Reading :: Activity Theory: An Introduction

 Activity Theory: An Introduction

Edited by Alex Levant, Kyoko Murakami, and Miriam McSweeny

I have been reading a lot of books lately that attempt to introduce activity theory. This collection isn’t the last (I still need to write a review of Andy Blunden’s Activity Theory as well). Nor, in my opinion, is this collection really an introduction — the chapters are largely pretty advanced. With authors such as Seth Chaiklin, Yrjo Engestrom, Bonnie Nardi, David Bakhurst, Annalisa Sannino, Mike Cole, Andy Blunden, and Anna Stetsenko, the collection has an impressive bench with decades of experience. That experience is really on display here, with two chapters (Bakhurst’s and Cole’s) being interviews that allow the authors to reminisce about their formative experiences in the 1980s and 1960s-1970s, respectively. 

Rather than going through each chapter, I’ll pick and choose a bit, based on my current interests.

Seth Chaiklin’s “The theory of activity — in a psychological perspective” examines the concept of activity as it developed in the Soviet Union and beyond. Chaiklin describes four periods:

1. Sechenov, early 20th century

2. Vygotsky Circle, 1925-1940

3. Personality, 1960s-1970s

4. Collective activity, 1980s (p.77). 

After reviewing this theory, Chaiklin raises the concern that “activity theory” is being used broadly and thus may not always be applied to the same research object. He adds, “research traditions that have developed or adopted Soviet ideas about activity should be understood on their own terms, where their relation to the original tradition about the theory of activity must be evaluated critically, rather than assuming that contemporary traditions are necessarily a continuation or elaboration of the original tradition” (p.85) — not to disallow certain applications, but to better signal research focus and tradition. 

In “The politics of expansive learning: A study of two social movements,” Yrjo Engestrom, Mikael Brunila, and Juhana Rantavuori consider two social movements in terms of activity theory and the cycle of expansive learning: PAH, a Spanish movement that has stopped evictions due to a mortgage crisis, and Herttoniemi Food Cooperative, a Helsinki cooperative aiming at sustainable forms of food production and consumption. Both explore the inner workings of these movements using CHAT.

In “Encountering cultural historical psychology and activity theory: An interview with Michael Cole,” based on an email exchange between Levant and Cole, we get insights into Cole’s early involvement with cultural historical psychology and activity theory. The story starts in 1959, when Cole entered Indiana University as a graduate student and became aware of a generous stipend for students who studied Russian and participated in an academic exchange program (p.330). Cole completed his basics, but didn’t have time to study Soviet psychology, so he arrived in Moscow in 1962 with a background in Skinnerian behaviorism. Looking for a connection to his schooling, he identified Luria as a possibility due to Luria’s publications on conditioned reflex methods for studying word acquisition. After reading Luria’s twin study, Cole contacted Luria, who agreed to take him on for the exchange program. He went home in 1963, having conducted some research with Luria but not intending to follow up on it (p.331). 

Shortly afterwards, his academic mentors asked him to consult with a mathematics teacher in Liberia about his students’ difficulty in learning mathematics. Cole, as he was naive about cultural variations in learning, spent much time traveling Liberia and speaking to many different people about this difficulty. Westerners mainly thought in terms of learning deficits, but Cole and colleagues decided that their starting point had to be to learn about indigenous mathematics (p.332). As they wrapped up the first project and began preparing a second one, in 1966, Luria invited him to an international psychology conference (p.333). Cole spent that summer in Moscow, meeting regularly with Luria and finding out about Luria’s Uzbek study (p.334). “Unlike us, Luria approached cross-cultural research with a strong theory of history based on Marxist Historical Materialism that distinguishes high and low cultures with corresponding high and low levels of economic activity and mental development” (p.334). Cole made the connection to his research in Liberia, but “we conceived of schooling as but one of the everyday activities that children engage in” (p.336). And “what Luria interpreted as the acquisition of new, pervasive, higher modes of thought we were more inclined to interpret as changes in the application of previously available modes of thought to the new and thus unfamiliar problems presented in an alien form of discourse common to the test circumstances and schooling practices” (p.336).

After completing more studies and a monograph on the Liberian studies, Cole read Leontiev on activity theory, recognizing in it the same concept they had tried to get at with their own use of the term “activity” (p.337).

Cole also traces the term “CHAT” to 1985, to a Utrect conference where he first met Yrjo Engestrom (p.338). 

Cole concludes by saying that “superseding the dualism between Vygotsky’s ‘sign-o-centrism’ and Leontiev’s ‘activity-o-centric theory’ remains a just-out-of-reach goal” (p.342).

Anna Stetsenko’s “Reclaiming the tools of the past for today’s struggles: Radicalizing Vygotsky, via Marx, in dialogue with Audre Lord” is the last chapter in the volume. Longtime blog readers may know that although I respect Stetsenko’s tireless efforts to rethink CHAT in liberatory terms, she and I frequently see things differently. And that happens in a big way in this chapter. 

Stetsenko wants to revitalize the heritage of Marx and Vygotsky for taking on the inequities we see around us: Marxism tried to solve these issues, issues that are still relevant (p.373). After going over her own biography as a researcher starting her career in 1991, just as the USSR began to collapse (p.375), then moving to the US in 1999 (p.376), she reviews Marxism’s development “as a revolutionary and uncompromising critique of the capitalist status quo, coupled with passionate activism for social change and a staunch commitment to its realization” (p.386). 

That point above is not where my big disagreement comes in. Rather, the alarm bells started ringing around p.391, where she tries to appropriate Vygotsky’s focus on the New Human, which she links to “many 20th-century prophets from the Global South and scholars of color” who envision a revolutionary new form of human rising from the debris of the failed existing social orders (p.391). She sees the New Human as being raised to a higher level.

I’ve talked about the New Human extensively on this blog — see my review of Rosenthal’s New Myth, New World for starters — and explored how Vygotsky describes this figure, lifted from Trotsky and rethought in terms of assimilating and using cultural mediators. As we review the Vygotsky Circle’s works from their instrumentalist period, such as “The Socialist Alteration of Man,” Studies in the History of Behavior, and Cognitive Development, it’s clear that Vygotsky was not racist: He believed that everyone had the opportunity to assimilate cultural tools and achieve cultural development. But he was most definitely ethnocentric: these various peoples could only rise to new heights and become the New Human by accepting and assimilating these culturally advanced tools and the new social structure offered by communism. This was the whole point of the Uzbek expedition, nakedly laid out by Luria in the introduction to Cognitive Development! (See Proctor’s Psychologies in Revolution for an extended critique — or, for a much more compact one, see Cole’s interview earlier in this collection.) 

So, for me, lauding the stifling figure of the New Human seems like doing the exact opposite of the work Stetsenko is trying to do: to acknowledge and honor indigenous knowledge and agency. Truly honoring indigenous agency would require being at peace with many directions for development and many understandings of the world, not just the single line of development implied by the New Human (and demanded by dialectics). It would require questioning the implied eschatology that seems to underlie so much Marxist developmental theory, an eschatology in which the rest of the world finally wakes up and agrees with the author! (See Matusov’s discussion of dialogical pedagogy and especially his criticism of Freire.) 

Let’s get back to the collection as a whole. Although I don’t think it is truly an introduction to activity theory, this collection has some very valuable pieces in it. For my money, the interviews with Cole and Bakhurst were the most useful, but each piece contributed to my ongoing understanding of CHAT. If you’re interested in CHAT — and you know a bit about it — definitely pick this collection up.