Re: [xmca] lave in mca ("Vygotchane" and the Gibsons: any connection?)

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

I was a part of discussions of those connections during my early stay in
the USSR, Anton. And they came up again at the
International Congress of 1966. I did not know enough to know their
significance for another two decades. Did such a connection really exist? I
guess if I wanted to know, I would inquire of whatever became of the
Soviet-American exchanges that began after 1956. I am not sure what appears
in references. There was this kind of negative impact of referring to the
wrong non-Russians that seemed a problem to people at the time.

I assume its counts locally as a fact that Zaporozhets was a mentor
Vladimir P. Zinchenko. That could be another
source of evidence for the facticity of such a story.

(signed)
Sub-urban rumor

On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 10:07 AM, Anton Yasnitsky <the_yasya@yahoo.com>wrote:

> RE: "Alexander Zaporozhets,
> mentor to VP Zinchenko and part of the circle that included LSV, Luria, and
> Leontiev, interacted considerably with the Gibsons" --
>
> Mike, is there any [documented] evidence in support of this statement or
> this is just yet another urban legend?
>
> AY
>
>   ------------------------------
> *From:* mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
> *To:* "Forman, Ellice A" <ellice@pitt.edu>
> *Cc:* Jean Lave <jlave@berkeley.edu>; "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> *Sent:* Sunday, July 8, 2012 11:43:59 AM
> *Subject:* Re: [xmca] lave in mca
>
> I am attaching a pdf of an article by Ole Dreier which provides a kind of
> precis of his book that Jean refers to.  The links to
> the references to Gibson in her article in part draw upon Ingold, but Ole D
> has book out on objects with Allan Costall that
> make those links even clearer.
>
> I am seeking help on finding English language work by Gomes that Jean sites
> with approval; its from a book in Portuguese which makes it a little
> inaccessible to most of us.
>
> And for those of us who wonder what all of this has to do with CHAT,
> consider the non-coincidence that Alexander Zaporozhets,
> mentor to VP Zinchenko and part of the circle that included LSV, Luria, and
> Leontiev, interacted considerably with the Gibsons.
>
> 6 degrees of separation?
>
> mike
>
> On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 7:40 AM, Forman, Ellice A <ellice@pitt.edu> wrote:
>
> > I agree with Mike. After reading Lave's article in MCA, I realized that I
> > needed to read her new book to understand her position better. Lave, J.
> > (2011). Apprenticeship in critical ethnographic practice. Chicago:
> > University of Chicago Press. I'm just getting started reading it but I'm
> > glad her article led me to it. She makes it clear that critical
> > ethnographic practice does not pit writing against activism, as Mike
> claims
> > here. Here's one early salient quote:
> >
> > "Critical ethnography certainly is engaged in social criticsm and an
> > integral concern for social justice . . . But critical ethnography has
> > other entailments and layers of meaning as well. It involves a
> relational,
> > historical worldview and metaphysics that question a number of
> commonsense
> > understandings. It envisions ethnographic research as a long struggle to
> > illuminate social life, challenge commonplace theories and their
> political
> > implications, and change theoretical practice in the process. This book
> > pursues a more ample consideration of what we mean by critical
> ethnographic
> > practice." (p. 10)
> >
> > Right now I'm in the midst of exploring how Lave's early research on
> > tailoring in Liberia led her to pursue these broader and deeper
> > investigations of her own apprenticeship in critical ethnographic
> practice.
> >
> > ________________________________________
> > From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
> Behalf
> > Of mike cole [lchcmike@gmail.com]
> > Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2012 12:54 PM
> > To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> > Cc: Jean Lave
> > Subject: Re: [xmca] lave in mca
> >
> > Lave: Changing Practices
> >
> >
> >
> > I think it would be a pity if xmca-ites settled for Peter’s
> > characterization of Jean Lave’s article as a call to activism, and as
> > pitting writing against activism. I did not interpret Jean’s comments as
> a
> > call to march in anti-war-de-jour activities, or join an occupy protest
> to
> > slow down corporate greed.
> >
> >
> >
> > Peter commented, in part:
> >
> >  *Scribner took it to the streets, marching in the marches and such, and
> > bully for her. I've got to weigh things differently, I suspect. If I go
> > protest la guerre-du-jour, holding my sign at the campus gates, is this a
> > cost-effective action? Or is getting my writing done more important,
> > especially the public pieces that are read widely, if not terribly
> > influentially, at least in terms of current policies? (but then, standing
> > at the campus gates with a sign protesting wars or monied interests
> > probably has limited payoff as well.) And in my very conservative area,
> I'd
> > no doubt pay an additional cost, such as the outcry against my activism
> for
> > causes that go against the grain of popular opinion.*
> >
> >
> >
> > Firstly, the general silence she identified (correctly or not, people who
> > were there should comment, but it rings true enough to me) was the
> absence
> > of  “historical specificity and political analysis.”  She then linked her
> > ideas to those of Gramsci in the following way:
> >
> >
> >
> > *Gramsci’s political account of learning and education (and everything
> > else) grew out of*
> >
> > *his analysis of the “absolute historicism” of philosophy of praxis. He
> > pointed to the central engagement of state and private institutions of
> > education in inculcating and defending dominant hegemonic relations of
> > consent. That is not all that is going on in our complex contradictory
> > world, of course. But because virtually all ISCAR participants do the
> work
> > of these institutions, we also need to carry out the political analysis
> > that our positions call for.*
> >
> > * *
> >
> > None of Jean’s examples of the kind of changes in practice that she
> > advocates focused on marching in the streets or challenging the guerre
> (S!)
> > du jour. They did, however, focus on a number of examples (Drier, Ingold,
> > Gomes, Holland, and her own) all of which involve the scholar, as
> scholar,
> > engaging in critical analyses of current research practices within the
> > professions of which they are a part.
> >
> >
> >
> > Overall, the message that I took from the talk/essay was that those who
> > adopt what locally we refer to as a CHAT perspective have commitments to
> > grounding theory in practices that are supposed to put our theories to
> the
> > test. Her recommendation that we worry about educating the educators,
> whose
> > practice is education, seems to me completely uncontroversial. Her
> positive
> > cases seem uncontroversial as recognizable lines of scholarly research
> some
> > of which has been discussed in this forum (we should “take  seriously the
> > understanding of research as craft, and of both learning and changing
> > identity as aspects of craftsmanship" for example).
> >
> >
> >
> > I do not know nearly enough about most of the examples that Jean holds up
> > as potential models to follow. It seems that remedying my ignorance about
> > those examples would be a productive place to start. For sure, the
> serious
> > problems facing all forms of education, but in the case of most of us,
> > institutionally, the problems facing higher education, are acute and
> > getting worse very rapidly. Jean’s summary of that situation seems to
> line
> > up with my own knowledge of events, but perhaps that is because we are
> both
> > present for the dismantling of what was once a great public university.
> > Much less clear are lines of theory/practice research that would/could
> make
> > a difference.
> >
> >
> > Anyway, there is a serious call here for a fundamental, critical,
> > theory/practice orientation to our work. Answering this call IS a
> political
> > as well as an academic act. It may also be a warning that the privileged
> > lifeworlds of academics that those of us over 30 years of age have
> > experienced may be in danger of disappearing faster than the ozone layer.
> >
> > mike
> >
> > (Ps- sorry for the funny font gyrations. Cut and pasted from a word doc.)
> >
> > On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 6:00 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > I'm going to assume my unappointed role as discussion-launcher for the
> > > Lave article in MCA that was voted as the feature discussion article on
> > > xmca. I may not be able to stick around for long, as we're going on
> > > vacation Saturday in hopes that somewhere on this earth we can find a
> > place
> > > that's not as hot as Georgia, USA.
> > >
> > > Lave's paper is based on her plenary closing talk at ISCAR in Rome, an
> > > even I did not attend. As an aside, as long as it's held in
> > mid-September,
> > > shortly after our fall academic semester begins, I and others like me
> > > probably won't attend. It's just too ill-timed to miss 1-2 weeks of
> > > classes, depending on location, right after getting the semester off
> the
> > > ground.
> > >
> > > Lave references several ISCAR talks she found compelling, so it's nice
> > for
> > > us non-attenders to get a sense of what she found valuable in Rome.
> > >
> > > If there's an overriding theme to her paper, it might be that
> > > cultural-historical researchers ought to be more involved in social
> > > activism. I was struck while reading the paper by how she could easily
> > have
> > > used Silvia Scribner as her role model for the talk, even though SS
> goes
> > > unmentioned. A month or so when I wrote to the list about my reading of
> > her
> > > collected papers, I noted that her activism on the labor front probably
> > cut
> > > into her writing time, although perhaps her career was conducted before
> > > electronic media made expectations for writing much greater-there were
> > > fewer journals and fewer book publishers, and writing itself was much
> > more
> > > laborious (a point related to the recent discussion of writing) in that
> > it
> > > was often undertaken by pen, then retyped, and ultimately less amenable
> > to
> > > revision than it is these days.
> > >
> > > She urges social activism, although the paper is general enough to
> allow
> > > for individuals to take that appeal up in their own ways. Academics
> are,
> > to
> > > some, "above" ideology, and so should avoid the fray; yet most of us
> here
> > > would agree with her point that all thinking is ideological, and so
> being
> > > an activist on important social issues is a natural extension of our
> > work.
> > > If we are all ideological in our thinking, research, and writing, and
> if
> > > social issues are shaped by ideology, should we not then contribute to
> > the
> > > shape of  social issues through what we know via scholarship? (and
> how's
> > > that for a Western logical syllogism.)
> > >
> > > Scribner took it to the streets, marching in the marches and such, and
> > > bully for her. I've got to weigh things differently, I suspect. If I go
> > > protest la guerre-du-jour, holding my sign at the campus gates, is
> this a
> > > cost-effective action? Or is getting my writing done more important,
> > > especially the public pieces that are read widely, if not terribly
> > > influentially, at least in terms of current policies? (but then,
> standing
> > > at the campus gates with a sign protesting wars or monied interests
> > > probably has limited payoff as well.) And in my very conservative area,
> > I'd
> > > no doubt pay an additional cost, such as the outcry against my activism
> > for
> > > causes that go against the grain of popular opinion.
> > >
> > > I hope these concerns are not too concrete for Lave's fairly abstract
> > > call-to-peaceful-arms about social activism. For those of us in fairly
> > > conventional academic positions (Lave's seems to allow for much more
> > travel
> > > than mine), activism has to be balanced against other considerations
> and
> > > demands on our time and local reputations. At this point, I'm more
> > > persuaded by the general thrust of her views than of possibilities for
> > > real-world activism whose consequences are greater than I can produce
> > > through my writing.
> > >
> > > OK, there you go, your turn.
> > >
> > >
> > > __________________________________________
> > > _____
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> > >
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>
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