Keeping the Conversation Going: An Interview with Jerome Bruner

BRADD SHORE

or three days in June of 1996,1 sat with Jerome Bruner in his study in his Greenwich Village loft, recording an interview at the request of the new editors of Ethos, Tom Gsordas and Janis Jenkins. The occasion was the inauguration of a new forum in Ethos: interviews with figures who are influential in contemporary psychological anthropology. I had spent the preceding two months swimming in the vast and deep waters of Bruner's work, putting together a series of anthropologist's questions. Our discussions ranged over a whole continent of issuesbiographical, methodological, historical, and, of course, conceptual. To talk with a man who has spent six decades thinking, studying, and writing about mindoften in the company of some of the most distinguished thinkers of the 20th centuryis not likely to turn into your garden variety chat. It wasn't. Jerry Bruner is a virtuoso conversationalist. Watching him field a tough question is like watching Yo Yo Ma negotiate a difficult passage of a Bach Cello Suite. Bruner is a scientist/humanist whose work has always developed through an unbroken chain of conversation, generations long, which includes talks with students, friends, opponents, family, and colleagues from all over the world. He himself attributes his long and productive career to his knack for "keeping the conversation going." In his thirty years at Harvard, his decade as Watts Professor at Oxford, and his New York years at The New School for Social Research and more recently at the Law School at NYU, Jerry Bruner has tacked back and forth among most of the major subfields of his discipline. His contributions have paved the way for significant advances in the fields of physiological psychology, perception, thinking, child development, language and symbolic processes, play, education, psychology and law, cultural models, and narrative models of self. The selected bibliography at the end of this interview attests convincingly to the fact that there is

BRADD SHORE is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Emory University. Ethos 25(1):7-62. Copyright 1997, American Anthropological Association.

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hardly a corner of psychology, or anthropology, for that matter, that has not benefited from his having camped out there for a good spell. Though Bruner was quick to remind me that he is a psychologist by training and by profession, he possesses a powerful and unmistakable anthropological sensibility. He has sought his answers from whatever and whoever had something of interest to say to him. His conversation is liberally laced with the names and works of a cadre of anthropologists with whom he developed important relationships: Geertz, Schneider, Evans-Prichard, Fortes, Mead, Benedict, Kluckhohn, and LeVi-Strauss. Many of his students, like Patricia Greenfield and Barbara Rogoff, did cross-cultural fieldwork. Given the centrality of culture to his understanding of mind, Bruner frequently refers to himself as a cultural psychologist. From his earliest work in perception, he argued for a psychology that made room for both intentionality and for the effects of cultural context in even the most fundamental aspects of perception and thought. As he is fond of repeating, "No hearing without listening; no seeing without looking." Though he is a lifelong "constructivist," in a field where it was not always easy to hoist that flag, Bruner is no simple cultural determinist either. A powerfully dialectical thinker, Bruner has always been quick to acknowledge, and indeed to study, those biologically based constraints on the human psyche, as well as the social, cultural, and historical contexts from which an actual mind derives its particular forms of life. What follows is a selection from a much longer set of conversations that will be eventually published as a book. In editing these conversations for publication in Ethos, I have sought to preserve Bruner's distinctive voice and his conversational style. Though I have divided the interview into topical chunks, these sections are merely rough approximations of topical breaks. Conversational flow, particularly from someone for whom chatting is a way of thinking aloud, does not always respect such neat boundary markers. The result, I think, does capture something of the man, his special way of framing high-minded ideas with personal and sometimes irreverent anecdotes, with slightly wicked humor, and always and forever in conversation with his vast "gang," his generations of friends and colleagues, students and family, collaborators and intellectual adversarieschatting over lunches, disputing at dinner, debating in committees, navigating in a sea of ideas aboard boats, in pubs, and around seminar tables, listening, talking, making meaning.

THE SHAPE OF A CAREER

BS: In your autobiography, In Search of Mind, you write, "I'm better at thinking up new things than following old ones through to implementation." I find that an interesting insight into how you think about vour

Keeping the Conversation Going 9

Figure 1 . Jerome S. Bruner

own career. Your first publication was way back in 1939, and for almost sixty years Jerome Bruner has continued to think up all sorts of new things. Since you naturally tend to think about lives developmentally, how do you conceive of the flow and shape of your own extraordinary career? Does it divide into stages, or chunks? Or do you think of it as continuous, all of a piece? JB: Well, it doesn't seem particularly extraordinary. I was always following the same set of voices, and I guess the voices had to do with the question of how you organize experience. How do you know? Now, why I became interested in that, God only knows. It may have had to do with the fact that I was born blind and had to construct a "visual" world, and then, when my sight was restored at two, I had to reconcile that "visual" world with the one you build out of real visual input. Who knows? BS: You don't have any conscious memory of having been blind? JB: I have none whatever, certainly no eureka! in which, postoperatively, I suddenly remember being in the light when the anesthetic wore off. I do remember some years later coming out of the anesthetic after a tonsil operation when the world seemed as if it were somehow flowing with light. It may have been a memory recovery of coming out of anesthetic at the time of my cataract operation, but I don't know. Interesting, though, that for me "space in the light" and "space in the dark" don't seem to differ that much. Friends sometimes tease me about being so good at finding my way around in the dark. Maybe I have a

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particularly "amodal" representation of space as a result of that early experience. A silly story: someone once asked me whether I find celestial and dead-reckoning navigation harder at night than in the daylight. An astonishing idea. Either way, you're constructing some sort of "abstract ocean" on which you're moving about (rather abstractly at that, as though in a Cartesian coordinate system). That kind of "navigational space" has virtually no sensory content for me. Whether that's because of being born blind or not, I've no idea. Let's not commit the genetic fallacy about the "importance of the early." BS: I remember asking Marshall Sahlins how he conceived of his career. The popular wisdom within anthropology was that Sahlins had virtually dominated what was thought of as materialist approaches to the study of culture when he was at University of Michigan and then went to France and discovered structuralism and did a complete turnaround, reinventing himself as a structuralist. When I characterized his career in this way to him, he looked at me in shock and said vehemently that he doesn't conceive of his career as being disjointed or turning around in any way whatsoever. For him, it was all of a piece, all continuous, however it might appear to others. Is that how you think about your own career? JB: I've been kidded a lot about this. I go from studying undergraduates in a laboratory with a tachistoscope to taking a look at kids just after they're delivered and so on. But it's still pretty much the same quarry. I remember when I was at a Society for Research in Child Development meeting and a graduate student came up to me and said, "Oh, we're so sorry that you've left the field of infancy and are now working with older children." And I said to her, "I'm stunned! You study infancy and then you want to find out what happens a little bit later in order to go back and take another look at infancy." I've never felt as if I've jumped into another field. It just doesn't sound right. BS: So you don't feel as if you leave behind the earlier things you've studied? JB: No way. Never. BS: It's interesting that your view of how your own career developed parallels your rejection of the idea of discrete stages of human development and your belief that all the earlier stages are incorporated into the later ones. JB: Well, they are. The thing that's bothered me about studies in cognitive growth when I look back is that we talk about the so-called "stages" of "enactive representation," "iconic representation," and "symbolic representation." The fact of the matter is that there are forms of all three kinds of representation early on. They're different of course. The small kid handles referentiality or intentionality perfectly adequately, which is a kind of symbolic form. And he'd never be able to get into the

Keeping the Conversation Going 11

symbolic system unless that were there. You can see perfectly well where I got the original idea. It's a very Peircean idea.1 You go from index to icon to symbol as if somehow there was nothing there before. That was Peirce's trying to abstract the problem a little too much. For in fact they're all there, and they gradually differentiate and get arrested. Johnny von Neuman once said to me that human intelligence is an extraordinarily interesting kind of thing, used mostly for correcting errors. That is to say, we have a primitive way of making a first order of approximations of how to understand something, and when we get into pickles with them, we use our intelligence to get out. We start out with primitive intuitions and, thank God, we are superb at correcting our mistakes. We need alternate ways of looking at things so that we can shift from one to the other to correct. And he said, "I suppose that's what you get for having so much brain." BS: Over the last sixty years, have you ever taken any strong position that you've eventually repudiated? A position where you've thought you had been dead wrong? JB: Repudiation isn't exactly the word I want. But certainly I've had the sense that a concept or approach wasn't doing for me what I wanted. For example, the idea of "stages" wasn't doing what I wanted. It wasn't dealing with the complexity of the issues that I wanted to deal with. So I give it up provisionally and put something in its place. There's no point in repudiating a concept as if somehow it had betrayed you about the world. Just try another way of doing it. BS: You have, without interruption, remained extraordinarily productive, to the point that as I was trying to catch up with some of your older work, you would be sending me new papers before I could make a dent in the old ones. How do you account for your virtually continuous and prolific output over all these years? I don't think it's normal for people to be continuously productive in this way over such a long period of time. JB: How would I account for that? BS: Maybe it's like asking how you breathe? JB; How I breathe, or why I wear a ten-and-a-half shoe. But I suppose there are some curious things that come to mind as I turn your question over in my head. One of them may be that there isn't all that much difference between my work and my play. It's all a form of playing. It's a family joke, my blurring of work and play. My daughter's great joke is that I love sailing because it poses familiar problems of interpreting position, current, wind, and such. But it's play too. I taught myself celestial navigation, which is anachronistic because people don't use celestial navigation. They use satellites. But never mind. Besides, play and work are not so different. My gang with whom I used to race in the Bermuda Race had decided that one of the things we should do if we all got rich was

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to give a special prize for the boat in the Race that had the best conversation on board on the way from Newport to Bermuda. Now I'm going to say something utterly banal but serious. If you take ideas seriously, you assume that they relate to your being and your life as well as to others. Ideas and theories aren't isolated in your own head. Nor isolated from other activity, like play. Those kinds of formalized play that are separated from life always risk sharpening the distinction between work and play whereas it isn't really a distinction. I work a lot, but it's really play-work or work-play. BS: A lot of people can recognize the fun in talking, but they think of it as just conversation. You seem to have the ability to translate that same conversational energy into writing, which for many people is a chore. It sounds as if writing has the same playful character as conversation. JB: It's a continuation; but it's more than a continuation. Because the fact of the matter is that the flow of ideas in life, particularly in conversation, is so fast, that you want somehow to get alone so that you can really work the thing out. Frequently you take positions. You say, "How the hell did I come up with that? Why did I say that?" I'm one of those people who goes through many, many drafts. I really do believe David Olson's point in that new book of his, The World On Paper.2 David says that the difference between writing and speaking is that in writing what you do is to "go meta" on the speaking, on the conversational thing, to try to find a way of saying it to which you can adhere and of which you have a correctable record. And that's the way it is for me. I love the process of finding out what I really think. In some funny kind of way, how do I know what I think until I read what I've said? BS: So conversation lets you bounce your ideas off other people's ideas. And writing is a kind of conversation with yourself? JB: Yes, it's with myself. But I also love giving drafts to [my wife] Carol [Feldman] who says things like, "That's great!" or "How can you say that there and then come to the particular here? You've left out three steps and it sounds perfectly obscure to me." And I do the same for her. So it gets to be that there is kind of an intermediate stepyou and your close friends. And I've always had close friends that are there when I'm writing, too. For years I had an almost mythological older brotherthe great Robert Oppenheimerwho was a fantastically complicated human being. We spent a lot of time talking not only at the Institute [for Advanced Study] but before that. I knew him in the days when he used to come in from Los Alamos. I used to stay with Ruth and Richard Tolman in their house in Washington, and he would stay there too. We got to be good friends and stayed good friends over the years. And whenever I tried out something having to do with the nature of knowing, which was a subject that absolutely fascinated him,. I'd ask myself "what would Robert say

Keeping the Conversation Going 13

about this or that?" I've done the same with a few other people. David Olson is another case in point of somebody who's close by my desk. And of course Carol. George Miller is another one. George is particularly valuable because we know that I know that he knows that I know that we disagree very deeply. But if I can make my point to him and he can say, "I understand what you are saying but I disagree," then that's okay. The main thing is, does he know what I'm trying to say even if he disagrees. So these kinds of friends have made writing much easier. BS: You seem to have a deep attraction to what you like to think of as the "subjunctive mode" of mind, which makes it easier to let go of your ideas and get them into print. I suppose that makes writing a lot easier. I know people who have this book that they're unable to publish because it's not perfect. They've been writing it for years and if you have a view that you're either right and or you're wrong, you get afraid that you might not quite have it yet. You're afraid to let go of what you're doing. But where you view the mind as open as you do, then you're really not afraid to let go of what you're doing because it's really all part of the process of learning and meaning-making, even your mistakes. JB: I know, it's part of the process, and somebody's going to respond to what you write and tell you you're a damn fool. And you're going to tell him why he's a damn fool. You know I never really thought about it so much, but I think that this kind of view makes writing considerably less threatening. That's one of the reasons why I love the essay. Because the essay is a try. There was a great exchange between George Miller and Phil Johnson-Laird when they were finishing their book on perception and language. They had gone through revision after revision after revision and finally George said to Phil, "Well, enough. We've got to decide now whether we're going for perfection or Thursday." So they decided it was Thursday, to the great relief of the Harvard University Press. Go back for a second to that question of why one goes on being productive. Why do we go on having conversations? Why do we go on wanting to talk to ourselves? And why do we go on wanting to chase down volumes in the library to find out what other people actually have said in the past? Did they really say that? What do they really mean? Or why do they spend all those hours observing kids or analyzing text or doing quirky little experiments? To us, it's what life's all about. Somebody will say, "Oh. You're those goddamned intellectuals." But I don't think that all this is really different from being any other kind of person. Everybody does that in some measure. Life consists, after all, in construing and reconstruing things from the horizontal, syntagmatic point of view, then from the vertical, paradigmatic perspective. So what's new about intellectuals? BS: Have you ever had a point in your career when you've been blocked in your writing?

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JB: It's a terrible thing to confess. No. BS: That's extraordinary. In sixty years as a scholar you never remember feeling blocked? JB: Oh, except for one kind of thing that has to do with getting your ideas straight. For about seven or eight years now, for example, I have been unsure whether I am writing a book on the self. I do new pieces which may or may not be a part of such a book. I don't think I'm blocked up so much. I keep turning out stuff. But six months later I look at it again and say "This is plain awful. You didn't understand or you put it in the wrong context." So I'm blocked, but not really blocked. I just don't quite get there, and it drives me nutty. It drives me sufficiently nutty so that when I come to the end of a day, still up against one of those stone walls, it really spoils my sleep and triggers my wife's protectiveness. BS: You seem almost preoccupied with the fear of boredom. In fact, you end your book Actual Minds, Possible Worlds with the provocative claim that "boredom has always played more of a role in human history than we are prepared to admit." I'm curious about what role you think boredom has played in human history. And I'm also curious about what role the fear of boredom has played in your own life. You certainly don't appear to suffer from boredom. JB: No, I'm not at all preoccupied with it. You learn how to avoid it or cope with it after a while. But I wish I really understood it well. I don't really have a systematic view of the nature of boredom. I do have a kind of proto-theory about it. It goes like this. There are two pure ways of pursuing thought. One of them is essentially working in the realm of ideal objects under stipulated boundary conditions, which is like mathematics. It's beautiful and full of excitement. I can still remember my high school days first learning about simultaneous equations, solving for a whole set of unknowns by putting a set of equations together. Pure thrill. It was the same with plane and solid geometry. You start off with the notion of a point. Move the point through space and you have a line. Move the line and you have a plane. Move the plane, and you have a solid. What a proceeding! That's one form of excitement. It dispels boredom, a kind of an anti-boredom device that satisfies the desire for elegant surprise. Then, there is poetry at the other extreme. Much later on in adult life, I started reading the Russian formalists, like Victor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson particularly.3 They talked about the notion of literaturnost, the "literariness" of fiction. The task of the poet is to rescue the banal and ordinary from its gray background and make it strange again. Make it strange again and even fantastic. Good scholarship does this: takes things out of the presuppositional mass, make them strange again so that we can get thinking about them. I've always thought of poetry and mathematics as two protections against cognitive boredom.

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BS: I would bet that your fearlessness in taking on something that had become banal to make it strange again is predicated on your certainty that you are going to be able to bring that strangeness back to meaning againto come home again. JB: Probably. That search for meaning is always driving us. BS: There are at least two different kinds of boredom, I think. There's the boredom which has to do with the ever-increasing demand for raw stimulationthe kind of boredom that I see a lot with young kids these days. The media helps create it and then caters to it. Movies have gradually given up entertaining by way of interesting plot or character development, replacing them with sheer action, violence, sound and light streams and special effects. Or take the modern shopping mall. It's become a kind of stimulus machine both satisfying the hunger for basic stimuli, and perpetuating the appetite. This kind of constant resetting of the nervous system's demand for raw stimuli generates a primitive sort of boredom, satisfied in a primitive way. But this is different from the way you are talking about dealing with boredom. In your view, the antidote to boredom isn't really more intense stimuli, but making meaning. JB: Right, making meaning which always carries the promise of both surprise and security. BS: It's taking a piece of something, and recognizing that this piece of something has a context to be discovered. Like seeing a piece of a puzzle and beginning to get the outline of the bigger picture. When students feel bored in a classroom, it is often because they're being fed pieces of something without being given the sense that there is a bigger picture. Kind of like being given a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle without a picture template to help make sense of the pieces. JB: That's right. Then it's just one goddamn thing after another. BS: The minute they begin to see the outline of the picture that these pieces make up, suddenly what was boredom turns into a challenge to make meaning. JB: "Hey!" they say. BS: Isn't one of the functions of education to replace the quantitative demand for increased raw stimulus with the other kind of strategy for evading boredomthe one that seeks after meaning in the world? JB: Well, yes. But look beyond that for a second. I think the word I want is what the Russian formalists called ostranyeniye, which means alienating you from the obvious and making you see it strange again. When you ask about doing science, there is always the notion that the process of science is one big game of somebody having hypotheses and then spending the rest of the century verifying them, a kind of verificationist notion. But science is not just that. It also involves a very interesting process of finding new and metaphoric ways to think about things.

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Even the experiments you do become tropes or metaphors. I'm reminded of an example, a funny little experiment that Gecile Goodman and I did years ago. She was a tutee of mine and wanted the experience of conducting an experiment. At that time I was thinking about how perception itself represented some kind of a compromise between different expectancies and the way in which things impinge on the sensoriumwhat Egon Brunswick referred to as Zwischengegenstand, an intermediate objective representative, a compromise of expectancy and input. So we had rich kids and poor kids judge the sizes of coinsa perfectly absurd kind of experiment. We found that the more valuable the coin, the greater the overestimation of its size, with the exception of the dime which everybody judged as much smaller than it actually was. The really interesting finding was that this effect was more evident in poor kids than in rich ones. Even simple size judgments were moved around by how we value things, or our experience with things. Now, tell me, how many people were worried in any practical engineering sense about the sizes of coins, or how kids judge their size? What in the hell difference does that make practically? But the experiment created a poetic image, a metaphor that was useful in the same way, for example, as the neutron in physics operated as a fantastic, generative metaphoric idea. Here was a particle that wasn't charged positively or negativelya mass without charge. And everybody was shocked awake by it. It's that kind of entering metaphor that gets a process of reflection and meta-cognition going in the scientific community. Now, I'm mad for the notion of "going meta" that gets you beyond the information given. It gets you a little beyond what you started with, even though it may be a source of a lot of error. But on the other hand, it is just that kind of search for meta-cognition that has pushed my own career, and I think that its cultivation should be a central task of education.

NO"BRUNERIANS"
BS: Much of your impact on psychology has been through your many illustrious students. How do you view your role and your impact as a teacher? JB: Let me start with an odd kind of anecdote about this business of passing on knowledge. I had a nightmare when I was a kid that I had sort of forgotten but that came up in the course of analysis. It's full of hostility, my analyst said. Maybe it was, maybe not. But it went like this. I woke one morning and discovered that everybody in the whole world had disappeared. I was the only one left. And there was a new humanity put on earth and I had to pass onto them everything we knew. Of course, my analyst immediately said, "What did you do? You killed off the world." But to me the terror of the thing was not that I had killed off the world or

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that they had died, but how in God's name would I pass everything on. And I want to tell you, you know how neurotic one can be! I thought that what I needed was contained in those beat up volumes over there on the shelf of the 1 lth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. You know where those sat? They sat in the bookcase next to my father's desk at home, in his study. I thought that was the best place to find what I'd have to pass on and I still have them here, close by. I mean I've tried other versions of the Encyclopedia, but they're just not as good. Maybe because of all of those brilliant jokers who wrote in that 11th edition. Remember G. K. Ogden was the editor of that edition. Maybe all of them had that same kind of nightmare I'd had when I was a kid! BS: To say nothing of its inherent virtue that it was your father's encyclopedia that he had given to you. JB: Yeah. I realize full well that it's neurotic as hell. In fact, I inherited it. BS: Now there's one hell of a transitional object for you. JB: It's amazing having the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica as my transitional object. [LaughterJ BS: I think it's a stunning achievement. [Laughter] JB: It's so crazy. BS: One of your Oxford graduate students, Alison Gopnick, who wrote that very nice piece about your Oxford years, made a fascinating comment about your teaching style. She said that despite your great influence on three generations of students, there are no disciples. There are no "Brunerians." JB: You bet. Not if I could help it. BS: Her quote was: "You managed to turn your students into something better than Brunerians, into themselves." An amazing tribute and a very interesting statement about teaching. JB: That's very sweet. It probably relates to my own life. I remember the first time I walked into the Harvard Yard. I looked about and thought about my heroes, like the living Walter Bradford Gannon and the departed William James. And I remember thinking, "Oh my God! Here is this place that represents this great tradition, carrying out the learned life. I've really got to do my version of it." And then there was another occasion of the same kind when I went into the Mary Hitchcock Library in Dartmouth where I had a study over the summer for reading. I recall going into the stacks and finding Aristotle's De Sensu and thinking to myself, "Jesus Christ! Here I am, in the middle of the summer in Hanover, New Hampshire reading Aristotle's De Sensu." Aristotle asks, "How do I know that it's Gleon's son walking down the steps of the Parthenon?" And I started asking the question of myself. I felt somehow part of a tradition, a tradition that was more important than any of us. No, I don't need disciples. What

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we need are people who will carry out that tradition of inquiry. To a major extent, it is a kind of conversational tradition although it gets transferred into the writing mode when you're being more serious about your conversation. So if somebody takes a position that's contrary to my position, I want them to work it out as well as they can. If Alison makes that sweet remark about me that makes me sound deeply unselfish, you need to realize that I'm not unselfish at all. I don't honor my students for echoing me back. I want to find out where they're going to take the idea next. And in some respects I was inspired by Edward Tolman. He didn't want Tolmanians. He had a few, but he didn't really want disciples. He wanted them to get on with the enterprise of a cognitive learning theory. I felt a lot of reward for their picking up something on their own and developing it. The line of work that Mike Scaife and I began on very young infants following an adult's line of regard to discover what they were attending to is a good example. We were interested in how they "knew" that others were attending to things "out there," knew it well enough to follow their gaze direction in search for what they might be looking at. Well, this requires some sort of "theory of mind," some very grasp of what philosophers like to call the Other Mind problem. And now research on children's "theories of mind" is boomingwhat is the basis of intersubjectivityand lots of my former students and post-docs are leading the way, like Golwyn Trevarthen, Alison Gopnik, and Alan Leslie who has even shown that autism is partly attributable to a failure to grasp how Other Minds work. Just look at Janet Astington's splendid book, The Child's Discovery of the Mind.4 My feeling about that is that once they get into the act, my job was to get into the business of giving it a lift, quoting their work, giving it a boost and talking about their theories. I'm a pretty arrogant character in terms of self assurance. I mean, I think I'm on the right tack and I don't need a lot of assurances from others. But I'm like everybody else. I mean, I look in the back of every book I get to see whether I'm in the index. And if I'm not, I say, "How the hell did they miss me." I'm just as vain as the next character. But somehow, I don't have to produce disciplesBrunerians, as you call them. And it's paid off in some way. For example, all that work on scaffolding like Mike Tomasello is doing at Emory and that David Wood is doing in England, and Barbara Rogoff at Santa Cruz, makes me feel I started something that got picked up and carried out on its own. Let them carry it on. That gives me a chance to get onto the next problem. BS: If you think about the people that have those adjectival versions of their names . . . JB: . . . some of them are not very kind people. BS: There's something to that. Is it also possible that if you're not a reductionist at heart that it's harder for people to associate you with a

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kind of bottom-line, categorical vision of human behavior, one which makes for a convenient bandwagon? JB: That's an interesting question. But you know the same thing holds for George Miller. There are no Millerians. BS: I suspect that it has to do with the sociology of knowledge within the academy. JB: I'm fascinated by this. BS: Peopleincluding many scholars, often think categorically. So if you want to found a "school" of thought, you have to have a "schtick." And the "schtick" has to be easily remembered. And you can't move on to too many different things, because that doesn't give people the kind of hook they need. You're harder to classify. JB: This is the issue of what some now call intertextuality. That's really fascinating. What I mean by intertextuality in this context is the effort to find correspondence between the theories of different scholars by pointing to homologies that exist between parts of their theories. Like taking the notion of "drive" in theories of animal behavior and "showing" that they correspond to notions of "drive" say, in psychoanalysis. The people who found "schools" love to incorporate other views by this technique of homologization. The "shticks" that you refer to, the ones so easily remembered, are usually of this order. But a notion like "drive," for example, has to be understood in the context of the particular theories where it figures. It's a tricky issue. Probably our worst modern offender in making such intertextual claims for his theorya kind of "raider" into other theorieswas Clark Hull at Yale who chose immodestly to call his theory "behavior theory." 5 Interesting that he had a host of disciples during his lifetime, but I doubt there are more than two or three Hullians left. BS: There are plenty of things one could say about Bruner: piles of insights, positions, and conclusions that are forever associated with Jerome Bruner. But it's a summary of a process. Not a summary of a single fixed theory and its elaborations. JB: I spent seven or eight very intensive years working with very young infants and luck has held with me. I had brilliant people working with me. People like Golwyin Trevarthan and Martin Richards. Golwyn went on working on the development of intersubjectivity between mother and infant. And I became interested in the question of how the next step is taken by the use of language. And so we started working on formats of language acquisition used for learning discourse in natural settings. Picking up linguistic rules, doing some very close studies of one motherinfant pair showing how the mother indicates that she knows that the child knows and then that she knows that the child .knows that she knows.

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That carried the notion of intersubjectivity a step forwarda cultural step at that. BS: This is a kind of tertiary intersubjectivity. Primary intersubjectivity involves a kind of direct contact between caretaker and child, eye contact and all that. Secondary intersubjectivity involves toys and other "transitional objects." Anthropologists have studied this for years as exchange theory, usually without considering its link to the psychological literature. Tertiary intersubjectivity would then be this more abstracted synchronization of minds you're referring to. JB: That's exactly right. So that allowed me to get into the next stepgoing from infant perception to child language. And then after child language proper, I wanted to get into more discourse-related kinds of things. Of course I try to keep in touch with where I started which puts a big load on me. But as you say, I like conversation. So I've got Patricia Greenfield and David Olson as conduits from one particular period, and Alison Gopnik from another, and so on. Now these scholars aren't "Brunerians," but they work on Bruner-type problems. Which suits me just fine, because it also saves me from having to work on every last detail of a problem. I leave it to them. BS: What would you call a Bruner-type problem? Is there is something characteristic of all the things that interest youa kind of family resemblance? JB: Yes. It's very much like Wittgenstein's notion of a family resemblance, or to be more precise it's more like the Wittgensteinian image of the thread which is twisted together, fiber by fiber, but in which there is not in any sense a single continuous strand. 6 1 see it as a kind of pragmatics of knowledge acquisition. Basically I think that's what the core of it is. That is you organize and construct knowledge on the basis of encounters with the world, for some use. When I say pragmatic, I really mean pragmatic in the deeply American tradition. Perhaps, more in the Peircean sense of pragmatic. Not William James's "pragmatic," but Peirce's "pragmaticism." BS: And that entails an intentional view of knowing. JB: It's an intentionalist view, yes. It always considers input in light of what Peirce called an "interpretant" that is operative.

HKORETHML WGUNATIONS
BS: One of the things that's most characteristic of your writing seems to be your resistance to what you call large and coherent systems of thinking. How would you characterize your own theoretical predispositions in this light?

Keeping the Conversation Going 21

JB: Large and coherent systems don't bother me. It's the route we often take in psychologya kind of metaphoric route. I don't think you're nearly as plagued with this in anthropology. But in psychology, you can start off a * la Clark Hull by having a series of axioms from which are then derived a set of hypotheses that you test by cannily designed experiments. You make out as if somehow you had full control of a situation which is assumed to be context-free. I mean, you cobble together some kind of a t-maze situation for rats to demonstrate a particular principle of delayed reinforcement, but your results depend on using just that particular situation. That kind of thing I find just isn't right, because it makes it seem as if there were kind of a linear causational type of thing at work and I don't think human affairs operate that waymaybe not even rat affairs! It fails to take account of the interpretations of those who are involved in the events that are supposed to be covered by these causational "covering laws," if I can use Hempel's old term. 7 The interpretations of participants actually change the nature of the situation as such. So that is where contingencies enter in. I mean that contingencies matter terriblywhether or not you think there's a salt supply within an area affecting whether you are going to migrate, or whether you think there are jobs available. But it's not just contingencies. It's the factor ofwhat am I going to call it?"dialectical contrariety," that there are things that are pitted against each other, in interpretive tension. I think the thing that characterizes any viable social system is that it pits contrary things against each other. For example, you have to build an economic system that pits opportunity against stability. And when I say "against," I mean, if you're a genius what you do is form some kind of balance and the balance is never for all and for always. You're never going to get a set of economic regulatory laws that remain effective forever. Several of my friends are involved in formulating what is in effect a new branch of law which is called the law of intellectual property. God, if you ever saw a field which wildly generates the higher mishigas, that is it. I mean, what constitutes intellectual property? It is an issue that generates endless dialectical contrariety. BS: So one of the attractions of studying the law for you is that law confronts the necessity to formulate large and coherent systems out of the messiness of life, which is forever throwing up resistance to its intellectual tidiness. Isn't it this perpetual confrontation of the give-andtake of real life with this kind of legal systematicity that you really enjoy? JB: That is exactly right. But mind you the thing that's so interesting about the law is that you form a system of jurisprudence because you have to, and you count on precedent and interpretation to fit it to new circumstances.

22 ETHOS

BS: You need law in the world for much the same reason that you need theories in social science. You say you dislike coherent systems of thought, but it seems to me that such coherent systems bear similar relationsboth descriptively and prescriptivelyto human behavior as law does to life. JB: I do argue just that. That is very much my position. I had a very interesting exchange with David Olson and Janet Astington in the Journal of Human Development. David wants an explanatory psychology. And I say, "Bravo for you." The fact of the matter is you can have an explanatory psychology except for the fact that when you deal with the particulars, context gets to be so crucially important. There's no way of avoiding it. And not only context, but a socially constructed context for the participants. BS: What is the alternative you have in mind to an explanatory psychology? JB: Not an alternative, but a parallel one. It's an interpretive psychologynot quite like Cliff Geertz's view of anthropology. I think psychological intrepretivism may be more constrained by "natural" or biological constraints on functioning than is interpretation in anthropology. That probably comes from the freeing power inherent in the human cultural adaptation. A lot of psychological functioning is still pretty strictly constrained in a primitive, precultural waylike the limits on human attention and memory, like the powerful temporal and spatial constraints that limit human cognitive processing general. To be sure, it often happens that cultural inventions come along that make it possible to transcend those "hard wired" explanatory limits. But we'll talk about that later. Let me get back to interpretation now. The difference between an explanation and an interpretation is that when you have one interpretation, somebody who comes along with another interpretation does not necessarily preclude the first. There's no "gotchas" about interpretations, whereas an explanation is "it"a unique and final account. Now, there are some people who don't agree fully with what I'm saying. Josh Lederberg says that I'm being simplistic in saying that, because the fact of the matter is that explanations have never worked out that way in science. You start out with one explanation, come up with another one which may include the first. But you can also come along with an explanation that doesn't include it, which is a completely different way of seeing things, like a quantum as compared to a classical mechanical way of looking at nature. BS: Well, even if it's right, it turns out that every explanation has a context within which it's right. A kind of limited "gotcha." JB: Explanations all have their range of convenience.

Keeping the Conversation Going 23

BS: Which makes it hard to distinguish between explanation and interpretation. Once you introduce this notion of "range of convenience," I have trouble seeing the distinction JB: Well, a lot of people are having difficulty on this one, including me. Nelson Goodman sent me a little note when I sent him a copy of Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, and he wrote: "I'm reading it. I'm having a marvelous time with it. Thank you very much. But why don't you call it Possible Minds, Possible Worlds?" [laughterJ BS: Or Possible Worlds, Impossible Minds, if you mean the study of academic life, [laughter] JB: And now, when I finally pull together this goddamned collection of essays and chapterswhatever this thing is I've been working on about the self, I'm going to call the thing Possible Selves, partly in honor of Nelson Goodman, because I love him dearly. And also because the fact of the matter is that we know perfectly well that self is in part a product of discoursea function of the discourses in which you chose to enter. Which is a very disturbing thought to a lot of my psychological colleagues. Remember, I have to live with psychologists to some extent, although nowadays I don't live with them as much I used to. They're likely to say things like, "A self is a self is a self," to which the only response is, "Oh well, except when you say, 'My wife is not herself today.' " BS: You seem to resist not so much explanations as reductive accounts, closed and overly explanatory models. JB: Reductive and linear accounts. That's one way of saying it. BS: At the risk of being a bit simplistic, I think we can make a general distinction between analytic thinkerssplitters, categorizersand dialectical thinkers, who focus on what you call the irreducible contrarieties of life, pointing out false dichotomies and attempt to discover the heretofore silent partners of conventional discourses. It strikes me that your natural mode of argument tends towards the dialectical. And it's a kind of ornery dialectic in some ways. For instance, when psychology was overly concerned with the inside of the psyche in the sense of innatist approaches, you proposed that insufficient attention was being paid to the psyche's outside, the social matrix of behavior. Yet when psychology was overly concerned with the external causes of behaviorin the sense of behaviorism, the stimulus-response stuffyou responded by focusing on the inside, insisting on the importance of intentionality. So it seems you enjoy a kind of friendly antagonism to current psychological theory, not so much in the spirit of being oppositional, but in rendering articulate some left-out piece of a dialectical puzzle. In contrast to the reductive spirit of more positivistic psychologists, the dialectical spirit seems to be everywhere in your writing.

24 ETHOS

JB: Oh, it's everywhere, but never enough. You can even find it in my work on thinking. If you look at A Study of Thinking, you'll find a good enough formalist point of view for it to serve as the basis for a lot of Alan Kay's work with Apple computer. And at the same time, without my realizing it, I provided the basis for making narrative also be at the heart of conceptsthematic concepts, so-called. Actually I didn't fully know what the hell I was doing. When I read those chapters on thematic concepts I think to myself, "What a blithering coward you are, Bruner. Why the hell didn't you follow it through?" I guess I didn't follow it through because it didn't have to do with the discourse I was then involved in. I wanted to get rid of those funny ways of talking about stimuli as if they simply impinged without a categorization step along the way, a step that brings in the mental. I also recognized the fact that categorizing was an innate trait of human beings. Not any particular categorization, but the fact of categorization. We simply cannot operate without categorizing. It's our nature. But there are categories that fit formal criteria, practical-use criteria, and thematic narrative criteria, and I wish I had pursued that point back then. In any case, I want to go back to your major point. It is true, I think that my thinking is dialectal. And if insisting on the presence of these dialectical forces in the operation of the mind is ornery, then I can plead guilty to orneriness. BS: Your style of debate seems to be to enter into a joust with the hope of raising the level of discourse by expanding a current perspective to include left-out matters. Hence your love of what you call "going meta." It's a dialectical orneriness with the hope of a synthesis and reconciliation at the end. So when you challenge people or oppose something, it's less with the hope of winning and doing away with them than with the hope of codiscovering a way out of a dilemma by "going meta" on the problem and eventually transcending the dilemma itself. JB: I think that's so. And you're the second person this week to accuse me of that, by the way. The other one is a very gifted Italian philosopher who teaches at University College, Dublin, by the name of Liberato Santoro. He's just written a fantastic piece on the concept of desire in the history of philosophy. One desires but one also wants a stable situation in which desire doesn't disrupt things. A kind of dialectics of desire. He's accused me of loving the play of dialectics. BS: In your essay, "The Conditions of Creativity," in that wonderful collection you did, Essays for the Left Hand, you suggest the relationship of creativity to what you term productive paradox. You see paradox as essential to creativity, just as for Bateson it is essential to play. One of the deepest sources of creativity, you say, is the working out of conflict and coalition. So opposition and conflict of some sort is inherent in the way a creative mind works and is part of the creativity. So totally overcoming

Keeping the Conversation Going 25

conflict, contradiction, or opposition might well suggest for you the end of thinking, at least of creative thought. This suggests a fear that reductive and final explanations would lead to the kind of boredom we discussed earlier. JB: Not only to boredom. I think it would also lead to violence. I think the one sure way to produce violent opposition within a society is to say, "This is the way it goes forever more." BS: When I listen to this, it makes me realize the degree to which the ways in which we work intellectually have a lot to do with a kind of a social orientation that we have. JB: Oh, I'm sure that's true. BS: I am also drawn to dialectical thinking and like to bring people together while not avoiding dispute. Isn't bringing contrary ideas together in that way a form of social engagement? It may have something to do with my attraction to the study of ritual. Ritual thrives on ambivalence and the bringing together of contraries. And it especially involves an attempt to both acknowledge and overcome violence. JB: That's a very interesting point. What you're doing, essentially, is working out the discourse pattern in your life into some theory that would explain that very discourse pattern. BS: There are people, the oppositional thinkers, who when faced with complexity or opposition to their ideas become increasingly entrenched. When they see a powerful and credible mode of thought that's opposed to their own, they become more and more entrenched and dig their heels in rather than try to find a way out of the conundrum by engaging the opposition constructively. I suppose they enjoy the violent confrontation. JB: If you ask about my kind of axiomatic, almost religious beliefs, one of them is that growth is what human goodness and virtue, or whatever you want to call it, are about. And those who prevent the working out of growth, which is a dialectical process in my deep-structure way of thinking, and who become committed to trying to kill the opposition, those are the people whom I think of as evil. And I see it in such interesting ways. I don't want to go into detail on this, but I have known some evil people who, in some way, prevent growth in others from occurring in order to improve their own position entirely, without a view to the broader context of the world in which they live. And they block community, civility, or whatever you please.

PSYCHOLOGY, E1HN0-PSYCH0L0GY. AND TOP" PSYCHOLOGY

BS: Let's move onto a whole range of issues that deals with the relations between academic psychology, ethnopsychology, and "pop psy-

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chology." Paul Rozin recently said something at a conference that was very interesting to me. JB: Paul Rozin usually does say interesting stuff. BS: He noted that the categories of traditional academic psychologyperception, memory, motivation, and so forthare not the categories that most nonacademics use in their folk theories of the person. It occurred to me that the categories that most people use in their folk psychology are things like "How to get along with people, sexuality, feelings." Some of these categories have a family resemblance to academic discourse, but it's mostly a different way of cutting up the pie. JB: These folk categories are much less cut up to start with. BS: They're less cut up. Or they're cut up in different ways. If you walk into any large bookstore and you look under psychology, what you .find are those categories. Most of the books in pop psychology are really reflections of a folk psychology, only tangentially influenced by the categories of academic psychology, unless it's an academic or university bookstore, where you might reasonably ask for something on perception or cognition. What you see is something on how to parent, how to deal with your mother-in-law, or on how to get along. . . . JB: . . . how to get along with people you can't stand. BS: And a whole host of folk categories for personality types or dysfunctional syndromes like The Peter Pan Syndrome, or "people who love too much." JB: Well, folk psychology wants to situate behavior in concrete situations in real cultural settings. The mother-in-law is a real cultural setting. "People you can't stand" is another. BS: The dominant model in academic psychology is a person or agent-centered psychology, whereas social psychology has a sort of secondary status. Well this may be true in academic psychology, but . . . JB: . . . the reverse is true in popular psychology. Pop psychology is the way moderately literate people talk about the kind of stuff that happens to them day by day. They don't think of books as a study in perception or something like that, but about getting along with motherin-law. BS: This is what a Freudian might call a mom and pop psychology. JB: Yes, a mom and pop psychology. Or more accurately mom, pop, and the boss. BS: In a lovely essay called "Possible Castles," from your bookActual Minds, Possible Worlds, you wrote that "folk theories have as much claim to reality as any theories we might make in structural psychology by the use of our most stringent scientific methods." And in fact you seem to embrace the position that folk theories should be treated as an especially important source of data for scientific psychology. So what does it tell us

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about the status of psychology that the categories academic psychology uses are so dramatically different from those categories of pop psychology? JB: That's a marvelous question. I now see that it goes beyond what I wrote. As initially intended, I was operating I think on the assumption, developed much better in later writings of mine, that people don't see stimuli. They don't see foot candles of input or something of the sort. What they see basically is a world related to their enterprises and of course their enterprises are predominantly cultural enterprises. And the data that they give you, how they see the world, are data that you have to explain. When I say "explain folk psychology," I mean that if you want to have a psychology which is a nonfolk psychology, which makes an effort at being an explanatory psychology, you're not going to replace folk psychology. But what you're going to do is to explicate how folk psychology happens to take the form that it does. BS: So it's a kind of meta-folk psychology? JB: It's more than meta-folk psychology. When a field like psychology tries to go scientific, it builds into itself presumably self-corrective verificational procedures that protect it from being wrong in the setting where it is done. But the great problem that you have is attempting to explain folk psychologies. You come to assume you're going to give an explanation in universal terms to deal with a particular thing. But soon you've exhausted your general concepts, and it comes down to the importance of surface structure. It's just very difficult to explain the whole thing in such general terms. You can explain some of the mechanisms. If I tell you that there is no way in which you are going to be able to carry out a conversation that requires processing phrase units at a rate more than a phrase every 1.4 seconds, that is a statement about the limits on what is possible in folk psychology. You can't really explain it, but you can place some extremely important limits on it. I can know that if is of that order with respect to speech processing. And under these circumstances, I can tell you that whatever your form of discourse is going to be, it can't use deletion rules and that kind of thing, that require more capacity than that. Now that's worth knowing. BS: So what you're doing in general psychology is discovering the general constraints within which the human psyche operates. This is your notion of psychic unity that you write about. A set of general processing constraints JB: That's right. You're going to be stuck with this. BS: But within those constraints there's an enormous room for variation in the way in which psychology works itself into particular lives and settings.

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JB: Ah, yes. That's the reason why I think I find myself in pretty much the same position with the kind of free-for-all Ken Gergens who operates on the assumption that anything is possible. But everything, alas, is not possible, and all is not socially constructed out of totally malleable material. BS: Just to clarify this issue, your response then to people like Dan Sperber, who reviewed Actual Minds, Possible Worlds somewhat critically with the claim that you've gone too far in this constructivist thing, is to say, "Look I'm interested at this point in the particularity of things. That's where I am now, but there is a genuine role for what you might call scientific psychology." JB: That's right. BS: And scientific psychology for you is the elucidation of those processing constraints. But you don't know what those constraints are, unless you're familiar with the way in which people really operate and that really means you have to leave the laboratory to really know how people operate in the world. Those constraints that you're talking about can't be derived simply from your laboratory experiments. JB: That's right. Exactly. BS: Psychology is distinctive in the social sciences in having spawned not only an academic discipline, but something called "pop psychology" as well. It's telling that we have a pop psychology, but we really don't have pop anthropology. There are some works that you can call that, but there's no general concept that people have of a "pop anthropology." JB: They translate pop anthropology into a kind of pop psychology. Like Margaret Mead. BS: That sort of pop anthropology really becomes a theory of "the person," not a theory of culture. Theories of culture as such don't seem to make it into popular discourse in this way. JB: Well, people don't know culture, because that's exactly like the fish being the last to discover water. They've got to go into another culture or become alienated. Most people aren't even aware of the culture. BS: Right. Culture seems to be a relatively invisible medium for the most part, except when various ethnic groups come up against one another, or try and make claims based on their ethnicity. On the other hand, in our particular culture people seem to be extremely aware of themselves as psychological beings. Now let me contrast that with my experience in the South Pacific. In Samoa, you might say that people have a pop anthropology, but no pop psychology. They have a self-conscious conception of their culturethey love telling you about their culture. And the differences between cultures. But if you ask them for a theory of the person, which I tried to do when I looked into their ethnopsychology back in the early seventies, well that was a lot harder to get at. I had to probe

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a lotget them to "go meta," as we have been saying. Psychology, or person categories were not at the surface of people's consciousness. In fact, a Samoan who was bilingual once asked me what the English word personality meant. She was living in San Francisco at the time and her kids used the term a lot but she had no gloss for it in Samoan. Well I stood there and I thought about it and I thought about it. JB: The travails of an anthropologist! BS: Well, I explained to her as best I could what the words self and personality meant and she looked at me and said she now knew the Samoan word for self or personality. Tino was her closest approximation, which means "body." That was closest she could come to translating the notions of individuated selfhood. And I said no, it's more like 'uiga, which means a characteristic or "side" of a person. But it only means one side or aspect of a multidimension being. JB: That doesn't catch the meaning of the English concept at all. BS: It doesn't catch our notion of a kind of homunculus hiding beneath the social roles and performances that goes into the notions of self or personality. JB: Yes, we do all presuppose some sort of homunculus. BS: So pop psychology emerges in our society because in our culture people feel a kind of native expertise in theories of the self in addition to there being specialists like you who deal with it scientifically. You might say that we live in something like a "psychiety" while Samoans live in a "society." By psychiety I mean a community in which psychological relations are culturally foregrounded and social relations are considered secondary, as a kind of acting or role playinga secondary kind of existence. Whereas in other kinds of communities social relations are the culturally privileged way people conceptualize themselves. JB: Like the Japanese. BS: Yes. The same thing seems to be true for Polynesians and Indonesians, all of whom share "sociocentric" societies. It's not that they lack theories of the person. JB: But they tend to stress person as participant. BS: Right, the social self and the social dimensions of personhood are given a culturally explicit place of honor in their ethnopsychologies. In Bob Levy's helpful terms 8 we could say that the social self is hypercognized in such communities. The more private aspects of the self that are disconnected from social relations are there but left relatively buried and inarticulate. So pop psychology it seems to me comes to the fore only in a certain kind of society. The society in which one of the most popular undergraduate majors is inevitably going to be psychology. JB: I want to say two things about all this. The usual way in which one accounts for this is by saying that we are a very individualistic culture

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and therefore we develop this kind of thingpop psychology. That of course is eating your own tail, because the fact of the matter is we may be an individualistic culture because we have that kind of orientation individually. And it doesn't matter which way you run around the circle from culture to individual. It's still a circle. This is related to a long tradition of dialectic between two ways of looking at man and culture. One is Greek or Greco-Roman and views man as the measure of all things. The Hebraic tradition, on the other hand, argues: "What is man that thou art mindful of him?" The inscription around Emerson Hall at Harvard was originally "Man is the measure of all things," and Abbot Lawrence Lowell, a highly intelligent political philosopher and Harvard president, countermanded Josiah Royce's work order for the inscription and it finally went up "What is man that thou art mindful of him." Consider this particular tension, a tension between man as agent and man who has no control over things. You find this tension commonly in the best of fiction. This uncertainty in the West between these two ways of looking at human destiny causes trouble in all particular situations. Narrative typically has an actor, an act, a goal, a setting, an instrumentalityKenneth Burke's famous pentad. Something goes out of balance as in Ibsen's TheDollhouse. What is that gal doing married to that son-of-a-bitch? The trouble is the engine of the story. The imbalance makes trouble. Our efforts to understand are fueled by this deep uncertainty as to whether we're the pawn of forces beyond our control or whether we're the measure of all things. And it makes Western man very conflicted indeed. BS: And of course, that same tension led in psychology to the endless debate between behaviorists or situationists on the one hand and agencycentered personality theory on the other. JB: Exactly what I was going to say. Let me take two extreme characters in psychology who were both of them in their way brilliant and both of them kind of far out. Henry Murray proposed a theory of personality where all needs and sensitivities rested within the individual who was endowed with a tremendous amount of agentive control. 9 Now take Fred (B. F.) Skinner. Students in psychology courses got both these views presented. They would keep flip-flopping. They would take Fred Skinner's courses, including a lot of literary people and humanistic people, and come out saying, "Well, we heard the worst from himwe can cope with that," then take Murrayand say they could cope with that too. There's always a tension between these two renderings of the condition of manman all-powerful, in an image of God, and man a helpless pawn of fate and chance and external forcesbeing controlled rather than in control. To pick up Christopher Ricks's point, 10 God says, "I made man in my image and gave him everything except knowledge about Good and Evil." What the hell kind of a God is that? What kind of architect is he

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anyway? So we don't know whether we are responsible or the forces of nature and culture. BS: It's interesting how this conundrum underlies much political debate in this country, about placing responsibility for crime, poverty, and the like. And like most such dilemmas, I suppose that this one is ultimately irresolvable. Which is a very distinctive take on human nature. I often say to my students, "Look, when all is said and done I think you're going to learn that it is possible to characterize human nature in ways that are meaningful and not trivial. But those characteristics are likely to involve significant contradictions at the heart of what it means to be human." And what you've identified in this kind of double image of mankind is not simply a Western discourse. It's interesting to look at it from an evolutionary perspective. If you take a look at primate evolution, two things become evident. One is that you see increasing social interdependence, touching, grooming, social roles, social learning. Delayed maturation. There's a whole nexus of increased social dependence. JB: And not only dependency. I always think about the long human immaturity as an opportunity for training in independence. BS: Exactly. This is the paradox. Increasing interdependency evolved hand in hand with increasing independence for human primates and also for the great apes. What you see simultaneously is an increase in social dependency and the possibility of intellectual autonomy because of cognitive evolution. You have the beginning of a kind of cognitive complexity which includes the possibility of meta cognition. Wherever you have that possibility of meta cognition, you have the possibility of a kind of perception which disconnects itself from the social world. When you teach kids language, you teach them the ability to say "no." Language contains "not." "No. I won't do it." JB: There are two kinds of "no," mind you. One kind of "no" is "Stop, don't do that to me." The other kind of "no" is negating a proposition. BS: That's the one. JB: That's the onepropositional negation. That's the killer. BS: So what we end up as human beings with extraordinary dependency demands elaborated in psychology as theories of attachment or as theories of social learning and social dependency. The whole elaboration of behaviorism became in the hands of people like Walter Mischel or Albert Bandura11 a sort of social learning theory and situationism which is linked to symbolic interaction theory like Goffmanian notions, all of which focus on the interdependence of our sense of self and our identity in the social matrix. On the other hand, you have also this possibility of a notion of a kind of autonomy, you know, an autonomous self. And here's the question that comes out of this. Let's assume that there's a kind of inherent existential paradox for human beings. What then is the role of

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folk psychologies in mediating that paradox? It seems to me that this provides us for a way of thinking about the role of folk psychologies or ethnopsyehologies. JB: But let me respond to that in an idiosyncratic way first and then I'll come back to the generalities. I remember a young graduate student I was very fond of, a sociologist at Harvard whose name was Harold Garfinkel, now the great Harold Garfinkel. He's such an appealing and interesting guy. He came to me and asked me for a reading and research course. He said, "You re doing all this stuff on perception and I find that kind of interesting." Before long I realized that Harold's game was to see whether he could get to the way in which people organize their worlds without the intervention of this bloody official psychology or sociology. Like your asking questions about life in Samoa that nobody there would dream of asking. Or like Clyde Kluckhohn asking the Navajo "How come you keep dogs?" GarfinkJe wanted to find out how they framed questions for themselves, to keep things as their own phenomenological level. How do people structure their worlds in terms of their own theory rather than in terms of some scholar s theory about their genes or their schedules of reinforcement or some goddamned thing like that. They, ordinary people, keep agency alive. That's the agency side of the story. The moment you say, 'Oh don't give me that stuff, I mean, the fact of the matter is it's our endocrine system that makes us feel the way we do, agency is gone, or masked. But both views of the human condition mav be true. The

Figure 2. Bruner (right) and Shore "going meta."

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ethnopsychological and ethnomethodological viewpoints which say essentially "I'm going to take people at their word, and the world as people think it is," that's the kind of world in which man is the measure of all things. Whereas, the other kind of position, which many psychologists prefer, attempts to eliminate agency as far as possible. BS: And of course what happens is that in some societies we study you find an ethnopsychology that doesn't privilege man as the center of all things but sees human beings at the fate of extra-human agency. JB: That's puzzling, isn't it. Really puzzling. I think you're not the measure of all things. I wrote a piece for the M.I.T. centennial celebration. It came out in the Essays for the Left Hand. It is called "Fate and the Possible." I didn't realizeas we don't when we write these thingsthe true implication of what I was talking about. But I think it's this conflict that makes students love psychology. They love nothing better than Neil Miller's study of rats in the shuttle box. A light goes on in the "start box." A shock follows soon after, and the rat learns to get the hell out of there. Unfortunately, by the time the light in the "start box" is no longer followed by a shock, the rats have no way to find out and change their behavior, because they have taken off for the other box and don't recognize that there's no longer a shock in the box. This is the so-called Neil Miller effect. And the students just love it and they go home and they tell their roommates about it. Silly rats. But fact of the matter, it's not just rats that do it and they know it. And I think that is the appeal, the tension between our being a kind of a feather in the wind of fate on the one hand and this solid rock of agency on the other. Paul Ricoeur in his book on narrative comments on this. 12 He says that it is because of the nature of human fate that narratives of life require this conflict we feel. You care or have what the Germans call Sorge, recognizing that others always have such a plight. And that's surely one of the reasons why compassion characterizes Western religion"forgive them for they know not what they do"and also characterizes our psychology. And makes us psychocentric rather than culturecentric. BS: The use of poetry or theory or some other kind of discourse to explain things or explain people has something to do with the role of ethnopsychology or folk psychology in people's lives. They're all forms of theory, though dressed up very differently. Now theory has the job of presumably shedding a light on a corner of experience. And part of this work of theory is to temporarily disambiguate what is really an inherently ambiguous thing. JB: For a particular purpose and for a particular interpretative audience. BS: Right. It does its work for a particular purpose and a particular audience. The odd thing is that in order to illuminate something a theory

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has to cover up something else. This is part of what Bohr meant I suppose by his complementarity principle.13 A theory gives us a temporary holding slot where we can say "this much I understand." And I think that ethnopsychology or folk psychology or pop psychology all do the same thing. JB: That's interesting. Fascinating. BS: Both folk psychology and academic psychology are inevitably only a partial rendering of human experience. They allow for public communication of certain states of being and make possible shared explanations for behavior. And equally clear is that there are always dimensions of people's experience that are left out of such theories, almost by definition.

EXTRAORDMARY I M S AND ORDMARY COGNITION

BS: It struck me last night that there is a correspondence between your own character and life and the view you have of ordinary cognition. JB: That's a very interesting point. BS: In some way, you're a deep optimist. In other ways, you're a realist. You also have a deep feeling for the possibilities in people and in situations. And you're an unstoppable conversationalist. Literally, your life seems to go on as a series of fascinating conversations. Those conversations are your most habitual acts of meaning. JB: They can also be acts of coercion you know. BS: They're all sorts of things. But you're also thinking aloud as you talk which is one of the exciting things about you. JB: But the puzzling thing is that you create a world around you that's a response to yourself, and you think it's the universe. This is the dilemma of ordinary human beings, but especially of intellectuals. You get ordinary mortals posing as that kind of deified entity called a social scientist or a psychologist BS: Just how ordinary a mortal you are is a matter of some debate. But I wonder about the extent to which your own research methods on narrative are acts of discovery or acts of teaching. It seems to me that most of the time most people aren't as articulate about their lives and their selves as when you prod them into narrative as part of your research. JB: It may very well be. It's characteristic of our discipline. I interview the Fox family members. They have never gotten that kind of prodding before and they "go meta," on themselves and their lives. They go meta because I make them go meta. Just like you and I do to each other in the course of these conversations. Just like you go to Samoa and all of a sudden here's an interesting stranger who is interested in them. They regard themselves as living in this dense surface structure of ordinary life.

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And all of a sudden what before was a given now becomes a topic for discussion, for inquiry and for thought in which they're asked to make comments. And the world begins to reflect it. And that's one of the reasons that I liked that study that Cliff Geertz published of Ruth Benedict and Evans-Prichard, Le"vi-Strauss, and Malinowski.14 It was absolutely marvelous. On the other hand, the one thing I would want to say is that there are corrective measures that one can take doing research. Besides, I have lot of natural sympathy for the disempowered and the ordinary. I'm not sure but maybe I have some kind of a feeling for the human plight, because of my conversational proclivity. That's true of most people in the human sciences who are any good at it. You know, they can laugh at the world they're constructing, and are capable of empathizing and of seeing others' perspectives. BS: It's kind of an imagination for other lives. Given your strong associations between thinking and education, to what extent is a theory of mind for you inevitably a theory of education? And therefore your research methods are as much a form of education as they are discovery tools. To the extent that you provoke people into narrative, are you using discovery techniques or educational techniques? Aren't you in fact provoking people into modes of meta-discourse and meaning making that they are capable of, but which in fact exaggerates the degree to which this kind of meaning-constructing enterprise really goes on in everyday life? I'm struck by the fact that most people lead probably much more mundane lives than you do. JB: Well, I don't know whether they feel themselves to be any more mundane than I feel. We all live kind of at some tolerable level of mundanity. We put up with a lot of routines. BS: Well, I guess to the extent that meaning making requires a kind of narrative which triggers meta-cognition, your research with these people promotes a kind of self-realization of what you are looking for. So the basic question is to what extent do you really believe that those activities go on with these people when you're not around? They obviously go on to some extent, but I'm struck by the fact that when I did research in Samoa, some of my more interesting informants and friends were the ones who said that this was an unusual experience for them but that they really learned to enjoy it. JB: But wait. They probably said to you "I never said this to anybody else in my life." BS: That's right. They said, "This is fun. Can you come back? Nobody's ever asked me this." And so what I was doing in addition to collecting data was a kind of education in the guise of a discovery procedure. It certainly was tapping into meaning making possibilities that

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people ordinarily have, but that are not always or even commonly used in this way. JB: Well, there's no question about that. It's a bit like psychoanalysis. I mean, in psychoanalysis you're supposed to free-associate. But the fact of the matter is as Don Spence and other people point out, the association is guided by the fact that somebody is giving you a kind of implicit theory in the hope that along the way by following the instruction to let one thing come out after another the way they ordinarily do, you will learn something. And you will not only learn something that is therapeutic, but you will also learn how to conduct yourself and behave on the couch. BS: Well, it's the original form of guided participation. JB: Absolutely. Do you think it's an inevitable feature of the work we've chosen as our life work? I kind of suspect it is. BS: As anthropologists we try to be aware of the degree to which we don't want to intrude too much and that sort of thing. But most of us are discourse-centered in our lives, relative virtuosi in these kinds of conversations. It's what we do for a living. That's our tool kita kind of meta discourse in which we're talking about things and thinking and pushing them to a new level. And some of us I think get fairly impatient with people who carry on a discourse that is not meta. So we push it meta insofar as we can. JB: It's funny. I keep coming back to Neils Bohr. He was talking about Edgar Rubin, when he and Bohr were young scholars at the University of Copenhagen together. It was about the figure-ground phenomenonyou know, when you see the vase, you can't see the profiles that compose them. He told it to me in terms of a story. His son Aage went down to the village where the Bohrs stayed for the summer and there was some sort of a notions store there and he stole some kind of a small thing. Aage was so stricken by guilt about this that a week later he came to his father and confessed and asked what he should do. Bohr told him to take it back and he did. What struck the elder Bohr at that point was that he could see his son Aage either in the light of love or in the light of justice. But if he saw him in the light of justice, he missed something about him as a lovable human being. If he saw him in the light of love, he missed something about him in terms of how we regulate a society. So for Bohr it was the old duck-rabbit problem of perception. And he said that was the thing that really set him off on his search in physics for these kinds of phenomena too. And it's a bit that way in even a deeper sense in the human sciences, because of the fact that we take discourse into our own mode and away from the discourse that people may normally engage in. Not entirely. I mean, there's always the empathy factor that I was talking about. When Clyde Kluckhohn studied Navajo witchcraft, the best thing he ever did was to get them talking about the problem of looking after their sheep.

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Where they put them and what they keep the dog for and why is the dog useful. It was all in their terms of reference. And then he would make the leap and say, "Are there any other things that having a dog is good for?" And they said, "Yes, you know, you can't tell about the things that are around here. It's good to have somebody warning you." "Warning you?" Kluckhohn asked. "You know, you never can tell what's going on out here." By that time, they had known Clyde for a long time. But he was talking on a tabooed subject, because people don't talk about witches and certainly in daily life they don't talk about the fact that their dogs are good barkers when there are witches around. So if you are to get a full account of people's lives, you have to provoke kinds of conversations that may not be typical everydaythat is, if you're going to get certain kinds of information.

WAYS OF KNOWMG
BS: Let's explore what counts as knowledge in psychology and anthropology. I want to deal with a set of issues around the uses of phenomenological approaches to knowledge and experience and their relevance to modern psychology and anthropology. It strikes me that both psychology and anthropology started off in their earliest years with the study of the senses. In anthropology, the earliest cross-cultural studies done were actually in cross-cultural psychology during the famous Torres Strait expedition in the 1880s. JB: W. H. R. Rivers.15 BS: Yes, Rivers and Haddon. JB: My first teacher, McDougall, was one of them. BS: And there was Boas's early trip to Baffin Island to study perception and the effect of environmentwhat started out as physical environment but later came to be known as "culture"on the senses. That set of interests went underground in anthropology for many years and was taken up only by a few cross-cultural psychologists. JB: It also gets picked up again with Berlin and Kay's work,16 of course. BS: That's right. It reemerged with in a big way with Berlin and Kay's, but it's also come back in contemporary cultural anthropology in a completely different sense in the concern with "the embodiment of knowledge." Actually, I think it's part of a poststructuralist reaction to an overly abstracted and intellectualized view of human knowledge and in an attempt to approximate some kind of authenticity of knowledge. JB: That's right. It is a concern with authenticity, and with understanding what aspect of knowledge stays put. What's the steady input from the senses that you can say, "That part is the .world." Psychology's

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engagement with the senses begins with Weber and Fechner. 17 Theirs was the model that I was exposed to very early on by one of my teachers, E.G. Boring. Basically it represented the nature of the human psyche as a systematic transducer and I want to put the emphasis on both termssystematic and transducer. What does it take, for example, to notice that one sound is louder than another? A "just noticeable difference" between them turns out to be a constant fraction of the sound from which you make the comparison. So that, for example, if you have a sound that can be characterized in its physical measurement as magnitude 10 and the ruling fraction is one-tenth, an increment of one is what it takes to get a just noticeable difference. Whereas if you if have a sound of magnitude one hundred, it takes ten to give you the one-tenth. You always have to increase the sound by a ratio of one-tenth to get a just noticeable difference (JND), and the JND gets to be the systematic psychological metric. Now, out of this developed the field called psycho-physics. The "psycho" part was essentially how the physical world was experienced, and "physics" was the role of systematicity or the constant fraction making a JND. This was tremendously thrilling in the 1860s and 1870s. It produced a special psycho-physical dualism. What they wanted was a dualism, not interaction. And if there was to be any interaction, it was to be the physical over the psychic. The physical caused the psychic. That became the initial model. But there was a different pattern that came along at the same time from a different tradition, which was a genuinely phenomenological tradition rather than coming from Fechner and Weber. I say it was mainly Weber, because Fechner himself was very conflicted by this. BS: Which Weber are you referring to here? JB: This is E. H. Weber. Fechner's name was, Gustave Theodor Fechner. Fechner himself finally rejected this view by saying that this was the "day view" of the human mindwhat he called the Tagesansicht. But the "night view" (Nachtansicht) of the mind took into account that mind also created things that went beyond sense perception yet had equal psychic reality. But there is another tradition that grew very much out of an analysis of the senses. Color has always fascinated man. The great Goethe wrote a book that was called the Zur Farbenlehrer, about color. In it, he made the claim that there were phenomenologically primary colors based entirely on their phenomenological simplicity. And those colors were, of course, yellow, blue, red, and green. And the basic argument is not that there's anything physically important about them but that those are the phenomenological primaries. He inadvertently introduced the notion that in experience itself you could find the "natural joints." It's a powerful argument that the world presents itself in an experientially natural way. You see it in a way that is natural. Now, if it's

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natural, then presumably it's natural transculturally. It's in the nature of human nature. BS: So this was a kind of a precursor to what became ecological psychology. JB: Very much so. But it's based on an appeal to what is natural and universal. This phenomenology somehow "represents" nature. BS: It suggests a sensorium that adapts itself to the natural configuration of things. JB: Somehow those primaries were in experience because they were in the world or something like that. Note that this phenomenological approach, proposing the natural joints of experience, precedes Darwin. Goethe's Farbenlehrer had appeared well before then. I think it was about 1810. But science is more than phenomenology; it's analytic, like Mendeleev's table. If there were natural primitives in experience and you mixed them, you should get some kind of a systematicity in results. And the field of color was perfect for this. What makes primary colors interesting (like blue-yellow and green-red) is when you mix lights of these colors, you get a chromatic white light. So people got into the arguments. Are some colors "purer" than otherspurer phenomenologically, but also purer in the sense of simpler. Goethe hated Newton's antiphenomenological way of looking at spectral color, and wrote Zur Farbenlehrer to get all that straightened up. For him, the systematic nature of color inhered not only in such miracles as the so-called "color circle" of the spectrum, but in the "natural joints" of experience that the primaries revealed. Needless to say, the phenomenological view got crushed by the physicalist one which got lots of additional evidence and backing from the mighty Helmholtz. Phenomenology doesn't fare well in a positivist environment. BS: This physicalist approach to the senses tends to be based upon a kind of a theory of primary categorization. JB: They'd never use the word category. They didn't dare. BS: They didn't dare, because it was too mentalistic. JB: That's right. BS: The framework that they were using for the senses was not a continuum, but a set of biologically based categorical perceptual primitives. I suppose that some of the senses, sight maybe, are more open to the kind of that kind of description. But smell and taste seem to be unlikely candidates for this natural joint approach to perception simply on the grounds that they are not so easily categorized or summed up by a set of discreet natural oppositions. There's something wrong with that. JB: Well, there's certainly something wrong with that. And so the new phenomenology comes along. Mind you, this is my way of interpreting the thing. One of the things that changed our view was W. H. R. Rivers's The Senses of the Todas.18 Rivers comes along and has something to say about

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the business of noticeability.19 I can't remember whether it was Rivers or if it was McDougall commenting on the fact that when they were coming in their outrigger boats toward the shore, one of the local fellows in the boat says, "there's the island ahead." The natives could see it coming up. But the researchers look and they'd see nothing. The natives then say, a moment later, "Oh, that palm looks so marvelous that's sticking up like that." But the others don't see it for a long while. So the notion of seeing involves noticing. But input is alike for different people. Now let's go back to color naming. . . . When years later Berlin and Kay introduced the notion that the first distinction in all color nomenclatures is black/white and then red, and so on, this was a wake-up call. It gave a clear signal to psychologists who wanted to read that kind of stuff. But believe me, not many people in psycho-physics do. "Who's Kay?" they'd ask. They all know that it's reducible to molecules, to rods and cones firing to produce color. What does color naming and categories have to do with it? But if cones, rods, and molecules produce color, how come these primitive schnooks have only words for black, white, and red? What's captivating about Berlin and Kay is the notion of attention or "cultural attention" that could almost be called a cognitive process. Sensing could not just be a receiving function. It had to be an outward-seeking kind of thing. . . . So now we go back to this interesting period where we're trying to look at the relationship between attention and perception, I took the view that there was no such thing as perception. There was no raw sensing. That sensing always required the operation of nous. If I can translate it into the Aristotelian and medieval terms that I learned much later, there was always a sensus communis operating right at the entry porta rejection of the Lockean distinction of primary and secondary qualities. There were no primary qualities. I argued that primary qualities were an abstraction imposed upon experience by the psychologists in the same way, for example, as atomic weights were imposed upon physical nature in Mendeleev's table, and I caught hell for it. Boy did I catch hell for it! I learned many years later that my antipositivism even came up in my Harvard tenure review years later. BS: These questions about the senses have reentered anthropology as part of the long-standing reaction to structuralism which was understood as a kind of reduction of experience to a set of very "deep structure" models, often framed in terms borrowed from linguistics. Some remain interested in the classical issues of the relations between perception and cultural classification. But other anthropologists have become interested in the senses in a different sort of waymore phenomenological than deeply cognitive. What they're saying is, "Look, what we talked about as 'cultural knowledge' or 'cultural models' comes to us packaged in diverse sensory modalities." And one of the things we want to understand is the

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old question, which we still haven't answered very well, of how people internalize this cultural business. We now realize that we can't assume that most people come to know their culture in the way that anthropologist's write about itthrough words, abstract propositions, or diagramsthe way that structuralists liked to represent culture. Most people come to know their cultural environments through a set of culturally orchestrated practices, practices which often exploit and orchestrate different senses in different ways. We know many things mainly visually, others by smell, or touch, and still others primarily through sound, like Steve Feld and Buck Schieffelin have argued for the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea.20 Now Jim Clifford, Michael Fisher, George Marcus and others have pointed to the fact that what anthropologist's do is the "write culture" which means to me translating these experiences into words, actually into propositions. So people who read these ethnographies encounter our informants and their lived experiences as written objects. Yet the most thoughtful among us know perfectly well that this kind of propositional language is almost always a reformulationa transduction if you willof the kind of knowing we're attempting to describe. So the question becomes how do we come up with a set of concepts, a vocabulary, and a narrative mode for better rendering so-called "experience near" ethnography, ethnography that doesn't bracket the sensory diversity of our knowing. JB: I learned about this a long time ago reading a monograph by one Bogoras on the Ghukchee. 21 That really knocked my socks off. It was one of those Museum of Natural History monographs, full of observations on how a strange object brought from another village would smell disgusting to local villagers. And there was that fascinating business of how a Chuckchee learned to use the micro-structure of tundra space to navigate his way across the "featureless" landscape. BS: It's just that kind of thing. Somehow novelists manage to convey these sorts of sensory polyphonies on knowing better than we anthropologists have managed to do. Years ago I realized that in all the years I was in graduate school, I never once saw a film or a slide, or listened to a sound recording about anything we were studying. It was as if we had literally risen above such data, to give a somewhat negative cast to your idea of "going meta." Culture was presented to us as a series of linguistically grounded propositions, and if there were visuals, they had to be in the form of tables or complex and highly abstract diagrams. I mean I remember when I started writing academic papers as a grad student, I used to fret about how I was going to translate my imagistic memories of Samoa into the kind of flow charts and complex diagrams that furnished the best scholarly papers of the time. JB: That's right.

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BS: One of the reasons that I need to keep going back to Samoa is that when I arrive in that place, I am overwhelmed by a series of sensory experiences, sensory gestalts, you can call them, that have to do with sight, touch, body posture, and especially with smell, that remind me deeply of Samoa in a way that I can't get to in my written work. JB: Samoa was your mitzvah. Absolutely. You saw that these things were looked at as kind of structural gestalten. BS: Well, only in retrospect. And only when I go back do I realize, "My God. I've missed all of this." "Missed it" in both senses of nostalgia and of a kind of academic misrepresentation. And I could think of no way to capture this in the ethnography. I remember asking Marshall Sahlins whether he thought it was possible that the feel of my rather pained body posture as I sit for hours in a Samoan house with my legs folded in and that hard post against my back, the particular smell and touch of the air acrid with smoke and heavy with flies, and coconut oil mixed with the fragrance of certain flowersall those sensory gestaltswere as central to "culture" as the kinship structures, the terminologies, the value patterns, and all the rest of it. I think it struck him as an interesting question, but an odd question. JB: He knew its truth. BS: Sure he knew it was true. But back then it was such a different, such an unfashionable way to think about culture. It seemed kind of low level, intellectually lame compared with kind of stuff we were used to in our writings. And there was no vocabulary within our field for talking about this experience-near stuff. So we get it traveling back and forth to our field sites for renewal and recall. And we tell anecdotes, and sometimes write them down in our "light" writings of the "letters from the field" genre. The memoir genre where we're allowed to describe such intimate memories. JB: Well, it almost started the genre of uninterpretability. BS: It certainly did. So this is all leading to a set of issues. How do we "save the phenomenon," as I believe Aristotle once put it. How do we act on the insight that knowledge is always mediated by the senses in which it's packaged, so that what we know is really inextricably bound up with how we know it. And here going meta becomes a problem, since it means transducing these elementary experiences into a more intellectually manipulable form. JB: The first thing I would do is to raise a red flag when you say, "by the senses," as if somehow the senses were operating as mirrors, which of course, they're not. BS: You're talking about the senses more as active constructors of experience than as passive recording devices.

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JB: The senses provide an account to fit the context. That's what all of this stuff on the constancies is aboutwhat the brightness of a white surface is in bright light and in shadow, or how tall a twenty-foot pole looks at twenty yards and at a hundred yards. You know, a white sheet in shadow looks brighter than a black sheet in bright light even though the latter is casting more light into your eye and on to your retina. So when Professor Boring discovered that I was a monocular, that I can look at the world only through one eye at a time, he said, "Oh, your depth perception should be very interesting." So he studied my depth perception and found that there was absolutely no difference whatsoever between my depth perception and anybody else's depth perceptionuntil such a time as you actually put me into a chamber where the only depth cue available was the disparate images on the two retinae. But then he said, "I see. You're a genius in the use of secondary cues?" And I said, "Well, if I'm a genius in the use of secondary cues why does anybody need primary cues?" For the fact of the matter is that cues to depth are massively redundant. There are masses of cues that you can use and you use what you can. Who said some of them are "primary?" Somebody whose theory required that they be so. BS: Now that you've raised the red flag of the senses as active agents in perception and also as highly context-dependent, let's put the flag at half mast for a moment. JB: Okay, we'll put it at half mast and I'll tell you what leads me to agree to put it at half mast. It's what your friend Bob Levy calls "hypocognition." I became very interested in that stuff as I'd been interested in Polanyi's work on "implicit knowledge," what was to come out in even more challenging form in John Searle's notion of "background knowledge." BS: Within some circles in phenomenology, this is called "pre-objective knowledge." JB: I'm not sure I follow why it's any more "pre-objective" than any other kind of knowledge. BS: I think it has to do with apprehension of something as objectively existinga matter of the degree of conscious awareness. JB: I'm troubled that the idea of the preobjective might suggest an illusory objectivitythat some percepts seem ontologically realer or more objective than others. That drives me batty in all versions of two-step theories of the sensesone part pure sense, the other part some sort of overlay from the Herbartian apperceptive mass. I don't think we ever operate perceptually without taking into accountimplicitly or explicitlyour background knowledge about the world. When you develop a perceptual hypothesis about "What's that?" that hypothesis comes out of an enormous amount of not very explicit knowledge of how

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things are in the world. Like when you're constructing speech acts, you are guided by a lot of implicit knowledge, often difficult to verbalize, about what kinds of felicity conditions govern or constrain what you must say, how you have to say it, and under what circumstances. So when one of our wonderful benefactors at Ethos, Tom Gsordas, talks about the senses, I'm going to say, "Sure, so long as you deal with the senses as some kind of abstraction of what input might have been like from the real world when it first hit the so-called sensorium." But of course the sensorium itself is already a "mind-orium." It's not really just a sensorium as such. I mean there is no such thing as the pure senses. BS: That's a wonderful way of putting itI love the notion of a "mind-orium." But unlike our own community where our literate traditions privilege linguistic and especially written knowledge as the primary means for enforcing meta-cognition, many traditional societies stress kinds of knowledge grounded in sensory transmission, particularly kinesthetic knowledge. So the question becomes whether there is a tight relationship between the way in which knowledge is encoded sensorily and the way in which that knowledge is experienced and known. And what implications does that have for a theory of self? JB: Oh wow. BS: Well, it is a big question. And I'm making my way here to the question of what happens when you have a theory of self, as you do, which is grounded in narrative and so becomes intrinsically language-based. It seems to me that this conception of self is based upon a theory of self as meta-cognitive, rather than "preobjective." JB: Well, it's interesting. But it can't be based on that alone. I mean, I agree with your general point. But I'm not sure how to explain it. Let me try. There is some kind of thing which has to do with the immediacy as compared to the mediacy of experience. And it's a curious kind of thing. It isn't necessarily there on the surface of experience. You put it very nicely. There you are in this situation in Samoa sitting there with your back on a post and your legs crossed and the air is acrid with smoke and the rest of it. There's something about that which is phenomenologically immediate. Nobody writing it down is going to quite capture this. What poets try to do in their language is somehow to find their way around the ordinariness, the banality of this experience, to give you a shock of recognition. BS: In Susanne Langer's terms, 22 what they try to do is use a "discursive" language to convey what she terms "a presentational" form of reality. JB: Exactly. BS: To say something which is somehow not directly conveyable through language.

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JB: I've been taking this little trip back through Hume's Treatise on Human Understanding. I was particularly interested in the way he dismisses "self and then brings it back as a constructed notion. It's perfectly plain that while Hume also played around with the idea of primary versus secondary sensations, he too was treating the primary senses as an abstraction. Hume is the kind of brilliant mind that is aware of a lot of things. Hume is not easy, but there you are. I know why he awakened Kant from his "dogmatic slumbers." Hume was a crypto-constructivist. BS: While acknowledging that the sensorium is not simply a passive recording device or receiver I still think that there is a significant difference between knowledge which is highly linguistically mediated and knowledge which is allowed to remain at a lower or different level of sensory input. JB: I know what you're saying. BS: This issue is very important to anthropology. I am reminded of Maya Derenthe wonderful filmmaker who wrote a marvelous little book on Haitian Vodoun called The Divine Horseman.23 JB: Alas, I never read it. BS: She was friends with Bateson and that whole crowd. In this book she wrote a little chapter called, "Dance as a Meditation of the Body" or something like that. Carol would really like this a lot. JB: Carol would love it, as only an ex-dancer can. BS: She says that religious knowledge which is incorporated in this embodied way in dance movement is fundamentally different from the kind of knowledge that becomes dogma, the knowledge that's translated into linguistic form. Otherwise, given the evolution of language, one would think that all human experiences would be immediately convertible into this much more supple form of knowing called language. JB: Supple but fixed. It's interesting. There is a marvelous book that you may have read, but maybe not, a book by Michael Riffaterre called Fictional Truth about how you recapture the immediacy of experience in fiction.24 BS: That's it. A literal recollection of things past. And that has a bearing not only on what we study and how we study it, but how we write ethnography. What is it that we're conveying about people's lives when we transmute their experiences into alien forms, or limited linguistic terms. JB: That's right. Now, I want to go back to your question about what do I say about the phenomenological character of self. Some say that there is some kind of ultimate truth that lies in that immediacy of experience. How can one doubt it?

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BS: That is really true. It is the anxiety associated with the tension between the attack on "essentialism" and the call for "experience-near" and deeply embodied ethnography. It provides for an acceptable replacement for essentialism in the form of experiential authenticity. JB: That's right. There is something about immediacy that is an implicit essentialism, when you described to me some guy in his sixties who comes to someone's house for dinner, a kind of a macho character, and, though he doesn't know his host's wife well, greets her by kissing her right on the lips, well, there is something about the immediacy of that act that gets a message across in a uniquely powerful way that adjectives don't capture. It says more than any personality-theory type description of that person you can come up with. Somehow it carries almost a sense of necessity about what that person is. Perhaps an implicit narrative necessity. It carries about it a sort of a narrative necessity. Like in the wonderful production of Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice at the Met last year. Not everybody liked it, particularly people in the gay community. You would have loved it. It was full of the senses. There's a scene in which the chief protagonist is at the barber. It's done with bright spot lights. The barber brushes talcum powder, to clean off Gustave von Aschenbach's neck, after he's trimmed his hair. It produces a pinkish cloud. There's something wonderfully ambiguous and immediate about it: vanity, a closed-in feeling, a dangerous cloud. It captures something crucial that can't be said, that evades banal categorization. That's art! BS: Like Baudelaire's symbolistic notion of sensory correspondences in the world, somehow put to words. JB: That's also the mystery of our field. BS: And anthropologists have been concerned since the earliest years of anthropology with problems of representation in a way that often had the senses as a hidden agenda. For instance Mead and Bateson developed something called visual anthropology which they carried out in that wonderful book Balinese Character.25 Long before it was fashionable, they believed that there was something to be conveyed by a series of photographs that would tell you something not easily conveyed in other terms. JB: And they did convey something. I still remember the dance instructor moving the novice's hand to a certain point. BS: It's interesting how that image has stayed with you. I remember the exact image too. JB: Take the support away and the child's hand still stays there. BS: And we don't have a language for coping with that. I guess psychologists now call it scaffolding, in the Vygotskian sense. JB: That's right. And somehow when we find the language for coping with it, it's going to lose some of its beauty.

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BS: That's because there's a transduction and a translation. But funny that this is the same transduction that gives you the excitement when you "go meta." So we're faced with a potent kind of tradeoff. JB: That's right. BS: Well this is maybe the hidden romantic essentialism of the notion of embodiment that I'm trying to get at. JB: There's something else that intrigues me about it. Those issues always have a kind of edge of terror around them. There is some way in which the purely visual or auditory or haptic seems a little uncanny until we can translate it into wordsthose marks on the Turin shroud are the face of Jesus, that sound is the cat jumping from the shelf, that touch on my shoulder is from a low-hanging branch. BS: You mean terror for us scholars? I think that this business of embodiment that Lakoff and Johnson have made so popular these days or the concern with the senses in anthropology, what Paul Stoller has called "the taste of ethnographic things," have to do with what I have called "the romance of the primitive." It's a modern, more acceptable version of "primitivism." JB: What an interesting idea. BS: Anthropology begins with a certain kind of disenchantment, often with people who are really disengaged from their own societies. I suppose you don't become a social scientist without a certain kind of disengagement which allows you to begin noticing things. Often this distancing activity is exciting, and sometimes it's terrifying. Those of us who grow up in that kind of disenchanted world not only get a kind of a pleasure from the meta-cognition that we get through talk and through analysis, but a kind of terror that comes from losing our footing in a world we refuse to take for granted.

THE POWER OF CULTURE

BS: Your work has been for many of us a kind of beacon cast from your field into ours. It is not only because of its intrinsic richness and interest, but because you have been almost from the beginning one of the very few psychologists to come out of the experimental tradition who has raised up the banner of culture. So let me ask you some tough questions about this business of culture. JB: There are plenty of them. BS: I'm not going to go on fishing for your assent here that culture matters in accounting for human behavior, because we all know that. But in what sense exactly can we say that "culture" really exists? And if it does, then how do we conceptualize it? Because oddly enough, though

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the concept is ours by right, anthropologists are not sure anymore about this thing called "culture." JB: Yes, I've noticed. BS: Without a good set of conceptual tools, the culture concept is in danger of becoming completely inarticulate and invisible to the very people whose job was for decades to sell the power of culture to the public. JB: No question about it. In fact, it's the question, in a way. Well I've got a funny way of putting it. It had to do with my reading last year this madly gifted but neglected Ignace Myerson. My notion of "culture" is going to soundat least on the surfacetoo much like material culture, but it goes like this. I think the main effort that goes into maintaining a culture is not the internalizing of something that's out there, but the extemalization of human worksthe externalization of works into a form that has some perdurance in a broader, longer-lasting culture. BS: This is what I call, the "first birth" of culturea projection into external forms of an inner compulsion, or idea, or picture or desire.26 JB: Exactly. This externalization has to do with the production of works, or, as Myerson would say, an oeuvre. BS: So you would say that one of the primary characteristics of the cultural is it's inside-out character, an inner form made public. JB: External and shared. But this sharing requires some medium that will carry the sharing. BS: As you know this very issue of just how shared and consensual cultural "facts" are has come to be considered a serious problem for modern anthropology. JB: Well, let me give you some examples, and I'll pick a vivid one. Take something like a gallows or a guillotine. Monsieur Guillotine, who was the inventor of the guillotine, regarded himself as extremely humane because his was a nice, quick way to execute someone which wasn't as painful as hanging or beating people to death. Now I found myself sitting in a restaurant with a group of French friendsintellectualsand one of them, Francoise, said to me, "Jerry do you realize that you're sitting under a painting of Monsieur Guillotine?" BS: A tribute to the most Cartesian (and literal) approach to capital punishment, detaching the head from the body. JB: [Laughter] I mean, what could be worse or what could be better, this great French solution to capital punishmentDescartes and dualism. The French create an oeuvre that detaches the head from the bodyneatly. So you externalize dualism in terms of objects. Objects themselves are important. They include such art objects as guillotines. These objects themselves don't make sense unless they fit into some kind of explicative code. In its context it becomes a humane way of committing a grossly inhumane act, and also a way of recognizing the mind-body

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duality. So even a brutal object like the guillotine gets encompassed in a code. Now, the code very frequently is exemplary of some deeper symbolic principles. But one danger for anthropology is that it dwells too exclusively in those deeper principles, finds them, and assumes that those deeper principles were actually operating inside people's heads within a culture rather than being embodied in the form of "words." It was the guillotine and the penal code, rather than what was in people's heads, that sustained the system of French capital punishment. But anthropologists sometimes talk about what they study in a form more suitable for conversation back at the Common Room at Cambridge. BS: Is there any way out of that? JB: Well, maybe one way is to tell narratives involving those externalized oeuvres, to give some sense of how they fit into people's lives and thoughts. Like that wonderful anecdote about Evans-Prichard. He'd been interviewing Nuer informants about their religious beliefs and, at the end, wondered whether they'd like to ask him any questions about his. They then asked him about his wrist-watch, the deity he seemed to consult before he undertook many of his daily activities! That's a beautiful example of the Nuer as anthropologists. They knew better than E-P what time meant in Western culture. BS: Narratives like this one have a way of intruding upon overly systematic accounts by triggering memories and associations which spill over the neat borders of those accounts. JB: That's right. BS: And so narrative breathes life into our accounts. JB: Yes, it gives life, but it also gives lie. BS: That's a fascinating view of narrative, that our anecdotes give the lie to the neatness of our accounts and so bring them to life. JB: That's right. That's one of the reasons that if you're going to be something more than the fish-and-cut-bait kind of ethnographer writing that dull stuff, which nobody ever reads anyway except anthropologists, it's necessary for the anthropologist to be a writer. Because the overall theory isn't quite good enough to encompass its particularities. Now I want to go back to culture as externalizations. Take for instance the majesty and presumed unchangingness of the law and how it is embodied and externalized for all to see and grasp. Consider the courthouse. In Cork City, the nearest city and county seat of where I spend my summers, there is a courthouse. I wish I were walking down Washington Street now so I could show it to you. It is built of the most solid granite. It is "granitic" and will stand forever. It speaks to the doctrine of stare desisis, that the law is always going to be the same, that it is not arbitrary, that it is solid as a rock. That's the way you build law. Those are the external things. Then, of course, there's the abstract code.

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BS: This is the essentialist moment of culture, deliberate reification in the interest of creating enduring institutions. Human beings tend not only to construct external "things" but also to find ways to fix their actions into institutions through repetition. So what begins as a single act, or even a slip can somehow become part of an artifactual landscape of "things," things which at one time were unique and made-up but now appear to be preexisting realities. Berger and Luckmann called this process "objectification." 27 JB: Yes, it's cultural facts as objects. They are objects. They are there, really out there. That's the externalization of culture in oeuvres. But it isn't the full story for me, because I take very seriously Kroeber's old idea of the superorganic. And now I get into an area where you're going to accuse me of being a bit of a mystic. I want to introduce the notion of memory. You know the French writer named Halbwachs wrote a book called Les Cadres Sociaux de la Memoire.28 A lot of memory isn't carried in your head. This is going to sound a little bit like Merlin Donald.29 I talked to him about this. A lot of memory is carried in external forms. There is some way in which we make these things external and the glory is I don't have to remember it. The gyroscope is a great case in point. A gyroscope can tell me where I'm headed on the basis of what I've done in the past and acts as a form of memory which says you are now headed north northwest. What was so great about clock and longitude for example is that they created a way of deciding where things are on the earth by creating lines, including a reference line that runs through Greenwich. Things on this side of it have a certain kind of a number, and those on the other side have a different kind of number. Suddenly every place is related to every other place by position on those lines. BS: Somehow these things were once externalized by particular people, but they became subject to common access and common agreement. So we now have agreement about longitude and latitude and that we will use Greenwich as our starting point for time and space. It's interesting that you're using the language of consensus here which sounds kind of old hat to anthropologists, many of whom have rejected this image of culture for one stressing power and multiple voices. Many anthropologists take your notion of a consensus about Greenwich and longitude and subject it to a kind of political critique which asks, "Who was it that's decided that Greenwich, England was the standard starting point for time reckoning, and what kinds of political and economic relations were at stake?" So in this reading of the culture concept, culture becomes saturated with power. Which is clearly the case. JB: Yes, it's right. But seen as nothing but power, it's clearly ridiculous.

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BS: Of course. But it is interesting how quickly a constructivist notion of culture can lead to a notion of the illegitimacy of culture, since it's always somebody's culture or somebody's version of culture. JB: It's interesting, because in some way that charge of illegitimacy will always keep culture alive and dynamic. You know that laws are made by the powerful, but the powerful can't just fob off laws in their favor. So you get into John Rawls's position that the central principle of justice is that it be blindfolded. If I can pick up on Alexander Bickel's point, when I hear people complaining they have been disenfranchised by the existence of a system of longitude based on clock time and so on, I say "Well, you know, I'm interested to learn that you think that, but what I want to tell you is that when I'm at sea I really put some time into checking to see whether my chronometer is right. And you know, I want the damn thing to be right. And I want to know what longitude it is." Law isn't like that. But as Lon Fuller points out, it has to have some elements of that in it. BS: You know, that's a really interesting example you use because that example points up one of the fundamental reasons why such institutionalization is inevitable and that's mutual coordination. JB: Yeah. How could you not have such coordination and have any kind of culture which depends upon the division of labor? BS: Yes indeed. Let's say you have this world of externalized objects. They're not objects, but they're treated as objects. JB: I prefer the French word oeuvre. BS: Or call them institutions or cultural texts or shared models or whatever. Certainly a dimension of culture is a world viewed as kind of a collection. It's like a museum full of objets. But in another way this view of culture doesn't take into account what Boas and Benedict and others emphasized, which is it's not the objects, but the "frame of mind" or the enframing of those objects in a cognitive pattern or a gestalt that makes them culturally meaningful. JB: Which has to be shared in some way. And that's where language comes into play, providing a system not only for referring to objects, but forframing them in the sense you mean. You know, the sort of thing that Saussure quite rightly made so much of.

U6ACY
BS: How would you like to be remembered in psychology? JB: I would want to be remembered as a person who moved psychology to a much more proactive stance with respect to the nature of human functioning. Away from a purely reactive passive stance. That really is absolutely everything. If I could only be remembered as the person who helped make psychology more proactive! For example, I wish there were

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more attention to my description of strategies in thinking, as well as to my formal descriptions of context in^4 Study of Thinking. Or, as with my hypothesis theory of perception, that you can't see without looking, and you can't hear without listening. BS: That's where you started out. JB: That's where I started. And I'm still at it with my constructivist stance. BS: So it's really transforming the objects of psychological study into agents. JB: It introduces the notion of agency. And I'm delighted to see agency coming back into social science. That certainly is number one. Don't make the organism a passive recipient of anythingnot even his culture. He's got to enter into interaction to learn a culture. You can't learn a culture as a spectator. BS: Just think of how kids learn computer programs and video games. All those manuals sit on the shelf collecting dust. JB: I mean, if you want to learn how to navigate go for a walk, or take the helm of a boat. You need agency to start off with. And agency means intention. So the second thing I want to be remembered for is giving a push to the notion that a stimulus is not a stimulus is not a stimulus. That a stimulus is something which in effect sets up processes of intentionality, in a philosopher's sense. Essentially it has to be mediated. BS: It seems to me that you won those battles. JB: I think maybe those battles are won. I don't know whether I won them or others did, but no matter. And I think I'm also winning the battle that in addition to explanatory models in psychology, you also need interpretive models. That the nature of interpretive thinking is a proper subject for psychology. BS: What's your idea of an interpretative model in psychology? JB: Narrative is surely one example. There are others, I'm surelike normative judgments. To interpret is not "I gotcha" thinking, where there's a unique solution, and that's it. In narrative, for example, there are always various versions of a story. I want to give myself a little credit for picking up on the narrative form of thinking from friends like Bill Labov and Frank Kermode. I listen to them. Nobody understands something well until they can tell some sort of story about it. When you're treating people as agents, then you need narrative. I'd like to think I helped get us started. My third legacy is the recognition of culture as a psychological reality. The notion of a "naked ape" is naked nonsense. We're not naked apes with something laid on. People are people by virtue of the fact that their main adaptation is cultural. We are culture-users and culture-makers. So I'd like to be remembered as somebody who taught that culture is not just some sort of thing that's out there. Culture is, as

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you say, "in the mind," and also in what you're doing. When people are doing something like going to the store, or they're going home or they're doing things that are culturally specified. BS: Are you saying, like Rick Shweder says, that there is no psychology that isn't cultural psychology? JB: No, I'm not saying really that. I'm willing to grant perfectly well that there is a dark-room psychology. Some dark-room psychology is going to be useful and some of it is going to be worthless. But you know, that remains to be seen. You have to be pretty damned brilliant to figure a way of doing it well. Now, some psychologists say to me that the only thing that matters is the conditioned stimulus/unconditioned stimulus interval. I know some people believe that. I say, "Why do you think that's so important? I mean, why are you going to devote your life to that?" And they respond that it matters a lot in understanding pharmacological problems of some kind. Some applied issues. I happen to know somebody who is spending his life doing this kind of thing in psychology. He's not a very bright guy, although he's got a full professorship at a major university by virtue of his playing well and usefully within this little pool that we are in. And he deserves it. I don't mean to preclude controlled experimentation. I've done enough experiments timing events in milliseconds to know how useful these little "artifices" can be. I can give you an example of why I feel a great tolerance for this other kind of stuff. It was a crazy study that I did. The one with the playing cards with wrong-colored suits. I tried to get an American playing card company to manufacture special cards for us, but failed. I had even written on Harvard stationary so they wouldn't tell me "I'm going to get the cops on you. What kind of scam are you trying to pull off?" But it was worth the trouble. BS: This resistance that they had to doing that was just as strong an evidence of the importance of category classification as the experiment was. JB: Exactly. But I only realized that years later. I mostly thought they were being a pain in the ass. And they were. So I went into an art shop on Beacon Street with T.S. Eliot's sister-in-law, with whom I had taken some drawing lessons. We brought in some playing cards and tried out different pigments until we found the right one to paint them with. Why was that study important? We were measuring recognition time in milliseconds by tachistoscopic exposures of canonical and noncanonical objects. How long does it take to recognize that the playing card you see in the tachistopic flash is, say, a red four of diamonds as compared to the time it takes to recognize a red four of clubs? What astounding results we got! BS: Isn't that the one where you had stained normally black cards red and people claimed that they had seen a slightly pinkish carddem-

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onstrating interference from their hypothesis that cards of certain suits were black? JB: Yes, they sometimes claimed that there was pinkish illumination in the apparatus. The findings were amazing, even for my learned colleagues. The main finding of course is that it takes many times as long to recognize a counter-conventional playing card than a conventional one. The one thing we had to circumlocute in that paper in the British Journal of Psychology was the response that we got from our subjects that we came to call the "Jesus Christ Reaction." "Jesus Christ that's red!" they would say in amazement. It was as if something had to break through a resistancewe called it "perceptional defense." BS: Another thing you are well known for is refocusing psychology to the study of meaning. JB: Yes. Jonathan Schell said to me the other day that it was a fantastic idea to call my booklets of Meaning, because it made meaning into something activea [Nelson] Goodman idea. But you can see how I was pushed to that active conception of meaning making. BS: What's your genealogy in terms of this focus on meaning making? Where did it come from? JB: I think from Nelson [Goodman]. But oddly enough, when he was interviewed about influences on him recently, Nelson gave me as one of the important factors that led him along this line. Another of your dialogic connections. BS: I'm just curious that your interest in meaning making flows from a philosopher rather than from your own field in psychology. Is there nobody else in the distinguished history of psychology who cared enough about meaning? JB: There were. Lots of themJohann Friedrich Herbart was typical. Like lots of others, he saw it as some sort of a synthesis of association. You see, one thing that you people in anthropology have never been plagued with was the heritage of Aristotle's laws of associationthe idea that when you associated something with something you were ipso facto on the way toward getting meaning. There are two issues here. Let me spell them out a little bit, because it's kind of intriguing. One of them is a sheer association between elements. Most forms of association are specific. Aristotle introduced the notion of the sensus communis that took specific associations and put them together transmodally in terms of some "common sense." That act required what the Greeks called nous, "the soul." In this Greek spirit, for something to have meaning it had to be associated with something and then put into some suprasensory conceptual form to yield "the world" or "reality." So along the way we developed the tradition of saying, "Oh we have association and then what we have is the synthesis beyond it," as with Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and

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then John Stuart Mill and his father, James Mill. Like the Berkeley an notion of "coach"that you synthesize a coach out of having the smell of leather, the sound of wheels, the shape of a coach, and so on. And from this came this creative synthesis which was the meaning. But that didn't strike me as adequatesaying that we've got the whole thing along the way because we have primary properties that adhere together. And then we have a secondary property that fit on top of it. That struck me as not the way in which meaning was made at all. I say meaning lies in what this situation is all about. So if this situation is all about that thinga lampI note it is a lamp used for illuminating a guy's desk. Oh yes, along the way I could put it in categories and tell you that the lamp fits with the kind of thing that miners wear on their head. And it fits with the kind of thing the dentist wears with his mirror. All that kind of thing. BS: You seem to be arguing for definition in terms of what George Lakoff calls the "interactional properties" of things rather than through intrinsic properties. 30 JB: That's it. BS: That they have to do with the kind of organism having a certain body of a certain size, with particular perceptual equipment, using this thing under certain conditions. JB: But I wish George would get off this narrow business of therefore all understanding has to do with body and space. BS: Well a lot of it does. There's no question. JB: Some of it does. But I wish he'd get off that and onto a broader picture. He makes some very good points. I like his search for "natural" primitives in semantics, more based on psychological functioning and on interactional properties. That's much better than the more formal approaches to semantic primitives. I wish I'd had more contact with George over the years; he's quite daring, don't you think? BS: Speaking of interactive properties. . . . JB: I guess there is one other thing I would also want to be remembered for. I'd hope part of my legacy would be to be remembered as the person who somehow got psychology and education back together. That was quite something. And it hasn't succeeded completely. Although it's interesting to me that the psychology that I hear at the AERA [American Educational Research Association] is a hell of a lot more interesting than the most of the stuff that I hear at the APA [American Psychological Association]. I don't go to the APA anymore. It's all little flirtations. The kids are not learning with each other. BS: One of the reasons why it might be more interesting is that educational psychology is necessarily in touch with kids in real-world situations.

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JB: That's right, with kids. And it's in touch with power, and with culture. My neighbor, David Hawthorn, is a very smart guy who's setting up this program for NYU for retraining skills for people who were displaced. Skills have become obsolete so fast. But the governors get together down there in Gharlottesville and they talk about math and science for the kids because we need more of it. And at the same time, we're downsizing engineering companies and firing engineers, and managers trained in engineering and technology. And you say, "Hey wait a minute. Whoa! One voice at a time. Or two voices together if we're going to make music." So education really relates to the culture more broadly and also to technology more broadly. I'll put the way a friend of mine, Ed Purcell once put it. He said, "Jerry Bruner has had the great and interesting effect of making education an intellectual subject. Which is true of nobody else."

NOTES
1. See Peirce 1991. 2. See Olson 1994. 3. See Shklovsky 1984 and Jakobson 1962. 4. See Astington 1993. 5. See Hull 1984. 6. "And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres" (Wittgenstein 1958:55). 7. See Hempel 1965. 8. See Levy 1984. 9. See Murray 1981. 10. See Ricks 1996. 11. See Mischel 1968 and Bandura 1986. 12. See Ricour 1984-1988. 13. See Bohr 1958. 14. See Geertz 1988. 15. See Rivers 1926. 16. See Berlin and Kay 1969. 17. See Fechner 1966. 18. See Rivers 1906. 19. See Rivers 1923. 20. See Feld 1982 and Schieffelin 1976. 21. See Bogoras 1975. 22. See Langer 1957. 23. See Deren 1983. 24. See Riffaterre 1990. 25. See Bateson and Mead 1942. 26. See Shore 1996. 27. See Berger and Luckmann 1966. 28. See Halbwachs 1952. 29. See Donald 1991. 30. See Lakoff 1987.

Keeping the Conversation Going 57

REFERENCES CITED
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Mischel, Walter 1968 Personality and Assessment. New York: Wiley. Murray, Henry A. 1981 Endeavors in Psychology: Selections from the Personology of Henry A. Murray. Edwin S. Shneidman, ed. New York: Harper & Row. Olson, David R. 1994 The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peirce, Charles S. 1991 Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic. James Hoopes, ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ricks, Christopher B. 1996 Essays in Appreciation. New York: Oxford University Press. Ricour, Paul 1984-88 Time and Narrative. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Riffaterre, Michael 1990 Fictional Truth. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rivers, William Halse 1906 The Todas. New York: Macmillan. 1923 Psychology and Politics, and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace. 1926 Psychology and Ethnology. G. Elliott Smith, ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Schieffelin, Edward L. 1976 The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. New York: St. Martin's Press. Shore, Bradd 1996 Culture in Mind: Culture, Cognition and the Problem of Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shklovsky, Viktor Borisovich 1984 A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922. Richard Sheldon, ed. and trans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1958 Philosophical Investigations. 3rd edition. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. New York: MacMillan Publishing Company.

SELECTED NBU06MPHY: JEROME BRUNER

Allport, G. W., J. S. Bruner, and E. M. Jandorf 1941 Personality under Social Catastrophe: Ninety Life Histories of the Nazi Revolution. Charact. Pers., 10:1-22. Anglin, J., ed. 1973 Beyond the Information Given: Selected Papers of Jerome S. Bruner. New York: W. W. Norton. Also as Psicologia della Conoscenze: I, Percezione a Pensiero. Rome: Armando Armando, 1976. Bornstein, M. H., and J. S. Bruner, eds. 1989 Interaction in Human Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bruner, J. S. 1946 Contemporary France and Educational Reform. Harvard Educational Review 16:10-20. 1948 Perceptual Theory and the Rorschach Test. Journal of Personality 17:157-168. 1950 Social Psychology and Group Processes. Annual Review of Psychology 1:119-150. 1951 Personality Dynamics and the Process of Perceiving. In Perception: An Approach to Personality. R. R. Blake and G. V. Ramsey, eds. Pp. 121-147. New York: Ronald Press.

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1956 Freud and the Image of Man. American Psychologist 11:463-466. Also in On knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1962. 1957a Going Beyond the Information Given. In Contemporary Approaches to Cognition: A Symposium Held at the University of Colorado. H. Gruber et. al, eds. Pp. 41-69. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1957b Neural Mechanisms in Perception. Psychological Review 64:340-358. Also as Mecanismes Neurolgiques dans al Perception. B. Matalon, trans. Archives de Psychologie 36:141 1957c On Perceptual Readiness. Psychological Review 64:123-152. Also in Beyond the Information Given: Selected Papers of Jerome S. Bruner. J. Anglin, ed. Pp. 7-42. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. 1958a A Colloquy on the Unity of Learning. Daedalus 87:155-165. 1958b The Freudian Conception of Man and the Continuity of Nature. Daedalus 87:77-84. 1958c The Need for New Myths. The Colorado Quarterly 7:117-128. 1958d Social Psychology and Perception. In Readings in Social Psychology. E. Maccoby, T. Newcomb, and E. Hartley, eds. Pp. 85-94. New York: Henry Holt. 1959a The Art of Ambiguity: A Conversation with Zen Master Hisamatsu. Psychologia 2:101-106. 1959b Learning and Thinking. Harvard Educational Review 29:184-192. 1959c Myth and Identity. Daedalus 88:349-358. Also in On knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. Pp. 31-42. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1962. 1961 On Learning Mathematics. Proceedings of the 1961 Summer Conference (Western Washington State College) 57(3):39-50. 1962a On knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Reprinted in paperback. New York: Atheneum, 1965. 1962b Preface to L. S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language. English trans. New York: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press and Wiley and Sons. 1965a The Growth of Mind. American Psychologist 20:1007-1017. Also as Occasional Paper No. 8, Social Studies Curriculum Project, Educational Services. Also in The Relevance of Education. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971. Also in American Psychology in Historical Perspective. E. R. Hilgard, ed. Pp. 509-525. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, Spring, 1978. 1965b Man: A Course of Study. ESI Quarterly Report. Spring-Summer: 3-13. Also in Toward a Theory of Instruction. Pp. 73-101. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1967. 1966a The Infancy of Man. Expanding Horizons of Knowledge about Man: A Symposium. Occasional Paper, Yeshiva University, New York. 1966b Toward a Theory of Instruction. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University. Paperback ed. by W. W. Norton, 1968. 1967 The Ontogenesis of Symbols. In To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, vol. 1. The Hague: Mouton & Co. 1970a Constructive Cognitions. Review o/U. Neisser. Cognitive Psychology, 1967. Contemporary Psychology 15:81-83. 1970b Poverty and Childhood. Occasional paper, Merrill-Palmer Institute, Detroit, Michigan. Also in The Conditions for Educational Equality. Sterling M. McMurrin, ed. Pp. 34-65. New York: Committee for Economic Development. Also in The Relevance of Education. New York: Norton, 1971. Also in Oxford Review of Education 1:31-50. 1971 The Relevance of Education. New York: W. W. Norton. 1974a Child's Play. New Scientist 62:126-128. London. Also as The Importance of Play. In Child Alive! R. Lewin, ed. Pp. 43-53. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975. Same ver. reprinted with same title in London: Temple Smith, 1975. Also as Play is a Serious Business. Psychology Today 8, no. 8 (1975):81-83. .

60 ETHOS

1974b Patterns of Growth (Inaugural Lecture at Oxford University, May 25,1973). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Also in The Study of Education, vol. 2. P. Gordon , ed. Pp. 205-220. London: Woburn Press, 1980. 1975a From Communication to Language: A Psychological Perspective. Cognition 3:255-287. 1975b Language as an Instrument of Thought. In Problems of Language and Learning. A. Davies, ed. Pp. 61-88. London: Heineman Educational Books 1976 Psychology and the Image of Man. Times Literary Supplement, December 17. Also in Scientific Models and Man: The Herbert Spencer Lectures, 1976. H. Harris, ed. Pp. 26-43. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. 1977 Early Social Interaction and Language Acquisition. In Studies in Mother-Infant Interaction. H. R. Schaffer, ed. Pp. 271-289. New York: Academic Press. 1978a Review o/A. R. Luria, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations. Human Nature 1:84-90. 1978b The Role of Dialogue in Language Acquisition. In The Child's Conception of Language. A. Sinclair, R. J. Jarvella, and W. J. M. Levelt, eds. Pp. 241-256. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Originally presented as the DeSaussure Lecture, London, May 1977. 1981a Concepts of the Child in Freud, Piaget, and Vygotsky. American Psychological Association Invited address, Los Angeles. In Abstracts of 1981 Convention of the American Psychological Association. 1981b Metacognition and Language. In Metacognition and Learning Disabilities. B. Wong, ed. Pp. 17-43. Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen Systems Corp. 1981c The Pragmatics of Acquisition. In The Child's Construction of Language. W. Deutsch, ed. Pp. 39-55. New York: Academic Press. 1981d The Social Context of Language Acquisition: The Witkin Memorial Lectures (Educational Testing Service). Language and Communication 1(2/3):155-178. 1982a From Disposition to Context. In Psychologie de demain. Paul Fraisse, ed. Pp. 73-84. Paris?: Presses Universitaires de France. 1982b A Brain on the Mind. Review o/Hebb, Essay on Mind. Contemporary Psychology 27:5-6. 1983a Child's Talk: Learning to Use Language. New York: W. W. Norton. 1983b In Search of Mind: Essays in Autobiography. New York: Harper & Row. 1986a Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1986b Play, Thought and Language. Prospects (UNESCO) 16:76-83. Also as Jeu, Pensee et Langage. Prospects (French edition) 16:83-90. Also as Juego, Pensamiento y Lenguaje. Prospects (Spanish edition) 16:79-85. 1986c Thought and Emotion: Can Humpty-Dumpty Be Put Back Together Again? In Thought and Emotion: Developmental Perspectives. D. Bearison and H. Zimiles, eds. Pp. 11-20. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1987a Introduction to J. Bruner and H. Haste, eds. Making Sense: The Child's Construction of the World. London: Methuen. 1987b Life As Narrative. Social Research 54:1-17. Also in The Need for Story: Cultural Diversity in Classroom and Community. A. II. Dyson and C. Genishi, eds. Pp. 28-37. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994. Originally published as Discurso de Investidura Doctor "Honoris Causa." Madrid: Universidad Aut6noma de Madrid, 1986. 1987c Prologue to the English Edition. In The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky, vol. 1. R. W. Rieber and A. S. Carton, eds. Pp. 1-16. New York: Plenum Publishing. Also as Prolog do "Dziel zebranych lwa wygotskiego." In R. W. Rieber and A. S. Carton, eds. The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky, vol. 1. (Russian edition). Pp. 3-21. New York: Plenum Publishing, 1987.

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1987d The Transactional Self. In Making Sense. J. Bruner and H. Haste, eds. Pp. 81-96. London: Methuen. 1987e A Way of Looking at Things: Selected Papers from 1930 to 1980 by Erik Erikson. In The New York Review of Books, December 3. 1990a Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1990b Comment on Kenneth Gergen's "The Construction of Self in the Post-Modern Age." Psychologische Rundschau 41:206-207. 1990c Culture and Human Development: A New Look. Human Development 33:344-355. Also as Cultura e Sviluppo Umano: Una Nova Prospettiva. In Clotilde Pontecorvo, Anna Maria Ajello and Cristina Zucchermaglio, eds. I Contesti Sociali dell'Apprendimento: Acquisire Conoscenze a Scuola, nel Lavoro, nella Vita Quotidiana. Pp. 43-60. Milan: Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto, 1995. 1993a Do we "Acquire" Culture or Vice Versa? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16:515-516. 1993b Explaining and Interpreting: Two Ways of Using Mind. In Conceptions of the Human Mind: Essays in Honor of George A. Miller. G. Harman, ed. Pp. 123-137. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1994a The "Remembered" Self. In The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush, eds. Pp. 41-54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1994b The View from the Heart's Eye: A Commentary. In The Heart's Eye: Emotional Influences in Perception and Attention. Paula M. Niedenthal and Shinobu Kitayama, eds. Pp. 269-286. New York: Academic Press. 1995 Meaning and Self in Cultural Perspective. In The Social Self. David Bakhurst and Christine Sypnowich, eds. Pp. 18-29. London: Sage Publications. 1996a The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1996b Foreword. In Culture in mind: Meaning Construction and Cultural Cognition. Bradd Shore. Pp. xiii-xvii. New York: Oxford University Press. Bruner, J. S., F. Bresson, A. Morf, and J. Piaget 1958 Logigue et perception. Paris: Presses Universitares de France. Bruner, J. S., and B. M. Bruner 1968 On Voluntary Action and Its Hierarchical Structure. International Journal of Psychology 3:239-255. Also in Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences. (Alpbach Symposium, Austria, 1968). A. Koestler and J. R. Smythies, eds. London: Hutchinson and Co., 1969. Bruner, J. S., and B. Cunningham 1939 The Effect of Thymus Extract on the Sexual Behavior of the Female Rat. Journal of Comparative Psychology 27:69-77. Bruner, J., and C. F. Feldman 1996 Group Narrative As a Cultural Context of Autobiography. In Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory. D. Rubin, ed. Pp. 291-317. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruner, J. S., and C. C. Goodman 1947 Value and Need As Organizing Factors in Perception. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 42:33-44. Bruner, J. S., J. J. Goodnow, and G. A. Austin 1956 A Study of Thinking. New York: Wiley & Sons. Reprinted in "Behavioral Science Classics" Series, with a new introduction. New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions Press, 1986. Bruner, J. S., A. Jolly, and K. Sylva, eds. 1976 Play: Its Role in Evolution and Development. London: Penguin Books/New York: Basic Books.

62 ETHOS

Bruner, J. S., and J. Lucariello 1989 Monologue As Narrative Recreation of the World. In Narratives from the Crib. K. Nelson ed. Pp. 73-97, 324. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. S., and D. O'Dowd 1958 A Note on the Informative ness of Parts of Words. Language and Speech 1:98-101. Bruner, J. S, and D. Olson 1978 Symbols and Texts As Tools of Intellect. Interchange 8:1-15. Bruner, J. S., R. R. Olver, P. M. Greenfield, et al. 1966 Studies in Cognitive Growth: A Collaboration of the Center for Cognitive Studies. New York: Wiley & Sons. Bruner, J. S., and L. Postman 1947 Emotional Selectivity in Perception and Reaction. Journal of Personality 16:69-77. 1948a An Approach to Social Perception. In Current Trends in Social Psychology. W. Dennis, ed. Pp. 71-118. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. 1948b Symbolic Value As an Organizing Factor in Perception. Journal of Social Psychology 27:203-208. 1949a Perception, Cognition and Behavior. Journal of Personality 18:14-31. 1949b On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm. Journal of Personality 18:206-223. Bruner, J. S., and V. Sherwood 1976 Early Rule Structure: The Case of "Peekaboo." In Life Sentences. Rom Harre, ed. Pp. 55-62. New York: Wiley & Sons. Also in Play: Its Role in Development and Evolution. London: Penguin, 1976, and New York: Basic Books, 1976. Bruner, J. S., and R. Tagiuri 1954 The Perception of People. In Handbook of Social Psychology. G. Lindzey, ed. Pp. 634-654. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Cole, M., and J. S. Bruner 1971 Cultural Differences and Inferences about Psychological Processes. American Psychologist 26:867-876. Also in Culture and Cognition: Readings in Cross-Cultural Psychology. J. W. Berry and P. R. Dason, eds. Pp. 14:230-246. London: Methuen, 1974. Greenfield, P. M., and J. S. Bruner 1966 Culture and Cognitive Growth. International Journal of Psychology 1:8-107. Rev. version. In Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research. D. A. Goslin, ed. Pp. 633-657. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969. Same version in condensed form as Learning and Language: Work with the Wolof. Psychology Today, July 1971:40-43ff. Same version in full in The Relevance of Education. New York: Norton, 1971. Olson, D. R., and J. S. Bruner 1996 Folk Psychology and Folk Pedagogy. In Handbook of Education and Human Development: New Models of Learning, Teaching and Schooling. D. R. Olson and N. Torrance, eds. Pp. 9-27. Oxford: Blackwell. Postman, L., and J. S. Bruner 1946 The Reliability of Constant Errors in Psychophysical Measurement. Journal of Psychology 21:293-299. 1952 Hypotheses and the Principle of Closure: The Effect of Frequency and Recency. Journal of Psychology 33:113-125. Postman, L., J. S. Bruner, and R. D. Walk 1951 The Perception of Error. British Journal of Psychology 42: 1-10. Ratner, N., and J. S. Bruner 1978 Games, Social Exchange, and the Acquisition of Language. Journal of Child Language 5:391-401. Smith, M. B., J. S. Bruner, and R. W. White 1956 Opinions and Personality. New York: Wiley and Sons. Reprinted in paperback. Wiley Science Editions, 1964.