Reading :: Beyond the Brain

Beyond the Brain: An Agentive Activity Perspective on Mind, Development, and Learning
By Igor Arievitch

This book reminds me of a book by Arievitch's frequent collaborator, Anna Stetsenko: The Transformative Mind. Both books are discussing activity theory and Vygotskian theory in sophisticated ways that would be interesting to readers of Mind, Culture and Activity and similar CHAT journals. But at the same time, both seem to be arguing against the cognitivist paradigm, a paradigm that has already been rejected by those readers. This dichotomy in their anticipated readership really throws me off. For instance, Arievitch critiques "brainism" (Ch.2), the tendency to reduce the mind to brain functions. But anyone who has much grounding in CHAT already knows the argument against brainism—an argument with roots in the Vygotsky collection Mind in Society, which was published in the US in 1978, cementing Vygotsky's reputation as the Mozart of psychology. According to Google Scholar, Mind in Society has over 130,000 citations. So I concluded that Chapter 2 really wasn't for me, and skimmed until I got to Chapter 3.

From Chapter 3 on, we get into more interesting territory. Arievitch, who studied under Leontiev, Luria, and Galperin (!!), draws heavily from Galperin's work—work that has largely not been translated into English. 

In Chapter 3, Arievitch forwards the claim that thinking can only be understood in terms of shared activity, with the mind regulating and orienting the individual as they interact with their ever-changing environment (p.25). Learning is social: it "takes place in shared activity of the child and the adult mediated by cultural tools" (p.25). And this brings us to Galperin's unique contribution: "he was one of the few scholars who explicitly made questions about the origin and function of non-automatic regulation of activity the focal point of his whole theory" (p.34). 

Arievitch argues that Vygotsky did not consistently apply his own developmental approach to cultural mediation (p.55). But such mediators, especially signs, can "restructure and 'amplify' human memory, attention, thinking, and therefore enhance the individual's ability to solve challenging tasks" (p.96). This question of cognitive tools, he says, has been fundamental to Vygotskians (p.115). 

He concludes by arguing that the mind has to be understood as an embodied agent (p.147). Where Vygotsky failed to sufficiently operationalize his approach, the agentive activity perspective attempts to do so. 

This review is only the barest discussion of this book, which has a lot in it. If you're intrigued by CHAT approaches, and especially if you want to contrast them with brainism, definitely take a look at this book.