[Xmca-l] Re: In defense of Vygotsky [It is activity, not perezhivanie, to which the child relates]

Annalisa Aguilar annalisa@unm.edu
Wed Oct 22 21:55:46 PDT 2014


This continues and extends from my original post concerning Andy's breakdown of ANL vs. LSV.

There are about 8 points total...

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2. [It is activity, not perezhivanie, to which the child relates] (see original post below)
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You say we (Enligh speakers) take for granted the meaning of perezhivanie, which I accept, and that it would have _meant_ something to LSV and his students in the contexts in which they lived. I am guessing, then, the word was already in use in the language, and that LSV was enlisting a commonly-used word for a specific purpose, and that was to capture the unit of analysis for the environment (as it presents to the child).

I enjoy very much when you you say:
"...the mediated relation to Nature is not *instead of* an immediate relation to Nature, but *as well as* an immediate relation to Nature."

...however, I think you have fallen into the pothole I was attempting to avoid. I am not trying to understand Vygotsky at this precise moment, but Leontiev (even if I agree with Vygotsky) What I am trying to tease out is what was it that Leontiev was asserting and why?

Is he saying that activity is a substitute for heredity or for transforming heredity as a larger force over heredity (to deter the notion of fatalistic determinism)? I'm sorry if I'm being obtuse, but I am in the dark, because, well, I am in the dark! 

--- clip from previous post below

>> Wed, 22 Oct 2014 06:28:48 +0000
>> Annalisa wrote:

> _2nd charge_: It is activity, not perezhivanie, to which the child relates
> ----------
> ANL in his assertion of the child relating to her environment, claims she can only relate to the environment (that is, nature) via objects available to her, and by acting upon those objects. For this reason, ANL challenges LSV's definition of perezhivanie as a unity of the subject and the object. Specifically, personality factors in the child and those "actionable" objects in the environment.
>
> (I think you are crying foul here because perezhivanie as a theory had not yet been fully formed (?) or perhaps not fully understood by LSV's students, ANL being one of them.)
> ----------

> Andy's reply to #2 above:
Perezhivanie is a Russian word which would have been well understood by Vygotsky's students, even if they had never analysed it before. No, the point is a subtle one: the mediated relation to Nature is not *instead of* an immediate relation to Nature, but *as well as* an immediate relation to Nature.

>--end


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