Mind,Self, and Human-Animal Joint Action

Abstract

Because Herbert Blumer maintained that symbolic interactionism was useful in examining all realms of social behavior, and advocated what Martin Hammersley refers to as “critical commonsensism,” this paper focuses on one of the most common contemporary social relationships—that between people and companion animals. I first examine the basis for Blumer's (like Mead before him and many interactionist scholars today) exclusion of nonhuman animals from consideration as “authentic” social actors. Primarily employing the recent work of interactionists Eugene Myers, Leslie Irvine, Janet and Steven Alger, and Clinton Sanders, this paper advocates the reasonableness of regarding nonhuman animals as “minded,” in that mind, as Gubrium emphasizes, is a social construction that arises out of interaction. Similarly, I maintain that animals possess an admittedly rudimentary “self.” Here I focus special attention on Irvine's discussion of those “self experiences” that are independent of language and arise out of interaction. Finally, I discuss “joint action” as a key element of people's relationships with companion animals as both the animal and human attempt to assume the perspective of the other, devise related plans of action and definitions of object, and fit together their particular (ideally, shared) goals and collective actions. I stress the ways in which analytic attention to human-animal relationships may expand and enrich the understanding of issues of central sociological interest.     

The Prototyping Mind: Rethinking Perception,Affordances, and the Mediation of Cultural Artifacts

This article focuses on a prototyping session during which 6 Zimbabwean medical professionals design a prosthetic device. Prototyping helps the team determine which features must be built into the prosthetic, amplifies tensions between team members, and puts on display the kinds of futures they imagine. I use the state of disrepair of the team’s prototyping materials to tease out the distinct layers of perceptual reasoning that are instilled in cultural artifacts. An appreciation of the global flows of cultural artifacts lends complexity to the framework of “affordances” and “mediation” employed in the study and design of tools for learning.     

Mind the gap: selling revolution,marginality and spectacle in post-revolutionary Nicaragua

A group of elderly women set up prayer camps in public roundabouts throughout Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, to pray for ‘peace and reconciliation.’ A few miles away, in a humble barrio, escaping sexual discrimination and violence, a 24-year-old transvestite performs a sexually charged act in a circus. Meanwhile, across from the national parliament, hundreds of ex-agricultural workers exposed to the pesticide nemagon exhibit their dying flesh to the nation and the world in order to expose corporate greed and government inaction. These cases, happening under the new Sandinista regime, reflect a plurality of social spaces where theatricality, as the rhetorical manipulation of spaces and bodies aiming to affect publics, has become a mechanism for revealing the interstices of power relations in present day Nicaragua. This work explores various instances of linked and entwined government-sponsored and -sanctioned social performances of power and visibility, as well as other social performances that draw attention to the gap between the rhetoric of the government and social reality.     

Tours of Duty, Cross-Identification and Introjection: The Colonial Administrative Mind in Wartime Indochina

Abstract  Some scholars have explained colonial policies as the outgrowth of the need to provide profits and prestige for the motherland. Others have linked policymaking to the use of colonial space as experimental laboratories of modernity; while others assert that the overseas was a terrain for finding solutions to some of the political, social and aesthetic problems which were affecting France at the time. In contrast, this paper traces how colonial policies can be explained at the level of individual colonial administrators. It does so not only by reference to the social backgrounds of officials, but also their inner "psychic processes." This study addresses the colonial tendency to imagine cross-identification between France and the colony. It presents three case studies of colonial officials in Indochina to investigate how administrators' perceptions of France became projected onto the colonies, and how one of them incorporated within himself some of the attributes of the colonized, an example of introjection. It is argued that these processes had an impact on policymaking. My theoretical goal with this piece was to apply a psychoanalytic approach to the study of the empire.     

Mind Matters

The conceit that either mind is reducible to matter or that mind is utterly ethereal is rooted in a mind‐versus‐matter dichotomy that can be characterized as the modern error, a fatally flawed fallacy rooted in the philosophy and culture of nominalism. A Peircean semiotic outlook, applied to an understanding of social life, provides a new and full‐bodied understanding of semiosis as the bridge between mind and matter, and human biology and culture. I begin by first delineating the false divide and showing Charles Sanders Peirce's alternative to it, then explore the implications of a semiotic approach to mind as transaction, then consider the self‐transcending nature of the human body‐mind. Finally I outline my ecological, biosemiotic account of mind, which reveals that, indeed, mind matters, and in ways that unexpectedly resemble the forms of animism that characterized the hunting‐gathering foragers through whom we anatomically modern humans emerged.     

Mind the Gap: Built Infrastructures,Sustainable Caring Relations,and Resilient Communities in Extreme Weather Events

Abstract

Climate change debates seldom link the insights derived from the physical sciences to the concerns of social scientists. Understanding how failures in built infrastructures increase the caring burden on women is one of these instances. This article draws on a pilot study on climate change and older people to demonstrate that women who provide informal care services are called upon to fill the gap between declining levels of formal care provisions and care needs when the infrastructures serving a community fail. This research challenges policymakers, emergency planners, and practitioners to think about the increased care burdens that women are expected to undertake during disasters involving extreme weather events like heat waves, cold snaps, and flooding, and reconsider policies that pass this responsibility down to the level of community without the necessary support services and built infrastructures being in place. This issue acquires additional urgency in the context of declining levels of care being publicly funded through the age of austerity as public expenditure cuts begin to bite.     

Thinking with the Mind,Syncing with the Body: Ballet as Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Interaction

Symbolic interactionist theory describes self‐consciousness as arising through symbolic interaction. I use one empirical case, ballet training, to suggest that symbolic interaction can, by producing self‐consciousness, cultivate unself‐consciousness. Using in‐depth interviews with twenty‐three individuals reporting on training experiences in six countries and twenty‐three American states, I show that dancers can learn, through self‐conscious symbolic interaction, how it feels to embody what an audience sees, as they strive to train their bodies to portray an institutionalized aesthetic. The embodiment of technique facilitates a markedly unself‐conscious “flow” experience while performing. In contrast, having an acute awareness of embodying an incompatible physiology inhibits flow and often motivates dancers to self‐select out of ballet. These interactionist sources of “nonsymbolic” interaction both evoke and suppress “mind” through social interaction.     

Whole in Body,Mind & Spirit: Wholistic Health and the Limits of Medicine

Abstract

Use of the Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory (SASSI), a new instrument for assessing the presence of chemical dependency, was tested on a college population. In tests with 376 subjects, the SASSI showed significant promise in discriminating between nonabusers, moderate abusers, and severe abusers. Further, results of the SASSI obvious attributes scale were correlated in the expected directions with indicators of level of chemical use. The particular need for an alcohol and drug abuse assessment instrument that is relatively impervious to social desirability effects is discussed in light of the history of assessment problems in this area.     

Deep Roles: Twelve Primordial Roles of Mind and Organization

The thesis in this paper is that there are 12archetypal roles in groups and organizations. Thesedeep roles have their origin in the rolesof the essential family — father, mother, son, anddaughter. In groups and organizations, each of theseimages of family roles will — through the basicdefense mechanisms of splitting and projection —be polarized into a good and bad part: The father as Godor devil, the mother as queen or witch, the son as crownprince or black sheep, and the daughter as princess orwhore. In addition to these eight primary deep roles,there come two secondary ones: the helpers Shaman and Slave whose function are to help the familysurvive spiritually and materially, respectively. Thetwo last deep roles are of a transcendental nature: thehero (winner) and the clown (loser), i.e., the one who has won a good family role, and the onewho has lost it — or never gained it. These 12deep roles are well known from such cultural artifactsas fairy tales and mythology. In groups andorganizations, deep roles are attended with power andinterest. Those who are attributed a deep role in theirorganization will have a similar symbolic power ascharacters in fairy tales and mythology.