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"

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 Sat Mar 1 15:18 PST 2008