Reading :: Psychologies in Revolution

Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria’s ‘Romantic Science’ and Soviet Social History

By Hannah Proctor

I continue to be fascinated by histories of Soviet psychology, specifically the cultural-historical school. So when I ran across this book, I had to read it. Although Luria is best known internationally as a pioneer of neuroscience, Proctor primarily reviews Luria’s early work (1920s-1940s) and his later accounts of it (most of his books on this work were not published until well after Stalin’s death in 1953). 

Specifically, Proctor rereads Luria’s accounts in historical context, looking for places where his research participants’ utterances overflow or cut against Luria’s explanations. She organizes the text by presenting different figures in Luria’s studies, each of which gets a chapter: 

• The criminal (covered in The Nature of Human Conflicts)

• The “primitive” (illiterates in Central Asia, covered in Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations)

• The child (covered in Speech and the Development of Mental Processes in the Child)

• The aphasic (covered in The Man with a Shattered World)

• The synaesthete (covered in The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory)

Proctor argues that 

Somewhat confusingly Luria’s research was animated by two distinct and indeed contradictory understandings of history: on the one hand, he treated individual human development as a recapitulation of civilisational development (the ontogenetic maturation from childhood to adulthood was treated as a counterpart to a phylogenetic progression from primitivism to civilisation), while on the other hand he emphasised the contingent impact of specific cultural and political experiences on individuals. (p.10) 

And that 

the pages of Luria's books attest to continued incongruities between the psychic territories he attempted to navigate and the maps he employed; incongruities that ultimately, I argue, led him to develop a new mode of scientific writing that found a different way of describing the diverse psychic terrains he encountered. (p.12)

This new mode was Luria’s so-called “romantic science,” a qualitative case study that drew heavily on literary conventions:

It was only in these case histories that Luria developed a form of scientific writing capable of fully attending to the utterances and experiences of the people he dedicated his career to observing, understanding and treating. Unlike the majority of his publications, these works are written in a detailed and empathetic style alert to the particularities of the conditions of the people they describe rather than seeking to relate those people’s consciousness to some abstract normative ideal. (pp.22-23)

(Luria’s two famous romantic science case studies are The Man with a Shattered World and The Mind of a Mnemonist.)

Luria’s path was made difficult because of his (Vygotskian) quest for what Proctor calls an “advanced” human subject, whom readers of this blog will recognize as the New Soviet Man, standing at the peak of Vygotsky’s peak psychology:

Luria’s research was premised on normative assumptions about individual human development. He argued that the ‘advanced’ human subject was the result of various developmental trajectories: the biological evolu-tion of the species from animal to human, the cultural development of societies from ‘primitivism’ to ‘civilisation’ and the maturation of the(‘healthy’) individual from baby to adult. An interest in tracing the progression from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ forms of thought united Luria’s seem-ingly diverse strands of work. At the apex of his mountain of development stood the ‘civilised’ or ‘cultured’ [kul’turnye], educated and healthy adult. Luria, however, had little to say directly about this ‘advanced’ figure. He could only discern its outline, as though it stood on a high mountain silhouetted in front of the glaring sun. Instead, he looked at the base in order to explain the route to the peaks. (p.8)

With this introduction, Proctor goes into the chapters centered around the different figures. All are fascinating, but let’s zero in on Luria’s expeditions to Central Asia in 1931-1932. I’ve discussed these on my blog. Luria and Vygotsky hoped to demonstrate that through literacy, people develop psychological tools or mediators that in turn provide them with capabilities including abstract thinking. In his expeditions, Luria found differences in how illiterate, semi-literate, and literate Uzbeks reasoned about categories and even whether they saw optical illusions. Yet some of these results were disputed by Kurt Koffka, the Gestaltist psychologist who accompanied the 1932 expedition, and the expedition itself was condemned by the Party for supposedly denigrating the mental capacity of Uzbeks. Luria put the research away, only to publish it 40 years later as Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations.

Proctor is fascinated by how the direct quotes from the Uzbek subjects contradict Luria’s interpretations and suggest different meanings, as well as Luria’s apparent ignorance of the political pressures that might affect the Uzbeks’ answers. She expresses these as paradoxes and ironies:

“Paradoxically, however, Luria conceived of the imposition of a particular mode of life and thought as a form of liberation. For Luria, the transition to abstract thinking did not represent a process of assimilation but of emancipation.” (p.74)

“Ironically, the lack of illusions that Luria identified in Uzbek people was precisely what he hoped could be overcome through the transition to the socialism [sic]. For Luria, illusion, fantasy and imagination were all crucial components of ‘advanced’ thinking.” (p.79)

Luria was hampered, as Proctor sees it (and I agree), by a teleological understanding of history, which he also applied to individuals:

“A loosely Marxist conception of history as advancing teleologically through a series of economic stages was combined with the Leninist conviction that such development could be artificially accelerated, conforming to what Francine Hirsch describes as ‘state-sponsored evolutionism’” (p.82)

“Luria followed the Communist Party line, conceiving of his work in explicitly anti-imperialist terms and insisted that psychological propensities were not biologically determined. Luria’s rejection of biological essentialism was, however, coupled with a continued emphasis on cultural superiority framed in terms of historical development: a hierarchical framework that undermined his professed egalitarianism. Despite defining itself as anti-imperialist, his progressive framework for understanding Uzbek society bore comparison to the frameworks employed by Western anthropologists, whose work he drew on heavily. Luria frequently drew parallels between Uzbekistan and other supposedly ‘backward’ places, including other regions of the USSR as well as communities in Africa. For all his self-proclaimed attentiveness to cultural specificity, his emphasis on the interchangeability of ‘backward’ places understood cultural difference in terms of temporal development.” (pp.83-84)

And perhaps most importantly:

“Despite insisting that no way of seeing is ‘a natural and inevitable achievement of the human mind’, Luria’s understanding of difference distributed humanity across one developmental slope and was thus implicitly value laden. … Luria placed Uzbek people, culturally if not biologically, lower on the rungs of a single developmental ladder.” (p.85.)

Proctor provides some historical context about how Stalinism dealt with the cultural diversity of the USSR: it embraced ethnic dress and superficial customs while leading diverse ethnic groups to a substantively homogeneous Communist future. “Luria’s contradictory depiction of Central Asia, which simultaneously cel￾ebrated tradition and progress, was in keeping with this state discourse” (p.88).

Finally, she notes how Luria seems oblivious to the implied power differences. In addition to the fact that the expedition traveled with security services, Luria “wilfully overlooked the historical situation of the encounter where any translation from Uzbek into Russian implied a power relation” (p.91). 

Later, Proctor adds: “Stalin depicted the fight between old and new ways of life, tradition and modernity, capitalism and communism, by imagining the latter as a vul￾nerable newly born baby. Luria’s experiments in Central Asia celebrated  the birth of the new but bore witness to the tenacity of the old (and it was for this reason that his work was eventually denounced).” (p.116). She adds:

as was evident in his experiments in Central Asia, a contradiction existed between Luria’s discussions of abstraction as a cognitive capacity, on the one hand, and as a research methodology, on the other. For Luria not only advocated abstraction as a mode of thought but simultaneously insisted that a properly Marxist approach to psychology should treat cognition as time bound and historical. (p.251)

And 

In the context of the Central Asian expeditions, Luria’s declared sensitivity to cultural particularity was complicated by his continued imposition of pre-existing normative frameworks onto the Uzbek people he encountered, muffling the specificities of their utterances. Classical scientific abstraction returned through the back door. (p.251)

Proctor does similar close readings with the other figures. Toward the end of the book, she argues that Luria was stymied by the abstract, clinical style of writing he used to recount his research as well as the impulse to provide dialectical syntheses. But in later life, his two “romantic science” books moved from synthesis to a recognition of fragmentation (p.227). “The majority of Luria’s publications described people in relation to abstract ideals, whereas his ‘romantic’ works sought to understand the people they described on their own terms” (p.228).

I personally found this book very rewarding, both for its deep connections among historical events and for its thoughts on how Luria’s “romantic science” represented a more capacious genre (based on Soviet realism) that could better address the ambivalences in his data. If you’re interested at all in Soviet psychology and specifically the cultural-historical school, definitely pick up this book. 

(Reading Roundup :: Stalinist criticism of the Vygotsky School and its aftermath)

It's been a while since I've done a reading roundup of associated articles. But I have a nice set of associated ones today, and I think they tell a pretty good story. Since these tell a story, I've dated each and tried to provide some historical context.

To review, in 1930 Vygotsky and Luria published Studies on the History of Behavior: Ape, Primitive, and Child, a quasi-popular book that synthesized Western understandings of ape and human psychology with a Marxist account based on Engels. The book had been originally slated to be finished by 1927; by 1929, Vygotsky was not enthusiastic about it since he was entering the crisis that marked the border between his instrumental period and his later holistic period (see Van der Veer & Yasnitsky Ch.4). Nevertheless, it was published—just at the point when Stalinist science was becoming more hostile to bourgeois science. Sociology was banned as a bourgeois pseudoscience in 1929 and Russian chauvinism meant that the many cites to Western psychologists and sociologists were not well received. In 1931, the Institute's party cell condemned Vygotsky and Luria's 1930 book.

Two other things happened in 1931. First, some of Vygotsky's colleagues—including Luria and Leontiev—took jobs in Kharkov, Ukraine, while Vygotsky accepted an invitation to lecture in Leningrad. Second, Luria and Vygotsky put together an expedition in Uzbekistan to study how nonliterate and semiliterate peoples changed with the influence of literacy; Luria went while Vygotsky stayed. The 1931 expedition was followed by a second one in 1932.

With that short history, let's get to the readings.

Razmyslov, P. (1934/2000). On Vygotsky's and Luria's "cultural-historical theory of psychology." Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 38(6), 45-58.

Razmyslov's report, according to Van der Veer (2000), was the result of the Moscow Inspection Commission of the Workers and Farmers Inspeectorate. It focused on the Uzbek expedition of 1931-32, although it also mentions their previous work.

The report is somewhat diffuse, but makes some specific and coherent criticisms. According to Razmyslov, Vygotsky "says that human behavior consists of a continual restoration and breaking of equilibrium between the human organism and the environment (p.46). To make this case, Vygotsky draws on a "bourgeois historicism that disregards the aspects of the development of productive forces and the relations of production, the labor processes, and class struggle," and his work does not study mental functions in the light of Lenin's theory of reflection (p.47). Indeed, Vygotsky and Luria did not proceed from "social, class consciousness" but from "the consciousness of some vague, foggy collective"—and Razmyslov criticizes Vygotsky's reliance on Durkheim here (pp.48-49).

In this context, Razmyslov notes Vygotsky's passage stating that higher psychological functions show up twice, first collectively/interpsychically, then individually/interpsychically. This view is "sociological" and relies on Durkheim (p.49). Razmyslov also slams Vygotsky for his "crudely mechanistic positions" in his earlier work (p.49). (Earlier in the report, he criticized Luria's early interest in Freudian work (pp.45-46). But Vygotsky's "mechanist mistakes of 1925 are aggravated even further" in later work (p.50).

Razmyslov then gets to the Uzbek expedition, and here I think some of his criticisms have a grain of truth. He argues that Vygotsky and Luria cannot look for primitive people's thinking in modern Uzbeks (p.51). They looked for child-level behavior in these Uzbek adults rather than chronicling their growth (p.51). Vygotsky's oral report of the expedition "was aimed at demonstrating the presence of primitive thought in all previously oppressed nationalities"; instead of showing how, in Uzbek, "the new man is being created and a communist consciousness is taking shape," Vygotsky tried to show that these peoples can't generalize (p.52). Razmyslov draws several examples from Luria's investigations (pp.52-54) and argues that Luria "literally tormented the respondents" (p.53—perhaps a fair assessment, given the historical investigation of Lamdan and Yasnitsky).

Razmyslov wraps up by charging Vygotsky's pedagogy with "elements of mechanism" (p.54) and producing a passage in which Vygotsky suggests the "demise of the school in the future" (p.55)—both themes showed up later in the condemnation of pedology.

Vygotsky died in June 1934. Luria and Leontiev, however, had to live through the results of this criticism and of the rapid changes in 1930s USSR.

Central Committee of the Communist Party. (1936/1950). On pedological distortions in the commisariat of education. In Wortis, Soviet psychiatry. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins. 242-245.

It took me a while to hunt down an English-language copy of this infamous decree, which was issued on July 4, 1936. The decree has been treated in a number of places, including Bauer, so I'll focus on the highlights. The Decree notes that pedology had Western roots and separated theory from practice—creating a theorist/researcher class that told teachers how to practice and "developed completely out of contact with teachers and school studies" (p.242). It was characterized as pseudoscientific (p.242) and anti-Marxist (p.244) as well as "stupid" (p.244). Specifically, it reduced student ability to biological and social factors, i.e., heredity and environment (p.243; 244). In doing so, it reproduced the pedology of the bourgeois class system (p.243); it imported racist and classist categories under the cover of objective research, imputing poor performance to children's heredity and environment rather than to systemic class discrimination (p.245). The authors argued for mainstreaming the vast majority of students who had been assigned to special schools (p.243). Ultimately, the authors demanded (among other things) that: pedagogues (teachers) should be restored to their full rights in the classroom rather than making their practice serve theories of pedology; pedologists and their books should be removed from the schools; children in special schools should be mainstreamed; and the books of pedologists should be criticized in the press (p.245).

The last demand listed above was fulfilled almost immediately.

Kozyrev, A.V., & Turko, A.P. (1936/2000). Professor L.S. Vygotsky's "pedological school." Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 38(6), 59-74.

First out of the gate was this critique, produced explicitly in response to the Pedology Decree's call for critiques. They characterize the late Vygotsky's views as "untested and often contradictory" (p.59) and note that his work had been continued by the "Leningrad Pedological School" (p.60).

They begin with the posthumously published book Thinking and Speech, which they correctly note "is only an elaboration of discrete materials that are variously dated" (p.60; see Van der Veer & Yasnitsky Ch.4 for a full accounting of the book's sources). They critique the book's thesis that thinking and speech come from different roots but interrelate; Vygotsky drew from Western sources, but not from Marx and Engels, even though "Engels was not only a polyglot but also a profound connoisseur of linguistics," and he didn't draw on contemporary Soviet linguists (p.61). Moreover, "by denying the unity of genetic roots in the origin of thinking and speech, Vygotsky denies the leading role of labor, which in Engels' apt definition created man" (p.61). The authors purport to demonstrate this role by citing Kohler, one of Vygotsky's main sources (p.61).

Secondly, the authors condemn Vygotsky for making up laws, such as that of the Zone of Proximal Development, through logical inference rather than empirical work (pp.62-63). They conclude (through reasoning that I found hard to follow) that Vygotsky believed that the working class could not attain the heights of scientific knowledge—that is, that Vygotsky could be criticized for a classist, bourgeois pedological outlook (p.65). They interpret the ZPD as a way to devalue the teacher's contribution, and they push back against this inference (p.65). Overall, they characterize Thinking and Speech as "full of overhasty, invalid, unscientific, and sometimes utterly unfounded 'scientific' conclusions" (p.65). And they argue that Vygotsky "did not even develop a method of research" (p.66). Finally: "this book still finds him immersed in cultural-historical theory, which he developed together with Luria and which, in its final conclusions, led them (inevitably) into the swamp of stagnation" (p.66).

The authors then turn to Vygotsky's pedological works, charging that he attributed all development to either heredity or environment (p.66; it's hard for me to see how this claim squares with the ZPD). They mention Vygotsky's twin studies at VIEM (p.67; are these related to the study Luria later published?). They also claim that Vygotsky's efforts to distinguish pedology from pedagogy were unsuccessful (pp.67-69). Around here, they cite Razmyslov. They conclude that Vygotsky's premature death "prevented him from embarking upon a truly scientific path" (p.70).

Finally, they criticize two of Vygotsky's followers, Zankov and Konnikov (the latter had just written her dissertation under Vygotsky's collaborator Levina). This seemed like the lowest blow to me.

Perhaps it was this article, which directly named Luria, that caused him to resign his positions as head of the psychology department at VIEM and at the Medico-Biological Institute, fleeing to Tsibli and then taking a medical internship (!) at the Burdenko Clinic of Neurosurgery until 1939.

E. I. Rudneva (1937/2000) Vygotsky's Pedological Distortions, Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, 38:6, 75-94.

This article, which came out in January 1937, may have caused Leontiev to leave his positions as head of the Laboratory of Genetic Psychology at VIEM and his professorship at the Higher Communist Institute of Enlightenment. When he returned in fall 1937, his arguments had changed considerably—arguably to address these criticisms.

In fact, although Wertsch sees "Theses on Feuerbach" as the founding document of activity theory, I think there's a good argument that this document is the true founding document. I'll explain that assertion beneath the review.

Rudneva's article also answered the call of the Pedology Decree (p.75), but it was more vicious—and an excellent example of Stalinist criticism. She characterized Vygotsky as a pillar of pedology and argues that

An analysis of Vygotsky’s works published over the past ten years, beginning with [Pedology of school age] and [Thinking and speech] (1934), reveal the anti-Marxist character of his views and his organic link to the anti-Lenin “theory of the demise of the school” (p.75)

Not only that, she charged: he also cites bourgeois scientists (p.75).

Her critique bore little resemblance to Vygotsky's actual claims. Rudneva argued that "Already in his earliest works, Vygotsky was saying that parents and teachers do not have the right to prescribe their children anything" (p.75); that school will wither away (p.76); that formal education does not influence development (p.76); that "Vygotsky blindly followed every word of bourgeois psychology of the time" (p.76); that "he endeavored to provide a psychological foundation for the theory of the demise of the school" (p.76); and that

Following his bourgeois teachers, Vygotsky also took from them their method of investigation. Hence, the work of Vygotsky and his pupils on children has essentially been a mockery of our Soviet children and amounted to stupid, absurd tests and questionnaires associated with Piaget, Claparbde, and others. (p.76)

Of more serious consequence is Rudneva's critique of Thinking and Speaking. She charges that "For Vygotsky speech is an instrument, a tool organizing the whole of mental activity" (p.77). And:

An analysis of Vygotsky’s utterances on the question of thinking and speech shows that it consists of anti-Leninist, idealist positions. He regards the whole of man’s mental activity not in the light of Lenin’s theory of reflection, as a unified but complex dialectic process of active reflection of objective reality in the human consciousness, but as an idealist, immanent (internal, self-sufficient) process taking place independent of social-class relations and independent of people’s productive activity. (pp.66-67)

Recall that Razmyslov also brought up this criticism. It would become important in the later works of the cultural-historical school.

Rudneva continued by claiming that "He disregards the material foundation of mental phenomena"—i.e., Vygotsky was an idealist (p.77). But in the next paragraph, she accused him of being a crude materialist and mechanist (p.77). "These utterances of Vygotsky’s on the question of the mind show that he explicitly disregards the Marxist-Leninist theory that the mind cannot be reduced to the movement of matter" (p.78). Related, she criticized his "totally false division of concepts into scientific and everyday":

A scientific concept, according to Vygotsky, can arise only from an everyday concept, and, moreover-and this clearly contradicts the basic positions of Marxism-not through reflection of the objective world in our consciousness; rather, it is generated by speech. Similarly, Vygotsky’s conception of the nature of a concept is clearly at variance with Lenin’s theory of a concept. ... According to Lenin, a concept is a reflection of nature in man’s consciousness. (p.78)

She also charges that his "theory of the origin and development of language from which emanates a denial of the role of grammar in formal learning, as we shall show below, is anti-Marxist, and antiscientific" (p.81). Like Kozyrev & Turko, she charges that "Vygotsky’s assertion that thinking and speech have different genetic roots is contrary to Marx & Engels’s theory of the origin and development of thinking and speech from the social process of labor" (p.81). In contrast, she favors the approved Japhetic theory in which "a transition from a linear language, gesticulating and mimetic, to a phonetic language, and from concrete thought to abstract thought, is related to the transition from the use of natural tools to man-made tools" (p.81).

She added:

According to Vygotsky, the unity of thinking and speech lies in the meaning of the word. Thus, he ended by identifying thinking and speech. 

In reality, every word is not only a generalization but also a grammatic unit. There is a dialectic unity between the content and the form of a word, but not identity: the word can be complex in content and simple in form, and vice versa. Disregard of the form of a word is tantamount to underestimating grammatic rules. (p.81)

She hits Vygotsky on the "false division" between lower and higher functions (p.82; n.b., Vygotsky was moving away from this division in his final, holistic period). And she argued that "Quite mistakenly, Vygotsky says that the mediation and intellectualization of functions take place under the influence of the word, which serves as a sign and a symbol" (p.82).

Moving on: Rudneva argues that despite Vygotsky's words, "in reality, for Vygotsky, formal learning plays an external role relative to development and makes no alterations in a child’s development. This is an absolutely invalid, scurrilous affirmation." (p.84). The ZPD comes in for criticism here as a pseudotheory borrowed from McCarthy (p.84). Similarly, Vygotsky's method of having children finish sentences is borrowed from Piaget and leads to "sociologizing" (p.87).

Next, Rudneva criticizes Vygotsky's method. And she names not only the dead but the living:

It must be borne in mind that the experimental work in Vygotsky’s investigations occupy a very limited place. He speaks much about the results of “experimental investigations” and extremely little about the method that he used. 

He and his pupils (Luria, Sakharov, Shif, Zankov, Leontiev) occupy a prominent place in uncritical dissemination of bourgeois method in our country, in particular, Piaget’s method. One of Vygotsky’s pupils, Sakharov, devised a method for studying concepts that does not essentially differ from the method of the well-known German psychologist and fascist, N. Ach; it consisted of finding a meaningless relationship between the shape of a toy and some fanciful abstract name for it. The absurdity of this method was obvious to anyone with common sense: the only name one can give to these stupid “experiments” is that they are an authentic mockery of our children. (p.88)

No wonder Leontiev and Luria were worried.

Finally, Rudneva accuses Vygotsky of formulating a law whereby "a child’s fate is irrevocably sealed by the influence of heredity and the environment": "Vygotsky formulated very clearly this fatalistic determination of children’s destiny by hereditary factors not only in his early works but also in his very last" (p.89). She uses this claim to directly tie Vygotsky to one of the main criticisms in the Pedology Decree. "Vygotsky mentions the environment as a source of the whole of a child’s development" (p.90). Further, she says that recapitulation is the essence of Vygotsky's theory:

The whole of the so-called theory of cultural-historical development created by Vygotsky starts out from the premise that a child repeats the path of the whole of mankind in his development. The development of mental functions historically consisted in a transition from natural forms of behavior to cultural forms; an individual masters functions, and their use becomes voluntary and conscious-and all this takes place under the influence of tools and signs. In the stage of cultural development, the word plays the role of tool. For pedologists, including Vygotsky, slander of the children of workers goes hand in hand with slander of imperialists of the colonial peoples to justify the seizure of new territories in the name of “progress” and “culture.” (p.92)

She charges: "Vygotsky does not understand the Marxist-Leninist theory of the environment; he disregards the role of man in transforming the environment" (p.93).

Unfair? Sure. But Rudneva lays down the markers for what would count as an orthodox Marxist-Leninist psychology during the Stalin years. Just to review:

• it must take productive labor activity as the starting place, not word meaning
• it must be rooted in Lenin's theory of reflection [edit 4/26/17: or at least pay lip service to the theory. See PDM pp.60-61 for an example.]
• it must reject or eschew bourgeois sources, instead grounding itself in Marxist and Soviet sources
• it must address differences in natural and cultural abilities in a way that is thoroughly grounded in approved Marxist sources

Leontiev, and to an extent Luria, learned these lessons well. In fact, Leontiev almost seems to have used the critique as a checklist for developing his later arguments about activity theory.

Leontiev, A. N. (1937/2005). Study of the environment in the pedological works of LS Vygotsky: a critical study. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 43(4), 8–28. 

Although this article was published in Russia in 1998, it was probably written in 1937 for a lecture Leontiev gave when he returned to work. It criticizes Vygotsky mildly, addressing criticisms similar to those by Razmyslov, Kozyrev & Turko, and Rudneva.

It begins with a discussion of the Pedology Decree:

At their foundation lies the theory of fatalistic determinism. Its essence is that development is understood as a process directly determined, on the one hand, by the innate characteristics of a child (his “abilities,” “talents”), and on the other, by the environment in which this de- velopment takes place. So the development of a child is viewed as a function of these two fundamental factors, no matter how complex the ways in which they combine and are interwoven. (pp.8-9)

He says that Vygotsky "at one time" held that the environment was a factor in child development (p.10). And, quoting Lenin, he charges that

from the very beginning, pedology, from the starting point of its investigations, stripped away the true unity: the unity of subject and object, the personality of a person and his human reality. Through abstraction, the child was removed from the real process of life, from the interaction that is his real existence. (p.11). 

Pedology was a false science because it did not grasp "the principle of the interconnection and transition of some lower forms of movement of material into other, higher forms" (p.11). He adds:

Both the child and the environment truly were studied by pedological researchers, but they were studied only as externally contrasted, abstract things. In what connections and relations did pedology study every given object entering into the makeup of the environment? (p.11)

The relationships are found in productive activity:

in every case the relationship between a person and the environment is defined not by the environment and not by abstract properties of his personality, but specifically by the content of his activity, by the level of development of this activity, and, if it can be expressed this way, by its structure and formation. (p.12)

This reasoning leads Leontiev to argue:

What distinguishes humans from animals is not that they have broken their connection with nature, or that the natural environment has been replaced by society, but primarily they have entered into a new and active relationship with nature. In other words, humans enter into a relationship with nature that is realized through the process of labor, through activity using tools; consequently, their relation to nature becomes one mediated primarily by objects. But through this process humans enter into a certain relationship with other humans, and only through these relationships—with nature itself. Consequently, their relationship to nature is mediated by their relationship to other humans. This means that for humans, the way that nature appears is no longer determined by the direct properties of natural objects themselves, and not even by the specific interrelations among people, fixed in their instinctive activity, but by the social conditions of their existence, their activity as social beings. Consequently, this means that since human beings become human, any object of their activity, even a natural one, becomes for them a human object, that is, a social object. (p.14)

In contrast,

To the animal, however, any “artificial” object created by humans is simply a natural object, it is nature because the animal’s relation toward it will always be an instinctive relation. Thus, of course, in reality there is no doubling of the environment.  (p.14)

For humans, social conditions "also appear in the form of secondary, superstructural formations, that is, in the form of language, in the form, generally speaking, of ideology" (p.14).

He adds: "how specifically-psychologically does the social environment appear in the process of the child’s development? This is the third question we emphasize—the question of the changeability and relativity of the environment. It is more fully developed by L.S. Vygotsky" (p.15). Leontiev treats Vygotsky sympathetically, but critically:

Studies of the development of thought and consciousness of the child led Vygotsky to a very important psychological understanding of meaning. Mean- ing is a generalization that realistically-psychologically stands behind the word that it stands for. As Vygotsky expressed it, meaning is a unit of human, realistic consciousness. (p.17)

To develop this claim, Leontiev says, Vygotsky developed his theory in terms of word meaning, relying on environment as explanation. "Thus, the theory of environment put forth by Vygotsky, locked in the circle of consciousness, loses its initial materialistic position and is transformed into an idealistic theory" (p.20). Leontiev adds:

Of everything that Vygotsky developed theoretically, the conception of the environment is the weakest. In that conception, as in a magic trick, collected in a unified, false construction, were all the theoretical mistakes, inconsistencies of thought, and individual idealistic views that we find in his main psychological works. They suffice in it, and therefore specifically in this conception Vygotsky least of all succeeds in overcoming the views of neopositivism that are traditional in contemporary French bourgeois psychology. (p.20)

Leontiev proffers an escape route: word meaning develops within activity. 

Thus, the meaning of a child’s word is this very “ideal” product in which his human relation to the reality signified by the given word crystallizes—a reality prominent now within the thinking consciousness of the child himself. The sociohistorical nature of the child psyche is determined, consequently, not by the fact that he communicates, but by the fact that his relationship to reality is socially and objectively mediated, that is, by the fact that his reality takes shape under specific sociohistorical conditions.(p.24)

And:

Thus, Vygotsky’s proposition that consciousness is a product of the child’s verbal communication under conditions of his activity and in relation to the material reality that surrounds him must be turned around: the consciousness of a child is a product of his human activity in relation to objective reality, taking place under conditions of language and under conditions of verbal communication. (p.25)

Here, Leontiev undertakes Vygotsky's rehabilitation, proffering his own concept of labor activity as the root of consciousness; blunting the criticism of the split between biological and cultural development; and gesturing at Lenin's reflection theory. Not bad. 

I'm running out of time in this longish review, so I'll just throw down some bare notes on other publications that Luria developed to protect his position and blunt Rudneva's critique.

Leontiev, A. N., & Luria, A. R. (1937/2005). The Problem of the Development of the Intellect and Learning in Human Psychology. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 43(4), 34–47.

An unpublished 1937 paper written for the Madrid psychology congress (which was moved to Paris). This paper discusses skill and ties into studies of the Vygotsky circle as well as "the outstanding works of our own L.S. Vygotsky" (p.39). 

Under conditions of objectively mediated labor activity, human speech emerges, which has a designating, objective nature and replaces the expres- sive voice reactions of animals; beginning to reflect objective connections of reality, it opens new possibilities of generalization and becomes a powerful tool of thought. Human cognitive, verbal awareness emerges, an element of which, in the words of L.S. Vygotsky, is meaning, that is, the generalization that stands behind this word; in it appears the specific unity of human thought and speech. The subsequent development of the intellect is also tied to its fate. This takes place over the course of the sociohistorical process and reflects all new forms of specifically human activity and all new forms of generalized reflections of reality in the human consciousness. (pp.40-41)

Leontiev, A. N. (1940/2005). The genesis of activity. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 43(4), 58–71.

This paper lays out the basics of activity theory, including the roots of psychology in productive labor activity, and characterizes it in terms of reflection:

Labor is not only that which appears together with man; it is not only that new relationship to nature that we observe as the result of the humanizing of animals. Labor is also, and primarily, what transforms the animal-like fore- runner of man into man. Again we see that the transition to a higher stage of development both in the sense of more complex and developed organization of the very subject of activity, in this case, man, and from the perspective of the emergence of a new, higher form of the reflection of reality, is realized primarily in the form of a change in life itself, the appearance of a new form of life, a new relationship to reality, and a new form of connection with nature. (p.58)

Notice the parries to previous criticism. More later. 

Reading :: Kurt Koffka: An Unwitting Self-Porttrait

Kurt Koffka: An Unwitting Self-Portrait
By Molly Harrower

I picked up this book not because I'm interested in Gestaltists per se, but because Koffka accompanied Luria on his second Uzbek expedition and came away with a very different interpretation. In their discussion of this expedition, Lamdan & Yasnitsky draw on some of Koffka's private correspondence, which is in Ch.6 of this book.

The book is composed of letters Koffka sent to Molly Harrower, his protege, from 1928-1941 (thus an "unwitting" self-portrait, since the letters were not meant for broad consumption). Those who are interested in Koffka as a person, including how he looked up to and felt slighted by Kohler, may want to read the whole thing. I'll just concentrate on Ch.6.

In Ch.6, Koffka has been invited by Luria "to accompany him on an expedition to Uzbekistan in Central Asia." It's early summer, 1932, and "The Uzbek Republic had just come under the Soviet influence, and the government-sponsored expedition hoped to make a psychological assessment of the natives for comparative purposes at some later date, when Soviet influence would presumably be evidenced" (p.143).

After some visa trouble, he reached Moscow in May, writing on May 30 that he lectured to an audience of 300. "Most of whom understood German, but since some did not, Professor Vygotsky [[Russian psychologist, designer of concept formation test]], a most charming man, acted as my interpreter." He added: "I talked for about 5 to 10 minutes, and then he gave the most fluent translation you can imagine. He talked much more fluently than I, and it seemed to me for a much longer time" (p.145).

The next day, he attended a noon reception "at the Uzbekistan legislation [sic]," at which "the Minister of Uzbekistan gave me a long lecture translated by Luria, on the conditions of his country. ... The minister from Turkestan was also present" (p.146).

On 22-23 June, he wrote about the travel: a 20-hour train ride, then a cab ride into the mountains to their hotel. Due to a thunderstorm, the bridges had been washed out and it would take several days to clear the road. "Therefore we decided to make our first experiment in a somewhat more civilized district, a village, Kishlak, a native village some fifteen miles from Fergana" (p.147). The party set out in a bus, which almost immediately had a flat tire, so two parties had to walk a mile and a half to get a new one (p.147).

On 14 July, he reported that they were about to leave Palman, going partway with the presidents of Uzbekistan and Kirghistan (who would spend a few weeks at Shaki Marden) as well as the local president of the GPU (secret police) (p.150).

Unfortunately Koffka had an attack of malaria and could not continue. Luria himself drove Koffka from Shaki Marden back to Fergana in "an Army Ford touring car," but the car broke down and had to be towed, stretching the journey from three hours to seven and a half (p.151).

After struggling with illness, Koffka had to leave. On the journey back, he reported: "The strongest impression I gained from being with these different people in the train was the amazing uniformity of their outlook. It was as though all of them, my colleagues included, had gone through the same school in which they had learned the same lessons, lessons in history, economics, politics, and philosophy." He adds: "The fundamental conviction colored their views on all subjects, and this conviction had all the power, but also all the rigidity of a dogmatic faith. Theirs was the proletarian state bringing the dawn of real culture, while beyond the Soviet border bourgeois civilization was still bending all its efforts, even their science and art, to the profit of capitalism and thereby perverting them" (p.159). "The uniformity of intellectual and emotional outlook is one of the strongest memories I carried away from my six weeks' visit to the Soviet Union. ... What confounded me was that they were all honest and yet uniform. Talking to them was like running against a stone wall. To have built this wall in a relatively short time is perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the Soviet government — however negatively one may value it" (p.160).

Regarding the expedition, he sums it up this way:

I suppose the Moscow government were willing to spend considerable sums of money on this enterprise because they expected formal proof of the beneficial effects of their policy on the intellectual and moral status of their citizens. 

The Uzbeks have still another reason. This emerged on several occasions, in conversations with different men in leading positions, among them the president of the Uzbek Executive Council himself. Under the Czarist regime a commission of psychologists had been sent down from St. Petersburg—so I was told by my various informants—to test the native population with a view to develop an educational system adapted to their intelligence. This commission had reported home that the Uzbeks were of such low intelligence that it would not be worth it to give them any education at all. And now the Uzbeks who were governing the country found themselves in this dilemma; they wanted to introduce their countrymen and women to science, which was to take the place of religion, but science had found that their efforts would be futile. (pp.161-162)

In all, this chapter provides a revealing outsider's look at the famed Uzbek expedition. As Lamdan and Yasnitsky argue, Luria's account did not note the optics of a large convoy showing up in rural Uzbekistan with two presidents and the head of the secret police in tow. Koffka's account gives us a better understanding of the conditions under which Luria's experiments occurred. More, he describes the uniformity of outlook in the young Soviet Union, a uniformity that could and did turn on Luria at the end of the second expedition.

As mentioned, I'm not really focused on the Gestaltists or Koffka per se. If you are, definitely pick up this book. If, like me, you're mainly interested in the insights it can bring to the Vygotsky Circle, stick with Chapter 6.

Reading :: Vygotsky and Literacy Research

Vygotsky and Literacy Research
By Peter Smagorinsky

Here, Peter Smagorinsky thinks through the question of literacy, applying Vygotsky's understanding of human development as culturally mediated. It's a solid book. But before we get into it, I do want to highlight a gripe, one that is not really about Smagorinsky per se.

Early on, Smagorinsky highlights the problems of interpreting Vygotsky when one does not speak Russian. Like me, Smagorinsky only speaks English, and he is very aware of the limitations. In fact, he ramps these up a bit, noting that Michael Cole, "who has spoken Russian for many decades, who lived in the Soviet Union during his internship with A.R. Luria, who..." -- and I'll spare you the lengthy list of qualifications -- that Michael Cole now insists on coauthoring papers with a native Russian speaker so he can better understand the "relevant context" of Vygotsky's words. 

To which I say: put down the hair shirt. I mean, Cole has now spoken Russian for longer than Vygotsky did. (Vygotsky died at 38.) Additionally, Cole certainly is more fluent in English than Vygotsky or Luria were, but this did not stop Vygotsky or Luria from reading, quoting, or criticizing scholars writing in English (and French, and German). Vygotsky never considered finding a native English writing partner to help him understand the writings of American behaviorists. Beyond that, Luria even taught himself  basic Uzbek before his Uzbek expedition — and he used Russian translators to conduct his studies there. 

Yes, I can certainly understand wanting to be careful about the cultural-historical context in archival studies. But I am also highly skeptical of gatekeeping tendencies in CHAT circles, tendencies that seem at odds with the scholarly standards of the Vygotsky Circle itself. After all, the Vygotsky Circle's texts are inevitably going to be taken up and transformed as they are applied to different sociocultural milieu -- or as Smagorinsky might put it, "reading is a constructive act done in conjunction with mediating texts and the social-cultural-historical context in which reading takes place" (p.127). 

Rant over, and back to the book. 

After the introduction, Smagorinsky provides a solid chapter (Chapter 2) discussing key Vygotskian terms and constructs. In Chapter 3, he discusses methodology and data from a Vygotskian perspective (and along the way, criticizes Luria's Uzbek expedition as culturally imperialist, p.70). Chapter 4 examines the culture of school and how it shapes literacy, while Chapter 5 discusses background for current literacy studies. 

Chapter 6 then examines reading as a culturally mediated and mediating practice. He reviews terms such as sign, text, intertext, and intercontext here, making the point that reading involves composing (p.127). He also defines text and culture. Chapter 7 reviews writing as tool and sign, Chapter 8 discusses nonverbal tool and sign systems, and Chapter 9 discusses thinking, speech, and verbal data. (Smagorinsky illustrates these later chapters with studies of high school classrooms.) The final chapter, Chapter 10, is a revision of Smagorinsky's superlative paper on the methods section as epicenter of social science research reports.

If you're interested in learning a lot about Vygotsky's terms and concepts from someone who has thought about them deeply, this is the book for you. Smagorinsky is a methodical thinker with an encyclopedic knowledge of Vygotskian thought, and this book is well worth reviewing for that fact alone. 

Reading :: The Psychology of Literacy

The Psychology of Literacy
By Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole

This book was published in 1981, shortly after Cole helped Luria publish Cognitive Development (1976) and after Cole, Scribner and colleagues coedited the Vygotsky collection Mind in Society (1978). It describes part of five years' worth of fieldwork in Liberia conducted by the authors (1973-1978), specifically work with the Vai, a minority population with the distinction of having developed and sustained their own written language. This phenomenon intrigued the authors, who had Luria's Uzbek expedition and Vygotsky's understanding of thought and language in mind as they developed a study of Vai literacy.

The authors clearly ground the study in Vygotsky, who provided grounding in psychology for "testing speculations about written language and thought"—grounding that was otherwise lacking (p.8). Based largely on Vygotsky's discussion of signs and tools and of lower and higher mental functions (pp.8-9), and drawing on Luria's Uzbek expedition for methodology (p.10), the authors hoped to conduct studies that could separate schooling from literacy (p.15).

The authors note, "we failed to find a discrete dimension of Vai life that could be labeled 'literacy'" (p.107): beyond family status in Vai society and sex, no other factors seemed to be common to literacy. They compared Vai literates, English literates (English was taught in schools), and Arabic literates (who were taught in religious schooling) (p.107), recognizing that these groups sometimes overlapped.

Like Luria, they tested the three groups of literates in terms of taxonomic classification: "in our population of informants, the only factor consistently associated with taxonomic choices was urban living" (p.122). In terms of logic, non-schooled literacy did not produce general cognitive effects—that is, there was no general "literacy" phenomenon, and therefore non-school literacies did not function as surrogates for schooling (p.132).

In terms of literacy and metalinguistic knowledge, they found that the adult Vai they studied did not perform like US/European children, with the exception of grammar: studies "had produced consistent results indicating that Vai script literates are better conversationalists about formal features of sentences than their nonliterate neighbors," probably because Vai literates often conversed about what makes good or correct Vai (p.159). In fact, the Vai practice of criticism required well-developed expository skills (p.219).

Literacy, the authors argue based on these studies, produces localized rather than generalized changes in cognitive skills. Yet "we have identified skills that are associated with literacy learning and that are not byproducts of general learning experiences in the classroom" (p.234). They explain these skills with the concept of practice, which "consists of three components: technology, knowledge, and skills" (p.236). Practice is

• recurrent
• goal-directed
• using a particular technology
• using particular systems of knowledge (p.236)

And "practice always refers to socially developed and patterned ways of using technology and knowledge to accomplish tasks" (p.236).

"This notion of practice guides the way we seek to understand literacy," they add: "We approach literacy as a set of socially organized practices which make use of a symbol system and a technology for producing and disseminating it" (p.236). They conclude, "our evidence justifies the position that literacy, as well as schooling, has identifiable cognitive consequences" (p.251).

This book is slow going in places—the authors really show their work in terms of methodology and data analysis—and sometimes the conclusions seem like they are small in proportion to the work put into the study. But in part that's because so much work has been done in Vygotskian studies of literacy since then. Overall, this book is a strong example of a painstakingly constructed methodology yielding specific results. If you're interested in literacy, cross-cultural studies, or Vygotskian theories of language, check it out.

Reading :: Alexander Romanovich Luria: A Scientific Biography

Alexander Romanovich Luria: A Scientific Biography (Plenum Series in Russian Neuropsychology)
By Evgenia D. Homskaya

I've mentioned A.R. Luria many times on this blog. But, in part due to remarks Chuck Bazerman made at CCCC last month, I decided to read more about Luria. Fortunately, UT's library has this biography—which currently retails on Amazon for $199.

The biography was written by Evgenia D. Homskaya (Moscow State University), who defended her own thesis under Luria in 1957 and went on to a prestigious career in her own right. Perhaps in consequence, this biography (first published in Russian in 1992) is not critical of Luria—although it is critical of the ideological hurdles he faced.

Although the biography addresses Luria's childhood, youth, and some of his personal life, for the most part it really is a "scientific biography," focusing on his accomplishments in each decade. (Each chapter addresses a decade of his work—"The Twenties"; "The Thirties"—except for the first and last chapter.) Much of the material is familiar from other sources, such as Luria's job offer from Kornilov in 1921 (p.15) and his first meeting with Vygotsky in 1924 (p.19).

Looking back at the end of the Soviet Union, the author is able to criticize the "morbid atmosphere" of 1930s Russia (p.25), which (for instance) endangered Luria during his Uzbek expedition. In a footnote, the author notes Luria's "notoriously famous telegram to Vygotsky" in which he declared that "'Uzbeks don't have any illusions'" (p.26). The author adds: "The telegram was interpreted by the officials in the political sense, which eventually led to a moratorium on the continuation of research in Central Asia" (p.26). The author doesn't thoroughly explore the implications of this lesson for Luria, who changed his field and his vocabulary several times to avoid further conflicts with the ideological constraints of the Soviet Union.

The expedition "failed" in the sense that a resolution condemned the research, along with Vygotsky and Luria's cultural-historical theory (p.30). Worse:

With the political atmosphere in the country becoming more and more suppressive, Luria was forced to react to the resolution by leaving the institute and arresting his psychological-ethnographic activity. Shortly after that, the situation was aggravated by a mournfully famous decree on pedology, accusing all psychologists and teachers who followed this direction incompetent and racist and prohibiting the application of tests for psychological research on children. ... Vygotsky and his followers were drowned in interdictions and false accusations that affected Luria and his work in particular. (p.30)

Luria moved to Kharkov in 1932 (p.30), conducting research with "patients with localized brain damage" and studying medicine (p.31). But "collaboration with the leader of the Psychoneurological Academy turned out to be unsuccessful," so he moved back to Moscow in 1934; Vygotsky died the same year (p.31).

Luria began studying twins at the Medico-Genetic Institute, leaving to become a full-time medical student in December 1936; in January 1937, the head of the Institute and colleagues were arrested and their research was declared illegal (p.31)—just another one of Luria's many lucky escapes.

Chapter 4 covers the Forties, in which Luria worked on rehabilitating Soviet soldiers who had sustained brain injuries during WWII. Chapter 5 moves on the Fifties, in which Luria worked on defectology—and had yet another lucky escape. A "colloquium devoted to the problems of the physiological theory of I.P. Pavlov" involved "the reconstruction of the biological sciences in accordance with Pavlovian teaching and against any other trends of thought and cosmopolitanism" (i.e., "a feature of capitalist ideology that neglected national traditions, culture, and patriotism, and advertized the purposes of universal totalitarianism" (p.41). Physiologist A.G. Ivanov-Smolensky arranged this session, in which non-Pavlovian approaches were declared harmful. The author notes that this event paralleled Lisenko's 1948 declaration that genetics was a bourgeois pseudoscience (p.41). Ivanov-Smolensky's mechanistic "motoric method" became ascendant, and Luria "was blamed as a representative of an anti-Pavlovian direction in psychology" (p.42). His lab at Burdenko was closed (p.42), and he went to the Institute of Defectology (p.43). In 1952-53, the "Case of the Doctors" "accused doctors of Jewish nationality"; as an ethnically Jewish doctor, Luria was in danger. But this process was interrupted in 1953 by Stalin's death—another lucky escape for Luria (p.43). He rose to VP of Scientific Research at the Institute of Defectology (p.43) and in 1956, publishes a book whose implications successfully challenged the 1936 Pedology Decree (p.44).

Chapter 6 covers the Sixties. At the end of the 1950s, Luria was able to return to the Burdenko Institute of Neurosurgery (p.53), where he focused on the question of memory (p.61). In the 1970s, Luria was able to revive cultural-historical theory, including having a monograph and his Uzbek expedition published (p.76). He argued that cognitive processes were determined by both the individual's experience and the common experience of mankind via language (p.76).

Ultimately, the author argues, Luria "collided" with authoritarian ideology in the 1930s and at the end of the 1950s (p.111). The author chronicles Luria's successful attempts to minimize the impacts of these collisions—he avoided the Gulag and worked up to his death—but I'd like to see more discussion of the forms that these attempts took. As Cole argues, Luria's maneuvers involved maintaining a relatively coherent research program while using the language of whichever approach was ascendant at the time, as well as escaping into adjacent fields (neurology, medico-genetic studies, brain trauma, defectology, aphasia) when necessary. These sudden changes and switchbacks meant that Luria was able to accomplish many things in many adjacent fields, but I wonder what his accomplishments would have looked like had he not been forced to maneuver around the vagaries of Soviet ideology.

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.