Reading :: Information & Organizations

Information and Organizations: The Manager as Anthropologist
By Max Boisot

The link goes to a reseller, since this 1987 book is out of print. I bought my own copy used from Amazon, and to my delight, within its pages was a Visa carbon from 1989 and a few Esso Tiger Tokens. 

Boisot is really interesting to me: an architect turned management theorist who has contributed substantially to theories of knowledge. He has an annual award named after him. Nevertheless, I had not heard of him until I searched the literature for adhocracies in 2013 and found his book on ATLAS. There, he discusses the I-Space, a three-dimensional cube representing the codification, abstraction, and diffusion of information. Fascinating, but also heterodox from my understanding of information in a way that I had a hard time putting my finger on. I made a mental note to go back to this work later and figure out what was going on.

Well, now is later, so I picked up two more of Boisot's books as well as a collection put together in tribute to him after he passed away. This 1987 book is the earliest of the group. It did clear some things up, but it is not as sophisticated or well thought out as his later work, and parts of it I flatly disliked. 

Why? Well, let's recenter on what the book is and what it's trying to do. The book is pitched to a general business audience and according to the back cover, "Max Boisot demonstrates that organization culture is perhaps best understood when examined with some of the tools used by the anthropologist." The book is largely written in a style that may have appealed to a general business audience in 1987 but that introduces real difficulties for an academic audience in 2022. It wedges in a lot of strained whimsy like this one:

Would some knowledge of managerial anthropology help a practical, no-nonsense manager of, say, a packaging firm to manage? This is a tall order, particularly as by 'no-nonsense manager' we usually mean someone who, when he hears 'culture,' reaches for his gun. Can he be persuaded to wait a little while longer before shooting the piano player? (p.13)

The second issue comes just before this passage, as Boisot is explaining that we should apply the basics of cultural anthropology, not to our "exotic" and "scantily clad brethren" of West Africa or the Hopi, but rather to "the British suburban stockholder, the American marketing executive" (p.13). Skipping past the ethnocentrism, there's a point to be made, sure: we can apply cultural anthropology's toolkit to organizations in our own culture. Okay. Which tools? It turns out Boisot doesn't really have any toolkit in mind -- he simply means that we can think about our culture. He even asks: is it possible that in thinking about our information society, we have been doing cultural anthropology all this time without even knowing it? (p.17; he doesn't answer this question, which I think any anthropologist would answer with a resounding no). He summarizes by proffering the concepts in this book, which he says bear "more than a passing resemblance to those used by anthropologists to describe culture" (p.19). He doesn't name these anthropologists—and I suspect that he is referring to the tradition of structural anthropology, although I don't think the conceptual framework he is using, C-space (culture space), closely resembles that work. Maybe a structural anthropologist can weigh in. Later in the book, Boisot describes the famous psychologist Kurt Lewin as a sociologist (p.107)—so I'm not inclined to be charitable about how he's characterizing his antecedents in the social sciences.

Let's pause so I can emphasize that this book is early in his career. I don't think he makes similar mistakes in his later books. And these issues, as maddening as they are, shouldn't obscure the actual contributions of the book, which are in terms of thinking through and representing different types of information in organizations.

That work really starts in the next chapter, when he draws on the idea that all information is coded (Claude Shannon's work is not cited here, but his model of information transmission shows up uncredited on p.38). He claims that we are all "communicating in a code and implicitly assuming that the context in which we interact is sufficiently clear" (p.23). "Only a few of these codes involve speech and writing"—he includes the examples of shaking hands and smiling, or the impropriety of tap-dancing at a board meeting (p.24). When we choose the form in which to communicate, we must choose from a repertoire of codes available to us, and we tend to use the least effortful code (p.25). Codes both structure our experience and communicate it (p.25). And to select is to code (p.28). He argues that we can imagine codes on a scale from direct experience to compression into symbols — that is, from uncodified to codified (pp.29-30). The less codified something is, the more ambiguous and interpretive it is (p.35). 

This brings us to the "simple communication model" on p.38 (the Shannon model) and a brief discussion of "coauthors" Shannon and Weaver (p.40; this is a common misapprehension—Weaver popularized Shannon's model, but they didn't coauthor anything). Following Shannon, Boisot notes three problems:

• The technical problem: "Is the message received the same as the message sent?" (p.40)
• The semantic problem: "Is the message received understood?" (p.41)
• The effectiveness problem: "Does the message lead to the desired behaviour?" (p.41)

So what we're seeing here is a quite structural understanding of communication and information, one that I suppose goes with the structural anthropology from which Boisot seems to have drawn some inspiration. I won't rehearse the issues with such a view at this point; if you'd like a critique, I commend Clifford Geertz' work as a starting place.

Here, Boisot introduces a second graduated scale: diffusion, i.e., how broadly the communication reaches potential recipients (p.45). Are we talking about a private wink between two people, or a broadcast that reaches a whole nation? Critically, he discusses "the diffusion of knowledge" (p.48), and in this early work, he slips between "information" and "knowledge" as if the two are the same. (In later books, he makes a sharp distinction between the two.) He also notes that codification is "the structuring and sharing of information [that] is the collective experience through which culture is built up" and in the private case, "when the experience being structured is to be found in one mind alone," we would only then use the term "coding" (p.49). 

He even provides a formula, D=f(C), 

where D is the rate of diffusion per unit of time measured along the horizontal scale and C is the level of codification measured along the vertical scale. f is some function that describes the specific shape of the diffusion curve for a given distribution of the population, communication technology, and so on. We shall not be concerned with elaborating this function... (p.56)

In the tribute collection published after Boisot's death, one author notes that Boisot was not good at math. Although he may have been inspired by Shannon, a mathematician, I don't think that this formula does much work for us. Boisot repeatedly says here and elsewhere that the C-space and later I-space models are conceptual, not empirical, and he does not attempt to make them correspond to empirical measurements. So it's difficult to imagine how one might validate such a formula: how do you meaningfully measure the rate of diffusion or the level of codification? 

Nevertheless, this work lays the ground for the C-space, which has the two dimensions of codification and diffusion. (Those who are familiar with I-space will wonder where Abstraction went to. In this early work, abstraction is understood as a function or component of codification—see p.109. Only later does he separate the two.) And with these two dimensions, Boisot sets out a number of 2x2 grids. On p.67, he maps the quadrants to personal knowledge, common sense, proprietary knowledge, and public knowledge (discussed further on p.73). On p.78, he puts "minimum entropy" in the codified/undiffused corner and "maximum entropy" in the uncodified/diffused corner. On p.100, he puts types of transactions—fiefs, clans, bureaucracies, and markets—in the four corners. On 116, he maps different org units: the R&D department, the board, the production department, and the sales department. And on p.171. he puts capitalism in the codified/diffused corner and feudalism in the uncodified/undiffused corner. This hammer gets put to work driving in a lot of nails. (Boisot continues this tendency of universally applying his models to the end.)

 Let's back up to see what he's doing with this conceptual framework. In Ch.4, "Knowledge Cycles," he says "it is not knowledge that flows in the C-space but the information on which it feeds" (p.75—yes,  here he is trying to distinguish between the two). He argues that "a number of forces are at work which can be resolved into four vectors"—basically toward each of the corners of the C-space (p.75). These movements "irrigate the C-space with information" (p.77). Yet people forget codes ("who today can read cuneiform script?") and thus "the knowledge that builds up in the different parts of the C-space is subject to the action of forgetting, that gradual process of erosion that in physics goes under the name of entropy (p.77). He argues that entropy is at its maximum in the uncodified/diffused corner, and at its minimum in the codified/undiffused corner (p.78). He also argues that new knowledge has a cyclical flow in the C-space, involving scanning, problem-solving, diffusion, and absorption (p.80). 

Skipping ahead, he divides the codification scale in three: the most uncodified are words and gestures, more codified is writing, and even more codified are numbers (p.109). Similarly, he divides the diffusion scale: least diffuse is "knowledge available only to the firm itself," followed by "Knowledge available to the firm and its competitors" and finally "Knowledge available to the firm, its competitors and its customers" (p.110). He cautions that these can't be translated into a single, universal empirical scale (p.110). And he adds that the "line of least resistance for information flows" is on a diagonal line from uncodified/undiffuse to codified/diffuse. "A more vivid way of restating the proposition would be to say that it is easier to get certain types of data by diffing in the files than by opening up someone's cranium and rummaging around" (p.111). (In his later work, Boisot continues to regard "craniums" or "heads" as substrates that can contain information and knowledge.)

Moving on, he asserts later that organizational growth can be represented as "an internalization of transactions" (p.140). These transactions can be internal and external. Those who have read Boisot's later work and learned about his 3D I-space may be surprised to see a different 3D representation here: the axes are codification, diffusion, and internal/external (p.143). I'm not sure why he dropped this axis unless (a) he really wanted to reclaim that third dimension for Abstraction or (b) he didn't think internal/external was doing a lot of work for him. 

At the end of the book, he tells us that he had three objectives for this book, which he did not state at the beginning:

1. "to sketch out in a simple and accessible outline a political economy of information consistent with its new role as the key resource in a modern competitive economy" (p.196)
2. "to show that a political economy of information and a theory of cultural processes were in fact one and the same thing" (p.196)
3. "to spell out in a tentative way some of the applications that the concepts presented might find in [a manager's] work" (p.196)

He acknowledges that his presentation of C-space included "simplifying assumptions" and did not include "the many qualifications that would weigh down a more academic work" (p.197). 

So how well does Boisot do? 

Understanding his audience, I was willing to cut Boisot a lot of slack in terms of simplifying assumptions and qualifications. But looking at his objectives, I find myself understanding his project much better—and I am thus more confident in how to evaluate it.

Objective 1: a political economy of information. I know very little about political economy. But for a political economy of information, the book does not sharply define "information" or adequately differentiate it from data or knowledge. Boisot does this in his later work, and he does it by extending the C-space rather than starting over. So I'll evaluate this first objective as a partial success.

Objective 2: show that a political economy of information and a theory of cultural processes are the same thing. Boisot does present his political economy of information as a theory of cultural processes. But I find this attempt to be unsatisfactory. His founding assumptions about information seem to be at odds with what we know about cultural knowledge and processes. He draws heavily on Shannon, but Shannon's work was mathematical rather than cultural, and reduces interpretation to decoding. He doesn't draw on other fields that could have really troubled and developed this account, including semiotics, interpretivist anthropology, or sociology. Tellingly, Boisot never gets to the level of examining fine-grained qualitative data in this book (and I don't think he does in his later work either). 

Objective 3: spell out applications for managers. Boisot did well enough that people are still talking about him, so I think his framework is appealing. Although I'm not writing as a manager, I personally am intrigued by the conceptual space of codification and diffusion (and I'll also throw in abstraction) as ways to think through how specific information artifacts are constructed and transported—although I understand "information" quite differently from how Boisot did in 1987.

I've written a lot in this review, and much has been critical. So I want to end by emphasizing that this book's concepts are intriguing enough for me to spend all of this time writing about it. The question isn't whether the book is good or bad—it's what job the book can do for me (and perhaps for you). What is the framework good for? What can't it do? In what ways can it inspire us to think about communication and culture differently? As you've seen, for me this book has been quite generative. And for that reason, if you're interested in exploring similar issues, I recommend it too—after you read Boisot's later stuff.

Reading :: Models

Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding
By Marx Warftofsky

I've been meaning to read this book forever. I think I first saw it cited in one of Yrjo Engestrom's early pieces (Learning by Expanding?) and was intrigued enough to see if the university library had it (it didn't). That was at Iowa State, and the same thing happened at Texas Tech and again at UT. Finally, after seeing it quoted again (this time by David Guile), I ordered the book.

The part of the book being quoted by Engestrom, Guile, and others is the chapter "Perception, Representation, and Action," which provides a taxonomy of types of artifacts. We'll get to it in a minute, but first, let's set up the book. It's in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, and it's composed of philosophical essays that Wartofsky published between 1953 and 1978. ("Perception, Representation, and Action" comes to us from 1973, the same year that Led Zeppelin released Houses of the Holy.)

In his introduction, Wartofsky explains that the pieces were written separately, but pulled together as a result of a series of four invited lectures he gave at MIT, in which he argued that "human knowledge itself has a history" — "that the nature of knowing, of cognitive acquisition itself, changes historically" (p.xviii). He traced these changes to human artifacts, including "tools and weapons" but also "language, forms of social organization and interaction, techniques of production, skills." And "the production of such artifacts for use ... was at the same time the production of representations" (p.xviii). These representations "are the precondition of so-called internal representations, that is, for the reflective activities of imagination, thought, conscious purpose" (p.xiv). Thus "human beings create the means of their own cognition" (p.xv). One can see why this line of argument would be interesting to Vygotskians such as Engestrom, Guile, and me.

Wartofsky further argues that "the cognitive artifacts we create are models: representations to ourselves of what we do, of what we want, and what we hope for. The model is not, therefore, simply a reflection or a copy of some state of affairs, but beyond this, a putative model of action, a representation of prospective practice, or of acquired modes of action" (p.xv). 

Thus we must consider two systematic issues. Analytically, what is the nature and function of a representation? Genetically, how did we generate the activity of representing itself, i.e., creating cognitive artifacts in the first place? (p.xvi). In these essays, Wartofsky says, he barely touches on the genetic question (p.xvi). 

Wartofsky goes on to argue that not all representation is linguistic: "representation is already involved in the very character of non-linguistic artifacts, insofar as they are themselves symbols, or are parts of systems of symbols, in which the artifacts themselves present meanings, intentions, relations, and come to represent to us the modes of practice involved in their production and use" (p.xvii). And "models are proffered truths. To proffer truth is the human means of acquiring knowledge. In this sense, cognitive acquisition, human learning is essentially mediated by representation. It is what makes theory possible" (p.xviii). Wartofsky adds this conclusion: "Strictly speaking, one may say that there is no human knowledge without representation; or more radically still, that there is no knowledge without representation" (p.xviii). 

With this argument in mind, let's turn to the aforementioned chapter "Perception, Representation, and Action," which most directly addresses this line of argument.

In this chapter, Wartofsky argues that "We do not perceive, and then act; perception is itself one of the instrumentalities or modes of action" (p.195). Thinking in these terms, we can understand historical human praxis as 

the fundamental activity of producing and reproducing the conditions of species existence, or survival. What is distinctly human about this activity ... is that human beings do this by means of the creation of artifacts. Their production, as distinct from the foraging, scavenging or hunting activity of other animals, proceeds by a transformation of part of the environment into an extension of the animal organs— as, e.g., tools are. But, in more generic terms, the 'tool' may be any artifact created for the purpose of successful production and reproduction of the means of existence. Therefore, the use of language for communication in this enterprise makes language itself such an artifact, or 'tool'; so too is the mode of social organisation, or of division of labor which is instrumental in the successful satisfaction of existence needs, or of the needs to reproduce the existence of the species. Extending the notion of 'artifact' or 'tool' still further, the acquisition of skills, in the processes of production (even at the level of foraging, scavenging or hunting, and prior to the introduction of agriculture or the domestication of animals) creates such skills as themselves 'artifacts', even where these skills do not entail the use of tools in the ordinary sense, but only the mastery of natural organs of the body, and of perceptual skills in pattern-or-cue-recognition, for the purposes of satisfying productive or reproductive needs. The crucial character of the human artifact is that its production, its use, and the attainment of skill in these, can be transmitted, and thus preserved within a social group, and through time, from one generation to the next. The symbolic communication of such skills in the production, reproduction and use of artifacts— i.e. the teaching or transmission of such skills is the context in which mimicry or the imitation of an action becomes a characteristic human mode of activity. It is, in effect, this ability to represent an action by symbolic means which generates a distinctive class of artifacts, which we may call representations. (pp.200-201, his emphasis)

Here, Wartofsky runs in parallel with Vygotskian ideas of mediation, and also emphasizes the cultural reproduction in which artifacts are enacted. He goes on to offer a typology of artifacts:

Primary artifacts: "those directly used" in "the production of the means of existence and in the reproduction of the species" (p.202), such as "axes, clubs, needles, bowls, etc." (p.201).

Secondary artifacts: "those used in the preservation and transmission of the acquired skills or modes of action or praxis by which the production is carried out. Secondary artifacts are therefore representations of such modes of action, and in this sense are mimetic, not simply of the objects of an environment which are of interest or use in this production, but of these objects as they are acted on, or upon the mode of operation or action involving such objects" (p.202). 

Through these representations, "nature becomes transformed, not only in the direct practical way of becoming cultivated, or shaped into objects of use ... it becomes transformed as an object or arena of action... nature itself has become historicized and socialized, and has come to be a representation of a certain mode of praxis or human action" (p.206).

Tertiary artifacts: Artifacts that are "abstracted from their direct representational function" (p.209); they "can come to constitute a relatively autonomous 'world', in which the rules, conventions and outcomes no longer appear directly practical," especially "when the conventions of representation ... become transparent" (p.208). He gives the example of a mimetic reenactment of a hunt or rehearsal for a hunt (p.207). These are "alternative imaginative perceptual modes, freed from the direct representation of ongoing forms of action, and relatively autonomous in this sense," but still they feed "back into actual praxis, as a representation of possibilities which go beyond present actualities" (p.209). While Wartofsky gives the example of reenacting a hunt, I think tertiary artifacts may cover examples such as formal logic that is abstracted from the actual problems it is trying to represent, or algorithms, or abstract formulas that can be applied to codified data (f=ma). 

Were these insights worth the price of admission? Maybe. The discussion above has been pretty well summarized by the people I've read who have drawn on Wartofsky's argument. But reading it myself, especially in close proximity to my recent readings on Boisot (who deals a lot with codification and abstraction) and the bio of Shannon (who was all about abstraction), has helped me to think a little differently about this typology. And what I think is that although this typology is a good starting place, providing a solid vocabulary for (for instance) critiquing Leontiev's treatment of tools, it is only a starting place for thinking through more complex issues such as how texts rerepresent our activities to ourselves. 

Still, it's important and challenging work. If you're interested in issues of artifacts and representations, check it out. 

Reading :: Complexity and Postmodernism

Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems
By Paul Cilliers

In this 1998 book, Paul Cilliers, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, explores postmodern theory through the lens of complexity theory. Someone I follow on Twitter mentioned this book a while ago, saying that it helped him to really understand postmodernist theory in a way he hadn't before, so I picked it up.

Full disclosure: I generally don't like reading philosophy. I'm not sure whether this is because I am too applied, or too concrete a thinker, or not well prepared, or whether the style of philosophy texts tends to be unfamiliar or obtuse to me. The philosophy texts that have worked best for me have been texts such as Latour's, which are usually well illustrated with concrete examples gathered from qualitative research or based on descriptions of social systems.  

Cilliers does not write in the Latour vein, and complexity theory, like postmodern theory, is often presented in abstract terms. So I found myself skimming through the book as I often do with philosophical texts. But I did gather some interesting points.

First, in the Preface, Cilliers notes that there's a difference between complex and complicated. "Things like computers and jumbo jets are complicated," he says: they have a large number of components, but can be described in terms of these individual components. But 

In a complex system, on the other hand, the interaction among constituents of the system, and the interaction between the system and its environment, are of such a nature that the system as a whole cannot be understood simply by analysing its components. Moreover, these relationships are not fixed, but shift and change, often as a result of self-organisation. This can result in novel features, usually referred to in terms of emergent properties. (pp.viii-ix)

In the first chapter, Cilliers explores complexity further. He points out that Claude Shannon developed the basis for information theory by using entropy as a measure of information content in a message: "By replacing 'energy' with 'information' in the equations of thermodynamics, he could show that the amount of information in a message is equal to its 'entropy'. The more disorderly a message, the higher is its information content" (p.8). One "problematic implication" is that "if information equals entropy, then the message with the highest information content is the one that is completely random. Obviously there is some tension between the concepts of 'information' and 'randomness'" (p.8). He goes on to discuss Chaitin's insight that randomness should not be defined in terms of unpredictability but rather incompressibility. For instance, imagine 1000 characters, and each character is a 3. (Notice that I was able to describe that set of numbers perfectly in the italicized sentence, using far less than 1000 characters—I could compress it.) (p.9)

Based on this discussion, Cilliers asserts that "A complex system cannot be reduced to a simple one if it wasn't simple (or perhaps merely complicated) to start out with" (p.9). 

Complex systems, Cillers says, have two "indispensable capabilities": the processes of representation and self-organization (p.10). For complex systems, veridical representation isn't adequate: meaning is conferred by "the relationships between the structural components of the system itself" (p.11). And in terms of self-organization, "a complex system, such as a living organism or a growing economy, has to develop its structure and be able to adapt that structure in order to cope with changes in the environment" (p.12). 

This first chapter, frankly, was the most interesting to me because I'm interested in the basics of complexity theory—although I'd prefer to explore it with an extended, well-developed example rather than the quick cuts we get here. The rest of the book turns to post-structuralism and postmodernism, which the author sees as addressing complexity. The gist is that postmodernism is responding to the issues of complexity. Unfortunately I found myself skimming through this part and can't give an adequate review of it. 

Reading :: A Mind at Play

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
By Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman

Just a quick review for this popular biography of Claude Shannon. I have been reading more of Max Boisot's work recently, and since it draws from Shannon, I wanted to learn a little more about him. This biography was inexpensive on Kindle, so I picked it up.

The biography is well-written, discussing Shannon's life chronologically so that we can understand the circumstances and influences surrounding his breakthroughs as well as the ways that one part of his life informed the others. Although I was most interested in these breakthroughs themselves—applying Boolean logic to circuit design, developing the study of cryptoanalysis, laying the foundation for information theory—understanding Shannon's life and the circumstances behind these breakthroughs helped me to understand his breakthroughs as well.

This was an important step. I haven't read Shannon, but I benefited directly from him in my undergraduate work as a computer science major. Later, in my Ph.D program, I heard faculty dismiss the "Shannon and Weaver model of communication" for being arhetorical, but I didn't have a good grounding in what that model was. After this book, I have a better idea, and I can see both the original problem to which he applied it and the problems that come when expanding its application to other problems. 

If you're interested in Shannon—or information theory, or codification, or just in how the information age came to be—consider picking up this book. 

Reading :: Beyond the Brain

Beyond the Brain: An Agentive Activity Perspective on Mind, Development, and Learning
By Igor Arievitch

This book reminds me of a book by Arievitch's frequent collaborator, Anna Stetsenko: The Transformative Mind. Both books are discussing activity theory and Vygotskian theory in sophisticated ways that would be interesting to readers of Mind, Culture and Activity and similar CHAT journals. But at the same time, both seem to be arguing against the cognitivist paradigm, a paradigm that has already been rejected by those readers. This dichotomy in their anticipated readership really throws me off. For instance, Arievitch critiques "brainism" (Ch.2), the tendency to reduce the mind to brain functions. But anyone who has much grounding in CHAT already knows the argument against brainism—an argument with roots in the Vygotsky collection Mind in Society, which was published in the US in 1978, cementing Vygotsky's reputation as the Mozart of psychology. According to Google Scholar, Mind in Society has over 130,000 citations. So I concluded that Chapter 2 really wasn't for me, and skimmed until I got to Chapter 3.

From Chapter 3 on, we get into more interesting territory. Arievitch, who studied under Leontiev, Luria, and Galperin (!!), draws heavily from Galperin's work—work that has largely not been translated into English. 

In Chapter 3, Arievitch forwards the claim that thinking can only be understood in terms of shared activity, with the mind regulating and orienting the individual as they interact with their ever-changing environment (p.25). Learning is social: it "takes place in shared activity of the child and the adult mediated by cultural tools" (p.25). And this brings us to Galperin's unique contribution: "he was one of the few scholars who explicitly made questions about the origin and function of non-automatic regulation of activity the focal point of his whole theory" (p.34). 

Arievitch argues that Vygotsky did not consistently apply his own developmental approach to cultural mediation (p.55). But such mediators, especially signs, can "restructure and 'amplify' human memory, attention, thinking, and therefore enhance the individual's ability to solve challenging tasks" (p.96). This question of cognitive tools, he says, has been fundamental to Vygotskians (p.115). 

He concludes by arguing that the mind has to be understood as an embodied agent (p.147). Where Vygotsky failed to sufficiently operationalize his approach, the agentive activity perspective attempts to do so. 

This review is only the barest discussion of this book, which has a lot in it. If you're intrigued by CHAT approaches, and especially if you want to contrast them with brainism, definitely take a look at this book.

Reading :: Community

Community: Pursuing the Dream, Living the Reality
By Suzanne Keller

I picked this book up to better understand how cultural sociologists understand community, and I'm glad I did. The book starts by examining the scholarship around community, then analyzes the growth of (human) community in a planned community, Twin Rivers, NJ, over 30 years. 

Part I (the first three chapters) mainly examines the scholarship on community, and I found it to be extremely valuable, as it addresses landmark sociology on community (Tonnies, Durkheim, Weber) via a well-integrated review that helped me see the development of the concept over time. 

In Chapter 1, Keller notes that "community is a chameleon term that is used in many, often contradictory ways" (p.4), including two "prevalent perspectives": that of "an organism where the whole is more important than individual members" and the more recent "atomistic/contrarian" model in which free persons are bound together in a voluntary social contract (pp.4-5). Community is often related to the following:

• Place, turf, territory. Nearly every commentator understands community as related to "a bounded, identifiable territory" until recent discussions of "cyberspace" (p.6). 
• Shared ideals and expectations (pp.6-7)
• Network of social ties and allegiances (p.7)
• Collective framework (p.7)

In contrast, community is not interpersonal intimacy, formal organization membership, group affiliation based on identity, or communitarianism, which emphasizes "a set of moral and philosophical principles" (pp.7-8). 

Keller asks: "How can self be linked to community and how can community be linked to society?" (p.9). This question animates the study in Part II -- but before we get there, we will examine each term.

Society "might be thought of as an overarching system of social, political, and cultural arrangements that encompass the totality. Its practices are formalized and abstract; its scale is superpersonal" (p.11). In contrast, community "is tangible, proximate, based on direct contact, mutual awareness, and a sense of empathy with those with whom one shares one's life in a definite place. In community, self and terrain are intertwined" (p.11). Community has been addressed by Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, de Toqueville, Marx, and Tonnies, and central questions of community are:

• "How are communities created and maintained over time?"
• "How is a 'spirit of community' generated?"
• "How are human differences bridged for the sake of the common good?" (p.13)

In Chapter 2, Keller discusses four prototypes of community: the Greek polis, the monastic community, the Puritan commonwealth, and 19th-century utopian communities. The tensions among these prototypes are behind the confusion in discussions of community today, since the same term is applied to different conceptions (p.39). In Chapter 3, Keller then turns to sociological work on community, starting with Tonnies' 1887 Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (founded in Hobbes; p.41). Durkheim produced a counterproposal, his division between mechanical and organic solidarity, which are fundamentally different from Tonnies' categories (p.43). (Weber also builds on Tonnies; p.44). Tonnies understood Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as ideal types, but also as historical trends and types of social relations— a fact that introduced some confusion (p.44). Modern societies embrace both types of relations (p.46). 

With this background, we get to Part II: The case of Twin Rivers. Keller argues that leaders played a crucial role in guiding collectivity and creating schemes of behavior (p.202). Initially, leaders were hard to attract, but after three decades, leadership positions became competitive (p.203). Interestingly, Keller found that leaders worked for the community due to different motivations, from ego to power to the challenge of making a difference (p.208). However, almost all leaders cited the principle of giving back to the community, something that was instilled by their families (p.208). 

Based on this study, Keller outlines ten "standard dimensions that form the bedrock of community" (p.266):

1. "A bounded site of territory or turf"
2. "Criteria of membership"
3. "An institutional framework of laws and rules"
4. "A set of values emphasizing cooperation, mutual responsibility, and sharing"
5. "A belief system that validates a particular way of life"
6. "A myth of community embodied in images, ideals, aspirations, and goals"
7. "Shared rituals and celebrations"
8. "Leadership structure"
9. "Social relationships that are personal, direct, responsive, and trusting"
10. "Transcendent purposes and goals" (pp.266-267)

Importantly, and related to #2, "collective identity rests on social exclusion to some degree," with outgroups defining the ingroup. In Twin Rivers, the outgroup was a nearby community that they contrasted with themselves (p.286). 

I've only given an outline of parts of the book that particularly interested me. But if you're interested in community—what it is, how it's defined, how it forms and develops—definitely pick up this book. 

Reading :: Regional Advantage

Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128
By Annalee Saxenian

My IC2 colleagues have been recommending this book to me for a while, and I finally got to read it near the end of the fall 2021 semester. Written by a professor of city and regional planning, the book answers the question posed on the back cover: "Why is it that business in Silicon Valley is again flourishing while within Route 128 in Massachusetts it continues to decline?" The answer of 1994—the book's original publishing date—is that "Silicon Valley developed a decentralized but cooperative industrial system while Route 128 came to be dominated by independent, self-sufficient corporations" (again via the back cover). 

Saxenian comes to this conclusion by comparing the regions historically, arguing that Silicon Valley developed "competition and community" (Ch.2), while Route 128 developed "independence and hierarchy" (Ch.3). Saxenian argues that to understand this comparison, we have to think in terms of regions, not cities or individual companies. "It is helpful to think of a region's industrial system as having three dimensions: local institutions and culture, industrial structure, and corporate organization" (p.7). 

In terms of culture, she notes that Silicon Valley's "culture encouraged risk and accepted failure" (p.38), while SV's firms "blurred the boundaries between firms" and eliminated "traditional boundaries between employers and employees and between corporate functions within the firm," replacing them with "independent confederations of project teams that were linked by intense, informal communications and that mirrored the region's decentralized industrial structure" (p.50). Unfortunately, she says, these entrepreneurs lacked the language to "describe this unusual mix of cooperation and competition," instead seeing themselves as rugged individualists: "They attributed their spectacular growth and unchallenged dominance of world markets to individual technical prowess and entrepreneurial risk-taking." And "Assuming that the dynamism of free markets would be self-perpetuating and self-governing, they saw no need to attend to the institutional foundations of their vitality," leading them to make choices that would eventually threaten the region (p.57).

Meanwhile, although Saxenian sees some examples of similar community-oriented networks in MIT's hackers, these were atypical in Massachusetts' Route 128 (p.59). Along Route 128, people were reluctant to take risks; business and personal life were separate; and business associations were merely sources of information, not integrative sources of enduring networks (p.69). Route 128 developed its own "combination of decentralized authority and continuous negotiation," the matrix (p.75), which generated conflict while masking centralization of authority (p.76). Matrix organizations tended to be indecisive (p.117). 

Consequently, Route 128's capabilities "were internalized within large firms and thus not available to start-ups or to other local producers"; they did not develop the combination of competition and collaboration that yielded Silicon Valley's innovation (p.111). 

In her conclusion, Saxenian argues that regions must shake off autarkic mindsets and instead construct more decentralized industrial systems (p.165). She argues that a regional strategy must be tailored to the problems and conditions of particular locations (p.167).

Overall, I found this book to be well worth reading. It helped me to think through units larger than the organization but smaller than overall "culture." If you're interested in doing the same, definitely check it out!

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.