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

["Nektarios Alexi" <NEKTARIOS.ALEXI@cdu.edu.au>]

Your reply has covered me. But i am pretty sure that our tendency as individuals to separating ourselves from those who approaching reality in a different way that we do is quite subtle and it can manifest in so many ways as the number of individuals that exists in the planet.

________________________________

From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Andy Blunden
Sent: Fri 27/07/2012 11:50 AM
To: Nektarios Alexi
Cc: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Taking culture into account/Doing harm?



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.
>
>
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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*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

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