More on reification...

Although I've almost stopped reading Wenger's book on Communities of Practice - my colleagues in the KIT Library are rightly getting insisitent that it needs to be returned - I just wanted to post one more quote before I lose it:

If reification prevails ... then there may be not enough overlap in participation to recover a co-ordinated, relevant or generative meaning.
Wenger, 1998, p.65

This means, I think, that you can't understand a field by just looking at the abstractions, tools, symbols, stories, terms, and concepts that reify something in congealed form. To undertstand, you have to be part of it by being engaged.