There is a tradition of criticism of the cultural-historical (circa
USSR 1932 version) concerning cultural variations in thought that goes
back at least 20 years. In the preface to Luria's book, Cognitive Development,
I demurred from his conclusions regarding the restriction of non-literate
peoples to functional/graphic thinking on methodological grounds based on the
prior decade of my own work in Liberia and Mexico. In 1981 and 1983 LCHC
(specific contributors names to be found in the initial footnote) wrote
two articles on culture and intelligence (Sternberg's Handbook of Intelligence,
Cambridge U Press, 1981) and culture and development (Mussen's Handbook
of Child Development, 1983) in which that criticism was extended in the
context of our critiques of cross-cultural psychology in the positivist
mode and the first steps at a synthesis were begun. In the first Activity
Congress in Berlin (1986?) the name of Vygotsky was hardly to be heard
and the name of Luria was heard even more rarely. In my talk at that
conference I outlined a way to think of the convergence of AMerican
pragmatic/contextualist approaches with cultural-historical-activity
approaches. The merging of those two streams of intellectual history,
I argued, could lead to a productive, qualitatively new, development
in the study of culture in mind.
Peeter Tulviste, in a series of publications (most accessible in his
Cultural-historical Development of Verbal Thinking; Nova, 1991) took
me/us to task as well meaning liberals, but not entirely wrongheaded,
and offered an activity-o-centric way of thinking about the heterogeneity
of thought in culture/history. Jim Wertsch in Voices of the Mind has
an excellent discussion of the different ways of thinking about
heterogeneity drawing on Bakhtin and all of the above. More recently,
Jim has written about the "ambivilance" of Vygotsky in references
he can supply.
In Cuernavaca, Mexico, last week, I was at a Vygotsky centenial while
you folks were discussing these issues. There these issues were
widely discussed with differening views expressed. For the vast majority
of attendees (400+) the urgent question is how to find a way improve
the education of the Mexican masses. People with very little resources
travelled long distances and sat through long meetings hoping that the
legacy of Vygotsky would help them deal with their dire fiscal/historical
circumstances. Vygotsky was still a new name to many of them. They
responded most positively, it seemed to me, to those among the speakers
who provided them with a 1950's narrative of the cultural-historical
school.
Perhaps we should think about an international, e-mail mediated, focused
seminar on these topics for the fall? I would participate with pleasure
on the basis of my limited experience in attempting cooredinated international
readings/discussions. Is this an important enough topic for more than
casual CHAT chat?
mike
ps- Piotr: I fully agree with you on the great value in various
literary figures as inspirations for psychological theory. For a lesson
on the temporal nature of visual images, Prince Myshkin's descriptions
of an execution or Tolstoi's theory-in-practice novel, War and Peace,
on the nature of human nature and historcal causality are difficult to
match.