MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVrrY, 4(4), 275-295Copyright © 1997, Regents of the University of Califomia on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparitive Human Cognition

Literate Activity and Disciplinarity: TheHeterogeneous (Re)production of American Studies

Around a Graduate Seminar

Paul PriorUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Taking up a sociohistoric approach to writing as literate activity in functional systems and to disciplinesas dynamic heterogeneous networks, I examine writing in graduate education as a key arena ofdisciplinary enculturation. Through an ethnographic analysis centered on the literate activity ofstudents and a professor in an American Studies seminar, I work to integrate participants' situatedactivity around a field research and writing task with the historically sedimented affordances of keymediational means. The analysis particularly foregrounds heterogeneity, as multiple trajectories arewoven together in the deeply laminated functional systems that (re)produce American Studies and itsinterdisciplinarity.

I began research in graduate seminars to identify the kinds of communicative competence neededfor academic writing tasks. However, analyzing the data, I found myself constructing not simplysituated accounts of those tasks, but tracing what amounted to opportunity task spaces shot throughwith different participants' evolving, multiple, even contradictory representations and actions. Thismultiplicity problematized the notion of communicative competence, which envisions abstractlinguistic and social knowledge governing performance in speech/discourse communities. Aca-demic writing tasks in seminars seemed susceptible to neither a rule-governed understanding ofperformance nor a unified interpretation of community. These findings posed basic questions aboutdiscourse and development, particularly about the distributed nature of text and knowledgeproduction and the heterogeneity of disciplinary enculturation. In this article, I introduce twosociohistoric notions—disciplinarity and literate activity—and iUustrate them through analysis ofa graduate seminar in American Studies.

FROM DISCOURSE COMMUNITIES TO DISCIPLINARITY

Discip]inary communities of practice are critical sites of sociocultural development and, hence,should be critical sites of sociocultural inquiry.' Over the past century, disciplines, subdisciplines.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Paul Prior, English Department, University of Illinois, Urbana^-Champaign,Urbana, IL 61801. E-mail: p-prior@uiuc.edu

Historically, sociology, anthropology, and education directed their attention away from privileged Western socialinstitutions to, respectively, the social practices of marginalized groups at home, exotic cultures globally, and earlyeducation. The social practices of the academy and the disciplines received relatively limited attention, a situation only

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and interdisciplines have pro]iferated, producing a dense jung]e not on]y of texts, technica] objects,and practices, but a]so of enculturated persons. These social formations have co-evolved with, andexist within, thick institutional networks, linking everything from university departments andcorporate laboratories to international associations and public or private grantors. As disciplineshave grown explosively; entangled themselves around, between, and within social practices; andrewritten the history of previous eras in their image, it has become difficult to defamiharize thiscultural neoformation. Although linked to radical changes in our physical, machinic, biological,and social worlds, disciplines have mainly been seen through purified public representations(Latour, 1993; Myers, 1990). Everyday tropes for, and structuralist theories of, discourse andsociety further encourage us to imagine disciplines as discourse communities, as autonomous socialterritories to be mapped in detemporalized spaces, as abstract systems of rules and knowledge tobe diagrammed.

Sociohistoric theories point toward alternative notions of communities as concrete, dynamic,and heterogeneous. Lave and Wenger's (1991) notion of legitimate periphera] participation incommunities of practice direct]y counters the trope of territorial and homogeneous communities:

Given the complex, differentiated nature of communities, it seems important not to reduce the endpoint of centripetal participation in a community of practice to a uniform or univocal "center," or to alinear notion of skill acquisition. There is no place in a community of practice designated "theperiphery," and, most emphatically, it has no single core or center, (p. 36)

Instead of a single fixed goal for learning—^the ideal member of an idea]ized community—Laveand Wenger argued that "there are mu]tiple, varied, more- or less-engaged and -inclusive ways ofbeing located in the fields of participation defined by a community" (p. 36). Instead of a sharedcore of abstract knowledge and language people internalize to become expert members, theysuggested seeing community as "a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over timeand in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice" (p. 98). Similarly,Engestrom (1993) rejected a homogeneous reading of activity systems:

An activity system is not a homogeneous entity. To the contrary, it is composed of a multitude of oftendisparate elements, voices, and viewpoints. This multiplicity can be understood in terms of historicallayers. An activity system always contains sediments of earlier historical modes, as well as buds orshoots of its possible future, (p. 68)

Engestrom's model of activity systems emphasizes contradictions (internal and external) as wellas heterogeneity. In his study of doctor-patient consultation in Finnish clinics, Engestrom (1993)identified heterogeneity and contradictions in the multiple voices/perspectives of the interactants,the layered presence of medical ideologies from different historical periods, and the waysconsultations were structured by specific institutional legacies and linked to competing historicalmodels of work.

somewhat remedied today. The first situated studies of discourse and graduate education that I know of have appeared inthe last decade (e.g., Berkenkotter, Huckin, & Ackerman, 1988, 1991; Casanave, 1995; Chin, 1994; Jacoby & Gonzales,1991; Ochs, Jacoby, & Gonzales, 1994; Prior, 1991, in press). Becker, Greer, Hughes, and Strauss's (1961) study of medicalschool is an important exception, but the authors paid little attention to discourse. The most sustained and developed inquiryinto disciplines has focused on science and technology studies (e.g., Bazerman, 1988, in press; Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Latour,1987; Myers, 1990; Pickering, 1995).

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How to handle such heterogeneity is a critical issue. For example, the striking asymmetries inmotives and actions between teachers and students and among students within classrooms (as wellas the routine intersections of institutional and social forces around schools) could reasonably beseen as a durable holistic pattern defining a distinct system of activity. However, subsuming all ofthe heterogeneity in the image of one activity system could lead to a kind of creeping spatialization,a view in which activity systems become the kind of autonomous, discrete territories that discoursecommunities have been. Alternative ways to conceptualize this heterogeneity are suggested byGoffman's (1981) notion that activity is laminated (that participants simultaneously hold multiplefootings) and by Goodwin and Duranti' s (1992) notion that context is always multiple and dynamic,relatively foregrounded cind backgrounded fiames rather than a static stage. These views suggestthat multiple activity footings co-exist, are immanent, in any situation. When one activity systemis foregrounded (e.g., school learning), other activity systems (e.g., of home, neighborhood,government, business) do not disappear. This kind of view also highlights perspective, the wayscoparticipants in an activity hold and coordinate differently configured activity footings (see e.g.,Gutierrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995; Holland & Reeves, 1994; Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989;Rommetveit, 1992).

Disciplines are typically figured as unified territories or systems of knowledge, whereasresearch on disciplines (e.g., Becher, 1989; Crane, 1972; Foucault, 1972; Harding, 1991; Klein,1990; Pickering, 1995) has instead pointed to complex configurations and relationships aspractitioners are situated by such factors as objects of study, methodologies, instruments, theories,institutional sites, audiences, social identities, interpersonal and institutional relationships, andbroader sociocultural discourses and ways of life. Disciplines in these accounts seem more likeheterogeneous networks than stable social objects. Thus, it seerns important to move from adiscourse community notion of disciplines as unified social and/or cognitive spaces to a notionof disciplinarity as the ongoing, mediated constitution of a kind of sociomaterial network.Disciplinarity invokes the dynamic integration of the historical and the situated, the productionof both knowledge and society, the mature practice and the novice, the social representation ofunity and the networked, dialogic hybridity of concrete activity. Graduate education is one keylink in disciplinary networks, a site of intense disciplinary enculturation (i.e., the continuingproduction of full participants and the discipline itself as weU as the integration or marginalizationof relative newcomers). In graduate education, writing is a central domain of action, providingopportunity spaces for (re)socialization of discursive practices, representing a central mediumfor displays of disciplinarity, and mediating the (re)production of disciplinary communities ofpractice. However, as with disciplinarity, conventional notions of writing need to be thoroughlyreworked fiom a sociohistoric perspective.

FROM WRITING TO FUNCTIONAL SYSTEMS OF LITERATE ACTIVITY

Discussing notions of audience in socially oriented analyses of writing, Phelps (1990) observedthat writing researchers and theorists have continued to be caught up in

the textual and the psychologized rhetorics where abstractions like the fictive audience (textualrepresentation) and the cognitive audience (mental representation) are more salient than the actualexchanges of talk and text by which people more or less publicly draft and negotiate textual meanings,(p. 158)

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As researchers moved from analysis of texts to contexts and fiom bounded tasks in laboratoriesto open-ended activities in classrooms, workplaces, and communities, they ran into a theoreticaland methodologica] obstacle: the formation of the unit of analysis for writing around texts andtranscriptions. Brandt (1990) noted that theorists often defined literacy based on features ofmaterial texts (e.g., transportability generating decontextualization and impersonality) rather thanon the situated practices of readers and writers. As Scribner and Cole (1981) found, the conse-quences of literacy are linked less to such generic textual technologies than to their particularsociocultural uses. LeFevre (1987) also challenged the privileging of text and transcription, arguingfor a rhetoric focused on invention (the generation of discourse) and its social bases (diverse formsof collaborative interaction, institutional opportunity spaces, and such social legacies as languagesand bodies ofknowledge). Witte (1992) conc]uded that privi]eging linguistic texts and transcrip-tional processes produces a fiawed unit of analysis. Drawing on sociohistoric theories and Pierceansemiotics, he proposed a constructivist semiotic (context-text-intertext configurations) operatingthrough multiple modes (oral and written language, graphic representation, nonverbal gesture,mathematica] and other symbolic systems). Russell (1995) questioned general writing skillsinstruction (e.g., fieshman composition), arguing that writing exists only as particular semioticmeans (genres) learned in and produced through participation in some activity system. With itsholistic, concrete notions of mediated activity and development, sociohistoric theory represents arich theoretical base for continuing to rethink the unit of analysis for studies oriented to "writing."

Because of a strategic interest in sign mediation of higher psychological functions and practicalinterests in regular and special education, Vygotsky's work (e.g., 1978,1987) and much subsequentwork in this tradition have focused heavily on ontogenetic internalization (inner speech, conceptformation, the zone of proximal development as a shift from assisted to independent performance).However, Leont'ev (1978) stressed the need to recognize the centrality of extemalizations (speech,writing, drawing, movement, the manipulation and construction of objects and devices), to seeneither action nor development as a one-way fiow between external and internal, but as simulta-neous, dynamic, and interpenetrated interactions. Externalization produces artifacts (fleeting ordurable) that enter into and channel subsequent streams of activity. A focus on internalization canobscure this interpenetration, sustaining a dichotomized view of the individual and society anddefiecting attention from the embodiment of activity (see Packer, 1993). Even fiom a synchronousperspective, activity typically involves acting-with other people, material artifacts, and elementsof the sociomaterial environment. I do not, for example, internalize the piano when I play it, thecar when I drive it, the computer and its graphic software when I draw with them, or the otherperson when I converse with her. In each case, I must learn not to act independently, but to act-with.Writing and reading texts are c]ear]y acting-with practices.

If internalization foregrounds the sociogenesis of the person, externalization foregrounds thesociogenesis of tools. The process of sedimentation in tools, like that of internalization in persons,transforms concrete situated activity into tacit, abbreviated, and presuppositional forms. AbrahamMaslow is reported to have said, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everythingas a nail." This aphorism partially captures the sociohistoric insight that human culture iscrystallized, transmitted and transformed through the historical development and situated use ofmediationa] means. Holland and Cole (1995) used the hammer to illustrate ways a tool embodiestheories of the person as well as the task:

It would be as ludicrous to use a sledgehammer to fasten a picture hanger as to use a tack hammer todrive spikes into railroad ties. And so it is with all forms of mediated activity: the principle of mediation

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implies that each new combination of goals, conditions, and mediational means constitutes a distinctivefunctional system of behavior (Luria, 1979; Vygotsky, 1929). And in so doing, the functional system"affords" certain tasks and presumes certain types of people, (pp. 482-483)

A hammer, thus, entails not only Maslow's nails but whole sociohistoric ensembles (types ofstructures, construction materials and processes, people, socioeconomic means of production). Toaccount for the effects of such ensembles, Holland and Cole draw on Gibson's (1979) account ofaffordance as the way things objectively, but relationally, invite particular perceptions and actions.^Like other artifacts then, a hammer is an objectification of sociohistoric activity in the world, andas such embodies, presupposes, and promotes the co-evolution of tools and worlds.

In the quotation just provided, Holland and Cole (1995) describe another key concept, functionalsystems. Whereas Luria (1979) talked about functional systems in terms of invariant goals andoutcomes being variably achieved, Newman, Griffin, and Cole (1989) pointed to the likelihood ofvariations in goals and outcomes, suggesting a more perspectival, negotiated view of functionalsystems. Beyond that, I argue for a need to distinguish between two senses of functional system,a distinction analogous to the one Bakhtin (1986) drew between concrete utterances and theirtypifications (speech genres). Thus, functional systems refer to both particular situated systemsand typified (i.e., relatively stabilized or prefabricated) systems. In his research on distributedcognition, Hutchins (1995) took a highly dynamic view of functional systems, in both senses, ashis basic unit of analysis. Hutchins also argued that these fluid functional systems are constitutedby "entrainment, coordination, and resonance among elements" (p. 288). In emphasizing theforging of connections, stable or temporary, among multiple elements, Hutchins's functionalsystems resemble Latotir's (1987,1994) heterogeneous networks.

If we view such networked functional systems as the locus of socitil and individual development,then what are the productive forces and what are the products of that historical activity? WhereLave and Wenger (1991) defined learning as "the historical production, transformation, and changeof persons" (p. 51), Hutchins (1995) identified three lines of development in any moment of humanpractice. In the most inunediate sense, the moment of practice traces the ongoing flow of a situatedfunctional system. A second line represents the development of persons, their learning throughparticipation in practice. The third line represents the development of the practice itself, of itsmaterial and conceptual tools and forms of social organization. Although these lines of develop-ment are fused in situated activity, Hutchins noted their distinctive heterochronicity. Typifiedfunctional systems would emerge in intersections of Hutchins's second and third lines of devel-opment (i.e., of persons as well as of practices). If functional systems are constituted by thecoordination of different types of elements with different properties, then a finer grained model ofthose elements could be useful. Tentatively, I identify five elements composing functional systems:persons, artifacts, practices, institutions, and communities.^ Cole (1995) and Engestrom (1990)differentiated mediational means based on Wartofsky's (1979) model of primary, secondary, and

r or example, a flat horizontal surface may afford sitting, lying, standing on, or running over for a person. If the surfaceis water, then those affordances disappear for the person, but at least the last two remain for a water bug. Gibson (1979)extended the notion of affordance to organisms (e.g., a person's embodied behaviors afford particular perceptions andactions to another person) and cultural phenomena (e.g., a post box "affords letter-mailing to a letter-writing human in acommunity with a postal system"; p. 139).

Artifacts refer to material objects fashioned by people (e.g., written texts, furniture, instruments, and built environ-ments) or taken up by people (e.g., ocean currents for travel, the night sky as a navigational aid, animals as domesticated

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tertiary artifacts. However elaborated, this view suggests seeing the course of human activity asthe fiuid, dynamic weaving and reweaving of heterogeneous functional systems.

The conventional image of writing as texts and transcription is a trope, a synecdochal index forfull functional systems of literate practice. An adequate account of writing must begin with threefundamental axioms. First, writing is situated in the moment-to-moment flow of activity (whateverit might be). Second, writing is mediated. It is not solo activity, but a confluence of phylogenetic,cultura]-historical, mesogenetic, ontogenetic, and microgenetic trajectories that weave togetherpeople, practices, artifacts, and institutions. Finally, as an important corollary of mediation, writingis dispersed. Focal texts and transcriptional events are no more autonomous than the spray thrownup by white water in a river, and like that spray, literate acts today are far downstream fiom theirsociohistoric origins. This notion of writing as situated, mediated, and dispersed is the basis forwhat I am calling literate activity. Literate activity, in this sense, is not located in acts of readingand writing, but as cultural forms of life saturated with textuality—that is, strongly motivated andmediated by texts. It refers not only to the semiotic processes whereby texts are imagined, produced,exchanged, and used, but to the sociohistoric processes in which functional systems and theirdiverse elements are continually being (re)produced.

VOICES IN THE NETWORKS: A STRATEGY FOR RESEARCH

Cultural-historical research, science studies, and genre studies have been converging on a strategyfor examining the sedimentation and prefabrication of functional systems as well as their emergentproduction in concrete activity. Examining the use of a computer mathematics game in classroomsin the United States and Russia, Griffin, Belyaeva, Soldatova, and the Velikhov-HamburgCollective (1993) found that the structure of the computer program was shaping not only the optionsavailable within the game and its practice sessions, but also the ways students interacted with theprogram, other students, and instructors. In other words, the program was strongly affordingparticular constructions of contexts, academic tasks, and participant roles. Most tellingly, itdiscouraged practices (repetition and reanalysis of solutions; collaborative learning) that instruc-tors and researchers desired. To account for the active role it played in constituting contexts ofinstruction. Griffin et al. (1993) turned to the history of the program:

Part of our contexts had been "prefabricated" by the programmers of the software; their contributionsabout what could and should be done in the educational context were revealed in screen displays. Theprogrammers had to be treated as "hidden" members of the communicative interactions, with distantbut powerful "voices." (p. 126)

food stock, a stone as a weapon). Artifacts are also durable symbolic forms, like natural languages, mathematics, specializeddiscourses. Artifacts may be inscribed in material objects but are also internalized by and distributed across persons. Bypractices, I refer to ways of acting and interacting in the world. Communities here refer to potentials for coordination thatemerge from developmental commonalties. In this sense, communities are interactively realized along a continuum fromthe thinnest and most trivial commonalties to the thickest and most profound. Institutions refer to stabilizations of artifacts,persons, and practices around formal and informal social formations (workplaces, organizations, families, recreationalgroups, gangs, and so on). These categories are not autonomous or mutually exclusive; in fact, these types of elementsmutually constitute one another in evolving histories of functional systems.

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Embodied in the computer game, the frozen "voices" ofthe programmers (indexing their ideologiesof schooling and technology) presupposed and thus shaped the communicative contexts of its liveusers (students and teachers).

Latour (1994) argued that unpacking the histories of artifacts offers an innovative solution tothe micro-macro split. In his account, the mediations of practice, the situated association of actantsin networks, bring temporally and spatially dispersed trajectories into the briefest and most microof interactions. In an ethnography of laboratory research, Latour and Woolgar (1986) identifiedthe way prefabricated inscriptions contributed to the constmction of scientific facts. Each inscrip-tional artifact produced a black box that could be incorporated into a cascading network (e.g.,observations recorded as columns of data tumed into tables and graphs incorporated in scientificarticles cited in subsequent articles and grant applications leading to funding of further observa-tions). They also noted the inscription of theories and facts in scientific instruments (like thespectrometer) and objects (like radioactive isotopes) that co-produced many of the "original"inscriptions. To reopen these textual and material black boxes, Latour (1987) proposed a strategyof following the actors, particularly tracing them to stages of development before they becameblackboxed. With this strategy, he illustrated substantial differences between science and technol-ogy in the making and as made.

Bazerman (1988) studied the sociogenesis of one particular cultural form: the experimentalreport in science. Through rhetorical analysis linking texts, persons, and institutions, he traced thedevelopment of the genre from early experiments published as personal correspondence to thehighly codified routines of experimental reporting in the 20th century. Bazerman described thereciprocal co-development of textual practices, laboratory practices, and institutionalized commu-nicative forums (joumals and scientific books). His analysis suggests that new communicativeforums provided an opportunity space for critique of experimental reports, that the desire to limitsuch critique led to more vivid textual recreations of experimental methods, that the demands ofthose new textual practices prompted more carefully documented and reasoned experimentalpractices, and that these changes in textucil and laboratory practices graduEilly shifted the groundsof scientific argument from transparent witnessing to the current methodological and theoreticalapparatus of science. In these accounts, Bazerman (1988) wove the biographies of scientists andeditors into the story ofthe sociogenesis ofthe genre, noting the way key practices crystallized inemerging genres were refracted through the biographical lenses of particular actors.*

Griffin et al.'s (1993) analysis of the computer program, Latour and Woolgar's (1986; alsoLatour, 1987) of biochemical research, and Bazerman's (1988) of experimental report genresrepresent separate traditions but display a significant convergence. The strategy each displays couldbe seen as an expansion of Vygotsky's genetic methodology from ontogenesis to the sociogenesisof functional systems and their diverse elements. It involves (a) a close, usually situated, study ofthe activity, identifying the elements of its functional systems; (b) an attempt to trace histories ofsome key elements, especially to recover particular motives, values, and practices interiorized inmaterial and semiotic artifacts and practices as affordances; and (c) the reanimation of artifacts.

Engestrom and Escalante's (1995) account of the sociogenesis and failed stabilization of Postal Buddy also pointedto the role of particular personalities, like the company's CEO, in the trajectory of its development.

For additional discussions and examples of this strategy see Cole (1995), del Rio and Alvarez (1995), Engestrom(1993), Cole and Engestrom (1993), Engestrom and Escalante (1995), Hutchins (1995), Moll and Greenberg (1990), andWertsch (1995).

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treating them as participants with a voice in constituting contexts of activity. In the followingsections, I pursue this strategy of seeking voices in the networks as I first examine critical momentsin which such institutionalized affordances as seminars and American Studies as a discipline werevisibly in the making and then turn to a situated case study of seminar tasks. Combined, theseanalyses are designed to trace, if quite partially, the functional systems that constituted andmediated literate activity in this site of disciplinary enculturation.

AFFORDING AMERICAN STUDIES: BUILDING TYPIFIEDFUNCTIONAL SYSTEMS

At Midwest University (MU),' a prestigious American Studies program is centered in a departmentwith a small core faculty supplemented by a large number of associated faculty from otherdepartments. American Studies was a seminar in field research that capped a three-quarter sequencerequired for graduate students majoring or minoring in American Studies. The first two quartersof the sequence had been taught by one of the senior core faculty. In the final quarter, the seminarwas taught by one of the associated faculty, Arthur Kohl, a senior professor in Geography. Eighteenstudents enrolled in the seminar, most in their 1st year of graduate work in American Studies.Except for two international students (fiom Hungary and China), all were native speakers ofEnglish. Seven were male, and 11 were female. Entering this seminar as part of a broader studyof academic writing, I attended and audio-taped sessions, collected students' draft and final paperswith the professor's comments, and conducted semistructured and text-based interviews with theprofessor and several of the students. One student also agreed to keep a process log during thequarter. In this section, I foreground three of the many heterogeneous lines of sociogenesis thatconverged in the seminar to produce the funcdonal systems that afforded students' literate activityand disciplinarity.

The Seminar

One of the elements much in need of reanimation is the institution of the seminar itself. Its historyindexes critical sociohistorical changes in the function of the academy and disciplines, changesthat have helped define modem societies. The last 3 decades of the 1800s saw a rapid growth ofuniversities and disciplines in the United States with the spread of new practices of knowledgeproduction, originating a century earlier in Germany. Universities were reenvisioned as sites forthe production of original and socially useful knowledge through research; the traditional roles offaculty and students were reconfigured as facu]ty became knowledge producers and students theiractive apprentices; and instructional practices shifted to serious dialogue (rather than oral exercises)and written (as opposed to oral) examination (see e.g., Clark, 1989; Hoskin, 1993). The seminarin the humanities and emerging social sciences and the laboratory in the physica] sciences were

'in Latour's theory, reanimation is linked to the principle of symmetry, which proposes that people and things be treatedequally as semiotic actants, whereas in the other traditions, reanimation typically involves not symmetry, but the recoveryof the cultural-historic, institutional, and individual origins of people and things.

' A U names of local persons, institutions, and places have been changed to pseudonyms (both in my text and in extractsfrom interviews and student texts).

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basic manifestations of this new progressive educational practice. The American Studies seminarand the departmental program it was part of were descendants of those early German seminars.They renewed the fundamental practices of having students present written work for critical review(oral and written) by peers and professors and of requiring students to advance through a sequenceof institutional written examinations that would culminate in the publication of original research.

Kohl

It is important to treat people as products of as well as producers of history, as part of what stabilizesand destabilizes functional systems. Kohl, for example, played an important role in constitutingthe situated and typified functional systems of the seminar. In class, he seemed open andiconoclastic, a teller of academic tales. However, his relaxed informality mixed uneasily withinstmction dominated by lecturing. Kohl grew up in Midwest City and studied geography at MUin the late 1940s. After finishing his M.A. and with university enrollments skyrocketing, he wasinvited to join the faculty in Geography as an instmctor. He never pursued a Ph.D., but moved intothe tenure track, eventually becoming a full professor and, for a time, chair ofthe department. Hisvita listed a moderate number of professional publications and a series of prestigious positions inprofessional organizations, government agencies, and university administration. Early in hiscareer, when many cultural geographers were analyzing human settlement in terms of socialphysics (e.g., "gravity" models). Kohl took up an ethnographic and philosophic orientation. Hisinterest in interdisciplinarity was expressed not only in his association with American Studies, butalso in his support for interdisciplinary programs as an administrator and his participation inarcheological research teams at sites in the eastem Mediterranean and the United States. As Idiscuss later, Kohl's task representations in the semineir and his positive reception of students'topical and textual diversity seemed to index his own somewhat centrifugal enculturation.

American Studies as a Discipline

Klein (1990) noted that American Studies is one of the older interdisciplines in the modernhumanities. Like any field, its genealogies are multiple and contested. However, it is clear that inthe 1930s, programs in American Civilization (or Culture or Studies), usually interdepartmentalcooperations between English and History, began to appear in some U.S. universities. It is alsoclear that World War II and its aftermath accelerated this process. Institutional milestones includethe establishment of The American Quarterly in 1949 and of the Association of American Studies(ASA) in 1951. In a review of one of the first books on American Studies, Spiller (1949) describedthe field expansively as a response to "the failure of educational scholarship to make our civilizationintelligible to others—and even to otirselves" (p. 168). He located it in a shift from his own cynicalWorld War I generation, "who know more about what is wrong than about how to make it right,"to the generation emerging from WWII with "a violent and reconstructive faith in themselveswhich is hard for us to understand and a confidence in human destiny which seems to us childishlyto deny the Day of Atomic Judgment that we have decreed and created" (p. 168). Gleason (1984)offered a more pragmatic assessment of the effects of World War n, pointing to govemmentsponsorship of nationalistic propaganda (designed to make the war intelligible to publics in termsof American Vcilues and ways of life) and of national character studies (tied to political, diplomatic.

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and military intelligence). Intelligence, a leading activity in the development of multidisciplinaryarea studies during the war, might have fostered a similar approach to American Studies. Davis(1990), for example, suggested that Norman Pearson's experiences as head of counterintelligencein London during World War II for the Office of Strategic Services shaped his approach when hebecame chair of American Studies at Yale and later president of the ASA. The aftermath of WorldWar n and the onset of the Cold War also boosted attempts to project American culture, history,and politics globally. The Salzburg Summer Seminar in American Studies, initiated in 1947, wasone manifestation of this projection.

However, Klein (1990, 1996) noted that optimism about this interdisciphnary venture soondissipated. In part, the parent disciplines (English, History, Political Science, Geography, etc.)never did find a common ground, and American Studies scholarship never did assume a centralplace in those disciplines. Klein (1996) particularly noted the continuing separation and tensionbetween History and English. Reflecting on social as well as disciplinary divisions at ASAconferences, Banta (1991) noted

Lit people tum out for lit sessions and historians listen to historians. From yet another impulse, peoplewill stay away from sessions devoted to ethnic or gay studies with the excuse, 'There's nothing therethat interests me," just as men are wont to shy away from sections dealing with women's issues andvice versa, (p. 380)

Banta's comments also refiect a more significant shift for American Studies. The field initiallycoalesced around American exceptionalism, the search for and (usually) celebration of endtiringAmerican traits. However, that search was disrupted by the counterculture currents ofthe 1960sand 1970s and the rise of cultural studies and postmodern theory in the 1980s. By the early 1990s,when my research began, American Studies had undergone a major reorientation. In a presidentialaddress to the ASA conference, Davidson (1994) refiected on organizational change (membershipincreasing from 1,800 to 4,500 in 1 decade) and theoretical ferment, which she evoked by notinghow traditional topics on the program (e.g., Melville, the Tennessee Valley Authority, slavenarratives) now mixed with the popular and postmodern (e.g., " . . . Japanese Elvis impersonators;Shamu the Whale; the lesbian subject in Arab culture; Irish and Cambodian connections in Lowell,Massachusetts; the 'white' problem in American Studies; Pueblo figurative ceramics; low-ridercars in northem New Mexico...."; p. 124). Emphasizing cultural diversity rather than unity, thesetopics marked the shift from exceptionalism to a comparativist approach that ultimately questionednationality as the master narrative for any discipline.

American Studies opened up institutional affordances for some kind of interdisciplinaryprograms in universities and some kind of scholarly publication about "America" in journals andat conferences. Over time, these affordances shifted from Americanist scholarship in traditionaldisciplinary fields and integrated studies of American exceptionalism to work on popular culture,comparativist and theoretical topics, and the corresponding connection of (personal) socialidentities to scholarly projects. In the seminar I observed, these affordances were quite visible. Forexample, the students' research interests meshed well with the comparativist emphases in the field.For his part. Kohl delivered a decidedly ethnographic push to a group of students more at homein the textualized worlds of English and History, yet his somewhat marginalized social, institu-tional, and disciplinary positioning tempered his influence. Of course, interdisciplinarity mayparticularly depend on such heterogeneous, conflicting, even ambiguous impacts.

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SITUATING FUNCTIONAL SYSTEMS OF THE SEMINAR

Negotiating the Task

The American Studies seminar was designed to give students experience with field research ontopics they had become interested in during the previous two quarters. Kohl began the first sessionby asking students what their research interests were. As each mentioned a topic, he worked to tieit in to his notion of field research—to local neighborhoods and people. In subsequent seminarsessions. Kohl lectured about fieldwork, urban geography, and the history of Midwest City. Hereferred regularly to maps, spending over 1 hour in one session showing veiried maps of MidwestCity and its neighborhoods (topographical, demographic, economic, infiastructure; past andcurrent). The third session met in a chartered bus. Microphone in hand. Kohl gave students a tourof the city, describing the history and geography of commercial and industrietl districts andresidential neighborhoods. Kohl canceled three sessions to give students time to pursue theirresearch, offering to meet, or go out in the fie]d, with them individually. He repeatedly emphasizedthe importance of place, the value of observation and interviewing, and the idea that questions arecrucial and enduring whereas the answers are almost always transitory. He spent a substantialamount of class time discussing the research project and the product he wanted to receive. Hedescribed the final written product students were to turn in as an outline for a larger work (e.g., aMaster's thesis, dissertation, or article), with some discussion (about five pages) of one section ofthe outline, and an annotated bibliography including primary (particularly interview) and secon-dary sources. Kohl asked students to turn in a draft, which he responded to in writing and orallyin the last class. The final draft was due at the end of the final exams.

Although the field research was a primary topic of seminar sessions, students seemed fairlyuncertain about the task. When Kohl announced in Week 7 that they should hand in a draft thefollowing week, students asked niany questions, some clearly negotiations. One student asked ifhe would mind a bibliographic essay instead of an annotated bibliography, and Kohl replied thatstudents could handle it however they wanted. Another student asked if he wanted Romannumerals, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs in the outline, and Kohl indicated the outline did nothave to be formal, that it could consist of paragraphs. Other exchanges challenged Kohl's taskrepresentations and displayed some of the tensions of interdisciplinarity. For example, Danquestioned Kohl's emphasis on geographic contexts, suggesting that place was not an importantissue in his research on a Jewish community center. After first talking about historical divisionsin American Studies between the dominant humanities (English and History) and the socialsciences. Kohl went on to say

Kohl: ... so I think there is a tendency in American Studies' students toessentially emphasize narrative, emphasize literary and historickinds of exposition, I would encourage obviously a sociologicalanalysis, or an economic analysis, but that's up to you, I wouldn'twant to impose a particular kind of construct or framework on yourparticular issue, so use whatever you are interested in, whateversources (you're after), I don't mean to not explore, you may findthat a geographic context, whatever that is, may be better than whatyou started out with, looking at the bibliographic material, or tracing

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the evolution of Jewish centers in Midwest City, that may be adaptedto it, because Jewish centers obviously do have a geography, theyare in places ... they change as the center of gravity of the Jewishcommunity changes, uh, Jewish communities tends to be clustered,as against being scattered ...

Dan: Are you sure about that?Kohl: Yeah ... I've had M.A. theses where they pose the question of,

where is the Japanese community in Midwest City? I mean thereare four or five thousand Japanese, where are they? well, there's onehere, one here, one over there.

Dan: I just keep on asking Jews whether they live in West Hill andnobody's answered in affirmative yet, so it's strange.

female?: Maybe they're ambivalent about it.female?: But in general they do, I mean that's just the only way to form a

Jewish community, is to stick together, I mean that's the generalpattern.

Kohl: Have you been to West Hill?Dan: Yeah, I have.

Taking up Dan's challenge. Kohl contextualized it in terms of cross-disciplinary divisions, locatedhis own (social scientific) orientation, stressed he did not want to impose a framework, and thenretumed to his themes of place and time in relation to Dan's research. Overall, these exchanges inclass significantly widened the textual affordances of the task; in effect, essays could count as"outlines" and "bibliographies" and many objects of study and frameworks could be constmed as'Tield research."

In his written responses to students' drafrs. Kohl was encouraging and substantive (e.g., writingon what he found most interesting, possible resources to consider, questions about specific points).Retuming the drafts in the final class, he offered a general response, he told students he had foundtheir texts very interesting and felt they had "bought the idea that it's the questions that are importantand not the answers." He also emphasized the importance he placed on the annotated bibliography,praising what students had already done and eisking them to include as well "the gaps, what couldn'tyou find or do" and possibly even "fantasy sources."

The diverse task representations that Kohl and students coproduced during the quarter in oraland written exchanges offered students complex affordances for their research and writing. Thestudents' papers, ranging from 5 pages to over 20, all aligned to some aspects of Kohl's taskrepresentations, but in quite varied ways. A number of students made questions and research plans(rather than any findings) the focus of their discussions. Most papers included recognizableoutlines. However, several only used headings to invoke an outline stmcture. One student, whotumed in a draft of a full paper in Week 8, used headings and also added a handwritten note to herfirst page: "My outline is embedded in this draft." Eleven students aligned to Kohl's representationof field research by doing and writing about interviews, but the others did not. Many aiso echoedKohl's geographic themes: At least 10 ofthe papers focused on specific sites and 3 included maps.A striking pattern the texts displayed seemed more connected to the comparativist approach inAmerican Studies than to Kohl's task representations: Many students' research explicitly addressedsocial identities, usually their own. Thus, a lesbian student planned to compare Midwest City's

LITERATE ACTIVITY AND DISCIPLINARITY 2 8 7

gay community to San Francisco's, an Irish Catholic woman was researching Irish Catholic nunsin a local parish at the turn of the century, two Jewish students wrote about local Jewishcommunities, the Hungarian student examined Hungarian immigration to Midwest City early inthe 1900s, and so on. To illustrate the heterogeneity of activity and texts in American Studies, Inext tum to the work of two students.

A Drive Around Town Should Do the Trick: Dwight's Task

In an interview, Dwight, an M.A. student in History, explained that he had written a senior honorsthesis on a 1930s strike in Midwest City, was writing on the same strike for this seminar, andplanned to continue researching it. He was the only student I knew of who took Kohl up on hisoffer to drive around Midwest City during the weeks classes were canceled. Dwight reported thatKohl had helped him to visualize how events of the strike related to the urban landscape of the1930s (a landscape Kohl remembered from his childhood). He said the drive with Kohl had beenvery useful, but added that he felt it represented "enough work" for the course.

Dwight's final paper (4'/i pages of text plus a 2-page bibliography) did not display any featuresof an outline (not even the use of headings) and made no references to local geography. Hisintroduction resembled a fairly standard term paper:

Examining the 1935 Truckers' Strike allows scholars to confront two theoretical barrierswhich plague working-class history: the structural Marxist model and the liberal/consensusmodel. I propose employing Historian David Montgomery's "shop floor/workers' control"thesis as an appropriate interpretive vehicle, thus allowing a broader historical perspectiveto emerge. While sacrificing a nationalist framework, a more signific£int regioneilist contextarises in which both working-class and middle-class responses to industrial capitalism maybe measured. Such responses, when examined at the community or grass-roots level, allowfor a more clear understanding of both class development and community social history.Contemplating the '35 Strike, then, allows me the opportunity to apply and test this thesis.

This introduction was followed by 2V̂ pages in which Dwight reviewed the history of the strikeand his theoretical framework. Near the end of the paper, Dwight offered a more in-progressassessment: "My field and archival research indicates a rich body of under-used resources. Clearly,this is a project rife with potential." His sources in the bibliography were all textual and notannotated, although his final three paragraphs might be interpretable as the bibliographic essayoption. Discussing these sources, he mentioned a collection of oral histories he planned to study,possibly aligning with Kohl's emphasis on interviews. In revising his first draft, he added aparagraph in response to a question Kohl had asked in his written comments about internal divisionsin the union and he expanded his concluding discussion of sources from one paragraph to three.Nevertheless, Dwight's paper appeared to be off-the-shelf work and his alignment to Kohl's taskappeared minimal, choosing a local topic, taking the drive with Kohl, and turning in a text thatdisplayed a few features Kohl had cued. In a text-based interview on Dwight's paper. Kohldiscussed the strike and his drive around the city with Dwight, but then indicated he wasdisappointed Dwight had not displayed in the paper what he had learned on the drive. Nevertheless,Dwight's assessment that the drive was "enough work" seemed to be accurate. Tempered by his

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sense Dwight had learned something useful on the drive for a research project with which he wasgenuinely engaged, Kohl's disappointment with the text was not refiected in the translation ofDwight's work into the institutional grade (A).

Laminating Literate Activity: Lilah Remaps the Territory

Lilah, a lst-year graduate student in American Studies, produced a text for the seminar that, unlikeDwight's, was strongly aligned to Kohl's task representations (a neighborhood, ethnicity, inter-viewing, questions). Lilah also agreed to do a process log on her writing for my study. From herfirst entry, Lilah sketched a map of her literate activity quite different from the simpler one I, asresearcher, had imagined. As she wrote about her quarter's work, her refiections moved seamlesslyacross multiple seminars, her home, and other contexts (past, present, and future).

As for more stressful thoughts—what about all these papers coming up and how can I breakthem down to make them more manageable?

I'm thinking that for Kohl's project, I'll study North Midwest City since I will also becontinuing work on a paper about Chicano ethnicity in another class. With the other paper,I studied how definitiorts of ethnicity changed through the 70's & 80's and how in much ofthe non- Chicano lit ethnicity was judgedfunctiorud if the ethnic group prospered in the U. S.,dysfunctional if they fared poorly. Obviously, that's the more conservative spectrum ofscholarship, but I think money is a pretty embedded standard for lots of things in the U.S.So with the North Midwest City research, I think I'd like to get a feel for how businessesinteract with the community artd what impact they have on notions of ethnicity, if they hadany impact at all. They must in some way since business leaders are often community leaders.

One of these days, I really want to get at how the businessman sometimes tums himselfinto a mythic, natural figure as in the case ofthe Raynor Street Titan, who is this year'sNorth Wind, I think. Greg brought a button home with a drawing of this guy looking likeFather Wind—cheeks puffed and some sage-like hat on his head. I think he sells insurancewhen he's not being the North Wind. Anyway, I think this self or cultural transformation isfascinating, and I wonder if this happens in other communities.

The previous quarter, the history professor, Marini, had asked students to write on a topic theywould research in greater depth the following quarter, and Lilah had written on Chicano ethnicityand economics. Deciding first to align her work for Kohl's seminar with that second paper forMarini by studying a Chicano neighborhood, Lilah soon consolidated the two tasks: The annualCinco de Mayo parade in the North Midwest City became the topic of both papers. Subsequentlog entries introduced another American Studies seminar where ethnicity was foregrounded, acourse taught by Ron Nash, a Native American who studied the ways Native Americans arerepresented in popular media and scholarly texts. Lilah also connected her writing to her husband,Greg, whose work involved community economic development. This link appears explicitly inher discussion of the North Wind button and implicitly in the previous paragraph, where sheexpresses an interest in exploring how business leaders shape community and ethnicity, a theme

Log entries in this section are presented in italics.

LITERATE ACTIVITY AND DISCIPLINARITY 2 8 9

she ultimately highlighted in her papers for both Kohl and Marini. On Lilah's map, writing for allher classes ("all these papers") is found in one territory. And why not? From her perspective, theyall happen on her time, in the lifeworld she inhabits.

For her work on Cinco de Mayo over the quarter, Lilah conducted five interviews withcommunity activists, attended the neighborhood celebration, went to a lecture/party held tocommemorate a new relationship between community organizers and the state historical society,read varied sources on cultural studies and Chicano ethnicity, gave an oral presentation, and wrotetwo papers. She ttirned in the draft for Kohl, got his feedback, and then tumed in the final paper.Lilah's final text aligned to Kohl's task representations in varied ways. She emphasized the researchprocess itself, used interviews as sources, and included headings for sections (evoking the idea ofan outline). The content ofthe sections also displayed her alignment. In "Time and Place," a headingthat quoted Kohl's repeated argument that time and place must be studied together, Lilah describedNorth Midwest City, drawing on a geography student's M.A. thesis. Lilah also displayed alignmentin her uptake of Kohl's written response to her draft. In the seminar. Kohl suggested students mightwant to compare their sites in Midwest City with those in other cities. In her draft, Lilah includeda section titled "Comparative Perspective," a kind of placeholder where she simply wrote that shemight use an article on Cinco de Mayo in San Francisco for comparisons. In his written responseto her draft. Kohl suggested another approach: "You may be interested in comparing Cinco deMayo with other ethnic celebrations as well as with other Chicano/Latino expositions. In M.C.Swedish, Norwegian and Irish national celebrations have a long history." For her final paper, Lilahfollowed Kohl's suggestion, comparing Cinco de Mayo with the history of a Norse-Americancelebration in Midwest City. She concluded her paper with a section on methodology, a bibliog-raphic essay discussing her sources, and a list of questions she had used as a guide in conductingher interviews.

To fuither explore the laminated trajectories of Lilah's literate activity, I partially trace a singlethread in her work constructed around Mexican food and, particularly, the taco. In an early log entry,afrer she has decided to study Cinco de Mayo, Lilah recounts a conversation from Nash's seminar:

One woman is writing her paper on Tex-Mex cuisine. As it happens, the year Tex-Mex becamebig was also the year when illegal aliens and cracking down on border control was the hotpolitical issue. She thinks it has something to do with imperialist nostalgia—desire forcultural artifacts of destroyed or subjugated peoples. It's also a commodification ofculture—a way of getting "goods" from another culture without the people.

Someone mentioned that she should go to the International Festival and look at how thatis conurtodified. Suddenly, ethnicity=food, i.e., something consumable. This is what I'mwondering about with Cinco de Mayo. What's used to present ethnicity? And is the festivalreally about ethnicity or more about commodification of an ethnic community that makes itmore palatable to the larger American community? I've always felt a little disappointed withthese events that claim to be intemational and end up just featuring different dances, clothes,foods. But until today I didn't know why. Really, they lose their cultural differentness byputting it into a shape Americans can buy.

From Nash's seminar, ethnic food as cultural commodification emerges as a possible theme forher work on Cinco de Mayo. Lilah's next log entry reports that she and her husband went to aMexican restaurant on the North side to check out the neighborhood. She writes that the food was

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fantastic and describes the restaurant, its customers, and what the neighborhood looked like atnight. Was Lilah out for a family dinner, doing field research for her papers, both, more? In aninterview she conducted for her research the next week, a community leader, Huerida, offered adifferent view of Cinco de Mayo. Her log notes:

/ can't remember what I was saying some time ago about postmodem interpretations ofethnicity and ethnic festivals—something cynical, I believe, about it all being reduced tofood and dance or something, but I got a very different feeling about it from talking toHuerida. He admitted a lot has been lost by making the festival bigger and more public(formerly they had to be small and quiet so as not to rouse racism in mainly Anglocommunities), but at the same time it's a chance for better understanding between differentgroups of people. It's not much, but it's something. Artd I got the feeling that it's importantyoung Latinos experience it.

As Lilah interviewed community activists, they related conflicting histories of the local Cinco deMayo celebration but uniformly challenged the equation of ethnic food, festivals, and culturalimperialism she had developed in Nash's seminar.

Lilah took up the theme of food and ethnicity, particularly the figure of the taco, in her papersfor Marini and Kohl. However, she connected food less to hegemonic appropriations by thedominant culture than to strategies of resistance and memory by the Chicano community.Moreover, the fiavor of the theme in each paper also refiected her assessment of and relations withher professors. In Kohl's paper, Lilah described the varied accounts ofthe local history of Cincode Mayo informally, playfully foregrounding the taco:

If the example of Cinco de Mayo is at all representative, it seems, then, that history is a matterof who owns cultural symbols. Not only will Santos's version of Cinco de Mayo's genesisand role in the community most likely stand as the authoritative text on the event, but hisability to successfully wield cultural symbols will, to an extent, determine what facets ofChicano/Latino culture the State Historical Society chooses to present. ... As it happens,Santos's cultural symbol has been the taco, a much more marketable commodity than thatelusive slice of history, the 1862 battle at Puebla, Mexico that Santos's critics would hke towield. In short, the debate on Cinco de Mayo is not one of culture versus commercialization,but about which cultural symbols to use and how to use them.

It gets murky, here, though. The taco versus the battle at Puebla seems a pretty patheticcontest on the face of it. And yet, in the waning years of the twentieth century, in MidwestCity, the taco has seemingly won out. The victorious taco is now opening the doors of theSHS [the State Historical Society] and, if Santos has his way, there will be more than migrantstories representing Chicano/Latino history in the state. By the year 2000, Santos wants toread about the "tme contributions of Hispanics—success stories." Utilizing vehicles like theSHS, Santos believes that he can ensure a certain kind of change regarding the community'sself-perception and outsiders' perceptions. Tacos become success stories and installationsat the SHS in this scenario.

For Marini, Lilah produced a more serious, historical discourse. After relating Santos's accountfor how the community came to accept his plan to use Cinco de Mayo as a way to revitalize the

LITERATE ACTIVITY AND DISCIPLINARITY 2 9 1

North Side, Lilah presents an account that links Santos, Cinco de Mayo, and the taco, succinctlysummarizing the taco's benefits:

When Santos finally got festival plans off the ground in 1981, and local businesses askedhim which ethnic aspect to market, he suggested the taco, and, as it tums out, the taco hasseemingly brought in grants and revenues to the community (over two million in 1990),'*bought Santos a voice in governmental affairs and history-making, and returned control ofthe community back to local businesses.

The only other mention of the taco in Marini's paper was parenthetic and unelaborated. When Iasked Lilah in an interview at the end of the quarter how she chose to depict a battle between thetaco and the historical event in Kohl's paper, she replied

um, Santos mentioned, he said, he said that, I don't know, he told the business community,"What can we sell? We can sell the taco." you know, [she laughs, I laugh], like I, that reallyhit a note because all these older people were saying, you know, "What kind of (foods) werethere? Oh, there were tacos," you know, this anglicized stuff, whereas like Santos wasreveling in it or something, I don't know, I think that's why it was so ironic, here's this taco,it is what has sold the festival, I think, and it is what has interested the State Historical Society[I laugh, she laughs], I don't get it all, but it's the taco that becomes history.

Following the taco across varied sites, accounts, and texts suggests the lamination and diffusionof Lilah's literate activity, the weaving of historical trajectories that are profoundly perspectival,mediated, and heterogeneous.

Although Lilah consistently indicated in log entries and interviews that she was more concemedwith and worked harder for Nash's paper than Marini's, and Marini's than Kohl's, her texts andactions told another story. When I asked why her efforts were so different, she pointed to theprofessors' personalities. Lilah indicated that she didn't really "charge up" for Kohl's task becauseshe felt as though he was not really interested in students' work, although he was encotiraging ofit, and because he was undemanding, reputed to be an easy grader. On the other hand, she alsomentioned she felt "freer" writing for Kohl than for Marini or Nash. Lilah indicated that Marinimotivated her to do the work, but also encouraged her to be contrary:

There's something about his [Marini's] personality that I just want to challenge.... It wassomething about just his whole course that I wanted to challenge, I think it's that— t̂hatstraight historical approach that I resist, and I think it's also his kind of, oh, what's the rightword, it's not arrogance, but it's that sense of knowing things.

Lilah's interview comments pointed to a number of factors motivating the way she undertookseminar writing tasks, including her own interests and preferred stances, grades, institutionalrelationships (who was in her department, who might be her advisor), and a kind of interpersonalattunement with the professors that was strongly affective and eveiluative. In all of these terms.Kohl's task and Kohl himself were not very motivating, yet not only was her paper for Kohl stronglyaligned to his task representations, her paper for Marini was as well.

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Lilah said she had selected the northside neighborhood and then Cinco de Mayo because shehad proposed studying Chicano ethnicity in Marini's seminar. However, nothing in the earlierpaper she had written for Marini suggested that she was contemplating (or Marini was seeking)local research using ethnographic field methods. The final draft I received of Lilah's paper forMarini was titled "Penultimate, as yet untitled drafr on Cinco de Mayo." Lilah had turned this draftin to Marini and received his written and oral responses to it. Some sections of Marini's paper weretaken directly or with minimal modification from Kohl's paper. With only slight revision, thesection on comparison, which Kohl had suggested and then shaped in his written response to herdraft, appeared in Lilah's paper for Marini. Lilah's analysis of Cinco de Mayo and ethnicity alsofocused on, and was sympathetic to, the views of the community leaders she encountered ininterviews prompted by Kohl's task. In Marini's paper, Lilah did not use subheadings and did citemore textual sources. Nevertheless, given the direction of these infiuences, her description of herpresentation on Cinco de Mayo in Marini's seminar, and Marini's response to it, is not terriblysurprising.

I presented my research at the last class (artd thank goodness it really was the last class!).And he seemed a bit frustrated that I hadn 't done more, that I'd listened more to the activists(who lament the loss of culture in Cinco de Mayo). He had the same perspective asKohl—there's no loss, only change. I feel like that's easy to say for an outsider. It still seemsto me that traditional notion of history. Historians define what is or is not going on;participants only inarticulately sense or react to things.

She goes on to note that Marini stressed the need to find documents to back up all the interviews,glossing his attitude as "It's not valid if it's not written."

Seeking basic procedural display with Kohl's task and intending to make it contribute to herwork for Marini, Lilah ended up aligning more with Kohl than Marini, displaying forms ofdisciplinarity that made her work problematic and frustrating from Marini's perspective. Why?Perhaps in part because Kohl's task proleptically stmctured practices and afforded experiences,such as the open-ended interviews, that indexed Kohl's own orientations to research. In otherwords, as Kohl's task representations mediated Lilah's literate activity, the sedimented, presuppo-sitional voices of social and disciplinary networks that Kohl had appropriated were beingreappropriated, largely tacitly, by Lilah. However, as Dwight's case makes clear, thatreappropria-tion was dialogic, not a one-way transmission of disciplinarity. Lilah's literate activity aroundAmerican Studies must be read as deeply laminated, weaving together diverse trajectories fromher multifaceted lifeworld.

CONCLUSION

In this article, I sought to illustrate some theoretical and methodological implications of movingfrom analysis of writing (texts and transcription) in discourse communities to analysis of literateactivity and disciplinarity in laminated functional systems (situated and typified). With writingviewed as a thread in the situated, mediated, and dispersed fabric of literate activity, heterogeneityassumes a central position. Heterogeneity appears in tracing writing processes and disciplinaryenculturation. For example, Lilah's research and writing for American Studies weaves together

LITERATE ACTIVITY AND DISCIPLINARITY 2 9 3

such dispersed and varied events as Marini's assignments, her Mexican dinner, the North Windbutton, the discussion in Nash's course of Tex-Mex cuisine and colonization, her affective reactionsto Kohl and Marini, and her interviews with the community leaders. In Kohl's seminar, such diversemicrogenetic, ontogenetic, mesogenetic, and cultural-historical trajectories collided in complexways. From these collisions, students engaged in actions and produced texts that were at onceextremely heterogeneous and quite centripetal. These diverse texts and tasks were all ratified inKohl's institutional reception. Yet tensions between, for example, historical and ethnographicapproaches are visible at many points (e.g., the different tasks performed by Dwight and Lilah;Marini's negative reception of Lilah's work). In multiple senses then, this research records theheterogeneous (re)production of American Studies (as an ensemble of people, artifacts, practices,and institutions) in the literate activity surrounding a graduate seminar.

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