A recent visit to an exhibition of ice-age art in Keighley, part of the Bradford City of Culture events, alerted me to the surprising links, but also the obvious differences, between the study of our deepest pre-history and contemporary educational research. The exhibition was a display, collected from all over Europe, of small, ‘mobile’ pieces of art carved or shaped from ivory, bone or stone. The oldest dated piece was also the most fascinating. The ‘Lion Man’ is a 30cm tall sculpture, carved from a mammoth tusk, with what clearly seems to be a lion’s head atop a recognisable (if rather elongated) human body. It was found in Germany and has been radiocarbon dated to about 40,000 years old. The sheer antiquity of this artefact makes it an object of wonder in itself, but I think that what draws 21st century people to such pieces goes beyond that.
The British Museum catalogue offers a number of interpretations, many contradicting each other, on what the Lion Man could ‘mean’. That the figure is non-representational and is evidence of symbolic thought is an accepted starting point, but beyond that the gates lie open to just about any reading you care to put on it. And, as with the Lion Man, so with the other exhibits. The attraction of such exhibitions stems from our desire to understand what such objects could possibly have meant to their creators: to ‘find meaning in meaning’.
Educational research is also concerned with finding meaning in meaning by attempting to enter social actors’ interpretive worlds via its various methodologies. As an area of social science, educational research is confronted with what Giddens terms the ‘double hermeneutic’: the sociologist of education is studying phenomena that are already constituted as meaningful by the social actors which the sociologist is studying. Social actors make sense of the world through their ‘first-order’ concepts: the often unconscious, tacit knowledge that they have about the conditions and consequences of what they do in their everyday lives. Such knowledge is essential to our ability to navigate our way through the complexities of the social world. The sociologist tries to understand those concepts through their own analytical apparatus—their ‘second-order’ concepts. Social class, my own area of research interest, is a good example of this distinction between first-order and second-order concepts. Research participants may ‘voice’ class in a range of allusive, euphemistic ways while for me it is framed in terms of habitus, capital and field. For the sociologist, the epistemological challenge lies in trying to bridge the gap between the two orders of concept. Can we ever really know what somebody ‘means’?
Unlike the study of ice-age art, the sociology of education does, at least, enjoy the benefit that its research participants are alive, and so triangulation methods such as ‘respondent validation’ offer some measure of assurance that we have ‘understood’ their meaning. (Although, since society is our ever-present context, Archer’s observation that it is a partly antecedent creation of now deceased ancestors into which we are all born is pertinent here). Professional archaeologists have their own second-order concepts with which they approach their objects of study. Although many of their conclusions are inferences, they are nonetheless educated ones. Ultimately, though, the vast temporal distances between the artefacts that remain to us and their original creators produce a yawning epistemological gulf between then and now. Archaeologists do not really know what the Lion Man ‘means’ any more than I do. In Giddens’ terms, they can never reach the original creator’s first-order concepts. This, though, I think is the attraction of all prehistorical objects. The huge gap in ‘understanding’ lends the imagination a free rein to wander. The very many different interpretations of Stonehenge are just one such example of this. We will always want to ‘find meaning in meaning’.
Dr Andrew Morrisson is a Senior Lecturer in Education in SIOE. His research interests centre on the sociology of education, with a particular focus on social class and theories of distributive justice.
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