Nate has usefully raised the issue of Luria's results from Central
Asia. I have done the same but view things somewhat differently
than Eugene (of course, intersecting the events in question from
such different starting points!).
Here is part of the exchange:
> Yes, there was religion based literature, but my understanding
> from Luria's
> work was that "literacy" was selective and very few had access to it. My
> point was in forming a "pre-soviet" Uzbekistan identity it was a
> version of
> literacy that was very Russian and a result of Luria's work and
> the literacy
> campaigns.
Behind "Luria's literacy campaigns" in Uzbekistan and other places of the
Soviet Union in 30s was NKVD the predecessor of KGB. If you carefully read
Luria's transcripts, you can find between the lines of "illiterate" people's
statements about power that Luria did not want to see in their answers (or
did he?!).statements about power that Luria did not want to see in their answers (or
did he?!).
-------
First, this exchange indexes with special clarity why people like
jim wertsch prefer the term socio-cultural to cultural historical
or activity theory. Luria was a modernist. Not the only one around
at the time in either Russia or the US. In so far as history
implied progress/development, it is a very unfortunate term to
use as a paradigm name. Or at least, some think so.
Second, Luria's work was never published in the USSR at the time
and could hardly have been a cause of anything... until we get
to the first report in 1970-71 and then 75-76 in Russian and
English. Very different times.
Third, as discussed in Cultural Psychology I think Luria's methods
in that work flawed from a chat point of view. However, our
socio-historical-activity-cultural-cohort in Russia thinks that
I am romantically relativist, while Jack Goody, David Olson, and
others assume that he affirms at modernist account of cultural
and psycvhological Development.
mike
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