Seeing, Reading, Writing, Talking and the Society of Things: Cultural Practices and Social Structures

• In Event: Haptic History: International Studies of Touchable Things (and Other Lacunae) in Educational History

Abstract

In the history of education and in pedagogical anthropology, things have consistently played an important role. Langeveld (1956) points in a similar direction with his comments on the “stimulative nature of things.” In his Studien zur Anthropologie des Kindes (Studies on the Anthropology of the Child), he uses the term “thing characteristics” and emphasizes that people feel a strong connection to objects with a “stimulative nature.” Klaus Mollenhauer (1987) has emphasized the significance of things for pedagogical theory. Käte Meyer-Drawe (1999), too, argues that things evoke “our ways of perceiving, talking, acting and thinking.” In his “essay in symmetrical anthropology,” Bruno Latour (1991) delineated a way to reconnect the object world with the social world epistemologically. Friedrich Wolfram Heubach’s Das bedingte Leben (The Conditional Life) (1987) takes a psychological approach to this subject.

In the history of education, the subject of the “materiality of education” has recently been considered from a variety of perspectives, including studies on the form and function of school buildings and their furnishings on the production of and consumption history of toys and on the design of special objects and foods for children. Things, objects and instruments as basic materials of cultural analysis offer approaches to a cultural history of the social sphere. All in all, these approaches mark a turn to historical anthropology and to a cultural history of pedagogical processes and processes of social distinction, as has already been initiated in the history of everyday life and the history of mentalities. From the perspective of educational and pedagogical history, these approaches open up a wide range of themes that go far beyond the above-mentioned examples. These include, for example, the meaning of mementoes in autobiographical reflection, the importance of dietary rules and the tools and instruments for cultivating the body, the role of furniture and clothes as conveyors of meaning (e.g. as signs of generational and social belonging) and means of disciplining, and the centrality of didactic materials and museum exhibits for educational processes.

My paper is based primarily on an autobiographical novel by Hanns-Josef Ortheil (b. 1951), Die Erfindung des Lebens [The Invention of Life] (2009). In this book, Ortheil reflects on how he was taught reading and writing in post-war Western Germany. In this study, I analyze the interrelations between cultural practices, the meaning of things and social contexts. Cultural practices like reading and writing as well as epistemic principles concerning the perception of things and artefacts are historically important elements of how individuals act, and create knowledge and meaning within their historical and social settings. The meaning of things is very much influenced by historically differing orders of discourse which are highly determined by ideological power strategies. By using cultural practices like reading and writing individuals can undermine these orders of discourse and intervene in the structure of meaning of a society’s material culture.

Author

• Karin Priem, University of Luxembourg