Abstract
In this chapter, it is argued that both ethnographers and newcomers need to develop relational agency in order to engage in local practices. New feminist materialism helps us understand this process as one of aligning ‘relata-within-phenomena’, but lacks a vocabulary for collective practices. This vocabulary is found in cultural–historical activity theory where three different approaches to collective practices are explored. I argue that as the cultural forces move through newcoming ethnographers, they learn to distinguish between harmony and friction in new ways because the activity and material space they engage in collectively are changing. This implies sharing collective motives of engagements. A completely collectively aligned motive is rare, since participants (including ethnographers) learn from different nested positions. The experienced practitioners are, however, more nested than newcomers in the cultural markers that can move humans and artefacts in and out of geometrical spaces. This process I define and discuss is the scalar learning of centripetal cultural forces, which may eject phenomena while nesting others in the collective practices.
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Notes
- 1.
For a thorough discussion of the problem of methodological individualism, see Zahle 2007. In my discussion, there is no absolute distinction between methodological individualism (sometimes connected to ‘liberal values’) and methodological holism connected to espoused ‘collectivist political ideals’ (Zahle 2007: 318). On the contrary, the theory of cultural learning processes connects values and ideals, person and collectives of persons sounded through by cultural forces.
- 2.
In a subtle way, it also illustrates the danger of relying on interviews as the only approach during fieldwork. Questions form answers. What the answers actually mean may be obscured by the interpretations of those who asked the questions in the first place from their own frame of learning.
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Hasse, C. (2015). Towards Nested Engagement. In: An Anthropology of Learning. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9606-4_7
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