Chapter 12: Positioning Ourselves within Practices and within the Human Condition

I find so much to like and agree with in Tania Zittoun’s and Alex Gillespie’s marvelously simulating lecture that I almost feel like signing off on it, in full agreement. However, I am too much the academic to let any minor questions and possible slight disagreements slide without comment. So, despite my strong endorsement of both their theory and method, I should like to suggest two ways in which both that theory and method might be extended slightly, but with what I regard as important consequences. Both my suggestions have to do with how persons are positioned and come to position themselves within specific sociocultural practices. One suggestion focuses on movements between particular positions (position exchanges) within socioculturally typical practices, routines, and scenarios. The other suggestion focuses on more abstracted, existential positionings within the human condition, writ large. So my suggestions are oppositionally situated within a physically embodied and concretely experienced versus a reflectively considered and abstractly experienced, conceptual space. Nonetheless, the latter is a form of experience that emerges within and through the former, both developmentally and logically.¹ In what follows, I will describe and illustrate these two suggestions theoretically and methodologically in ways that relate directly to the contents of the focal lecture by Tania and Alex. But first, a few remarks about positioning theories in general.