Dear All,
Sorry I couldn't post this message until after Easter holidays! Hope it has
not become completely obsolete...
At 11:30 +0200 4/10/01, Yrjo Engestrom wrote:
>Victor wrote: "In this case it is important to keep in mind that this
>understanding of activities and actions is fundamentally different from
>other understandings existing within the cultural-historical tradition, for
>instance the one by Leontiev..."
>
>I cannot help but wonder about the words "the one by Leontiev" in the above
>quote.
>
>Are you really sure that Leont'ev had "one" understanding of activity, or
>that we must only have "one" understanding of Leon'tev's understanding?
>
>I think Leont'ev's own writing about activity is deeply contradictory. As a
>psychologist, trained in the tradition of his discipline oriented to the
>individual as the fundamental unit, he was inclined to write about activity
>as if an individual phenomenon. As a Marxist activity theorist, he decidedly
>wrote about activity as collective phenomenon, formed and created by virtue
>of the historical emergence of division of labor in human communities.
>
>Yrjo Engestrom
>
I both agree and disagree with Yrjo. On the one hand, I believe Leontiev
did have a consistent position. His analysis of activity as a collective
phenomenon complemented his analysis of the individual, For instance, his
well-known example of hunting was used elegantly to introduce the idea of
dissociation between motives and goals of individual activities as a result
of division of labor in collective activities.
On the other hand, I think there is a deep, dialectical contradiction
between individual and collective (both social) activities, which doesn't
mean they should always be in conflict. Quite the opposite, by the very
definition of a dialectical contradiction they cannot exist without each
other. Temporary coordination (or discoordination) and mutual
transformations of these activities can manifest themselves in various ways
(in my view, that is what Phillip's great example is demonstrating). It is
a two-way process in which individual and collective activities "create
each other" (cf. "The zone of proximal development: where culture and
cognition create each other" by Cole).
Best wishes,
Victor Kaptelinin
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