Re: [xmca] If all hopes are lost for establishing a more workable social system , then please tell me where A.N.Leontyev has gone wrong with his definition of "Personal Meaning"

Great that you picked up on this Martin, and I think I see other potential
contributions higher up
the list of messages.

To those concerned with this question, which I assume is everyone on XMCA if
they are interested
in the ideas generaly discussed here, I warmly recommend the very
easy-to-read and thought
provoking account of discussing hamlet with agricultural people in rural
Nigeria not long after
World War 2 written by Laura Bohannan (Bowen), who wrote *Return to Laughter
* about her overall
experience, but this little piece about one beery day during the rainy
season.

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/home/idris/Essays/Shakes_in_Bush.htm

As with the discussion of IQ I suggested earlier, the direction this piece
takes suggests that
we mistakenly overlook those domains of "everyday life" in "technologically
less complex" societies
which make a difference that makes a difference in THEIR lives. And in those
domains, which are
the special province of THEIR cognicsenti (sp?), the complexity of thought
often defeats even Oxfordian
anthropologists. The problem, of course, is that we have, more or less by
definition, no way of making
relevant comparisons even after we trip over the fact that we all know
college professors who cannot
explain the phases of the moon.

If you have a distaste for reading about such matters, try getting ahold of
Kurusawa's "Dersu Usala." Very
pretty to look at, and as neat an exposition of the primitive mind
hypothesis and its problems as one could hope
for.

mike

PS- Luria, Vygotsky, children and the Uzbekis is certainly a worthwhile
topic and not irrelevant to some arguments
in contemporary Russian psychology as well as this discussion, but
personally I would rather not return down that rabbit hole until we put
some "first hand account" anthropologically inspired, data on our white
screens. Of course, you all will push things in directions you prefer
as well!!!

On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 3:16 PM, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:

> On 3/1/08 2:37 PM, "Mike Cole" <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > If there
> > is cultural evolution, or progress in history, how does one adopt a
> cultural
> > historical, activity perspective that declares thinking to be functional
> > systems that include the accumulated
> > artifacts of the community without concluding that thinking in, say, a
> small
> > agricultural village high in the Andes just to pick up on Paul's
> current
> > environment, is less complex because
> > the range of activities seems limited, the mediational means limited,
> > etc.?
>
> I think this is a central conundrum, and I'm trying to sort out my
> thoughts.
>
> First, I keep having to remind myself that progress is not a
> characteristic
> that history possesses in itself. Progress is a story we tell about
> history.
> At best, it's told by the survivors. At worst, by the victors. There's a
> wonderful, horrifying book that offers a people's history, documenting the
> 'rise' of American civilization on the backs of the indigenous and the
> poor... (I've lost the title.)
>
> Second, I think Marx's own account of history was complex and probably
> contradictory. (I need to check Hayden White's Metahisory for his reading
> of
> Marx's narratives.) For example, capitalism develops workers' capacities,
> albieit in a lop-sided manner, while it exploits them. Capitalism leads to
> socialism, indeed it's a necessary step. but in large part this is because
> it generates the greatest misery for masses of people, who finally can
> take
> no more. No simple progress here.
>
> Third, it's interesting to compare the chapters in Ape, Primitive, Child
> written by Vygotsy with those written by Luria. The former seem to me more
> nuanced. Vygotsky writes very evocatively and sensitively about the
> psychology of 'primitive' peoples. The richness of their vocabulary, for
> example, is lost when their language becomes more abstract.
>
> And according to the notes I was taking when reading this book, "Even in
> Luria¹s writing about his expedition [to Uzbekistan] two voices can be
> discerned, two distinct and competing conceptualizations of the changes he
> observed. Let us begin there." My notes, sadly, stop there! And the book
> is
> not here.
>
> Third, when there are qualitative reognizations, judgments of progress are
> no easy matter. Kuhn taught us that paradigms are 'incommensurate': there
> is
> no common measure to judge them by, because each of the criteria is
> internal
> to a paradigm.
>
> I guess that just as physicists have become accustomed to the need to make
> assessments such as 'faster' or 'slower' always relative to a frame of
> reference, we have to do the same. History may have been progress judged
> from the frame of some anglo-saxon white males, but... and the cognition
> of
> a mountain villager may be assessed as embodying important forms of wisdom
> from the perspective of people searching for a way to stop damaging the
> planet.
>
> Martin
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Received on Sun Mar 2 08:57 PST 2008