mike,
I for one would very much like to see a discussion of the relationship
between culture and history. I think this is perhaps the most crucial
issue. When Eugene tosses off the reference to Luria and Vygotsky's work
among the Uzbeki I have the feeling that something is being missed. As an
anthropologist by training, I'm somewhat astounded at the ways the term
culture gets used. As far as boundaries go, that's one area that seems very
difficult if not impossible to bound and its significant transformations
(crossings_ all seem to have to do, directly or indirectly, with historical
processes involving changes in productive systems. But history itself is an
equally loose word; e.g., the history is what the victors write, etc. The
marxist tradition in which Eugene most correctly places Vygotsky uses the
notion of history in a different way obviously and this is tied to a very
definite theory concerning the transition of modes of production. The
marxist historians, Hobsbawm, Thompson,, Le Febrve, or earlier, Kautsky on
christianity, etc. and to a large degree the Annales school basically start
from the premise that history as what is passed along about what happened is
the history of class struggle told from one or another perspective and the
specific form that the class struggle assumes is directly related to the
dominant modes of production. From my knowledge of the anthropological
record, I can't find serious refutations of some of the basic ideas that
underpin this or the notions of cultural evolution (a la Morgan) that
underpin the basic marxist theory of culture and history. Sure, there are a
lot of people who have made critiques (starting with Boas) but at the
structural level these critiques just wash out. The force of their
critiques remains the vacuity of the use of "progress" as a moral system and
I totally agree with that aspect of the critique. But when we look at the
structural institutional level, e.g., family systems, certain types of
institutions do tend to co-occur with certain levels of development of
technical productive forces and patterns of property. The historical record
of the development of the state in many different parts of the world, at
many different absolute times (7-10000 ya in mesopatamia and Egypt, only
3-1000 ya in the americas, perhaps only 500 ya in some of the Polynesian
Islands), illustrates patterns that cannot be attributed to diffusion but
that yet bear striking parallelisms ranging from the specificity of state
religious cults, the emergence of writing, and even royal incest.
Of course I recognize that the term "primitive" has had an important role in
all types of imperialism and cultural chauvinism and that is a birth mark of
the marxist theory of culture and history as well. Nevertheless, the words
"culture?" and "history" get used in a lot of what I hear/read people
saying/writing more or less the way Humpty Dumpty said words should be
used, which doesn't do a whole lot for advancing our knowledge of ourselves
or our world, although it certainly does seem to be associated with
advancing individuals through activity systems dedicated to the production
of ideologies compatible with the prevailing structures of power.
So yes, please bring on those readings!!
Paul H. Dillon
----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Cole <mcole@weber.ucsd.edu>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2001 9:32 AM
Subject: different flavors of chat
>
> Hi Eugene-- There is ample textual evidence for the reasons that Jim
> prefers sociocultural to sociohistorical; in general they support your
> points, Eugene-- when history is equated with progress, and ESPECIALLY
> when history/progress are interpreted as predictable, the consequences
> are well known and, I think is fair to say, unhealthy to human life (not
> the only unhealthy world view around, by any means!).
>
> There is also pretty good textual evidence for the tradeoffs involved in
> substituting culture for history,e.g. the absence of historical analysis
> that goes with the territory.
>
> If this is a topic people wish to discuss, I could pull together some of
> the relevant texts in the next few weeks, scan them, and make them
> available.
>
> I wonder if others, like myself, attended the Lahti AT conference a
> decade ago? There was a -- to me -- totally astounding set of events there
> that manifested the insensitivity/disinterest in issues of diversity at
> the time. I am thinking of the symposium that began with Toulmin,
proceeded
> to Zinchenko, and ended with a Vietnamese colleague (sorry, in my
chauvinism
> I forget his name). The hall was packed for Toulmin. 75%of the audience
> stood up and left when he finished speaking. When Zinchenko, translated
> by Peeter Tulviste finished, 75% of the remaining audience left. I recall
> moving, with a few colleagues, to the front and center of the room so that
> the remain speaker could see that he was not alone in the large hall.
>
> A LOT has changed since then. The recent conference in Brazil attested to
> that and the theme of the upcoming ISCRAT conference, where the
sociocultural
> and CHAT traditions re-unite attests to will for a diversified future.
Getting
> a running start at AERA seems a fine way to go, and if folks want to start
> even earlier or continue such discusions on XMCA, they will find a willing
> set of participants at LCHC.
> mike
>
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