1.4.1 The Researcher As Research Instrument

As teenager I realised that I often did not think as sequentially as I was told I would. In Vienna's spring-green or winter-frozen parks and in coffeehouses around billiard tables, we discussed such matters among friends. Unfortunately, my mates could not follow my perception about my non-sequential thinking. Only twenty-five years later, readings on connectionism in cognitive anthropology should break this loneliness.

Connectionism infers that human thinking occurs not only one-dimensional, linear, in sequential considerations. Unhampered by prescribed, conscious sequential logic, connecting and combining data from different also appears possible instantly and simultaneously, even contradicting kinds. The resulting instantly available, intuitive judgement of a situation, or solution for a problem, or answer to a question, become justified only afterwards by sequential, serial argumentation. Quinn and Strauss questioned a „widely shared folk model” that presumes „knowledge ... to consist of stored propositions that are processed serially” (Quinn and Strauss 1994: 285). To them, knowledge is not always processed serially, sequentially, and intuition therefore rational.

The responses that are the output of connectionist networks are improvisational because they are created on the spot, but regulated because they are guided by previous learned patterns of associations; they are not improvised out of thin air (Quinn and Strauss 1994: 287).

Consequently, I could expect that social science theory, research approaches and attitudes, which I accumulated and internalised, „learned” and „stored”, during my study of organization anthropology, would bear connectionistic fruit in my encounters with the movement. My own, „improvisational” intra-personal responses to encounters in the field, as forth-flowing from a holistic interpretative intention, I could regard as not necessarily falling „out of thin air”. The negative side of connectionism may be a blindness for subjective inconsistencies. Its positive side is a „regulated improvisation”, the thinking of the yet unthought (Kimmerle 1995: 104), the seeing of the yet unseen, the understanding of the not yet understood. What I had to allow my respondents, I could as well allow myself as researcher.

The idea of connectionism strengthened my self-confidence as qualitative researcher. Retrospectively I perceive, this connectionist self-awareness interacted fruitfully with my reluctance to look on the movement only from one theoretical angle. Instead, I intended to look at it holistically, connectionistically. I was my means to achieve that. Giddens observed „new attempts of synthesis” of theories (Giddens 1993: 16). As I acknowledged my anyway unavoidable connectionist capability, I could regard my self as a wandering synthesis of theories. Consciously committed to none, I hoped to be capable to apply parts of some eclectically as situations appeared to require.