![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article considers A.N. Leontiev’s activity theory through the prism of the scientific problem that gave rise to it. This problem is often described as the need to go beyond L.S. Vygotsky’s “word-centrism,” but it seems more reasonable to argue that the problem addressed by activity theory had already been posed by Vygotsky himself as the need to overcome the two-factor approach to determination of the psyche, which for cultural-historical theory meant a transition from social to psychological determination and from there to human freedom. This problem caused Vygotsky to change his theory many times and, in particular, led to a transition from the theory of higher mental functions (“instrumental theory”) to the theory of the systemic and semantic structure of consciousness (“cultural-historical theory”). This problem was taken up by [Leontiev’s] “Kharkov School” directly from Vygotsky, and the difference between their activity theory and Vygotsky’s theory was only in the proposed solutions. Whereas Vygotsky proposed a solution that viewed “the personalized emotional experience of events” [perezhivanie]1 as a unit of the psyche, the Kharkovites proposed what seemed to them a more materialistic version, the concept of activity as a mediator refracting the influence of two factors, the social and the physiological, on the psyche. Understanding the genuine problem that Leontiev created his activity theory to solve, affects our understanding of the main theses of activity theory as well as the research carried out from its perspective. From analysis of some of these studies, we derive and emphasize such characteristics of activity as holism/integrality and supra-individuality.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. There is no adequate one-word English translation of this Russian term; the journal Mind, Culture, and Activity devoted an entire issue to this term, 2016, vol. Citation23, no. 4. For readability, I have condensed the phrase to “emotional experience.” — Translator.
2. Solomon V. Shereshevsky was a man with an exceptional memory, described in A.R. Luria’s book The Mind of a Mnemonist. — Translator.
3. Lev Zasetsky was treated by Luria, who described the case in his book The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound. — Translator.
4. Vygotsky’s schematic of a triangle illustrated how a subject does not act upon an object directly, but through the mediation of both material and non-material tools, of which the “sign” is one. — Translator.
5. He uses the water molecule as a metaphor for development: we cannot study water by breaking it down into its component elements (oxygen and hydrogen atoms); water is the dynamic interaction of these elements. — Translator.
6. The assumption that there is an immediate connection between psychic phenomena and the antecedents or causes of these phenomena. — Translator.
7. It is well known that a similar opposition between the level of psychic reflection and the level of activity became for A.N. Leontiev [Citation8] one of the basic principles of the development of the psyche in phylogenesis.
8. There is a direct indication in his article that a word may be considered as a used object, and a direct description of activity by a word may be considered as “the child’s use of the appropriate word” [10, p. 342].
9. Over time, this understanding of the specificity of activity theory became so implicit that one of Leontiev’s modern followers even had to introduce the special concept of “activity gestalt” [Citation4]. True, Iu.B. Dormashev’s need to introduce this concept substantiates not so much the integral nature of the interaction at all levels of activity, as the subordination of the “object” and “subject” of activity to that integrality as a whole [Citation4].
10. The distinction between these Russian words does not really exist in English. It is similar to that in German between Bedeutung and Sinn. Znachenie is meaning that can be shared by all speakers of a given language; smysl is subjective, personalized meaning. See Dmitry A. Leontiev, “Dimensions of the Meaning/Sense Concept in the Psychological Context,” in C.W. Tolman (Ed.) (1996), Problems of Theoretical Psychology. North York, Ontario, Canada: Captus Press. — Translator.
11. A person on a primitive collective hunt who frightens game into the range of other hunters who are waiting in ambush; his activity is only meaningful, in Leontiev’s view, because it is part of a collective endeavor. — Translator.