A question from a newcomer the other day about the CHAT acronym, and how
the parts of its expansion Cultural-Historical Activity Theory should be
seen as related led me back to a thread I've been sort of following through
the Xlist archives before, without actually braiding it into a textual
piece of macrame.
I thought it might be an interesting piece of collective memorywork to just
give you a tracing of some of the vocabulary -- when did the CHAT name come
into use? -- and some of the people and activity. Just a sketch of what I
have been skimming through today:
The Xlist archives go back to November 87. First hit on a word search for
cultural-historical (with or without a hyphen) is Yrjo Engestrom's CALL FOR
IDEAS AND SUGGESTIONS on February 11th 1988, where he requests the list
participants to:
"Send me any ideas, suggestions or questions that you might think would
benefit preparing a good, interesting conference around the
cultural-historical ideas of human activity. I would especially appreciate
your suggestions and ideas concerning the themes and possible sessions or
workshops in the congress. It seems very certain now that a large group of
leading Soviet psychologists and philosophers working in the Vygotskian
tradition will also attend - so the congress will provide a forum for
exchanging ideas across many old barriers."
So there IS activity with cultural-historicalit right from the start -- but
no CHAT, yet. Yrj=F6's posting was in preparation for the second ISCRAT
congress (International Society for Cultural Research on Activity Theory),
which was in Lathi, Finland in May 1990, four years after the first one in
Berlin. (There's a brief history of ISCRAT at
http://www.iscrat.org/history.html ).
In the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s there were occasional
reflections on the Xlists concerning how to fit together the social, the
cultural and the historical in a single, conceptually apt (as well as in
terms of textual politics) label. In a posting from April 24th 1989 Mike
Cole reports in a posting on *What shall a thing be called?* on a
correspondence with Jim Wertsch, where he has discussed:
"the pros and cons of various names for the general approach to the study
of mind initiated in the USSR by Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev. Those
worthy gentlepeople, as you know, used various names for their enterprise,
including cultural-historical, instrumental, and later the concept of
activity came to be highlighted."
Mike thinks that:
"the issue of labels is non-trivial. The notion of cultural psychology is
"in" among some social scientists these days; Jim Stigler and Rick Shweder,
who are participants in this network, are editing a book with that title
and hosting a discussion at SRCD on this topic later this week. Jerry
Bruner is writing a book that may have this label in its title and I have
been working on a manuscript that will, unless this discussion changes my
mind, also bear the label, cultural psychology.
The question is, what "voices" are evoked by various labels, and which most
suit various purposes? I would be very interested in what ghosts spring to
life for various XLCHC participants when they hear socio-cultural approach
to psychology vs. cultural psychology vs cultural-historical psychology,
and what what alternatives seem most reasonable."
No time to dive further into that, here...
In May 1990 Yrjo writes about "cultural-historical theory of activity" and
in December Mike uses *cultural-historical activity theory* ONCE. The
not-yet-condensed label may have been more widespread, but my word-search
gadget is primitive enough to be thrown off track by intervening
line-breaks and unable to do combined searches :-( On the other hand...
references to the *cultural-historical scool* with Vygotsky, Leont'ev,
Luria as the *original troika* are a lot more frequent in those years than
the explicit combination with AT.
The first archived occurrence of CHAT in this specific sense -- there is,
of course, a lot of chit-chat and other chatter -- is in a posting by Mike
on November 28th of 1992:
"I am responding to a recent message by Chuck Bazerman which raises many
interesting issues. First, there is the question of relating current
research in the cultural-historical activity theory tradition (hereafter
CHAT for short) to current thinking in literary criticism and social theory
of the structuration theory kind. A note sent earlier today quoting Kenneth
Burke speaks to that point. It is a vast area open for exploration, one
that seems to speak to issues raised by Ratner and responded to by
Velichkovsky most recently."
As for priority claims, I have, however, heard Mike attribute the CHAT
acronym to Arne Raeithel, which may well be true (in some lost or private
message): in 1991 and 1992 there was a lot of electronic chat about CHAT,
over the Xlists as well as in the network of psychology researchers working
on the funding application for an international project called *Acting in
Culture*. The preparatory discussions, as far as content was concerned,
seem to have been carried on to a considerable extent over the Xlists. The
project was to be aimed at collaborative production of theory, well
grounded in corresponding traditions in various countries. The
collaborators "in order of appearance" were Mike Cole, Alfred Lang, Arne
Raeithel, Jim Wertsch, Yrj=F6 Engestr=F6m, Yutaka Sayeki and Naoki Ueno -- M=
ike
read this proposal at the ISCRAT session in honour of Arne Raeithel last
year, and I have the proposal text from Alfred Lang's emeritation CD. The
project was not funded anywhere :-( but the issues of this project
continued to provide fertilizer :-) for the Xlist discussions for a
considerable span of time (well, how does one draw THOSE limits? -- is
there ever an end??)
By the next autumn the CHAT name seems to have been adopted into the UCSD
vocabulary, at least: there is a course on Cultural Historical Activity
Theory running from October to December 1993, and using the CHAT acronym as
a subject line label in their postings of summaries and questions to the
XACT list. Earlier courses/ /seminars had been on Activity Theory, plainly
-- again as far as I can see from skimming the archives. But in the fall
quarter of 1993, it's definitely CHAT: and from thence it's been with us!
cheers
eva