We’ve developed this framework to plot Deep Disposition work, demonstrate the relationships between the different types of work involved, and help us and others situate ourselves within it. It is still in development, and will evolve as we share and apply it.
Overview
The Canvas centres around three nested Layers of Self, Community and Society. The boundaries of these layers are permeable and constantly shifting, so the lines are dotted. As are the boundaries of the four ‘enculturation’ Zones of Told, Breathed, Built and Lived, which plot across the layers.
The nested-layer structure follows the socio-ecological tradition in developmental psychology — Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory (The Ecology of Human Development, 1979), which is also in our Glossary. One honest difference: Bronfenbrenner’s rings are defined by how directly a person participates in each, with the person at the centre rather than forming a ring of their own. Our ‘Self’ layer is doing something slightly different from his innermost system, and we have kept it because it earns its place in practice.
Sitting underneath, around, and through the work are three types of Support. Although these three types are distinct, they are also inseparable, and mutually dependent. Although these three types of Support are situated near certain Zones, that is not intended to carry meaning – Relating is as important for Built as it is for Breathed, for example.
Perhaps imagine that the whole model is always spinning.
Where this comes from
The concept behind the Zones is enculturation – the lifelong process through which people learn, embody, enact, make sense of, and replicate their culture’s norms, values, ways of being and deep dispositions. The term was coined by the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits in Man and His Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology (Knopf, 1948); a standard reference treatment is Fitz John Porter Poole in Tim Ingold’s Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology (1994). See our Glossary entry, which also carries a caution about the concept’s contested history in anthropology since the 1980s.
It happens in many ways: through explicit teaching in families, schools and religions; through implicit socialisation as we observe and imitate others; through embodied and material enactment through habits, rituals, and built environments; and through symbolic and mediated expressions such as stories, art and media.
Over time, individuals may also engage in reflexive enculturation, critically examining or reshaping the beliefs and patterns they have inherited — an idea present in Herskovits’ original formulation, not a later addition. Enculturation is a feedback loop: a process of both shaping culture and being shaped by it in return.
How the Zones relate to those modes
Our four Zones are informed by those modes rather than derived from them, and it is worth being straight about the join. They do not map one-to-one: ‘embodied and material enactment’ is a single mode that we split across two Zones (Breathed and Built), while ‘explicit teaching’ and ‘symbolic and mediated expressions’ are two modes we combine into one (Told). Four happens to meet four, but by our design choice rather than by derivation.
We think the split and the merge earn their keep — the practical difference between somatic practice and the built environment matters more to this work than the theoretical difference between a lesson and a film. But the Zones are a practitioner’s cut, not an operationalisation of the anthropology, and presenting them as the latter would be overclaiming.
Reflexive enculturation has no Zone, which is a genuine gap rather than an oversight we are comfortable with: it is the mode that carries the possibility of change, and it currently sits in the prose and not in the diagram. We are working out whether it belongs as a fifth Zone, as something that cuts across all four, or as a property of the Self layer. Views welcome.
| Zone | What it is | Enculturation mode |
|---|---|---|
| Z1 · Told | The ways in which deep dispositions are articulated, shared and contested. E.g. education, culture, media, advocacy. | Explicit & symbolic |
| Z2 · Breathed | The deeply internalised practices through which culture becomes embodied. E.g. meditation, ritual, somatics, reflection. | Embodied |
| Z3 · Built | The infrastructures, technologies and designs that encode and reinforce deep dispositions. E.g. architecture, design, technology. | Material, environmental |
| Z4 · Lived | How deep dispositions are reinforced and modelled through social participation and the rules we live under. E.g. community projects, institutional and legal change. | Implicit and explicit — participation is largely implicit, but legal and institutional codification is among the most explicit forms cultural transmission takes. This Zone carries both, and may need splitting. |
In use
This is still WIP, but for now here is a quick-and-dirty demonstration of how the Deep Canvas might be used – as a tool to map interventions and the relationships between them, and spot gaps or opportunities.
This could be one grantmaker’s portfolio, or it could be a view of the whole change ecology’s approach to a particular narrative re-orientation.
Note that just one of these interventions alone might not be particularly impressive or influential, but when in concert with the others, a real power develops. You could think of it like music: a single note is not very impressive, but a whole symphony is.
This canvas also allows us to spot gaps. This is of course a hypothetical example – but where’s the Built work, in any Layer? Or the Community Lived work? Or the Community Told work? There will need to be work across all Layers and Zones – in this example, work should be found/initiated in those areas.