Re: Individual activity, motivation, progress & diversity

Eugene Matusov (ematusov who-is-at cats.ucsc.edu)
Wed, 01 Nov 1995 23:56:37 -0800

Hello everybody--

I'd like respond briefly (hopefully :-) to questions people raised in regard
to my Sunday message.

1. Angel's recent messages on indigenous cultures and educational reform are
extremely thoughtful and sad. I agree with Jim Martin that analyzing
"successful" stories is important. Also some "failure" are for good (e.g.,
the Russian communist experiment in this century). In a way, test by
"success" can be more dramatic and painful than a test by "failure" (at
least you know what expect in this case).

2. Michael Glassman wrote, "If you lose the even, continuous quality between
the two [the social and individual -- EM] I think that you lose a great
deal, and it slides into either social determinism or maturationism." I
absolutely agree with that and I actually wanted to express this point in my
message. Sorry, if it didn't get through clearly. Thanks, Michael, for
this clarification.

3. Peter Smagorinsky asked, "... how does Moll explain such phenomena, which
I can only assume are taking place in present-day South Africa? Even though
blacks constitute a majority there, thus making the situation fundamentally
different, the problem still remains of accounting for the persistence of
cultural beliefs in times of legal change."

Peter, it seems to me that Ian (Moll) did not seem to provide much
discussion beyond I provided in the quotes. It is interesting indeed of
what kind of discussion is going on between black and white people in South
Africa in regard to education for blacks. Does anyone know? It's too bad
that Ian is not on the xmca net.

4. Thanks Mike for your useful extract from the LCHC article, "Culture and
intelligence." It would be interesting to know if Ian agrees with what you
wrote but makes different conclusion or he would disagree entirely. There
are at least two possible positions to reject the conclusion about value of
sociocultural diversity of ways of doing things presented in the extract: 1)
there is the best way of doing things (and this way is Western one) or 2)
there are many ways of doing things but the Western way is more powerful (so
far).

5. Angel wrote in a reaction to Mike's extract on October 30, "Our
understanding of 'intelligence' or other related notions has moved from one
of Xcentric (X=dominant cultural group) 'deficit' to the sociolinguistic
and cultural relativistic notion of 'difference'... and perhaps we should
move onwards to a further understanding of the issues in terms of
'domination'." I think that the "deficit model" is not so wrong when it
refers to deficit of power. Foucault would probably say that intelligence
is power, so lack of power means a lack of AN intelligence (i.e., a specific
intelligence that produces the crucial misbalance of power). In this regard
and the talk about power, the contrast between Ian's and Peter's approaches
can be simplified in the following metaphor: Ian suggests armament of the
weak (via involving in formal Western schooling, Western competitive skills,
and Western value system), while Peter suggests disarmament of the strong
(via appreciation cultural diversity by Western culture and diversifying
Western institutions and practices).

6. Galina Zuckerman wrote on October 30 about individual activity, "He
[Georgiy Shchedrovitsky -- EM] suggested to differentiate between two terms:
"individual" and "individualized", the latter indicating social origin and
social context of any human action or activity. That helped a lot to extend
an activity theory in Russia in the last decade, particularly to develop
models of nonadditive cooperative action which never is equal to the sum of
individual imputes of all the participants." I think that Shchedrovitsky's
notion of "individualized activity" is interesting but not exactly on the
target for me (the term itself sounds awkward in English for me. Galina,
how does it sound in Russian?). I think that the solution of dualism
between the social and individual can be in the paradigm shift from
considering the Robinson-Crusoe-discovering-the-world perspective to
considering sociocultural activities and people's roles in and contributions
to them. Schedrovitsky's notion seems to point to the right direction but
in negative terms stating what sociocultural activity is not (i.e., it is
not a sum of individual actions) rather than what it is.

Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz
------------------------------------------------
Eugene Matusov
Psychology Department
University of California at Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
EMATUSOV who-is-at cats.ucsc.edu