[Xmca-l] Re: About Vygotsky and Bar-Kokhba [Бар-Кохба (בר כוכבא‎)]. Bella or somebody can instruct me?

[David Kellogg]

Well, first of all, I should say that no blasphemy was intended (or, in my
view, committed). The reason why Reza Alsan's book "Zealot" is so
interesting is in fact that as a Muslim (actually, a lapsed fundamentalist
Christian who returned to Islam) he approaches the subject quite
historically. History, he reminds us, deals in probabilities; only faith is
really about "really".  Where there is no faith, there isn't any blasphemy
either, and that applies to me as much as to Reza Aslan.

In "The Problem of the Environment" (Vygotsky Reader) Vygotsky explains
that ontogenetic development is unique in that the child is face to face
with a complete form of development in the person of the mother, and this
completed form of development helps guide the very first steps. No other
kind of development (geological, biological, or sociocultural) is
teleological in precisely this way.

So it's useful to keep reminding ourselves that divine revelations to the
contrary notwithstanding, the people of Christ's time didn't know that this
illiterate and probably illegitimate son of a carpenter and a peasant girl
would be the single most important religious figure in Western culture for
the next two thousand years. Even those who followed him thought he was
just the Messiah (the Messiah was necessarily human and not divine) and the
key problem for all who knew him was either when or whether he was really
going to re-establish the temple and, not incidentally, royal line of David
and with it Hebrew sovereignty in Palestine. When he didn't, and was
crucified instead, it was a big disappointment to everybody--including
Christ himself ("My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me").

The Christian Jews who survived Jesus were a little like the
revolutionaries in Russia--there was an elite, educated emigre wing which
spoke Greek (Peter and Paul) and then his friends and relatives back
home (his brother James and the other apostles). Right from the beginning
there was a lot of tension between the two wings: the elites (especially
Paul) were really much more interested in non-Jews, while James insisted
that you had to be Jewish to be a Christian. Thanks to the repression
following the Bar Kochba rebellion, the elite wing won out (the locals were
exterminated to a man, and some of the tortures that the Romans designed
were extremely creative: flaying alive, braining children with
stones--Rabbi Akiva was wrapped in wet wool before being burned at the
stake so that it would last longer). The survival of an elite explains
some otherwise curious facts about the gospels, such as the fact that they
are written in Greek and the very sympathetic treatment of Pontius Pilate
(the real Pilate was so bloodthirsty that the Emperor called him back to
Rome to upbraid him for excessive enthusiasm!) Also, as the Liberation
Theologians pointed out, it explains the conservatism of the institutional
church, which still sits rather uncomfortably beside some of the actual
pronouncements of Jesus.

The "Bar Kochba" game concerns a prisoner who was brought, mortally
wounded, before Bar Kochba. Bar Kochba wanted to find out which of his men
had tortured him so as to punish him, but the man could not say "yes" or
"no", hence the game "Don't Say Yes or No", and by extension Leontiev's
"Forbidden Colors" game. Other versions of the Bar Kochba game apparently
do allow Yes or No but no other answers--so they are rather like the
English game "Twenty Questions" or "Animal, Mineral or Vegetable".

One thing I missed in Lois's talk was a discussion of the element of
violence in play, and especially in verbal play. There is this very
interesting sequence of spoken data at the beginning of Mark Tappen's
contribution to Packer and Tappen's  edited volume of papers from AERA 1995
("Cultural and Critical Perspectives on Human Development", SUNY Press) in
which the child is explaining what he would do if he woke up and he was a
girl. It's a long sequence--because the researcher is persistent--but it is
essentially a sequence of one liners, most of which are violent or
aggressive in some way and all of which are defensive or offensive. It is
certainly play. But it is certainly not revolutionary or even clearly
developmental, and one reason is that it lacks the element of convergence
that we see in games like Bar Kochba.

David Kellogg
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies





   They thought that he was just another

So I think


On 22 June 2014 13:31, valerie A. Wilkinson <vwilk@inf.shizuoka.ac.jp>
wrote:

> "Quite a statement" is quite a compliment, as I see it.  And thank you
> Achilles, for a question rooted in the text.  In consideration of
> capitalism vs ? and Party? vs ? and being in "a patron"'s pocket and vested
> interests versus standing for the little ones at all times, and everything
> we have talked about play and game here in this list, it seems that David's
> reference to a work that can be called "quite a statement" is worthy of
> discussion, framing, and debate, if that is called for, or at least
> response. Especially since we are also talking at the same time about a TED
> talk about play and the academic problems of framing problems.
> Vandy (Valerie)
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:
> xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Jan Aukes
> Sent: Sunday, June 22, 2014 0:28
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: About Vygotsky and Bar-Kokhba [Бар-Кохба (בר
> כוכבא‎)]. Bella or somebody can instruct me?
>
> David,
> Simon Bar Kochba as the real Christ? That seems to me quite a statement.
>
> > Op 21 jun. 2014 om 10:17 heeft David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> het
> volgende geschreven:
> >
> > Achilles:
> >
> > Actually, Bar Kochba was the real Jesus Christ. There was a biography
> > of Christ called "Zealot" written not long ago which raised a big
> > scandal in the USA because it was written by a Muslim. The really
> > revolutionary thing about the book, though, was that it tried to
> > understand what Christ must have meant to the Jews of his time.
> > Actually, there were hundreds of Christs--political leaders of the
> > Jews who declared themselves Messiahs and tried to get rid of Roman
> rule, ending up crucified.
> >
> > Bar Kochba was different because he actually succeeded. That is, the
> > Romans were expelled from Judea, and a real Jewish state was set up
> > for three years (until 132 AD, if I remember correctly). Then the
> > Romans took Judea back, and murdered everybody even remotely connected
> > with the successful rebellion. The Christians, who had never been
> > sympathetic to the rebellion in the first place (because of course
> > they had already had their Messiah) at this point became a strongly
> > pro-Roman religion, and decided to convert non-Jews, eventually winning
> over the Emperor himself.
> >
> > As you probably know, there was a big debate over "Liberation
> > Theology" in Latin America during the sixties. A lot of this centred
> > around the discovery by some Latin American priests that prior to the
> > pro-Roman turn, Christianity had been a strongly revolutionary creed
> > associated with someone who was, in essence, a somewhat premature Bar
> Kochba.
> >
> > A final note, just because I like to tie threads together and we have
> > been talking about play. The Forbidden Colors game which Leontiev uses
> > in his studies of attention and will is related to a traditional
> > Jewish "Yes/No"game called "Bar Kochba".
> >
> > David Kellogg
> > Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >> On 21 June 2014 14:49, Achilles Delari Junior <achilles@delari.net>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> Please, dear professors,
> >>
> >>
> >> In front Vygotsky's publications about poetry, theatre and arts in
> >> general, from Gomel's 1921/1922 period, I turn motivated to know
> >> something about the relation of Vygotsky as man (tchelovek), citizen
> >> and young thinker, with different kinds of insurgent social process,
> >> struggling for freedom. For instance there are, at least, 3 different
> >> situations of this kind touched by him in those newspaper
> >> publications : (1) Bar-Kohba; (2) The Dekabrists; and (3) October
> >> Revolution. But what more deeply touch me is just the first one,
> >> because I really do not know nothing about, and seems to be very very
> >> important in Jewish long history for Land and Freedom. And, believe
> >> me or not, this is important for many people here in my country, not
> >> necessarily Jews. If you pleased, could you help me to find more
> >> reliable sources about the historical process in which was envolved
> >> Bar-Kohba? If the answer would be excessively obvious - sorry for spend
> your time with me. I will search better by myself. Thank you, a lot.
> >>
> >>
> >> Achilles, from Brazil.
> >>
> >>
>
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