different places and tells stories about them. These stories include visits to dietician-led groups to address kidney disease; a sewage plant; and a dinner with asparagus. The latter has a punch line that I am sure has already occurred to you.

One discussion, in which she attends a workshop for cooking with "old grains," yields the insight that eating is not bounded by the body. Eating also involves selecting and modifying grains over centuries to yield variations that are digestible, nutritious, and productive, as well as using cooking methods (she cites Wrangham here). She concludes: "Here is the lesson for theory. Doing is not necessarily centered in an embodied individual. It may well be distributed over a stretched-out, historically dispersed, socio-material collective" (p.93). This insight is not particularly new, but it is well put here.

The phrase "Here is the lesson for theory" occurs near the end of each chapter, and if you're reading it on a Kindle (I'm not), I imagine you could search for it to get the basic insights of the book. If not, you'll need to read through the illustrative anecdotes.

So what did I think? I think this book was less interesting to me than the first two, partially because it was not as well bounded, partially because the metabolic metaphor really does most of its work in the first chapter. The illustrations seemed a little drawn out for me and the insights seemed less unique and fresh than in The Body Multiple. Still, if you are interested in posthumanist critiques of agency and cognition, this book may give you what you're looking for. 

Readings :: Ethnographic Decision Tree Modeling

Ethnographic Decision Tree Modeling
By Christina H. Gladwin

I picked up this slim monograph the other week (93pp.) and read it in maybe one sitting. Part of the Qualitative Research Methods series, this 1989 book proposes a modeling strategy for interpreting ethnographic data on how people make decisions:

This method is called ethnographic decision tree modeling because it uses ethnographic fieldwork techniques to elicit from the decision makers themselves their decision criteria, which are then combined in the form of a decision tree, table, flowchart, or set of "if-then rules" or "expert systems" which can be programmed on the computer. (p.8)

The author emphasizes that decision criteria should be emic, but made explicit (p.9). She notes that "people do not rank order alternatives wholistically when they make a decision. They just choose one of several alternatives without ranking them" (p.10, citing Kahnemann & Tversky, Shoemaker, Quinn, and Arrow). Thus her approach is not linear, but rather context-sensitive, testing the interpretation of an observed behavior (p.11). Thus the ethnographic data collection can take from a few weeks up to two years, and model testing can take up to 6 months (p.13). These models, like model trains, are simplified (p.13).

When we get into the models, however, we find that there's a lot of craftwork and tacit knowledge involved. In an extended case study — how students decide whether to buy a meal plan at their dorm — she models the results of each interview, then combines them, telling us to "combine them in a logical fashion while preserving the ethnographic validity of each individual decision model" (p.39, her emphasis). Okay. The models also assume a lot about both decisions and justification, primarily by portraying branching pathways with yes/no decisions.

I like modeling qualitative data, so I can see value in this modeling process. It's a good way to aggregate messy data and see patterns that may not be visible in raw interviews. However, I do worry that these "model trains" may not take us very far: they attempt to rationalize decisions that are potentially much more complicated, and they appear to rely on untriangulated interviews, meaning that they represent what people say or recall or reconstruct about their decision making. 

Nevertheless, used judiciously, this modeling technique could be really helpful. I'll keep this book in mind in case I need to model decisions in the future. If you're interested in modeling qualitative data in this way, please do pick up this book.

Reading :: Culture, Language and Personality

Culture, Language and Personality
By Edward Sapir

I picked up this paperback some years ago in a used bookstore, and finally got around to reading it during the pandemic. The original text is copyrighted 1949; this paperback was printed in 1964 and has one of those amazing abstract 1960s covers. It's just a pleasure to look at. 

When I picked it up this year, I noticed the previous owner's name written on the fly page along with "1980 (used)." As it happens, the name was very distinct and matched someone I knew at UT. I reached out to him and he confirmed that he had owned the book during his undergraduate days (!!). 

So what is the book about? These are selected essays Sapir produced on, well, culture, language and personality. More specifically, Sapir examines the function of language, the status of linguistics, the nature of culture and religion, the question of how cultural anthropology and psychiatry related, and the concept of personality. Rather than thoroughly review these essays, I'll just pick out a few specifics.

In the essay "Language" (written in 1933), he notes that every known group of human beings has a language, and he rejects the idea that language emerged because gestures were not enough to communicate (p.1). All language, he says, consists of "phonetic symbols for the expression of communicable thought or feeling" (p.1; I think he means phonemes rather than written phonetic symbols, and notice the same bias toward spoken language that Vygotsky had). "Language is heuristic" in the sense that "its forms predetermine for us certain modes of observation and interpretation," and thus "as our scientific experience grows we must learn to fight the implications of language" (p.7). Race, culture, and language do not often coincide, he says. But with increased emphasis on nationalism (recall that he wrote this in 1933), these are collapsed (p.39). He suggests the logical necessity of an international language (p.42). (Readers may recall that Esperanto had a lot of enthusiasts in the early 20th century, and I wonder if he had something like that in mind.)

He does discuss writing as well. Writing, he adds, "proved that language as a purely instrumental and logical device is not dependent on the use of articulate sound" (p.2). He also claims that effective writing systems are "more or less exact transfers of speech" (p.12), a claim that is understandable given the time but, I think, incorrect.

In "International Auxiliary Language," Sapir continues the idea of an international language, this time recognizing that "English, or some simplified version of it, may spread for certain immediate and practical needs, yet the deeper needs of the modern world may not be satisfied by it" (p.51). He argues that we need a simpler, more logical language. Although I am monolingual, I also recognize that English is wildly inconsistent. 

In "Linguistics as a Science," I pulled just one quote: he states that "linguistics is destined to have a very special value for configurative psychology ('Gestalt psychology'), for, of all forms of culture, it seems that language is that one which develops its fundamental patterns with relatively the most complete detachment from other types of cultural patterning. Linguistics may thus hope to become something of a guide to the understanding of the 'psychological geography' of culture in the large" (p.73). Although not directly connected, this line of thought of course reminds me of Vygotsky and Luria in the very early 1930s, about the time of the Uzbek expeditions.

Okay, that's it for this collection of essays. Sapir is a little far afield for me. But if you are interested in early-to-mid 20th century thoughts on culture, language, and personality, this time capsule should be of help to you.

Reading :: We Tried to Warn You

We Tried To Warn You: Innovations In Leadership For The Learning Organization
By Peter H. Jones

In this short book, Peter Jones draws on his background in design research and strategic consulting to address the question of how to form a learning organization -- one that can learn from failures and effectively support customers as well as employees inside the organization. "To navigate the rapid change and complexity in today's wired markets, we can create continuous early innovation and early warning systems. A new organizational role is now possible, whose job is paying attention to weak signals and articulating insights to both suggest innovations and tactfully frame the bad news from the field" (Kindle loc 147). UX is ideally suited for this role. 

To discuss this role, he draws on Weick's notion of sensemaking, pointing out that most orgs don't have a situation room or other mechanism to tell stories about change, "no organizational practices or rituals for organizing their communication and storytelling" (loc 185). Thus "The kind of stories people want to hear get reinforced and repeated" (loc 353). One result is that UX (like technical documentation, honestly) gets introduced into the process late in the lifecycle, negating the foresight that it could bring to the product (loc 436). UX becomes subordinated to project management (loc 482). 

What do we do about this? Jones suggests a few things. One is to build in UX research earlier in the lifecycle, before specifications have hardened, so that it can impact the design of the product at all levels. Another is to make sure that "early warnings" are tolerated and valued in the organization: the organization must become more dialogic and more accepting of disrupting narratives. He adds:

We have outlined a clear value proposition for allowing failure and encouraging dialogue when it happens. Perhaps the best argument is that finding and fixing small failures on an ongoing basis prevents large-scale failures that occur later when we ignore reality. (loc 1041)

The book is a short but dense and rewarding read. If you're thinking through how your organization can become more nimble and oriented toward learning, definitely pick it up. 

Reading :: Wardley Maps

Wardley Maps By Simon Wardley

First of all, thanks for Frederik Matheson for introducing me to Wardley’s work. I’ve been reading it in bits and pieces, but finally was able to devote some time to read this linked PDF -- which is not a published book, but rather a compilation of Wardley’s Medium posts under a CC license. Still, it hangs together decently well as a book.

Wardley describes an issue he ran into years ago while serving as a CEO in the tech space: he had no way to envision strategy. He assumed that other CEOs did and that he just had to figure out how they were doing it. Eventually it dawned on him that they were as lost as he was. Like him, others leapt directly from purpose to leadership. Reading Sun Tzu, he realized that other factors had to be taken into account: landscape, climate, and doctrine. And he had no way of accounting for these.

This realization began a spate of eclectic reading as well as analogizing from other domains. Wardley drew from his experience playing games (chess, World of Warcraft), from warfare (especially map making, but also OODA), from Simon’s theory of hierarchy, from business and management sources (the Red Queen’s race, Boisot’s I-space, Moore’s Crossing the Chasm), and other sources in order to develop visualizations that could help him better understand strategy and make strategic decisions in the technology space. 

The resulting system is eclectic and complex -- and I mean that as a compliment. Wardley emphasizes (here and on his Twitter feed) that it’s more of a direction than a guaranteed product -- a way to map strategy that we can experiment with and improve. By folding in insights from different domains, Wardley builds in different perspectives and pushes us to think through strategy in ways that go beyond storytelling. 

How reliable are these maps, and do they serve to provide certainty or to generate potential relationships to explore in other ways? Gee, I don’t know. To me, they seem like they provide a visual vocabulary for identifying and categorizing potential change rather than a precision predictive tool. But (full disclosure) I skipped the exercises, which largely focused on business strategy for established companies. Still, I can see Wardley Maps as a heuristic that does for business strategy what the Business Model Canvas does for identifying core business components -- that is, it gives you the rules of the game, helps you to apply and understand things you already know, and identifies things you need to either discover or invent. 

I’m not a member of that target audience, since I’m not running a company, but I can see how the principles can apply to individual work and academic units. And this brings me to what I think is the broader lesson. When you feel lost or confused about what you’re trying to do, one way to address it is to change how you’re representing your work to yourself. That’s why we use calendars and to-do lists, Kanban boards and SWOT, flowcharts and business model canvases (and in qualitative research: flow, network, and matrix models). Wardley Maps zoom out beyond the scope of all of these, representing broader strategic issues in a way that emphasizes specific principles and considerations, and providing a way to explore new connections and relationships before you have to experience them. Reading this book didn’t make me want to draw Wardley Maps, per se, but it made me want to lift some of these techniques to address the ways in which I have been feeling overwhelmed in my own work. If you’re similarly struggling to pull back and see “the big picture,” definitely give this book a read. 

Reading :: Mind as Action (supplemental notes)

Mind As Action
By James V. Wertsch

I reviewed this book a long time ago (2003!), but a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. So I'll make some supplemental notes focusing on mediation.

In Chapter 2, Wertsch makes several claims about mediated action:

1. Tension between agency and mediational means. Wertsch again takes up the question of signs and tools, giving the examples of pole vaulting and multiplication, which are both impossible without mediators and that require an analytic strategy to apply mediators to the action at hand (p.30). 
2. The materiality of mediational means. He reminds us that even signs are material: "materiality is a property of any mediational means," including spoken signs (p.31). 
3. Multiple goals of action. Furthermore, mediation is associated with multiple goals, often in conflict (p.32). 
4. Developmental paths. "Mediated action is situated on one or more developmental paths" (p.34).
5. Constraint and affordances. Mediators "constrain or limit the forms of action we undertake," partially because "even if a new cultural tool frees us from some earlier limitation of perspective, it introduces new ones of its own" (p.39). 
6. Transformations of mediated action. "The introduction of novel cultural tools transforms the action" (p.42).
7. Internalization as mastery. An agent masters a cultural tool by using it, developing specialized skills through that use (p.46). 
8. Internalization as appropriation. Beyond mastering a cultural tool, the agent appropriates it, i.e., makes it her or his own (and here Wertsch draws on Bakhtin, p.53). 
9. Spin-off. Cultural tools do not simply result from needs, but are "spun off" from current tools being used for new purposes. Here Wertsch uses the example of fiberglass being developed for military purposes and then being applied to pole vaulting poles (p.59). "Such accidents and unanticipated spin-offs may be the norm rather than the exception when it comes to cultural tools  used in mediated action," implying that "most of the cultural tools we employ were not designed for the purposes to which they are being put" (p.59). Among other examples, he cites David Olson's terrific book on writing systems (p.62). 
10. Power and authority. Mediational means are not "neutral cognitive and communicative instruments" (p.64), and we can examine them not just in terms of the individual agent but also in terms of institutional and societal interests (p.65). Again, Wertsch invokes Bakhtin to explore these angles. 

There's much more to this book, and perhaps I will get into further insights in future supplemental notes! But I'll stop here for now. If you haven't picked up this book, I encourage you to do so!

Reading :: Voices of the Mind

Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action
By James V. Wertsch

I was surprised to discover that I apparently haven't reviewed this classic from 1991. Drawing on Vygotsky and Bakhtin, Wertsch seeks to explain and develop the notion of mediation. Longtime readers of this blog will already understand the basics of mediation. See Vygotsky's economical introduction for some background—including the background for a distinction I'll foreground in this review: physical vs. psychological tools.

As Wertsch argues:

The third general theme that runs throughout Vygotsky's formulation of a sociocultural approach is the claim that higher mental functioning and human action in general are mediated by tools (or "technical tools") and signs (or "psychological tools"). Here again the influence of Marx and Engels is evident, especially in Vygotsky's discussion of the use of tools in the emergence of labor activity. But Vygotsky's main contribution resulted from his focus on psychological as opposed to technical tools. His lifelong interest in the complex processes of human semiotic action allowed him to bring great sophistication to the task of outlining the role of sign systems, such as human language, in intermental and intramental functioning. (pp.28-29)

Vygotsky was, as Wertsch points out, quite focused on speech in its relationship to thinking. This "ethnocentric bias" "is not so much one that invalidates the research as it is one that limits the applicability of constructs to certain groups and settings. It reflects a pattern of privileging that distinguishes the performance of people functioning in various cultural, historical, and institutional settings" (pp.31-32). Yet one lasting contribution is the insight that "the inclusion of signs in action fundamentally transforms the action. The incorporation of mediational means does not simply facilitate action that could have occurred without them; instead, as Vygotsky (1981a) noted, 'by being included in the process of behavior, the psychological tool alters the entire flow and structure of mental functions...'" (p.32). Signs change the flow of behavior. 

The focus on speech was one limitation of Vygotsky's thinking; another was his focus on "small group interaction, especially the interaction of the adult-child dyad" (p.46). For that reason, Vygotsky largely treated concept development as an individual process—but around 1934, Vygotsky began considering concept development "from the perspective of how it emerges in institutionally situated activity" (p.47). Wertsch thinks that if Vygotsky had survived past 1934, he would have extended his ideas further into the intermental realm, something that Wertsch advocates: "extending Vygotsky's ideas to bring the sociocultural situatedness of mediated action on the intermental plane to the fore" (p.48). Here, Wertsch believes that Bakhtin's ideas are relevant, since Bakhtin examines the relationship of utterances, meanings, and social languages, and thus the relationship between individual (intramental) and group (intermental) meanings.

After covering the basics of Bakhtin, Wertsch returns to Vygotsky's analogy between tools and semiotic mediation (Ch.5). Vygotsky had noted the limitations of this analogy, but Wertsch boldly states that in his view, "he did not push this analogy far enough": we should think of these diverse semiotic mediators as a "tool kit" (p.93). Thinking along these lines will push us to ask why someone uses one tool and not another in a given situation (p.94). Wertch again brings in Bakhtin here, noting how different semiotic mediators may come from different social languages.

Later, Wertsch criticizes Leontiev for losing sight of semiotic mediation: "In contrast, looking at action in isolation, without concern for the mediational means employed, loses sight of one of my most fundamental points and what is perhaps the most central contribution Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and many of their colleagues made to the study of mind: mediated action is an irreducible unit of analysis, and the person(s)-acting-with-mediational-means is the irreducible agent involved. ... Shchedrovitskii (1981) has argued that A.N. Leontiev's account of activity and action is flawed by the fact that Leontiev lost sight of some of Vygotsky's insights about semiotic mediation" (p.120). 

And I'll leave it there, although the book has much more to recommend it. If you're interested in mediation, Vygotsky, and/or Bakhtin, definitely pick up this highly readable classic.

Reading :: Facing Gaia

Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime
By Bruno Latour

Last summer I reviewed Latour's Down to Earth, one of the two books he published in English in 2018. This one, Facing Gaia, is the other. Both are oriented to the same problem, which is how to deal with climate change. But whereas Down to Earth was oriented to casual readers, this one is more academic.

Here, Latour argues that the "anthropology of the Moderns" that he has studied throughout his career resonates with the "New Climate Regime": "the physical framework that the Moderns have taken for granted, the ground on which their history has always been played out, has become unstable" (p.3). The result is an ecocrisis in which we should detect "a profound mutation in our relation with the world" (p.8, his emphasis), but we don't: "we receive all this news with astonishing calm," not acting (p.8). The question of why we haven't acted is at the center of the book.

Latour argues that the division between nature and culture is untenable (pp.15-16). Using the figure of Gaia from James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, Latour portrays this figure as a "muddle" that results from a distribution of final causes (p.100), Latour encourages us to follow the actors, the overlapping waves of action that "are the real brush strokes with which [Lovelock] seeks to depict Gaia's face" (p.101).  Gaia is not a whole or superorganism (p.104), and thus we must abandon the distinction between individual and system. This point is critical later in the argument:

When they [social scientists] talk about "society as a whole," "the social context," "globalization," they are drawing a figure with their hands that has never been bigger than an ordinary pumpkin! But the fact is that the problem is the same whether we are talking about Nature, Earth, the Global, Capitalism, or God. Each time, we are presupposing the existence of a superorganism. The passage between connections is immediately replaced by a relation between parts and the Whole, and the latter is said—without much thought—to be necessarily superior to the sum of its parts—whereas it is always necessarily inferior to its parts. Superior does not mean more encompassing; it means more connected. One is never as provincial as when one claims to have a "global view." (p.135, his emphasis)

To interpret this passage, it may help to know that Latour has said that when people talk about "context," they typically make a circle with their hands that starts at the collarbone and ends at the sternum, leading him to think that context is the size and shape of a pumpkin. He also adds a footnote to the end of the paragraph: "There is a confusion between the cartographic globe, which is a way to register as many differences as possible through the simple device of Cartesian coordinates, and the globe of so-called globalization, which is the extension everywhere of as small a set of standard formats as possible" (p.135, footnote 68). That is, Latour is objecting to systematization as a way of simplifying relationships by reducing them to a single manageable frame. He adds in the next paragraph:

Scale is not obtained by successive embeddings of spheres of different sizes—as in the case of Russian dolls—but by the capacity to establish more or less numerous relationships, and especially reciprocal ones. The hard lesson of actor-network theory, according to which there is no reason to confuse a well-connected locality with the utopia of the Globe, holds true for all associations of living beings. (p.136)

This discussion leads Latour (again, as is his wont) to contrast science and religion, which he does through tables: one contrasting two approaches to science and two approaches to religion (p.178) and another that rearranges these columns under the heading of "Natural religions" and "Terrestrialization" (with a science column and a nature column under each) (p.181). (One might suggest that in systematizing science and religion, these tables simplify their relationships by reducing them to a single manageable frame.)

The next lecture is on the end of times. Latour argues here that the certainty of truths from on high is "the exercise of terror" (p.198) and that (quoting Vogelin) the West was the apocalypse for other civilizations (p.205). In trying to determine the date of the Anthropocene, Latour (p.218, footnote 84) embraces a starting date of 1945, not just because that is when we laid down the first radioactive layer from the atom bomb, but also because "it frames exactly the existence of the Baby Boomers." (Latour was born in 1947, and to my knowledge, this is the most Boomer thing he has written.)

And I'm going to wrap things up here. If you've read Latour, especially more recent Latour, I don't think you will encounter many surprises in the second half of the book. He identifies and sharpens differences, then flips and betrays them (as he did with the science-vs-religion tables earlier). He criticizes science and religion in the same terms. He argues that we must carry religion along with us to a new understanding of the world. We must question the distinction between organism and environment and we must emancipate ourselves from the infinite. 

Do you need to pick up this book? No—if you have a casual interest in Latour, I would suggest some of his earlier books, and if you want to understand how Latourean thought can be applied to ecological questions, I would recommend Escobar first. But is it still readable and entertaining? Sure.