Re: [xmca] Taking culture into account/Doing harm?

[Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>]

Not at all, Alex. They clearly suffered from some misconceptions in this 
area. My problems are to do with the idea that this limitation is 
necessarily shared by anyone who uses their ideas, i.e., to be a 
Vygotskyist you have to be some kind of cultural imperialist. And that 
it is impossible to meaningfully relate to someone with a dualistic view 
of nature if you have yourself a materialist theory of knowledge such as 
Activity Theory, or for that matter some variety of Deconstructionism. 
That you have to be a horse in order to judge a horse, or more 
precisely, that you can't be just this kind of not-horse in order to 
teach horses. I also question the idea of making Vygotsky to blame for 
the entire fabric of modern society which confronts an indigenous person 
... which obviously, put this way, no-one does.

I am asking people to disassemble these totalities, as Scribner advises 
on p. 132, citing Vygotsky.

Andy

Nektarios Alexi wrote:
> Hello Andy,
>  
> If i understood well, your position is that it is a kind of 
> misunderstanding from some or many scholars  that Vygotsky and Luria 
> were thinking of indigenous people as psychologically primitive?
>  
> Nektarios
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Andy Blunden
> *Sent:* Fri 27/07/2012 11:19 AM
> *To:* eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> *Subject:* Re: [xmca] Taking culture into account/Doing harm?
>
> Marx speculated that Russia could bypass capitalism and go direct to
> socialism via the pesant communes. And this material was published in
> Vygotsky's days.
>
> Andy
>
> Martin Packer wrote:
> > ... Marx, towards the end of his life, was keeping 'ethnographic 
> notebooks' that contained his reflections on reading ethnographies of 
> indigenous peoples, including those in the US at the time. He seemed 
> to be considering the possibility that there is *not* a single 
> trajectory to history; that various routes are possible, and that some 
> indigenous groups had established a (largely) socialist kind of 
> organization without any of the infrastructure that standard Marxist 
> theory insists is necessary.
> >
> > I do think (and I have argued in print) that LSV took from Marx and 
> Hegel a specific view of history that led him into difficulties in 
> seeing that indigenous people are not psychologically primitive.
>
>
> __________________________________________
> _____
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Joint Editor MCA: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hmca20/18/1
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Book: http://www.brill.nl/concepts

__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca