Abstract
This chapter presents an argument for an anthropology of learning, which foregrounds the force of collective cultural learning rather than social processes in the empirical field. As a collective force, culture is not simply an analytical implication but a process that makes materials emerge and aligns the ethnographer’s word meanings with those of the ethnographic subjects. Word meaning in cultural historical activity theory implies learning words as collective anchors for thinking. The process is exemplified with episodes from a fieldwork following physics students in their first year of studies and the way artefacts, such as chairs, numbers (like 42) and colour cards, anchor collective thinking in practiced places. The chapter discusses how cultural materials and words intra-act in learning to create the phenomena we perceive collectively.
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Notes
- 1.
Also spelled Leontiev or Leontjev.
- 2.
My interest is, however, not in semiotics, which I find a much too fixed way of describing collectively aligned intra-actions that create cultural artefacts. Memory is not a ‘record of a fixed past’ (Barad 2007: x), though I also believe Vygotsky adds to Barad’s framework the notion of word meaning as an embodied thought-anchored process, which is also mental.
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Hasse, C. (2015). Collective and Social Cultures. In: An Anthropology of Learning. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9606-4_3
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