Bakhtin and Vygotsky

Mike Cole (mcole who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Sun, 14 Nov 1999 10:38:44 -0800 (PST)

Nibbling at this feast of discussion:

Robert following up on Eugene's note (which I hope to return to!) wrote:

Given your close association with her, I also take you to be an authority
on the following point:
" I know that Barbara Rogoff was heavily influenced by Bakhtin in
development of her concept of "appropriation." " Someone told me that as
far as they know, Vygotsky and Bakhtin, despite being contemporaries,
never actually interacted or cited one another's work. I wonder, therefore
why so many Vygotskian scholars in the USA have taken to citing both of
them together ? Is this because they share some elements of a specifically
Russian cultural frame of reference ?

All of this is very complicated by who wrote what under whose name in the
"Bakhtin circle." Voloshinov is one good candidate for a "ventriloquated
Bakhtin." And Voloshinov wrote critically of Luria on Freud.

My own view is that the basic notions of Bakhtin and Vygotsky-Luria (I
don't know about Leontiev in this connection) on mediation are VERY similar,
at times almost as if they were intellectual cousins, one drawing on
religious metaphysics, one on modernist secularist metaphysics.

I would be really interested in examples of direct disagreements beyond
Luria's early essay on freud.

mike