Cups, Plates, CVs and other Material-Semiotic Orderings

in Child and Youth Development:

A Dialogue between Psychology and Anthropology

Michalis Kontopodis (PhD)

Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

michalis.kontopodis@staff.hu-berlin.de

Summary

The study of childhood and child development has a very old tradition that goes back not only to

psychology, but also to anthropology. Anthropology has nowadays become post-colonial, post-

humanist, feminist, post-feminist and non-representative and ethnographic methodology is more

and more applied in both disciplines. In this context a particular attention is increasingly paid on

material and corporeal issues of everyday life and child development as well as on the equal

participation of children/ youngsters in the research. By examining a series of ethnographic

materials from kindergarten and school research projects this keynote presents a relational

approach to materiality and corporeality and focuses on two interrelated notions those of

‘mediation’ and of ‘practice’ in an attempt to understand the role materiality and corporeality play

in child development and everyday life.

The early study of childhood & culture

I guess that developmental psychologists here in this congress in Lausanne remember the year

1925, because in that year Jean Piaget took the chair of philosophy at the University of

Neuchâtel. It is also possible that the most critical of them remember that within quite a different

geo-political context that same year, Lev Vygotskij became one of the three members of the

Methods Committee for Psychology of the Scientific Council for the People’s Commission on

Education (Vygodskaja & Lifanova, 2000, p.108). A further event which took place in 1925 was

the 14th Conference of the Communist Party of Soviet Union. Because of the conflict between

Leninism and Trotskyism (which officially began there and led some years later to the defeat of

the second), Vygotskij faced difficulties in printing and circulating his famous Educational

Psychology and Psychology of Art1 that year.

1 These two books express not only Marxist but also Nietzschean and Trotskyist influences and were in many regards provocative both for psychology in the context of the Soviet Union but also for psychology in general. Educational Psychology was written in 1924 and printed in 1926 with a different publisher as originally agreed and Psychology of Art was written in 1925 and not printed at all in that time, although it was initially accepted for print (for further details see: Keiler___)

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Even if developmental psychologists and educational scientists are aware of these events, they

usually ignore another major event in childhood research that should be taken into consideration

while dealing with the history of the study of childhood and culture: in November 1925 the

famous anthropologist Margaret Mead set sail from the US for Samoa in order to undertake what

is commonly seen as the first anthropological fieldwork with children outside Europe and North

America (Mead, 1928), followed by Malinowski (1928) and others. A decade later in 1936,

Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, this time in Bali and New Guinea, tried to enrich

ethnographic fieldwork about children through visual recordings, using a 35 mm still camera and

a 16 mm black and white motion picture camera, the most advanced technology of the time

(Bateson & Mead, 1942; Mead, Bateson, & Macgregor, 1951)—a methodology which later led to

the popular nowadays ‘visual anthropology’ (LeVine, 2008).

At that time but in yet another geo-political context, the cultural scholar Walter Benjamin was

writing the very influential book Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Benjamin & Adorno, 1992). This

manuscript, which was completed in 1938 and was first discovered in 1981 in the National

Library of Paris, where Benjamin hid it from Nazis in 1940, is an analysis of his own childhood

under the threat of fascism in Berlin and might be seen as one of the first anthropological studies

of childhood that took place in Europe.

Recent trends in the study of childhood & culture

Based on the pioneer work of Vygotskij, Mead, Bateson, and Benjamin, a series of childhood

studies have been completed since the second half of the 20th century. While it is not possible to

summarize in two sentences the 20th century history of this research, one can observe in general

that anthropology had often experienced radical ruptures in itself and has become post-colonial,

post-humanist, feminist and even post-feminist while ethnography has become non-

representative, decentralized, multi-sited and collaborative.

Psychology has often been more conservative and less innovative, there have however been

important theoretical movements in its margins which increasingly also used ethnographic

methodology. To refer to more recent works, a great deal of cultural-historical or post-

Vygotskian theory and research deals with issues related to learning, education, and child

development. Concepts such as appropriation, agency, activity, culture, and meaning are central

to this kind of theory and research (Chaiklin, 2001; Cole, 2006; Cole, Engeström, & Vasquez,

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1997; Dafermos, 2002; Daniels, 2008; Daniels, Cole, & Wertsch, 2007; Davydov, 2008;

Engeström, 1987; Hedegaard, 2001; Kozulin et al., 2003; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Oers et al., 2008;

Rogoff, 2003; Stetsenko & Arievitch, in press; Valsiner, 1987).

Anthropology of childhood has recently gained much attention inside US anthropology with a

special issue of American Anthropologist (June 2007) and two „In Focus“ commentary series of

Anthropology News titled „Transforming the Anthropology of Childhood“ and „Confronting

Challenges in Research with Children“ (April, 2008, see: Bluebond-Langner & Korbin, 2007).

One could also refer here to the renowned anthropological research center led by Christoph Wulf

at the Free University of Berlin and its numerous publications (Tervooren, 2006; Wagner-Willi,

2005; Wulf, 2001, 2010; Wulf & Zirfas, 2004, 2007)2.

Concerning the different historical and local contexts of cultural-historical and anthropological

research, it is self-evident that there is no such a thing as a homogenous body of knowledge that

could be called ‘anthropology of childhood’—nor is there homogeneity in cultural-historical

psychology. However, I would dare to identify some general trends in both approaches here, so

as to reflect on both and suggest a working framework for childhood studies.

One can observe that while classic ethnographic and interpretative research methodology has

become more and more popular in cultural-historical psychology, anthropological research itself

has entered a post-representation period as well as moved to more innovative methodologies

such as visual anthropological fieldwork, virtual ethnography, multi-sited ethnography and

collaborative action research. Recent debates in anthropology concern not only human

interaction but also materiality and corporeality as techno-scientific products (Henare, Holbraad,

& Wastell, 2006; Oppenheim, 2007) and examine ‘social’ phenomena of different scales – here

the notion of society refers to societies of chemical substances, viruses, cells, molecules, organs,

things, animals, people, institutions, technical and medical devices as well as to their

interrelations. Important scholarship in anthropology has also criticized dominant masculine

rationalities in science and technology and examined the variety of cultural understandings and

practices regarding medicine, illness, health, disability, ageing and everyday use of technologies.

2 Regarding the cultural-historical school, one may also refer to works published in Mind, Culture and Activity (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) or in the series of the Cambridge University Press Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives (see: http://www.cambridge.org/series/sSeries.asp?code=LID). Regarding the anthropological research, one may refer to journals such as Children & Society and Ethos (Blackwell) and Childhood (Sage) or to the book series in Childhood Studies of the Rutgers University Press (see http://children.camden.rutgers.edu/RU-book_series.htm)

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Not always has this pioneer anthropological work been reflected on the anthropology of

childhood. The first book which moved in this direction in childhood studies was the Allan

Prout’s edited volume from 1999: The body, childhood and society which has been followed by a few

more publications on international level (Kelle, 2007; Kontopodis, 2009; Sørensen, 2009).

According to Prout:

Bodies and children must be seen as hybrid entities, constructed through material as well as discursive

practices... Examining childhood bodies in this view becomes a matter of tracing through the means,

the varied array of materials and practices involved in their construction and maintenance - and in

some circumstances their unraveling and disintegration (Prout, 1999, p. 15)

Research Materials and Examples

Having this theoretical background in mind I would like now to turn to examples taken from two

different research projects in which I was involved:

a) a school ethnography that investigated the enactment or performance of students’ pasts

and futures in the everyday life at a secondary school in Germany and

b) an interdisciplinary research about obesity politics and eating matters in Berlin

kindergartens.

In both these projects I used ethnographic methodology with a particular focus on the

production, use and circulation of materialities – according to recently developed approaches in

the anthropology of technoscience (Latour, 2005; Mol, 1999; Suchman, 2007). I participated in

the research field on long-term basis as an adult who was something between children/

youngsters and teachers and enjoyed trust from both parts. The research was unfolded in

different stages and my research questions were specified parallel to the ongoing analysis of the

collected ethnographic materials. My interest was in both research projects not only theoretical or

epistemological – but at some extent also political, in the sense that I wanted my research to

contribute to freedom, and generate or support heterogeneity and movement in the researched

field (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). It is not my aim to present here analytically the

methodology and results of these two research projects – I am only going to draw here on two

examples in order to develop my theoretical argumentation. Following Holzkamp I see these

examples not as accidental but as instrumental in theory building and integral part of the theory

itself (Holzkamp, 1993). The examples refer to scenes or phenomena which were being observed

frequently and repeated themselves in my data records. In following I will nevertheless try to

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present the examples in a transparent way and provide the reader with space for alternative

interpretations.

Materialities at School

We are at a secondary school in Germany. Each student is maintaining two files: a paper one and a

computer one. The paper files were stored on shelves in the classroom of the student’s

Communication Group. The computer file was stored in the computer network of the school

and was accessible from different school rooms. It contained all the texts written by the student

and all the information he or she had collected since the beginning of the 9th grade. There is a

slight difference between the computer personal file and the other files: with the computer file,

all data could be completely changed, combined, re-combined, and transformed; everything is

always ‘in progress’. Picture 1 depicts a fragment of such a file, where dated documents written by

the student during one school semester are in sequential order. The documents written in the

previous semesters were arranged in the same way. Why is it important to have everything dated?

And what is the role of the files in developmental processes?

Picture 1: Student’s PC file

Here time is spatialized. Documents are dated and arranged in chronological order so that a

temporal order is created. The student is supposed to maintain his/her file by updating it

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regularly. Dated documents are kept together, so that it is always clearly visible if a document of a

particular date is missing and should be supplied. There is always a next step to follow; one

activity leads to the next. The further the schooling proceeds, the more convergent the discourse

formation. Experience is being filtered and possibilities are reduced; long descriptions on past

events become increasingly dense and different voices are excluded so that a restricted number of

statements come into view in the end, according to which the student’s professional choice is

decided (Kontopodis, 2007). The relation between the past, the present and the future is

mediated and enacted so that time is quantified, continuous, and teleological.

By the end of the school year, the students are supposed to make important decisions about their

lives, and plan their futures. The students make use of their files to write CVs and application

letters, they portrayed and advertised themselves by narrating their past, they applied for various

vocational trainings or low-paid jobs. This process is materialized in the temporality of the

student’s file(s) and its results are also materialized in the resulting school certifications, CVs, and

application letters. Here is a draft of a CV a student made after Esther’s presentation:

English (translation by M.K.)

Personal Strengths: - works well in a team, but also independent

- Understanding of work processes, organization,

planning

- flexible, good comprehension[1]

Hobbies: - swimming and fitness

- computer [2]

preferable career: -????????????????? [3]

Place, Date: #city#, #date# [4]

This draft was made by a student under the teacher’s guidance and saved in his computer file

where it could undergo modifications and be finalized in the coming weeks. What is of particular

interest here is that under the entry “preferable career” (part 3), the student typed a line of

question marks in boldface, thus materializing the being-in-process or the becoming-a-self-

responsible adult as discussed above. Discourse formation has not been accomplished yet. The

student is now supposed to further reflect on himself in order to discover his desired profession

and make decisions about the future. Exactly this process is materialized in the CV.

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As we all in this audience know, the notion of mediation goes back to Vygotskij. The concept of

mediation could be seen as a cornerstone of his theory and has been much discussed in socio-

cultural and cultural-historical psychology (Cole, 1995; Lompscher, 1996; Pourkos, 1997;

Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2004; Vygotsky, 1931/1997, 1934/1987; Wertsch, 1991). In the process of

working on his theory, Vygotskij shifted the focus of his attentions from the relationship between

a child and an abstract sign to the communication between a child and another human and the

mediators enabling this communication (Keiler, 2002). Here is that another notion comes into

play – that of ‘practice’. But I will come back into this in a moment. First of all I would like to

remind you Vygotskij in 1931 arguing that no scientist of his time – including himself – has

managed to develop an adequate understanding of the role of signs and tools in child

development:

The indeterminate, vague meaning that is usually connected with figurative use of the word tool

actually does not lighten the task of the researcher interested in the real and not the picturesque

aspect that exists between behavior and its auxiliary devices. Moreover, such designations obscure

the road for research. Not a single researcher has yet deciphered the real meaning of such

metaphors. Must we think of thinking or memory as analogous to external activity or do devices

play a certain role as a fulcrum giving support and help to the mental process? What does this

support consist of? What, in general, does it mean to be a means of thinking or memory? We find

no answers to these questions among psychologists who willingly use these vague expressions.

Even more vague is the idea of those who understand such expressions in a literal sense. (Vygotsky,

1931/1997, p. 61).

Moving away from developmental psychology toward other disciplines one realizes that

nowadays the notion of mediation is also widely used by M. Serres, Br. Latour, D. Haraway in

the context of the so-called ‘Science and Technology Studies’. What is important here is that

mediators are considered symmetrically to human actors. In this context a term used by actor-

network theory is the ‘actant’. While ‘actors’ are normally understood as conscious beings,

‘actants’ comprise all sorts of autonomous figures which make up our world (both terms are,

however, occasionally used interchangeably). They can denote anything endowed with the ability

to act, including people and material objects: statements, inscriptions (anything written),

technical artifacts, entities being studied, concepts, organizations, professions, money, etc.

(Callon, 1991; Habib & Wittek, 2007; Latour, 1999; Law, 1986, 1992, pp. 381–384).

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A few works which discuss the connections between actor-network theory and cultural-historical

psychology have recently been published (Fox, 2000; Miettinen, 1999) as well as have combined

these theories and methodologies in learning research (Kontopodis, 2009; Sørensen, 2009).

In my view, mediation here has two interrelated aspects: a) it is semiotic and b) it is material.

With ‘semiotic’ it is here indicated that the relation between the past and the present includes

meaning. It is a signifying relation between signs. Pickering (1995) comments: ‘Semiotics, the

science of signs, teaches us how to think symmetrically about human and non-human agents

(…). The agencies we speak about are semiotic ones, not confined to the rigid categories’

traditional thought imposes (Pickering, 1995: 12-13). The CV is written in a particular way and in

the same way the file is structured. They bring together autobiographical memory (Fivush, 2008)

and institutional or organizational memory (Middleton and Edwards, 1990).

Apart from these rather semiotic dimensions, what is very important is that the report has a

material presence. The semiotic relation between the past and the present is also material, i.e.

materialized or objectified (Haraway, 1997). The CVs as well as the files shape both the individual

memory of the student and the institutional memory of the school. Teachers and students can

access this piece of information from very different contexts for various purposes. In all these

different contexts it is the CV or the file that carries memory rather than the teachers/ students

themselves (Middleton et al., 2001). The CV or the file can thus be understood as an actant-

mediator that fabricates a particular past which is enacted each time the CV or the file is read,

referred to, used etc., in the present.

Shaping the institutional memory, the CV or the file presented above does not carry meaning and

functionality itself, but only in relation to other actants, i.e. other documents. The CV as well as the

file presented above – is related to the official school files, students’ documents, teachers’

memos, certificates, cards of absences and a series of other materialities. All these can be

perceived as objects or mediators that organize, materialize and stabilize one’s development and at

the same time mediate relations between the students and the teachers in the sense of Vygotskij

but also enact relations between pasts and futures and structure organizational remembering and

forgetting (Engeström et al., 1990; Middleton & Brown, 2005; Middleton, Brown, & Lightfoot,

2001). Especially in the context of the current transformation of the social security system in

Germany and other European countries, this kind of ordering functions as a technology of the self—

thus producing non-deviant, self-responsible, and self-controlled individuals (Foucault et al.,

1988) and eliminating the chances for broader and more radical societal changes.

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According to Law, “orders are never complete. Instead they are more or less precarious and

partial accomplishments that may be overturned. They are in short better seen as verbs rather

than nouns”. What is more: there is no single order but “plural and incomplete processes of

social ordering” (Law, 1994, pp. 1-2). Indeed, endless material-semiotic orderings formations

have been established in modernity as ways of normalizing human development in school and

educational settings (Morss, 1990; Walkerdine, 1993; Wulf, 2002), institutionalizing events

(Latour, 1993, 1994), regulating and channeling discursive processes (Foucault, 1972; Scheffer,

2007), ritualizing actions (Wulf & Zirfas, 2004), stabilizing relations (Middleton & Brown, 2005)

and organizing time (Heidegger, 1927/2001, 1929/1991) s. also (Geissler, 2004; Kamper, 1987).

This endeavor is impossible to realize without objects which ‘slow down’ and ‘stabilize’

everything:

In fact, the object (…) stabilizes our relationships; it slows down the time of our revolutions. For

an unstable band of baboons, social changes are flaring up every minute. One could characterize

their history as unbound, insanely so. The object, for us, makes our history slow (Serres,

1982/1995, p. 87)

Corporealities at Kindegartens

One could say that the analysis presented above is a typical actor-network theoretical analysis

which brings Latour in dialogue with Vygotskij and other developmental psychologists. However

innovative this analysis might be, what remains invisible in the above-presented examples is the

human body itself. Moving beyond the actor-network theory Annemarie Mol has recently

introduced the notion of the ‘food-eater’ as a way to speak about embodied action and

subjectivity while avoiding the dead-ends of modern Cartesian epistemologies (Mol, 2008a; Mol

& Mesman, 1996). “I eat, therefore I am” (or “I become” in terms of Deleuze & Guatarri) is

what the reader of Annmarie Mol’s recently published article in the new journal Subjectivity would

say while pondering her/ his own subjectivity (Mol, 2008a). Food eating is not only essential for

human and non-human bodies to survive, but it is also related to a series of practices, which in

the Western modern world have emerged through the development of life sciences. The research

of Annemarie Mol is here of primary importance. Mol studies food and drink and is developing a

theory of the subjectivity of the ‘food-eater’––a person and a body who is not universal but is

situated in local biologies (Lock, 1993) and practices of preparing food. The methodology

developed by Mol advances ethnography by exploring what and how people do (the ‘praxis’ in the

so-called ‘praxiography’). Practice, care, and embodiment have been studied thoroughly in

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feminist studies, science and technology studies and other sub-disciplinary directions. Following

this relatively new research direction, I would like here to turn to an example from another

research project, in which I have been involved in, a project which has investigated the history,

scientific politics and everyday practices of cardiovascular disease and prevention in Germany

and USA3

During my ethnography in kindergartens and day care centers in Berlin and New York I observed the

same thing: to my surprise, both in a kindergarten in the former East Berlin and in another one in

Brooklyn, teachers used a similar kind of material ordering so that children do not share any food but

eat their own portion during snack time. In Berlin, teachers used small dishes made of glass, putting

just one cookie on each dish while the children were out of the room. They then put the dishes on

the table—one dish, i.e. one cookie, per child. In New York, teachers used small disposable plastic

cups (no bigger than 3 cm3) and filled them with pieces of pretzels and crackers. No children were

allowed to participate in this activity, instead each child received one cup when snack time began.

Children here were sitting on the floor. In both cases the material ordering prevented children from

sharing food—but why? What is very interesting is that the same thing happened for different

reasons in Berlin and in New York: in Berlin, this was a way to prevent fat children from eating more

cookies than appropriate and belonged to a series of emerging obesity-prevention practices taking

place in German kindergartens for the last five years. In New York, however, as a teacher explained

me, this practice was supposed to prevent the circulation of germs and viruses which would take

place if a child were to touch his/ her nose and then the food which other children were eating. This

practice belongs to a series of measures that have been initiated by the Department of Health in the

last five years; they are not related to any disease or pandemic in particular. The Health Department

supervises both public and private day care centers and pre-schools in order to ensure that these

measures are indeed applied (summary of different fieldnotes written in English by MK).

The fieldnotes are noted here because they present different ways in which bio-scientific

knowledge shapes or transforms everyday practices, even in fields that are not directly linked to

biomedicine. Bio-scientific knowledge is becomes here translated into everyday practices and

transforms the way teachers are teachers, the way children are children and the ways teachers and

children are related to each other. Children are in both cases at risk, teachers are responsible for

public health and food-eating is organized by means of a spatial and material ordering that

ensures that children do not share food.

In the last fifteen years in the context of the so-called anthropology of technoscience, Franklin

and colleagues (Franklin & Lock, 2003; Franklin & Ragoné, 1998), Lock (2002), Haraway (2003,

3 See: http://www2.hu-berlin.de/ethno/seiten/forschung/forschungsprojekte/csl/en/prselbst/index.html. I ought special thanks to Stefan Beck, Jörg Niewöhner, Christoph Heintze, Jeannette Madarász, Martin Döring, Martin Lengwiller, Tom Mathar, Katrin Amelang and Wolfgang Knapp for our cooperation in this project.

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2008), Rabinow (1996, 1999), and others have extensively studied how new biology transformed

the processes of life reproduction. Reprogramming genes, cells and micro-organisms, tissue

cultures, organ transplantation and other techno-scientific practices radically transformed what

had been taken for granted as ‘natural’ and biological processes. They brought together practices

of economic change and development with gendering, ageing, and doing kinship with humans

and companion species. They thus enabled new forms of control (Rose, 1999), while raising a

variety of ethical-political issues––sometimes challenging modernity itself (Latour, 1993). Our

argument here is that biopower is not only limited to the direct applications of bio-technology;

biopower is distributed through a range of techno-scientific practices which not only affect cells,

organs, genes, mice and dogs, but also… children and childhood.

The semiotic orderings described above in both cases imply that children should not participate

in constructing the environments where their everyday lives take place. Also common to both

Germany and the USA is that the educational authorities want to be up-to-date and use the latest

bio-scientific knowledge to organize the everyday lives of children and teachers in kindergartens

and day care centers. However, drawing on our ethnographic material, one could say that the

dominant discourse in kindergartens in Berlin concerns cardiovascular disease and obesity, while

in New York the dominant discourse deals with viral infectious diseases.

What I would like to focus on here is, however, not the discourses themselves but the way in

which they become enacted or materialized. Both in the theory of Vygotskij as well as in the

theoretical works of Latour, Law, Mol and others the notion of mediation is interrelated to the

notion of practice (Law, 1997; Mol & Law, 2004b). It is argued that only in practice mediation

occurs and material-semiotic relations are enacted or performed. Taking into consideration the

two different traditions – the cultural-historical one and the technoscientific one, one can also

identify two distinct ways in which current scholarship speaks about practice.

To begin with, some scholars influenced by the soviet cultural-historical activity theory––

including Marx as well as Hegel––refer to practice not as opposed to theory but as dialectically related

to theory (Chaiklin & Lave, 1993). From this point of view, theory is only meaningful to the

extent in which it advances practice in the creation of a more equal society (Chaiklin, in print).

Theoretical concepts such as those of situated cognition, of peripheral participation, or of

communities of practice have been employed here in fields as diverse as psychology, educational

research or anthropology in order to develop an understanding as to how people participate in

practices which are cultural-historically rooted and at the same time transform these practices in

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emancipatory ways (Dreier, 2008; Hedegaard & Chaiklin, 2005; Lave & Wenger, 1991). Particular

attention is paid here to collective forms of action and organization – although the notion of the

‘collective’ refers mainly to humans, not to viruses or cyborgs.

Quite a different direction of theory and research draws on the tradition of pragmatism, which

opposed theory to practice in an effort to understand psychological and social phenomena4. In

this context scholars speak of a ‘practice turn’ (Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, & Savigny, 2001) or of a

‘performative turn’ (Wulf, 2004) in contemporary theory and speak about doing—doing things

with words (Austin, 1975), doing class, doing disability (Moser, 2006), doing gender (Butler,

1993), etc. Particular attention is paid here to corporeality and questions that regard health, care

and medicine – questions, which usually are not dealt with in social sciences or in developmental

psychology (Mol, 2002, 2008a, 2008b).

In both Germany and in the USA, teachers have been very inventive in using tables, chairs, the

floor, cups, dishes, and other objects to distribute food. This material arrangement enables

specific action while making other actions impossible. One could say that it is only the coming

together of information materials + teachers’ narrations + cups + pretzels + ill children + germs

that makes each of these ‘things’ what they are—but this arrangement is unstable and fluid, and it

is very easy to create different forms of presence and absence (Law, 2004) so that one thing is

taken out and the whole as such becomes different, e.g. different information materials +

different teachers’ narrations + cups + pretzels + fat children (but no germs). The relation of

these objects and subjects has a genealogy which can be traced back through public health

policies, educational reform, and Western modernity, but this genealogy is not linear and is

contingent in itself (Foucault, 1971/1972, 1979). At the same time, the various ‘things’ that

participate in this practice might be enacted in very different ways in other practices: cups might

be used in drinking water, foods in teachers’ and children’s decorating activities, etc.

The materiality of cups plays an important role in the American setting. They are small and can

only contain one child’s snack, but at the same time they are easier to carry than dishes because

the food will not fall out; they do not break because they are made of plastic so that children can

eat their snacks while sitting on the floor. In the German kindergarten, snacks were served on

small plates made of glass and the children were supposed to sit and eat at a table and observe

very strict rules of movement enforced by the teachers. This arrangement reflected not only the

different material aspects of the tools used (plates made of glass which might break and which 4 For a review article on contemporary theory on pragmatism and theory of practice see (Bogusz, forthcoming).

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cannot be moved a lot without the food falling down), but also a series of expectations about

whether children are supposed to eat and move as adults-to-be (German kindergarten) or in very

different ways than adults usually do (American pre-schools). The materiality of cups and dishes

goes together with the corporeality of children who, by using these cups and dishes, moved in

specific ways and ate healthy—whatever ‘healthy’ means in the different contexts. Very often, not

only objects made of plastic, wood or glass participated in the doing healthy-food-eating, the

food itself was made in a healthy way—embodying different and hybrid forms of life-scientific

knowledge as well as popular imaginations about what is ‘natural’ or ‘proper’ for children to eat.

Referring to more ethnographic materials, we could mention whole wheat bread, organic

chocolates and fruit popsicles as examples of material-semiotic orderings which concerned the

very essence of food and not only the way it was distributed or eaten.

Discussion and Open Questions

Summarizing this brief analysis, we could say that the concept of practice is of particular

importance in analyzing how knowledge and discourse becomes translated, embodied or

materialized, transforming material-semiotic orderings in a variety of everyday life settings

(Haraway, 1997) because material, corporeal, and semiotic qualities of objects and bodies do not

exist a-priori as ideal qualities, they are enacted in relation to other bodies or objects when various

kinds of action take place (Law & Hassard, 1999). One could also say that corporeality and

materiality are not pre-defined or given but are enacted or performed in relation to each other in

the context of different practices. It is only in relation to cups and plates that a body is performed

and it is in also relation to CVs and files that a body is considered to be a mind – i.e. an absent

body. I make use of the notion of practice here also in order to emphasize that the same thing can

have different meanings and be done in a different way in the context of different cultural-historical

practices––in relation to other things (see also: Mol, 2002; Mol & Law, 2004a; Moser, 2008,

forthcoming).

What becomes also clear in both examples presented above is that materiality or corporeality is

intertwined with semiotics and discourse: CVs mediate development, cups and plates mediate

being at risk and enact or realize a set of possible relations between teachers and students

rendering some other relations invisible or in-active. In this regard one could eventually advance

the understanding of mediation by speaking of material-semiotic arrangements or orderings (the

slash between the material and the semiotic is here more important than the words themselves,

see (Haraway, 1997; Law & Hassard, 1999).

14

Regarding the notion of “development” as such one could argue on the ground of the above-

presented analysis that development does not automatically and self-evidently occur “out-there”:

development can be seen as a set of relations and materialities participate in the making of this

set of relations, stabilize, organize, direct, produce and order it while enacting particular

temporalities as well as spaces of “out-thereness” and an “in-hereness” (Law, 2004). The enacted

temporalities are often multiple in the way e.g. that developing towards a given end goes together

with avoiding another end (i.e. the risk).

Ethnography offers a privileged access to questions regarding materialities and corporealities in

children’s everyday lives and illuminates their particular roles and functions in concrete situations.

Combined with other methodologies such as participatory role-play or film-making with

children/ youngsters as well as with multi-disciplinary analysis ethnography can prove to be even

more effective in exploring the complex and multiple material-semiotic becomings in which

children/ youngsters participate in their everyday lives.

In the above-presented examples it becomes clear that endless material-semiotic arrangements

can participate in a single action. What is important as seen from an ethnographic or

praxeographic perspective is not to analyze everything, but what is important for the participants

in a concrete practice and for the practice itself.

What is still very important in childhood studies – and with this I would like to close my

presentation – is creating spaces in which the children/ youngsters themselves can participate in

the analysis of the practices in which they are engaged as well as in their transformation. Children

and young people should not be reduced to objects of our research – but should and can actively

participate in many ways in the research process and collaborate with researchers in doing

research. Letting a window open for future research in this direction I would like here to

conclude with an extract from my short film “Obesity Politics in Berlin Kindergartens”. Here I

asked children to play theatre and perform how they eat in their everyday life in the kindergarten.

I filmed this theatre play and discussed it later in combination with more video material with the

children, their parents and teachers as well as with doctors working on obesity prevention and

other colleagues. My aim has been here to let children express themselves about the practices in

which they usually engage in the kindergarten as well as to create a space for critical reflection

about and eventually for collaborative transformation of these practices.

15

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