2006-06-05 pa

Notes on

Shore, Bradd. (1997). Keeping the conversation going: An interview with Jerome Bruner.
Ethos, 25(1), 7-62

Rich, complex, not directly to out topic(s) of narrative, community and memory but it
touches these issues on and on disguised in other topics –seems to be as much “crossing
boundaries, disciplines, times and topics as our attempt – haven’t nearly grasped most of
it in my hurried attempt to scan what it could contribute to our review

• Title was choosen because JB (Jerome Bruner) attributes his powerful career to
his “knack for ‘keeping the conversation going’

• Within the interview by Bradd shore (BS) JB continuesly uses stories and
anecdotes to illustrate his points or to introduce his line of thought (walking the
talk of the significance of narrative and stories – and his way of remembering his
own development of thought of different concepts etc.

• Bradd ” (1997, 8)describes it as “his special way of framing high-minded ideas

with personal and sometimes irreverent anecdotes

• Cultural psychologis JB <-culture is central to his work

• JB on self: “self is in part a product of discourse – a function of discourses in

whoich you choose to enter.” (1997, 23)…
links identity, self in with discourses in communities rather than an abstract “a self
is a self is a self”

(30)Dialectical position: culture – man, “ it doesn’t matter which way you run around
the circle from culture to individual. It is still a circle.
Man as the measure of all things versus what is man that thou are mindful of him –
man as agent and men who has no control over things – typical uncertainty that
causes trouble in all narrative of the WESt

We a reculture users and culture makers (52), Culture is in the mind and in what we
are doing

Description of narrative: narrative has an actor, an act, a goal, a setting, an

instrumentality
Trouble as engine of story

BS: “meaning-making requires a kind of narrative that triggers meta-cognition”

Narrative & memory (49ff)

BS on function of narratives: “Narratives …have a way of intruding upon overly

systematic accounts by triggering memories and associations which spill over the
neat borders of those accounts. “breathes life in to our accounts”

JB it gives life but also lie

 Deliberate reification is an essential part of culture, “externalisation of culture in
oeuvres, refers to HALBWACHS Les cadres sociaux de la memoire (social framing of
memory). “A lot of memory is carried in external forms. There is someway in which
we make these things external and the glory is I don’t have to remember it

Can we link this to tagging, rss feeds etc. without Bev can’t remember anymore ??
:_)

Example gyroscope – what is this PA???? it tells me where I am heading on the basis
of where I have been in the past and acts as a form of memory

System of longitude and latitude, Greenwich etc. but also connected to power issues
– why Greenwich?

These external objects – oeuvres – artefacts that carry memory need to be shared in
some way – for framing their meaning – JB states this is were language comes in, I
feel this is also where community comes in (and technology as social tagging
/bookmarking)?

Narrative &understanding:

“Nobody understands something well until they can tell some sort of story about it”

just so this doesn’t get lost: we should include the story of the writing of this paper ( as an
autoethnographic narrative ??) - our community, our practice, domain, technology for
creating memory or for relieving memeory?