It seems that things get hot when we start dealing with what that medium
might be even when we agree in principle that human brains are part of a
system that is composed of other and various kinds of human artefacts and
structures that exist independently of the brain.
Today, while dealing with the ever problematic issue of how to treat various
administrative categories of ethnicity, thinking the inevitable: i.e.,
administrative ethnic categories are, among several things, glosses for
social class, it struck me that I haven't ever seen a discussion on xmca of
class as a factor in Vygotsky inspired research. Perhaps it isn't even in
Vygotsky. I can't remember seeing anything in the two Vygotsky books I've
read (Stds on Hist of Bhvr, Thght & Lng). But I also haven't seen anything
in any of the various secondary books and articles I've seen.
Nevertheless, if Vygotsky was working within the framework he professed to
be working in, it would be inescapable for some issues of class, or class
consciousness to be somewhere in the discourse (whether as issues of
bourgeois or proletarian culture, etc.)
It would seem even more inescapable when looking at formal education (the
framework within which scientific concepts become an issue) which initially
emerges as a framework for maintaining class structures (ample evidence
available from cultural and historical record of stratified societies).
Following Willis', Learning to Labor, or Eckert's, Jocks and Burnouts, we
see that high schools in our society perform this function on the down side
through an interplay of the school's institutional activities and
multi-generational working class networks through which the teenager
journeys. We also know that prep schools perform this process at the
narrower end of the social pyramid.
Isn't this an example of internalization? Are there any studies of class in
the CHAT tradition or studies in which class figures as an important
element/category? At this point it's not crucial for me to know how "class"
is defined as long as it includes a reference to the individual's relation
to the productive process in sectoral terms, just whether some notion of
class is employed.
Paul H. Dillon