A few bits and bobs from today's sem

Readings:

      Foucault, a French philosopher and social theorist who wrote on the nature

      of power and the manner in which it functions: 

            Foucault: Power is everywhere

Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of a Prison. London: Penguin

Foucault, Michel. 1998. The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin

      Aubert, Laurent. 2007. The Music of the Other. Burlington: Ashgate
      in the library      on amazon



      And a study on normal musicians (for example):

Finnegan, Ruth. 2007. The Hidden Musicians: Music Making in an English Town. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press

Logos: Words and Ideas:

Emic and Etic (inside and outside perspectives)

interlocutor


David Graeber on Piaget's (the developmental psychologist I was on about) idea of Egocentrism:

Egocentrism and Partial Consciousness    

One of Piaget’s more remarkable achievements was to take a fact that almost

anyone knows—that children tend to see themselves as the center of the universe—and make it the basis for a systematic theory of intellectual and moral development. Egocentrism, according to Piaget, is a matter of assuming

one’s own, subjective perspective on the world is identical with the nature of

the world itself. Development, in turn, becomes a matter of internalizing the

fact that other ones are possible; or, to put it a bit more technically, creating

structures which are really the coordination of different possible perspectives.

Very young children, for example, do not understand that objects continue

to exist when they are no longer looking at them. If a ball rolls out of

sight, it is simply gone. To understand that it is still there is to understand

first of all that there are other angles from which one might be looking at it,

from which one would still be able to see it. In older children, egocentrism

might mean anything from a child’s inability to imagine that others might not understand what she’s telling them, to the difficulty (which often endures

surprisingly late in life) in realizing that if I have a brother named

Robert, then Robert also has a brother, who is me.

Egocentrism, then, involves first and foremost an inability to see things

from other points of view. Even if it’s a matter of understanding the continual

existence of objects, one is aware of them through potential perspectives:

when one looks at a car, or a duck, or a mountain, the fact that there are

other sides to it (other perspectives from which one could be looking at it)

becomes internalized into the very nature of what one is perceiving. It would

simply not look the same otherwise. Hence, for Piaget, achieving maturity

is a matter of “decentering” oneself: of being able to see one’s own interests

or perspective as simply one part of a much larger totality not intrinsically

more important than any other.

In matters social, however, one clearly cannot do this all the time. It is

one thing bearing in mind, when one looks at a house, that it has more than

one side to it; quite another to be continually aware of how a family must

seem to every member of it, or how each member of a group of people working on some common project would see what was going on. In fact, human beings are notoriously incapable of doing so on a consistent basis. Here again, there appears to be a very concrete limit to the human imagination.

from: 

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p63-4.

available at: 

library

PDF

Music:

Moby: Play (1999)
on itunes
amazon