Reading Activity, Consciousness, Personality Dialectically: Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and the Centrality of Society

Abstract

Whereas cultural-historical activity theory has proven to be fruitful, providing a framework to those scholars interested in understanding human knowing and learning from a more holistic perspective, essential aspects of the original theory either have not been taken up or have been transformed in the take up. In part, the problems arise from the difficulties of translating Leont'ev—as the work of Marx on which the theory is built—into English, where several originally distinct pairs of (Russian, German) categories and concepts are conflated into one (English). The purpose of this article is to bring into the foreground some of the fundamental aspects of cultural-historical activity theory that have disappeared during translation and uptake into Anglo-Saxon scholarship.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Anton Yasnitsky for his assistance in accessing some of the original Russian texts referenced in this article.

Notes

¹This is particularly clear in two chapters (Vygotskij, 2005) published in English as “Concrete Human Psychology” and “The Historical Meaning of the Crisis of Psychology: A Methodological Investigation.”