Cultural Production

Related terms:

Cognitive Technology, Cultural Construction, Cultural Creativity, Cultural Meaning,

Educational Setting, Social Scientist

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What does the digital do to knowledge

making?
Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, in Towards a Semantic Web, 2011

The ubiquity of recording and documentation

In the era of mass communications recording was expensive. It was also the preserve
of specialised industry sectors peopled by tradespeople with arcane, insider technical
knowledge—typesetters, printers, radio and television producers, cinematographers
and the like. Cultural and knowledge production houses were owned by private en-
trepreneurs and sometimes the state. The social power of the captains of the media
industry or the apparatchiks of state communications were at least in part derived
from their ownership and control of the means of production of meaning—the pro-
prietors of newspapers, publishing houses, radio stations, music studios, television
channels and movie studios. Cultural recording and reproduction were expensive,
specialised and centralised.

There were some significant spaces where modern people could and did inciden-
tally record their represented meanings in the way pre-moderns did not—in letters,
telegrams, photographs and tape recordings, for instance. However, these amateur
spaces almost always produced single copies, inaccessible in the public domain.
These were not spaces that had any of the peculiar powers of reproduction in the
era of ‘mass’ society.

By contrast, the new, digital media spaces are not just sites of communication; they
are places of ubiquitous recording. They are not just spaces of live communication;
they are sites of asynchronous multimodal communication of recorded meanings
or incidental recording of asynchronous communication—emails, text messages,
voicemails, Facebook posts and Twitter tweets. The recording is so cheap as to be
virtually free. And widespread public communication is as accessible and of the same
technical quality for amateurs as it is for professionals.

Despite these momentous shifts in the lifeworld of private and public commu-
nications, most knowledge production practices remain ephemeral—conference
presentations, lectures, conversations, data regarded as not immediately germane,
interactions surrounding data and the like. Unrecorded, these disappear into the
ether.

Now that so much can be so effortlessly recorded, how might we store these things
for purposes ancillary to knowledge production? What status might we accord this
stuff that is so integral to the knowledge process, but which previously remained
unrecorded? How might we sift through the ‘noise’ to find what is significant?
What might be released into the public domain? And what should be retained behind
firewalls for times when knowledge requires validation before being made public?
These are key questions which our scholarly publication system needs to address,
but thus far has barely done so. They will surely need to be addressed soon, given
the ubiquity of recording in the new, social media.

> Read full chapter

Anthropology and History

J.D. Faubion, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

2 Anthropology and Ethnohistory

A more modest anthropological tradition of diachronic research has borrowed its
methods less from natural history than from empirical historiography. It has a partial
foreshadowing in the particularistic study of the drift and dissemination of traits
and artifacts from the centers to the peripheries of cultural production with which
diffusionists in both Germany and the US were occupied between the 1890s and
the 1930s. It has its more definitive commencement in the immediate aftermath of
the Second World War. Its most familiar designation is still ‘ethnohistory,’ however
misleading the suggestion of parallels with ‘ethnoscience’ or ‘ethnomethodology’
may be. In any event, the signature task of ethnohistory has always been the
investigation and documentation of the pasts of those native or ‘first’ peoples whom
anthropologists had, until recently, proprietarily or conventionally claimed as ‘their
own.’
In the US, its more concrete initial impetus came with the 1946 ratification of the
Indian Claims Act, which soon led to anthropologists serving as expert witnesses—-
sometimes for the plaintiffs, sometimes for the defense—in the readjudication of
the treaties of the pioneer era. In the US and elsewhere, it had a crucial catalyst
in the granting of public access to the administrative archives of the pioneers, the
missionaries, and the bureaucrats of European colonization. Hence, its characteristic
focus: the dynamics of contact and conflict between the subaltern and their would-be
overlords: pioneering, missionary, colonizing, or enslaving (Cohn 1968, 1980).

Narrowly delimited, ethnohistory remains a specialist's craft. Since the 1970s, how-
ever, its methods and its themes have met with an ever widening embrace, and if
‘historical ethnography’ and ‘historical anthropology’ are not yet synonymous with
standard disciplinary practice, they are certainly of a piece with it. The anthropo-
logical gaze is now less often ‘from afar’ than it is longitudinal. Such a vantage
has been pivotal in the renovation of political economy. It has also brought fresh
and stimulating perspectives to the address of kinship, race, national and personal
identity, and gender. Its deployment and its impact may or may not be indications
of greater disciplinary enlightenment, but they are by no means indications of
passing intellectual fashion alone. The lengthening of the anthropological gaze has
rather gone hand in hand with the ascendance of a postcolonial order in which
social and cultural boundaries have become increasingly permeable and structures
increasingly indistinguishable from processes. It has gone hand in hand as well with
the ascendance of the postcolonial demand that anthropology offer a reckoning, not
simply of its relation to the colonial past but also of the status of the knowledge that
it claims to produce.

> Read full chapter

Judaism and Gender

L. Levitt, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

4 Jewish Cultural Production

Recent works of feminist art and literature have not only built on the work of Jewish
scholars in a variety of fields, they have also used popular and material culture to
offer critical perspectives on Jewishness as a cultural and ethnic as well as a religious
identity. Some works highlight the absence of Jewish women from certain forms
of religious or cultural production like the reading and writing of sacred texts in
Helene Aylon's work (Kleeblatt 1996). Others have used these artifacts including texts
to create new theatrical or cinematic productions on or about Jewish women.
Since the 1970s there has been a growing body of Jewish feminist literature especially
by lesbian Jewish feminists (Alpert 1997, Beck 1982, Klepfisz and Kaye/Kantrowitz
1986). These writers often focus on Jewishness as a cultural and political and not
a religious practice. More recent efforts have included the reclaiming of Klezmer
music and the resources of Yiddish film for new cultural production (Fox 1999).

In the arts the inclusion of women has expanded the realm of Jewish cultural
production in the United States as well as Israel. Increasingly Jewish women are
playing an active role in these efforts by creating new works, sponsoring exhibits,
and participating in various forums to present feminist artistic works to a broader
audience (Kleeblatt 1996, Pellegrini 1997, Antler 1998, Prell 1999). Here Jewish
museums have become a crucial site for new forms of Jewish feminist cultural
production.

> Read full chapter

Memory, Media, Nostalgia, and Grief

Ned Prutzer, in Emotions, Technology, and Health, 2016

Memory, Representation, Language, and the Lacanian Gaze

Examining the modes of representation deployed in each work requires attention
toward various bodies of theory, the first being affect theory. The shift toward
affect within media and cultural studies focuses on subjects’ sensory engagement
with artistic works, considering the import of corporeality in the production and
reception of artistic texts (Hurley & Warner, 2012). This challenges the use of affect
within psychoanalysis in fashioning affect as “an innate, fleeting, and instinctive
biological response to a stimulus that becomes a feeling through cognition and
becomes an emotion through the process of recalling similar experiences from
memory” (Hurley & Warner, 2012, pp. 103-104). A distinction, then, exists between
a feeling, forged through biological reflex, and emotion, forged through subjective
association. Regarding the latter, affect scholar Brian Massumi holds that affect
exists within circulation—not within the individual, as psychoanalysis locates it. To
Massumi, sentiments are public, and “the subject is simply one of many ‘nodal
points,’ in the ‘affective economy’” (Hurley & Warner, 2012, p. 105). One’s focus,
therefore, rightfully lies in “the point of impact” and “the mark of the impression”
(p. 105). Given this, an emphasis on the circulation of media texts within affective
economies, a facet of affect central to the construction of the humanistic perspective
toward memory that I describe reveals much about the mediation of memory within
popular media productions.
Like affect theory, the work of Roland Barthes is also vital to this analysis, specifically
for how he conceptualizes the relationship between text and image. In “The Pho-
tographic Message,” Barthes (1977) writes that “[t]he closer the text to the image,
the less it seems to connote it; caught as if it were in the iconographic message,
the verbal message seems to share in its objectivity” (p. 26). Barthes also notes
that a prime function of text when paired with a sign or image is to emphasize
the connotations contained in the image. Likewise, Émile Benveniste’s work on
subjectivity in language is helpful in examining the nature of dialog and text in
cultural productions. Benveniste elucidates the dialects subjects create in language
by using the pronouns “I” and “you” (Adams & Searle, 1986). This shapes the mode of
address in a cultural production and constructs reality linguistically, influencing who
owns a given narrative, who projects upon it, and who is being addressed. Therefore,
an analysis of how subjects convey subjectivity in language and how text can work
in tandem with the images of media productions presents an insightful means of
tracing the significance of the circulation of affect within a range of meaningful
subjective associations.

It is also important for such an analysis to focus on how a cultural production

constructs cultural memory. The nodes of cultural memory are constantly reorga-
nized in a continuous process of remembering as well as forgetting through the
shuffling of new links for old ones (Lotman, 1978). Due to this, culture becomes
“a social phenomenon” and “a record in the memory of what the community has
experienced,” which must be articulated as “that which, they presume, will become
a memory from the point of view of the reconstructable future” (Lotman, 1978,
pp. 213-214). Within Massumi’s conceptualizations, one sees a synthesis of affect
and cultural memory emerging as a powerful analytic tool. Affective economies and
cultural memory are not so dissimilar when one considers their descriptions side
by side. Both, after all, are concerned with circulation and the subjective, associative
meanings that are reshaped and transform within culture over time. Accordingly,
both strains of critical theory support the fluidity of memory and counter the
authority that subjects can invest in memory and media artifacts.

Lastly, the work of Jacques Lacan is particularly useful for the perspective that I
develop here. Lacan portrays memory as influenced by desire. The unconscious,
as such, becomes a discourse of the other, the need to project, imagined within
the field of the other. Unconsciousness, then, is an otherness within consciousness
structured like a language (Blake, 2013a). Moreover, Lacanian theory posits that the
gaze of the other is in fact the construction of the self (Blake, 2013b). In the cultural
productions examined here, the gaze of the other is the camera lens, turning the
Lacanian mirror into a form of mediation. Furthermore, Lacan’s formulation of the
objet petite a is also of critical importance here. The objet petite a is a desire for
the other, one that is “unobtainable and not capable of returning or satisfying our
own need to know.” To Lacan, this leads to “the imprecision and impossibilities of
language to describe the Real.” The objet petite a also “almost always corresponds to
that which has no form or necessary existence, and is symbolized by the subject’s
desire or scopic drive to gain entry into the symbolic world of language” (McGuire,
n.d.). The reliance on mediation to facilitate memory that I focus on can readily be
situated within such insights. Lacan’s interest in the emptiness, insufficiency, and
subjective power of the signification which comprises the objet petite a illuminates
subjects’ problematic faith in the authority of media as a symbolic force in accessing
the past objectively through memory.

Ultimately, through each of the cultural productions that follow, I will show that
a combination of the areas of analysis I have examined in this section depicts the
misconceptions on memory and mediation that cultural productions can embody
and address. For instance, in the films I analyze in the next section, the protago-
nists use photographs and other forms of media in place of memory. While this
substitution of mediation helps them articulate and act upon their nostalgia and
grief, it also obfuscates the very reality that they feel these media actively provide as
a means of performing and modifying the past. Moreover, the insights yielded from
these engagements with mediation illuminate the dynamics of PostSecret and Dear
Photograph in the mediation of nostalgia and grief within online environments.

> Read full chapter

Education, History of
J. Schriewer, A. Nóvoa, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral
Sciences, 2001

3.3 From the History of Educational Ideas to a Sociohistory of

Knowledge
In contrast to traditional histories of educational ideas, the ‘new’ cultural history of
education is interested in the production, diffusion, and reception of educational
discourses throughout time and space. In other words, it is interested in ‘a historical
imagination in the study of schooling that focuses on knowledge as a field of cultural
practice and cultural production’ (Popkewitz et al. 2001). Therefore, the research
interest has shifted to the discursive practices that regulate schooling, especially in
situations of conflict or rupture. In this sense, several authors are calling for a histo-
riography, not of the general terms, but of the conceptual structures that determine
educational discourses, and for analyses, not of prominent ideas, but of fields of
historically defined discursive problematiques. Such an approach is also important
for analyses of the roles played by educational experts in providing ‘legitimate’ or
‘scientific’ interpretations of school realities. It helps to understand the original
institutionalization of educational studies, not as a narrative of intellectual progress,
but as a form of ‘governmentality.’ The question is not how to identify different ideas,
but how to apprehend the rise of expert systems of knowledge (Drewek et al. 1998).
The same holds true for the analysis of the complex transformation procedures
that change academic subjects (integrated into their distinctive conceptual spaces)
into school subjects (integrated into the arena of schooling), or for the study of the
production and diffusion of textbooks that are not simply ‘delivery systems’ of factual
information, but the results of cultural constructions imposing particular ways of
seeing and interpreting the world. In this sense, knowledge has increasingly come
to be taken as a text that redefines subjectivity and identities, that elaborates rules
and behaviors, and that configures meanings and beliefs.

> Read full chapter

Near Middle East/North African Stud-

ies: Culture
M. Cooke, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

4 Moral Authority
Political independence in MENA countries demanded political and moral vision
that would owe as little as possible to European norms. Intellectuals set out to
‘revolutionize the revolution.’ In 1946, the Iran-Soviet Society sponsored the first
congress of Iranian writers which called for the centrality of ideology to literature.
Seven years later in Lebanon, the first editorial of the influential monthly periodical
Al-Adab declared that all forms of writing must be politically engaged. The time of
art for art's sake had passed to be replaced by a revolutionary ethic in all creative
activities.

MENA writers, and more recently filmmakers, have a moral authority rarely found in
the US and Western Europe. Since books, plays, paintings, and films may assume the
force of a political manifesto, governments as well as nongovernmental associations
such as Islamist groups try to monitor cultural production before, during, and after
its completion. Intellectuals judged to be dissident may be eliminated, exiled, or
co-opted. For most MENA intellectuals prison is a badge of honor, exile a terrible
necessity, co-optation an ever-threatening possibility.
Co-optation is a widespread phenomenon in MENA, making arduous the decision
to stay in one's country. Filmmaking is particularly susceptible. Like theater, film
watching is a communal experience and as such it allows individuals to share
with an anonymous group a sense of justified anger, or to laugh at the expense
of oppressors. The power of such cathartic moments has not been lost on re-
pressive regimes: national film institutes sponsor, censor, and retain monopoly
of the finished product. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iranian filmmakers, like the
internationally recognized Mohsen Makhmalbaf, have had to submit their scripts,
rushes, and final films to the government censors, who are especially concerned with
Islamizing the representation of women. During the latter part of Hafiz Assad's rule,
Syrian filmmakers were sponsored to produce films that were remarkably critical of
the regime but that were rarely shown.

Films like Muhammad Malas' The Night (1991) are only shown during international
film festivals. People know of their existence and long to watch them. In the
meantime, the dissenting individual may be given a government post or some
other form of visibility that demands a measure of criticism of the government that
is sponsoring the criticism. Such ‘commissioned critics’ provide an outlet for the
people's frustration and anger with a repressive regime, thereby helping to fashion
a facade of democracy. In his Historical Miniatures (1993), the Syrian playwright
Saadallah Wannus (1941–98) examines the triangular relationship between state,
society, and public intellectuals through the controversial meeting of the fourteenth
century Mongol tyrant Tamerlane with the North African historian Ibn Khaldun.

The project of cultural production from inside authoritarian regimes is fraught with
danger: just how much criticism is too much, how much too little? Nevertheless,
despite the dire consequences for articulating opposition, public intellectuals rarely
flinch from what they consider to be their responsibility. Some are killed for their
words. Many are imprisoned. So many have published books about their prison
experiences that it is possible to talk about a body of MENA prison literature that is
beginning to receive the critical attention it deserves (Abrahamian 1999, al-Musawi
1999). The fact that intellectuals have had such experiences and that they then
publish them gives them a moral authority that others, whose writings may be as
‘good,’ may never achieve. Research on intellectuals' prison experiences and writings
has tended to be conducted outside the country. The dictates of Aesopian language
demand that the text not be decoded in the place where it is produced for fear of
further political repercussions. Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1977) has
influenced scholarship on prison writing throughout the MENA region.

> Read full chapter

Mass Media, Political Economy of
G. Murdock, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

7 Political Economy and Cultural Analysis

This new institutionalization led to a significant growth in academic research, but
tenured faculty did not enjoy a monopoly of insight and commentators working
outside the universities continued to make important interventions in debates.
Although this renewed interest in the relations between culture and economy ranged
widely, it tended to coalesce around several key strands.

First, the rise of multimedia conglomerates with interests spanning a range of public
communications sectors breathed new life into long-standing questions about the
possible links between patterns of ownership, structures of corporate control, and
the range and diversity of cultural production and produced a significant volume of
research charting the new configurations. Debates around the implications of these
emerging structures also found an audience outside the academy through books
like Ben Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly (1983).

Second, analysts attempted to refine the general idea of ‘the cultural industries’ by
investigating the contrasting ways in which production processes were organized
within major media sectors and tracing their implications for creative labor and
for the range and forms of cultural output. The contributions of French scholars,
Patrice Flichy (1980) and Bernard Miege and his colleagues (1986), were particularly
significant in establishing this line of research.

Third, scholars returned to political economy's central concern with the constitution
of complex democracies by way of Jurgen Habermas's influential idea of ‘the public
sphere’ as a space of open debate situated between the State and capital and relatively
independent of both. This led a number of critical analysts in Britain and Europe
to reply to commentators calling for an enlarged market sector in television with a
vigorous defence of public service broadcasting as the cornerstone of a mediated
public sphere. The critique of market-driven broadcasting had developed somewhat
earlier in the United States and the ideas first floated by Dallas Smythe, a former FCC
economist, and other political economists in the 1950s played an important role in
the successful lobby to introduce a Public Broadcasting System a decade later.

Fourth, scholars moved beyond the issues raised by the changing conditions of
national media to explore the re-composition of the emerging transnational com-
munications system. Just as the last of the former colonial territories achieved
political independence and emerged as autonomous nation states, critics led by
Herbert Schiller (1969) argued that they were being incorporated into a new imperial
system, based not on the annexation of their territories but the colonization of their
cultures by the aggressive consumerism promoted by the major American media
and entertainment corporations.

Fifth, encouraged by the rapid growth of the underground press, community radio,
and a range of other alternative and oppositional media from the mid 1960s on-
wards, critical researchers began to explore the political economy of non mainstream
and radical media.

These various strands of work attracted widespread criticism from cultural analysts
working in other intellectual traditions who accused political economists of reducing
cultural life to economic dynamics. This criticism is misplaced. Political economy
sets out to show how the underlying dynamics of economic life shape communica-
tive practice by allocating the material and symbolic resources required for action
and how the resulting asymmetries in their control and distribution structure both
the conditions of creativity in cultural production and the conditions of access and
participation in cultural consumption. It focuses on the ways that capitalist dynamics
help to organize the playing fields on which everyday social action takes place and
write the rules of the game. Epistemologically it is rooted in critical realist rather than
interpretive models. It does not deny that in any particular instance the run of play
is marked by creativity, improvisation, and not infrequently, opposition and contest
but its principal concern is not with events but with the constitution of underlying
structures and the opportunities for action they facilitate and constrain. As noted
earlier, it is particularly interested in the way that asymmetries in the distribution and
control of core resources for cultural action impinge on the vitality of participatory
democracy.

> Read full chapter

Human Interfaces
Roger Lindsay, in Human Factors in Information Technology, 1999

MINDCHANGE AND THE TECHNOLOGY OF LITERACY

Let us try to reformulate the mindchange hypothesis to fit the case of literacy tech-
nology; I am going to insist upon the use of this unattractive label to remind us that
function-oriented, artifact-based cultural innovations are technological, regardless
of the physical structure and superficial complexity of the artefacts involved. And
technology which supports and enhances mental operations including memory and
communication, rather than physical skills, is cognitive technology. So written script
is a form of cognitive technology and will be called literacy technology (or at least LT
for brevity). Some important hypotheses associated with the theory that LT causes
mindchange are set out below as two main hypotheses, each accompanied by a num-
ber of subordinate implications. It is assumed for the purpose of constructing these
hypotheses that mindchange requires a transition between qualitatively different
mindstates, and that qualitatively different mindstates are mutually incompatible.
The rationale for this is that purely quantitative differences in cognitive performance
can be accommodated within normal mechanisms of learning, and that compati-
bility interpretations such as class inclusion (e.g. MS2 includes MS1) are effective-
ly quantitative. For mindchange to be inferable from physical evidence it is also
essential that some cultural productions (e.g. inventions, ideas, communications)
be uniquely (or at least with some discriminating probability) associated with each
mindstate.

1. LT causes qualitative cognitive change (MS1 → MS2) in individuals:a.Changed

individuals will be aware of altered cognitionsb.Individuals will be in either
MS1 or MS2c.MS1 individuals will not fully understand MS2 productionsd.-
MS2 individuals will not fully understand MS1 productions
2. LT causes qualitative cognitive change in communities:a.Change transfer will
take timeb.Cultural productions incompatible with MS1 will increase in fre-
quency as change transfer proceedsc.Cultural productions incompatible with
MS2 will reduce in frequency as change transfer proceeds

The richest source of evidence on the cognitive impact of LT seems to be Clanchy

(1979). Clanchy himself sometimes seems to hold a version of the mindchange
hypothesis and his view that literacy penetrates and structures ‘the intellect itself,
and that later scholars must ‘reconstruct the mental changes which it brings about’
(Clanchy, 1979: 149) has already been quoted. However the evidence which Clanchy
reviews does not seem to lend support to the idea of mindchange at all.

Let us consider hypothesis (1). It has already been noted that adult illiterates who
belatedly acquire literacy skills, not uncommonly report the dramatic impact this
makes upon their mental life. However, the impact seems to result entirely from
gaining access to the cultural facilities and communicative opportunities available
in a literacy based culture, not from the cognitive change per se. Literacy might
well seem a tedious and insipid body of skills if it were shared by no-one thesis of
his book. On the contrary Clanchy’s evidence suggests that the cognitive changes
associated with LT were partial, and piecemeal and extended over a timespan, of
the order of centuries. What might seem to be a qualitative change between the
beginning and end of this sequence, would of course, be experienced by no single
individual. Let me use Clanchy’s evidence to illustrate this point.

To begin with, the idea of a unitary LT is a historical fiction. Reading and writing are
nowadays seen as intimately related, but this was not so when the technology was
introduced. The writer was usually unable to read, and the reader unable to write:
“Throughout the Middle Ages the writer remained a visual artist, and the reader a
specialist in the spoken word. Medieval reading (lectio) was primarily something
heard rather than seen until the invention of printing, and writing (scriptura) often
continued to be admired for its calligraphy rather than its textual accuracy.”(Clanchy,
1979: 230)

Even so, it might be supposed the difference between vocalised speech and silently
apprehended text must surely have been sufficiently stark to gain notice. Again
not so, most people’s encounters with text were via a vocal rendition of it by one of
the few possessing reading skills:

“the medieval recipient prepared himself to listen to an utterance rather than to

scrutinise a document visually as a modern literate would. This was due to a different
habit of mind.”(Clanchy, 1979:214)

Even the surviving term “reading” as in “reading Psychology at Oxford”, would

according to Clanchy, originally have meant “being read aloud to”. Silent reading
emerged as a much later cultural and cognitive development.

Hypothesis (2) is more plausible, but the timescale involved is much greater than
anything required by Constant’s Kuhnian idea of cognitive change: it is cross-gener-
ational not an inter-individual, synchronic pattern of transmission from the eccentric
margin to the cultural mainstream. Cognitive change within a “cultural cohort” was
gradual and the post-literate mindstate coexisted peaceably alongside the mindstate
it was to largely replace:

“writings seem to have been thought of at first as subsidiary aids to traditional

memorising procedures and not as replacements of them. A new technology usually
adapts itself at first to an existing one, camouflaging itself in the old forms and not
immediately realising its potential.”(Clanchy, 1979: 256)

One piece of suggestive evidence comes from the legal process of conveyancing
or transferring property from one person to another. In the pre-LT era an unsub-
stantiated oral contract required supplementary evidence in the form of a transfer
of some physical object such as a doorknob, to provide substantive proof that the
transaction had occurred; this was known as “livery of seisin”. transfer of some
physical object such as a doorknob, to provide substantive proof that the transaction
had occurred; this was known as “livery of seisin”. Forensically, this procedure was
quite unnecessary once a written and signed contract existed. In practice however:

“Because writing was only an ancillary aid for laymen, it did not immediately sweep
away traditional non-literate ways of doing business. Reliance upon symbolic objects
and “livery of seisin” in conveyancing of property persisted. Writing was converted
into the spoken word by the habitual practice of reading aloud, and of listening to
or making an “audit” of a statement, rather than scrutinising its text on parchment.
Clerks and scribes themselves were slow to comprehend the full potentialities
of documentary proof, as their inconsistencies in signing and dating documents
demonstrate.”(Clanchy, 1979: 263)

The picture which emerges from the historical record is quite different from the one
which might be expected on the mindchange hypothesis. Where the mindchange
hypothesis requires sudden switches in cognitive state, the facts suggest gradual
and cumulative change. Where the mindchange hypothesis requires incompatibility,
the facts suggest coexistence. Where methodology insists that dissociations exist
between cultural productions and mindstates in order to test the mindchange
hypothesis, the mindstates seem not to be discrete and mutually exclusive structures
within an individual but continuously evolving processes operating over a timespan
which makes comparison meaningless because of the multitude of covarying factors.

Of course it is possible to reject LT as a model for computer driven mindchange on

the grounds that the magnitude of the latter may be substantially greater. This is
possible but not really plausible. Yates (1966) has charted the massive differences
between how memory skills were used and taught in mediaeval times, with reliance
on mnemonic strategies and the systematic use of mental imagery, and the virtual
disappearance of such techniques from the modern curriculum. Similarly, Baddeley
(1976) discusses the disappearance of the Eighteenth Century “Syllabary”, or text
promoting memory by presenting visual illustrations of the component syllables
of words or phrases which it was considered important for the young to learn.
A different kind of evidence comes from independent psychological reports of
investigations of individuals with extraordinary memory capabilities. The first of
these studies was carried out in Russia on a reporter from a Moscow newspaper.
The other was carried out and reported in the USA.

“One was the subject of Luria (1969) the other was studied by Hunt and Love (1962).
These two men were similar in several respects including the fact that the places
where they spent their early lives were only thirty-five miles apart.”(Klatzky, 1975)

The coincidence is striking. It is greatly mitigated once it becomes clear that both
men were born and raised in isolated Jewish settlements in the Soviet hinterland,
in communities in which literacy was rare and education entirely based upon mem-
orisation skills. The mindstate produced by what was effectively a mediaeval pro-
gramme of education, produced a pattern of performance sufficiently distinctive
from the cultural norm to attract the attention of psychologists in two different con-
tinents. Though this contrast between mindstates is undeniably extreme, the reports
do not suggest that either individual experienced any difficulty in comprehending
the cultural productions of the 1960s.

Another tack is to argue that LT is too extreme or atypical a cognitive change to

model the effect of computers. Again, the evidence from the history of technology
provides little comfort. In most cases novel technologies coexist quite comfortably
alongside the artefacts and practices they replace, e.g. replacement of water wheels
by rotary steam engines as power sources in the late 18th and early 19th centuries,
or replacement of piston engines by turbojets in the 20th century (Constant, 1980;
Price, 1984; Laudan, 1984). The rate of substitution seems to depend much more
on social and economic factors than on anything to do with cognition; for example
the:

“wars that cut off France from Spanish barilla, Germany from Chilean nitrate and
Russian oil, and the United States from natural rubber have in each case drastically
changed the economies of the respective resources and their use and thus induced
technological developments which eventually replaced them.”(Weingart, 1984: 134)

> Read full chapter

Borders, Anthropology of
H. Donnan, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

2 Cultural Borderlands
Borders have become a metaphor for the cultural flux and indeterminacy of much
contemporary life. In anthropology the border metaphor was introduced by critics of
the classic anthropological view of culture as shared, consensual, and discrete. Often
with personal experience of cultural contradictions—as members of sexual, ethnic,
or other minorities—these critics sought ways to study the differences within and the
spaces between cultures, ways that could incorporate the changes, inconsistencies,
and incommensurabilities of everyday life. These inter-cultural spaces are often re-
ferred to as ‘borderlands,’ a usage that evokes the geopolitical and the metaphorical,
the literal and the conceptual. In this view, borders and borderlands exist not just at
the edges of the nation-state, but anywhere cultures meet (Rosaldo 1989).

Borderlands are zones of cultural overlap characterized by a mixing of cultural styles.

They are liminal spaces, simultaneously dangerous and sites of creative cultural
production open to cultural play and experimentation as well as domination and
control. The fusion of registers in borderlands may be ultimately empowering for
those who inhabit these zones, but it need not always be so, as testified by the lives
of many Mexican migrants in the American Southwest.

Not everyone agrees that it is helpful to extend the use of ‘border’ and ‘borderland’
in this way. When cultural encounters share some of the specific socio-political
processes characteristic of borders between states, such as unequal access to official
forms of power, the borderland metaphor may be appropriate. But where there is no
strong analytical connection to state border processes, understanding of the border
can become reductive and delocalized (Heyman 1994).

Cultural differences and the juxtaposition of different worlds of meaning come to be

emphasized at the expense of stressing inequalities of power. Heyman and others
feel uneasy about this differential emphasis, reflecting wider tensions within the
discipline over the relative prominence to be given to culture and power. The force
of the image, they feel, takes over from the analysis.

In a sense, of course, borders are always metaphors, since they are arbitrary con-
structions based on cultural convention. Metaphors, moreover, are part of the
‘discursive materiality of power relations’ and in this respect no less concrete in their
consequences than state borders (Brah 1996, p. 198). Metaphorical and state borders
are not, therefore, as far apart as some studies imply. In fact, the anthropology of
borders has benefited from the productive interaction of approaches that emphasize
one or the other. The following sections outline other anthropological analyses of
borders from which the border-as-metaphor draws its force and resonance.

> Read full chapter

Feminist Epistemology
H. Rose, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

5 Global Technoscience and Global Feminisms

In a quite extraordinary way, the feminist epistemology debates have paralleled and
offered an entirely different face to the widespread demands for equal opportunities
within the labor market, including that of science. This, whether claimed for reasons
of justice or for economic efficiency, has become subtly linked to arguments about
changing the character of cultural production, typically side-stepping whether the
claim entails an appeal to social, cultural, or essentialist difference. Today, innovative
corporations concerned for their global markets sound remarkably like dedicated
multiculturalists in their arguments that products aimed at a socially diverse market
are better if designed and produced by a matching diversity of producers. That the
former tend to equate better with ‘sells more’ and the latter equate better with ‘is
more democratic’ and ‘will produce a more sustainable science and technology’ is
almost incidental. Both are responding to the feminist epistemological challenge
that who gets to produce knowledge, and who is excluded, matters.
 But it has been the advent of what social theorists have termed the risk society, that
is, where the development of science and technology have become associated in-
trinsically with major environmental risks, which has also fostered an immense turn
towards democratic control to protect the entire socio-ecosystem. This immense
cultural and political move has paralleled the struggle within the sciences. Working
from outside science, a mixture of NGOs and mass popular movements from both
the North and the South have confronted the technosciences and the corporations.
As we have seen with the fate of the Kyoto agreement, individual governments and
global corporations continue to mobilize the old constructions of science as outside
culture and capable of producing certainty, in order defend themselves against the
need to take socio-ecological risk seriously. Nonetheless, although it would be a
mistake to announce the environmentalist cause won, it has become less and less
easy for the corporations and supportive governments to pursue their commercial
and technological objectives without any sense of global responsibility and concern
for either human or green nature. Where they display such indifference they find
themselves confronted by new alliances capable of mobilizing immense popular
criticism. The more sophisticated recognize the need for sustainable development
and are more open to new more socially inclusive forms of governance. How far
these are serious or tokenistic is too soon to judge.

It is only possible in a brief article to do little other than hint at the links between the
feminist epistemology debates and these huge cultural and political developments.
Sometimes, as with the mass people's science movement in India and the work of
the feminist science theorist and activist Vandana Shiva, the links are more evident.
But it will be historians looking back at this extraordinary shift in the cultural status
of science and technology at the cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
who will have the pleasure of disentangling the cultural and political contribution of
the feminist epistemology debate to these sea changes.

> Read full chapter

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