The Cooperative, Transformative Organization of Human Action and Knowledge

Abstract

AbstractFocusing on a range of features that are central to the constitution of action, this chapter is an empirically based theoretical contribution to the field of research attempting to understand how human sociality is established and sustained. Human action is intensely, perhaps uniquely, cooperative. Individual actions are constructed by assembling diverse materials, including language structure, prosody, and visible embodied displays. Semiotically charged objects, such as maps, when included within local action, incorporate ways of knowing and acting upon the world that have been inherited from predecessors. New action is built by performing systematic, selective operations on these public configurations of resources. The way in which a single action encompasses different kinds of resources makes possible (1) distinctive forms of cooperative social organization as alternatively positioned actors contribute different kinds of structure to a single shared action (e.g., the talk of a speaker and the silent visible displays of hearer work together to construct a turn-at-talk and the utterance emerging within it); and (2) the accumulation and differentiation through time within local cooperative transformation zones of dense substrates that create a multiplicity of settings for action. Each setting for action must be inhabited by competent members who have mastered the culturally specific practices required to perform the activities that animate the lifeworld of a particular community. Through the progressive development of, and apprenticeship within, diverse epistemic ecologies, communities invest their members with the resources required to understand each other in just the ways that make possible the accomplishment of ongoing, situated action. Human beings inhabit each other's actions.