Abstract
In this chapter, I use technology as an example of a cultural force. The cultural force creates proximal zones for the frictioned cultural ecologies nesting people in material surroundings. This is the last aspect of cultural learning processes (following social designation, practice-based learning, learning by culture contrast and scalar learning discussed in the previous chapters). The example discussed is the Standard Model and the development of the particle detector behind the discovery of the Higgs particle. Meaningful matter is stabilised – but within a particular developmental zone. Material artefacts, like technologies, define and transform the nearest developmental zone of all participants. If cultural forces evolve and move through all persons in organisations, they also have implications for the very special particular newcomer: the expert researcher, who is professionally engaged in learning the cultural activities of other people. How can an ethnographer learn to engage with the questions that engage the ethnographic subjects? The evolving process of being both ignorant and making sense is explored as a process of expansive learning for both ethnographers and other participants. In this sense, material multistability is a constantly evolving process of learning, which involves all the researchers’ development zones of space-time-mattering.
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Notes
- 1.
Simple representations acting as mental models help the individual physicists to understand (Nersessian 1995). In natural science some scientists would argue that theories, in the form of mathematical formulas, act as a mathematical model, as do graphs used to illustrate them. Some definitions stress that models expressed in words are theories and all theories can be conceived of as models – contrary to models, which are not always theories. One example is mechanical, hydraulic or electrical models.
- 2.
The Standard Model has been called the triumph of particle physics in the 1970s. It incorporated all that was known at that time and has since then successfully predicted the outcome of a large variety of experiments. Today, the Standard Model is a well-established theory applicable to a wide range of conditions, but it is a model in the sense that it builds on the assumption of the Higgs boson. (http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/theory/model.html retrieved 5 January 2005).
- 3.
The information and even many of the formulations such as “the last piece to Standard Model (with the exception of the Higgs particle)” are taken from the particle physicists’ own formulations (http://www-donut.fnal.gov/web_pages/standardmodelpg/TheStandardModel.html, http://teachers.web.cern.ch/teachers/ Retrieved 3 June 2004).
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Hasse, C. (2015). Future Zones of Development. In: An Anthropology of Learning. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9606-4_8
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