UC Santa Cruz

The study synthesizes videotaped observations of Cherokee children’s and families’ interactions to illustrate a cultural process of harmonious collaborative practice that occurs simultaneously across developmental time scales, from the cultural/historical to the microgenetic. The study shows that in multiple scales of observation, the children’s and families’ interactions contribute to the moment-by-moment harmonious embodied collaboration that includes everyone present and remains harmonious and free of conflict, from their micro movements to the cultural historical situation. These processes comport with Cherokee Community Values that involve many explicit ways that Cherokee families have been directly instructed to collaborate by and with children and Elders since before European contact.

These observations exhibit patterns of historic, community-wide Cherokee practices occurring across generations while simultaneously capturing fluid collaboration unfolding in fractions of seconds. Specifically, the Cherokee children, families, and community members in this study collaborated in fluid and harmonious ways across generations within the community as they simultaneously collaborated in ways that are also fluid, harmonious, and with a high degree of mutually embodied, multi-modal interactional synchrony. Engagement in Cherokee community-scale collaborative practices fundamentally involves skillful attunement and bodily coherence in micro-scale collaboration.