Page 50 of Volume Four of Vygotsky's Collected Works (1997, New York: Plenum Press) has a ref to the quipus, in the context of Vygotsky's exquisite discussion of the rise of "artificial stimuli", from Pierre Bezukhov's "patience" in War and Peace (p. 46) to child mastery of arithmetic.

A few nights ago I was watching my six-year old neice (who is Chinese) trying to do her arithmetic homework. When she had a difficult problem, she would move her finger in the air. I found this odd, because she had pencil and paper right in front of her, so I asked her what she was doing. She told me she was using an abacus!

When I see things like this, I am entranced with the idea that children don't just learn, but in some way reinvent mediational means. On the other hand, Vygotsky clearly rejects the modish (in his day) notions about ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny and insists that the output of the latter is the input of the former process, and is thus "represented but not replicated".

What he DOESN'T discuss, and what really bothers me, is what this means for the relationship between ontogenesis (that is, development over a process of years) and microgenesis (that is, learning over a matter of hours and minutes). Is it similarly a matter of "analogs but not parallels" and "represented but not replicated"? What would these look like? Like Yang-yang's imaginary abacus?

David (Kellogg)
Seoul National University of Education