Let me comment on Keith Sawer's paper because now it seems it did lead to
an interesting discussion.
I think that the novelty of Keith Sawyer's paper is that it highlights some
interesting parallels between the Giddens-Archer sociological debate on the
one hand and certain controversies within the sociocultural approach on the
other. These parallels are worth noticing and Keith can well be complimented
for doing just that.
However, the way Keith draws these parallels and, most importantly, the
final point of analyses that he arrives at - namely, that there are those in
sociocultural approach who espouse "inseparability" idea and those who do
not - is not far reaching enough (and is sort of a dead end like some people
aready remarked).
How are the parallels drawn in this paper? It appears to me that they are
drawn in a purely logistical way, as a classification of approaches based on
a strictly logical/semantic criterion - whether the authors speak in terms
of inseparability or they do not, and moreover, whether they speak in
exactly the way that Keith finds satisfactory (e.g., Rogoff speaks of planes
of analysis but this is not enough for Keith; by the way, Rogoff also speaks
of individual and social processes as being figure and background and
clearly indicates that one or the other can be at the focus of attention -is
this also not enough? it is in the same paper that Keith referred to).
Most notably, this analysis is conducted irrespective of the content of what
is being described by those various authors. Inseparability of what from
what? Of process from entity? Of mind from culture? Of individual from
society? Of internal from external world? Of mental from physical? These all
are lumped together in Keith's analysis. If content is disregarded, then
this is what makes it into a purely logical exercise and what obscures the
really interesting issues hidden behind the "inseparability debate".
The real issue, I would think is how the mind and self are conceptualized by
various authors, and not just in terms of separability/inseparability, but
at a conrete psychological level. And what are the specifically
psychological mechanisms of how the self and mind are related to culture and
society. That Rogoff and Lave do not specify these mechanisms clearly enough
had been noticed by a vast number of authors, most recently, by Carol
Linehan and John McCarthy (in the paper that is posted on MCA web page right
now!). The critique of their position, especially in terms of their relative
neglect of individual psychological processes and of the
individuation/internalization, has really become very strong recently. This
is also exactly what our symposium in Aarhus was about, wasn't it, Gordon?
By the way, Lave and Wenger are clearly concerned about how to conceptualize
the self and individuality when they write "one way to think of learning is
as the historical production, transformation, and change of persons" (Lave &
Wenger, 1991, pp. 51-52). That this is not then pursued in detail, is
another issue - and as I said, this has been noted by tens of authors
recently in what appears to be a growing reaction to the participatory
approach. Keith is right that in certain publications (e.g., the one by
Matusov, I believe in Human Development), certain expressions sound as if
the individuality is denied altogether - but this is not representative of
the general approach of Rogoff, Lave et al. in general. In other words, the
problem is not that they stand on inseparability position but that they do
not specify concretely enough what the mind and the context are and what
kind of concrete mechanisms allow for these links between these. This is
also the difficulty of the sociocultural approach in general, or as Nate
correctly noticed, the real stumbling block is the internalization process.
Since this issue has been raised, here is also a quote from my paper with
Arievitch in MCA in 1997 that addressed the very same issue:
"The strong focus on communicative aspects ...creates the situation when
...activity subjectivation recede to the background of attention in the
research by Rogoff and her colleagues. As a consequence, neither operational
content of new activity forms that must be mastered by the child nor the
transformations of this activity's psychological structure are analyzed in
this approach. The psychological mechanisms of the formation of new
cognitive processes, which then regulate the child's actions, remain
unspecified. ... the concentration exclusively on intersubjectivity results
in neglecting the process of subjectivation of new activities in the
processes of teachinglearning. The focus on interdependence,
although highlighting important dimension of the coconstruction of
the self, stops short of explaining how a competent,
selfefficacious, independent subject emerges and functions in shared
activities."
sorry if this sounds very critical, is not meant to be. Keith appears to be
among those many many other voices that do raise important critique of the
participatory metaphor. Seems to be the Zeitgeist.
Anna
-------------------------------------------------------
Anna Stetsenko
Professor and Program Head
PhD Program in Developmental Psychology
Graduate Center, City University of New York
-----Original Message-----
From: Gordon Wells
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Sent: 5/2/2002 1:17 AM
Subject: Re: Vygotsky as individualist
I have been following the discussion of the
'separability/inseparabilty' of the individual and the community(ies)
in which s/he paerticipates with considerable interest. I had never
imagined that one could subsume the individual within the social. Any
visit to a classroom provides convincing evidence of the unique
contributions that individuals make to joint activities.
There are, it seems to me, a whole number of reasons for rejecting
the inseparibility hypothesis:
1) We are each conscious of ourselves as having continuity across
different activities/communities of practice. That is to say,
although we adjust to the demands and expectation of the particular
activity system in which we are currently engaged, we are conscious
of a continuing identity that is able to contribute in varying ways
to different actiivity systems as a result of our previous experience.
2) In any joint activity, it is quite evident that different
individuals are able to contribute differentially, as a result of
different life trajectories. If this were not the case, the common
experience of a group being able to achieve more than any individual
member would not be possible.
3) Unless talk of 'individual agency' is empty, it is clear that the
way in which individuals exercise agency is related to their unique
trajectories of previous experience and the identities that each has
constructed in the process.
4) There can be no question of the separability of the different
biological organisms who make up an activity system/community of
practice, and it is these separate organisms who participate in the
shared practices, including their idiosyncratic use of of various
kinds of artifacts, both material and symbolic, that are collectively
used in mediating the achievement of shared goals . While it is quite
reasonable to talk of collective memory as a situated achievement, it
seems clear that it arises from a joint construction based on the
contributions of individual participants, whose memory is based on
their individual experiences of particular events as well as of their
interpretations of shared events in the light of their previous
experiences.
As far as I can see, none of the above emphases on individual life
trajectories contradicts the fundamental tenet that individual
development depends on the appropiation of values, knowledge and
skills that are first encountered in joint activities, and
appropriated and transformed from action and interaction with other
members of the culture. But to give precedence to the social doesn't
to my mind require one to reject the importance of individual modes
of participation that can only be understood in terms of individual
life trajectories.
-- Gordon Wells UC Santa Cruz. gwells@cats.ucsc.edu http://people.ucsc.edu/~gwells/
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