Chapter 3 - Figured Worlds

Chapter 3

Figured Worlds

What if gender relations were defined so that women had to worry about whether or not they were attractive?

What if, as in the Trobriand Islands, bundles of banana leaves were so important that older women spent much time and energy assembling them?

What if there was a world called academia, where books were so significant that people would sit for hours on end, away from friends and family, writing them?

Many of the activities that engage human energy and interest have an imaginative component.  John Caughey believes that humans enter imaginary worlds – via dreams, daydreams, or spectatorship, to model possibilities, to inspire new actions, or even to provide an escape or withdrawal from action.  Benedict Anderson even goes so far as to see nationalism as an “imagined community.”  Thus, people’s identities and agency are formed dialectically and dialogically in these “as if” worlds.

In 1978,Vygotsky wrote a paper that expanded his notion of children’s potential for development.  He explained the usual fascination of manipulating their worlds by means of symbols, i.e., a couch becomes the hideout for the bad guy.  He goes on to explain that children will be motivated to participate in that imaginary scene that goes beyond their immediate surroundings and enter the imagined world.  For example, a piece of candy becomes a jewel and the child will not eat it.  Children may also run a race, the goal to win, and ignore their fatigue and pain in order to win.  This, he says, is a conceptual world that differs from the everyday events of the world. 

Vygotsky explained that children’s mental and emotional faculties are culturally formed.  If we look at the role of tangible objects, made collectively into artifacts by the attribution of meaning, we can see them as tools that people use to affect their own and others’ thinking, feeling, and behavior.  Through habitual use these cultural tools become resources available for personal use, mnemonics of the activities they facilitate, and finally constitutive of thought, emotion, and behavior.   This is the “pivot” or symbolic prop.  Toys, even sticks assigned the status of horse, can be the pivot.  The symbol will eventually be discarded and the child can continue without the physical prop.

As the child grows older they may participate in games that have more rules and less fantasy.  Still the child must shift himself into a conceptual world beyond his immediate surroundings in order to become the actor in the game and treat its events as real.  This is the precursor to living an institutional life.  Individuals are treated as scholars, bosses, or at-risk children and events such as the granting of tenure, a corporate raid, and the self-esteem of at-risk children are taken in all seriousness.  But to see imagination extended so is simply to recognize that it pervades cultural life. 

In chapter 4 of this book, the authors consider the world of Alcoholics Anonymous.  In AA meetings participants tell stories about their lives before they join the organization.  They collect tokens (poker chips), for the periods of time they have remained sober.  They come to name themselves, and often see themselves, as “alcoholics” and not just drinkers.  All of these elements of AA are meaningful in, relevant to, and valued (or not) in relation to the frame of meaning, a virtual world, a world that has been figured. 

In the world of AA the poker chips were not won by holding a straight flush.  Rather, they were meaningfully revalued to a world where the stake, the thing at wager, was staying sober; the chip became an emblem of a different achievement, another kind of success – The difference between picking up and not picking up a chip is, for some, the difference between a good and a bad life.

By “figured world”, then, the authors are referring to a socially and culturally constructed realm of interpretation in which particular characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others.  By means of such appropriation, objectification, and communication, the world itself is also reproduced, forming and reforming in the practices of its participants.