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Reading Research Quarterly 44(1) pp. 8595 dx.doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.44.1.4 2009 International Reading Association 85

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n their introductory chapter to The CambridgeCompanion to Vygotsky (CCV), editors Harry Daniels,Michael Cole, and James V. Wertsch (2007) state

their goal for the volume:

It is our intention that this book will make Vygotsky easierto read by discussing his work in terms of the cultures inwhich [his work] arose and developed; seek to clarify as-pects of the intellectual legacy that he left; and then discusssubsequent applications of this legacy. (p. 2)

That is, they view Vygotsky in light of the culture of hisorigins and then with respect to the culture that hasevolved from the foundation he provided. Their aim isto contribute to an understanding of Vygotskys workby contextualizing and historicizing his own career and

then challenging readers to understand how his workhas been taken up, and most productively could be tak-en up, by subsequent generations of scholars who claimhis influence and further claim to apply his principles.

I say claim because, in the view of many who arewell-read in this scholarship, assertions of a Vygotskianperspective are often tenuous at best. I too often see ref-erences to selected sections ofMind in Society (Vygotsky,1978) that do not suggest a richer reading or consider-ation of either his own more extensive writing or thebody of work produced by people conversant with hiscareer project. Vygotsky sought to resolve the crisis offragmentation that he saw in the psychology of his day.The crisis remains, as evidenced by the abundance ofpsychologies and their different foci available in the 21stcentury. Vygotskys solution was to propose and lay thefoundation for a comprehensive psychology of humanconcept development. His ambitious plan includedthree central facets: It was fundamentally genetic (i.e.,developmental), it relied on the premise that frame-works for thinking are social in origin and are internal-ized through cultural practice, and it used the axiomthat mental processes are mediated by tools and signs

(Wertsch, 1985b). Wertsch summarized a Vygotskianperspective as being concerned with human conceptdevelopment as volitional, goal-directed, tool-mediated

action in cultural context.Vygotsky has been cited to account for learning and

development in many scholarly fields. Wells (1999)numbers among many who are concerned that these ci-tations are often ill informed. He has commented (refer-enced in del Ro and lvarezs chapter in CCV) that theoften-invoked zone of proximal development (ZPD)

is the only aspect of Vygotskys genetic theory of human de-velopment that most teachers have ever heard of and, as aresult, it is not infrequently cited to justify forms of teachingthat seem quite incompatible with the theory as a whole. (p.313; cf. Smagorinsky, 2007)

I would say that researchers are at least as guilty ofthese trivial applications of Vygotsky as are teachers. Iregard this superficial referencing by researchers as amore serious problem in that they have time to thinkmore carefully about their work than overburdenedteachers and so should take more seriously their respon-sibility to read their sources and their attendant scholar-ship with care. When a theoretical source is used moreas a means of membership in a club than to advance apointas I think is too often the case with citationsto Vygotskythen the reference strikes me as, at best,disingenuous, and at worst, unethical.

Reading extensively in Vygotskian scholarship seemscritical to referencing him knowledgeably, given thechallenges that Vygotskys writing presents to the 21st-century reader. Daniels, Cole, and Wertschs CambridgeCompanion stands as an important contribution to thisscholarship. It is similar in quality to Wertschs (1985a)edited volume Culture, Communication, and Cognition:Vygotskian Perspectives, which was the first book I readwhen initially trying to understand Vygotsky in the ear-ly 1990s. I make this comparison because the editors

The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky. Harry Daniels, Michael Cole, and James V. Wertsch (Eds.). 2007. New York:Cambridge University Press. 462 pp. Hardcover ISBN 978-0-521-83104-8; US$91.00. Softcover ISBN 978-0-521-53787-2; US$27.99.

The Culture of Vygotsky

Peter Hussein SmagorinskyThe University of Georgia, Athens, USA

Essay Book Review


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Reading Research Quarterly 44(1)86

of both collections have assembled an impressive set ofinternational authors with expertise on this topic, andbecause the chapters in both volumes are written to fo-cus on a specific aspect of a Vygotskian perspective andexplicate it as a way to illuminate issues important toVygotskys larger project.

The roster of authors is impressive, representing

nine nations and including chapters by a distinguishedgroup of Vygotskian scholars: Ren van der Veer, DavidBakhurst, Anne Edwards, Dorothy Holland and WilliamLachicotte, Vera John-Steiner, Boris Meshcheryakov,James Wertsch, Michael Cole and Natalia Gajdamaschko,Vladimir Zinchenko, Mariane Hedegaard, Pablo del Roand Amelia lvarez, Harry Daniels, Alex Kozulin andBoris Gindis, and Yrj Engestrm. Of the 14 chapters,at least half are written by people either native to Russiaor fluent in the language (Van der Veer, Bakhurst,Meshcheryakov, Wertsch, Cole and Gajdamaschko,Zinchenko, and Kozulin and Gindis). Others are writtenby European-origin scholars who have read Vygotsky intwo or more languages.

The inclusion of many Russian-speaking contribu-tors is among the qualities of this volume. Even thosewhom I consider to be conversant with Vygotskys orig-inal writingthose whose publications are rife withreferences to works of Vygotsky that are only availablein Russianare cautious about their grasp of both thelanguage and the concepts. Michael Cole, who has spo-ken Russian for many decades and who lived in the for-mer Soviet Union during his internship with A.R. Luria,wrote that I have been writing jointly with Natalia[Gajdamaschko] precisely because I feel so strongly the

need for more than simple translation help in dealingwith the meta-psychology and national ethos that is therelevant context for understanding the local words (M.Cole, personal communication, June 26, 2008). JamesWertsch, who speaks to Russians in Russian and hastranslated Vygotsky into English, also backs off fromclaims that his knowledge of Russian is fluent (J.Wertsch, personal communication, July 3, 2008).

I wish that more people shared Coles and Wertschshumility in seeking greater expertise in an area in whichthey have long been among the worlds foremost schol-ars. Instead, what I see too often are drive-by refer-

ences to Vygotskys work. I have come across the ZPD inaccounts of teaching and learning without attention totheir cultural and historical dimensionsa central fea-ture of a ZPD analysis. I have also seen Vygotskys con-cern for the importance of play stretched to imply thatVygotsky believed that learning should be fun. Andyet, as Hedegaard argues in her CCVchapter, Vygotskysnotion of play refers to experimental activity designedto create possibilities and not to the idea that learningshould involve merriment.

Vygotsky, from what I can gather, was not a funguy but rather an extraordinarily intense and formida-bly brilliant man. References to his work that do nottake into account his larger project ought to be severelyreviewed and critiqued. That is, if the ZPD is invokedwithout attention to issues of culture, intersubjectivity,the historical role of tool-mediated action in the setting

of teaching and learning, and other issues that tie hisideas together, then any reader ought to view the refer-ence with skepticism. Otherwise, as is now the case,Vygotskys work will continue to be treated superficial-ly and misappropriated to suit authors purposes andnot to advance scholarship within the framework ofhis ideas. The CCVnumbers among those publicationsthat will inform and stimulate readers who hope to linkVygotskys work to their own, and to do so with fidelityto his larger conception of human development.

The extent to which this book will be of interest toreaders ofReading Research Quarterly (RRQ) is probably a

separate question from whether this book meets its owngoals. As the editors statement of purpose reveals, theCCVis concerned with Vygotsky broadly speaking ratherthan with Vygotsky as he applies to reading or literacyresearch. Indeed, reading or literacy researchers whohope to see themselves or their friends referenced herewill likely be disappointed. Although there are brief ref-erences to Leanders (2002) attention to identity artifacts,Lees (2000) cultural modeling, Gutierrezs (Gutierrez& Stone, 2000) work on the third space, and Palincsarand Browns (1984) reciprocal teaching, these constructsare used in service of broader points rather than serv-ing as central points themselves. Of these, only recipro-cal teaching merits an index listing. If this volume is toinform the work of reading or literacy researchers, thenthey need to seek a broader understanding of the full-blown Vygotskian project. I submit that researchers whohope to make any real sense of Vygotsky in relation totheir own work need to take this richer perspective.

I next focus on the contents of Daniels et al.s (2007)collection by considering the themes that I see recurringacross the chapters. Undoubtedly, I will overlook impor-tant issues that other readers might themselves foreground

in considering this volumes contributions to Vygotskianscholarship. What I offer here is a set of themes that Ihave found compelling and that have advanced or sharp-ened my own thinking in relation to Vygotskys careerproject and, for that matter, my own. That many otherangles are available and could be emphasized suggeststhe richness of this volume and what it has to offer thosewho seek a clearer understanding of both Vygotskys owncareer and the many lines of research that have followedfrom the framework he provided.


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87The Culture of Vygotsky

The Context for Vygotskys WorkThe authors ofCCVs chapters contextualize and histo-ricize Vygotskys career and work routinely throughouttheir essays. They argue for a reciprocal conception ofcontext, one that takes into account the etymology ofcontext as derived from contexere, meaning weavingtogether (see Cole, 1996). Vygotsky, then, although aproduct of his times, also helped to produce his times.This sense of situated agency is critical to understandinga Vygotskian perspective, which relies on the premisethat thinking is social in origin yet is not fatalistic aboutthe implications of this condition for how individualsmay potentially act on their environments.

Each author yields insights into Vygotskys thinkingand how the setting of his life and work contributed tothe trajectory his ideas took. The editors caution read-ers that

Each author in this volume is engaging in an act of interpre-tation that is constitutive of our own context as Vygotskyslife and work were constitutive of his. We emphasize thesecomplicating circumstances because recognition of thesecircumstances should help us to ward off the temptationto arrive at a single truth about the man, ideas, and eventsabout which we write. (p. 4)

Although, then, clar ify ing much about Vygotsky, thisvolume also implores readers to recognize the inter-pretive task that awaits anyone who hopes to becomeinvolved in appropriating his perspective in their ownscholarly work.

Vygotsky was born in 1896 and died of tubercu-

losis, which afflicted him throughout his adult life, in1934. His magnum opus, Thinking and Speech, was pub-lished the year he died; he dictated sections from hissickbed, no doubt contributing to the texts notoriousdifficulty (see Zinchenko, CCV). When he was 21 yearsold, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian ProvisionalGovernment, and the Russian Civil War from 1917 to1922 resulted in the creation of the Soviet Union in1924. Vygotskys mercurial ascension into the upperechelon of Soviet psychologists in this era was quiteremarkable given his youth, his outsider status as a na-tive of Belarus, and his Jewish heritage within the hier-archical and Balkanized social structure of Soviet life

(see Kotik-Friedgut & Friedgut, 2008, for an accountof Jewish influences on Vygotskys worldview). He be-gan his career as a teacher and, in 1925, completed andpublished his doctoral dissertation, translated as ThePsychology of Art. His decade-long career as a psycholo-gist, then, took place concurrent with the launch of theSoviet Union and its foundation in a highly centralizedMarxist philosophy.

The Soviet system has long been known for its bru-tal reinforcement of its ideology, and in its early days

and through at least the 1950s monitored its psycholo-gists with a vengeance (see Cole, Levitin, & Luria,2006). Because of the excessive role he identified for in-dividual development in social context, says Zinchenko,Vygotskys commitment to Marxist beliefs did not savehim from criticism. His works were banned, denounced,and declared to be vicious and even evil. He was luckyto have managed to die in his own bed in 1934 (CCV,p. 213). Others, however, were not so fortunate to die ofnatural causes. In Thinking and Speech, Vygotsky did notreference Gustav Gustavovich Shpet, one of his men-tors. CCV contributors conclude that Vygotsky likelyavoided acknowledging Shpet because he did not wishto bring upon himself the fate of Shpet himself, whowas dismissed from his academic positions on multipleoccasions and subjected to brutal interrogation and ex-ecution in 1937 by Soviet authorities (Wertsch, CCV, p.184) due to his freedom and dignity and the indepen-dence of his thought from MarxistLeninist ideology,which at the time was growing stronger and stronger

(Zinchenko, CCV, p. 212). Shpets literary contemporaryMandelshtam, notes Zinchenko, met the fate of Soviets,no matter how seemingly benign their field of endeavor,who in any way defied the party position: He perishedin the Gulag a year after Shpets murder (CCV, p. 231).

Vygotskys death coincided with harshly punitiveedicts issuing from Soviet leaders. The Pedology Decreeof 1936 banned both prior and future work in the areaof pedology, the study of child development (Shmeleva,2002), which was the general area in which Vygotskyswork fell. It is no coincidence that the Great Purge orGreat Terror, in which Stalin took repression and per-

secution to astonishing new levels, began the followingyear. The Decree declared pedology to be false science,eliminated university departments in the field, and dis-missed or arrested its scientists.

Ewing (2001) pointed out that the Decree was de-signed to purge the thinking that had produced trackingin Soviet schools through the assessment and classifica-tion of students by segregating students according toresults of formal assessments. According to Ewing,

the Central Committee charged that pedologists pseudo-scientific experiments had called excessive attention tothe most negative influences and pathological perversions

in children, their families, and surrounding environment.Such testing meant that an ever larger and larger numberof children were assigned to special schools after being cat-egorized as mentally backward, defective, or difficult.In fact, the Central Committee declared, many of these chil-dren were perfectly capable of attending normalnaia shkola(normal schools), but once these labels had been affixed,they were considered hopeless cases. (p. 480)

So far, so good: The 21st-century reader might easilysee these charges as quite reasonable and in accord with


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current critiques of tracked schools, especially by thoseworking from a Marxist perspective (e.g., Apple, 1982).

Yet other agendas were at work. Polit ical leaders,Ewing (2001) noted, were concerned that pedologistswere displaying pedological distortions, succumbingto class-hostile elements, and engaging in wreckingactivity w ith anti-Leninist objectives (p. 472), sug-gesting that the welfare of children was viewed and in-terpreted within the framework of the states ideology.The Decrees recommendations, he found, were made aspart of a broader move toward more repressive policiesand government intervention in both science and dailylife in the Soviet Union. This shift was no doubt influ-enced by the paranoid and nativist response to the riseof Nazis in neighboring Germany, the regimes effort tofind a scapegoat for shortcomings of the Soviet schoolsystem, and a rise in esteem for the proletariat accompa-nied by a distrust of elite intellectuals, many of whomfound themselves suddenly and fatefully threatened inSoviet life. Ewing continued:

The Central Committee went beyond these complaintsabout school policies, however, by charging that pedologicaltheory itself was based on falsely-scientific and anti-Marxistfoundations. In particular, any suggestion that childrensfate was determined by f ixed social or biological factorswas condemned as directly contradictory to socialist de-velopment, which had successfully re-educated people.Such claims about environmental and hereditary inf luencesallegedly revealed an uncritical borrowing of bourgeoistheories intended to maintain the dominant positions ofexploiting classes and superior races by perpetuatingthe physical and spiritual doom of the working classes andinferior races. (p. 480)

In this climate, reading Vygotsky and his colleagueswas forbidden almost immediately following his death;indeed, the translation ofThought and Language intoEnglish in 1962 predated its availability in the SovietUnion by a dozen years. Kozulin and Gindis note, Forpolitical reasons, any open discussion of Vygotskys ideaswas practically impossible from 1936 to the late 1950s(CCV, p. 334), and Daniels reports that Vygotskys bookPedagogical Psychology was considered to be so politi-cally unacceptable to the rulers of the Soviet state thatone had to have a special pass from the KGB that wouldadmit one to the restricted reading room in the LeninLibrary where the book could be read (CCV, p. 307).

Vygotsky no doubt embraced much about Marxismbut not enough to suit the state. The environment offear in which psychologists of his day worked, in whichideology always trumped science, surely helped toshape his wr iting, no matter how courageous he mighthave been in challenging the orthodoxies of his daychallenging the work, for instance, of Pavlov, the reign-ing titan. Readers might see some similarities betweengovernment intervention in science in the Soviet Union

and George W. Bushs America; and yet I can write thisessay without fear of being brutally interrogated and ex-ecuted or sent to the Gulag, although I hear that theynow have vacancies at Guantanamo Bay.

In addition to taking into account the politicalrealities of his day, the contributors to CCV interpretVygotsky by placing his work in the context of thinkerswhose work he drew on to formulate his own ideas. Thiseffort has two primary benefits: It helps readers to learnabout Russian scholars who are little known to English-language readers, and it helps to locate Vygotskys workwithin the theoretical, methodological, and ontologicalstreams that f lowed through his research.

Van der Veer notes that That Vygotsky was rescuedfrom oblivion and Basov remains relatively unknown...demonstrates Clios capricious nature (CCV, p. 39). AsVan der Veers reference to the Greek muse of historysuggests, Vygotskys current fame and influence, al-though largely a function of the quality of his ideas, arealso a consequence of his work having been kept alive

by his colleagues, particularly A.R. Luria, during thePedology Decree and ultimately revived for translationand publication following the death of Stalin. Otherswere less fortunate. The contributors to CCVhelp to ac-knowledge their role in Soviet psychology and broadenour understanding of the complex lineage of thinkers ofwhich Vygotsky was a part.

The chapters by Van der Veer and Zinchenko mostspecifically address psychologists and other scientif-ic thinkers who influenced Vygotskys work. Van derVeer prov ides a categorical review of Russians whoseresearch contributed to the paradigms that Vygotsky

entered and ultimately refined or shattered entirely:Pavlov, Bekhterev, Chelpanov, and others. Zinchenkofocuses more specifically on G.G. Shpet, whose legacybenefits from Zinchenkos detailed treatment. Thesereviews disinter the reputations of overlooked scholarsand help to provide a heritage consisting not merely ofnames but of the intertext of ideas that run throughVygotskys work. These chapters complement well theRussian and Soviet scholarship that has been publishedin English in the journal Soviet Psychology, renamed theJournal of Russian and East European Psychology followingthe fall of the Soviet Union.

Both Bakhurst and Wertsch situate Vygotsky in

broad philosophical streams of thought. Bakhursts goalis to defend the view that Vygotskys legacy should beset against the tradition of philosophical rationalism,which provided for Vygotsky his Eurocentrism andhis linear vision of historical progress (CCV, p. 74).His chapter serves as a defense of Vygotskys rational-ism and its distinctively Western ways of thinking. Inhis chapter, Bakhurst contrives a dialogue between hisown view that Vygotskys rationalism was critical tohis perspective and the antirationalists view that the


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89The Culture of Vygotsky

fecundity of Vygotskys insights depends on liberat-ing them from this rationalist perspective, which, it isclaimed, has a deleterious, indeed reactionary, influenceon his thought (CCV, p. 51). Rather than finding theserationalist premises to be disabling, Bakhurst arguesthat through his formulation, Vygotsky worked withinboth their constraints and affordances to produce hisaccount of human development. He was no doubt aproduct of his time and place; just as he was by neces-sity a Marxist, he was by culture a rationalist. Bakhurstfinds that this orientation provided Vygotsky, poweredby his formidable intellect, with the tools he needed tosynthesize a complex host of ideas into a psychologythat took on the crisis of fragmentation that he found inthe field of his day.

Wertsch focuses on Vygotskys inconsistent accountof the construct of mediation, a central dimension of hisaccount of human development. Mediation in general re-fers to the role of signs and tools (or, in Coles, 1996,parlance, artifacts) in both internali zation and exter-

nalization in human transactions with their social set-tings. For Vygotsky, the primary mediational means forhumans is speech. Listening to and engaging in speechwith cultural elders and veterans is what provides a per-son with a worldview and the specific language throughwhich to characterize it, allows for new ideas to emergethrough the process of expression and articulation, en-ables the development of signs that embody concepts,and provides the means through which people commu-nicate with others and act upon their worlds. Wertsch(1991) and others have since expanded the cultural toolkit to include a host of nonverbal mediational means (cf.Smagorinsky, 2001), with the recognition that, as Luriamaintained, speech remains the tool of tools (Cole,1996, p. 108).

Wertsch argued that the inconsistencies he f inds inVygotskys account of mediation follow from Vygotskyssimultaneous grounding in what appear to be contradic-tory ontologies in European thought: one that producesexplicit mediation (through observable means) and onethat produces implicit mediation (through intangiblemeans). These perspectives follow from what Wertsch(2000) has called designative or Enlightenment (orwhat Bakhurst cal ls rationalist) traditions, and ex-pressivist or Romantic traditions, both of which had

influenced European thought for centuries at the timeof Vygotskys career. Although Wertsch (2000) has ar-gued previously that Vygotsky seemed unaware of thiscontradiction and never resolved it, in his CCVchapterhe looks for more synthesis, arguing that

the two forms of mediation can be seen as part of a largertheoretical framework when one considers some common-alities in the way he treated these forms. In particular, heviewed both forms of mediation under the general dictumthat sign meaning develops. (p. 191)

A Vygotskian perspective requires seeing each actdeeply in light of the intertextual and intercontextualhistory that has produced the moment. I have focusedon key mediators that helped to shape Vygotskys think-ing. Other authors include attention to the mediationalideas that served as contours for Vygotskys views. Thisarchaeological work is an important contribution ofCCVin that it helps readers to understand both individ-ual thinkers who provided Vygotsky with inspirationand foil and broader ideological factors that inescapablycontributed to his own development as a citi zen andscholar.

Familiar Vygotskian Themesand One That Is Not So FamiliarSeveral authors explore what I consider to be familiarVygotsk ian themes, not simply rev iewing them butpushing themselves to gain new insights through their

analyses. These chapters include those by John-Steineron thinking and speech, Cole and Gajdamaschko onthe notion of culture, Hedegaard on concept develop-ment, del Ro and lvarez on the ZPD, and Daniels onpedagogical implications of a Vygotskian perspective.The volume also includes Kozulin and Gindiss chapteron Vygotskys work with children having special needs,which may be less familiar to the casual reader of hiswork. It is impossible to do justice to these chapters ina brief review, given the rich range of topics they coverand the wisdom they offer. I will attempt, however, toprovide a few generalizations on the basis of my read-

ings of these chapters.Those well-read in Vygotskian scholarship shouldnot be surprised to see these topics foregrounded in acompanion to Vygotsky. For most readers, the con-structs of culture, the ZPD, and so on are commonfare. Indeed, one might wonder why they need extend-ed treatment in this volume, given the attention theyhave already received in so many publications. Theirenduring status as staples of a Vygotskian perspective,however, suggests both their importance in his theoryand the degree to which they benefit from continualreconsideration.

There are many reasons for the need for ongoing

analysis and explication of these constructs. First,Vygotsky was not entirely consistent in the ways inwhich he used his terms. Wertsch, as noted, found thatVygotsky used the notion of mediation as grounded intwo conflicting traditions. Cole and Gajdamaschko fur-ther note that Vygotsky used culture in three distinctways: as artistic and creative processes and products, asmediational means in human mentation, and as a termto characterize groups of people who have producedparticular sorts of rationalist artifacts considered more


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advanced than the means developed by primitivepeoplea sort of cultural judgment that seems out ofsynch with Vygotskys other conceptions of culture (seeSmagorinsky, 1995). Knowing the implications of eachdefinition helps reduce the incidence of bogus dis-agreement as we seek to harness Vygotskys conceptualsystem, as Wertsch urges in hoping that the argumentsin this volume clarify problems that follow from shallowreadings of Vygotsky (CCV, p. 192).

What these chapters ultimately impress on me isthe need to acknowledge that a Vygotskian perspectiverequires seeing each act deeply in relation to the cul-tural and historical practices of which it is a part. As Ihave reviewed, the authors in this collection endeavorto situate and historicize Vygotskys work; not only inthose I have featured thus far but in every chapter inthe volume. Understanding Vygotsky depends on thesort of contextualization that permeates CCVs chapters,and interpreting events using a Vygotskian perspectivein turn requires a culturalhistorical framework. The

chapter by del Ro and lvarez on the ZPD is instruc-tive in this regard. Too often, the ZPD is construed asan ahistorical instructional dyad. Yet for a Vygotskiananalysis to have any relevance, the culture of the settingneeds to be taken into account, including the ways inwhich the mediational tools emphasized in the interac-tion have a cultural value in the traditions and conven-tions that govern the setting. Overlooking that history,and focusing only on the elder or veteran and the learn-er, ignores the ways in which the various participantsascribe value to the means of mediation and bring priorways of thinking and acting to their interaction.

I could provide this sort of elaboration for any ofthe chapters that I include in this section, yet wouldundoubtedly wear out my welcome with RRQ readersin doing so. My point is that, even if you have read ex-tensively in these areas, you will find much to considerin these chapters. My own copy ofCCV is thoroughlymarked and underlined, even in areas in which I thinkI have some understanding. The issues, however, aretoo complex and challenging for me to have learnedthem once and for all through prior reading. Additionalperspectives and insights offered through these chap-ters are available to those who believe that their knowl-edge, no matter how great, can be further extended and

their thinking further stimulated by engaging with theideas of other scholars considering the same texts andquestions.

Although the ZPD has become virtually synonymouswith Vygotsky, his work in the field of defeklologija,translated as defectology, is no doubt less familiar.The subject of defectology is the focus of Volume 2 ofthe Collected Works (Vygotsky, 1993) and also serves asthe topic of Kozulin and Gindiss contribution to CCV.Readers might cringe at the archaic notion that children

with special needs are defective, yet that was the pre-vailing conception at the time. Kozulin and Gindis lo-cate this perspective in the mechanistic mentality ofthe 1920s that explicitly compared human beings withmechanisms (CCV, p. 333), with the attendant beliefthat malfunctions can be diagnosed and corrected. Theterm covered a wide radius of conditions, including im-pairments in hearing, seeing, and speaking and whatwas termed mental retardation. Vygotskys work overthe course of his career further considered the treat-ment and education of children from a broader range ofnonnormative makeups.

This interest was initially pragmatic. Given theunmerciful reality of everyday life in his hometown ofGomel during the civil war (19181922) (CCV, p. 332)that made existence precarious, the young Vygotsky, a1917 graduate of Moscow University, took a teaching po-sition in 1918 that enabled him to pursue his interests inliterature and the humanities. He soon gravitated to theGomel Teacher Training College and became director

of its psychological laboratory, an assignment that in-volved developing methods of psychological evaluationand supervising their administration in schools. At theend of the civil war, he relocated to Moscow and beganan affiliation with the Section of Abnormal Children inthe Peoples Commissariat of Education and ultimatelyfounded the Medical-Pedagogic Laboratory for the Studyof Abnormal Children, which remains in place today asthe Institute of Corrective Pedagogy.

Kozulin and Gindis relate that Vygotskys career-long concern with special-needs children began in theearly Soviet Union when their numbers included the

many orphans and traumatized children who survivedthe civil war. Their chapter makes clear a central ideain Vygotskys approach to children who fell outside thenormal range of functioning. Rather than taking themechanistic approach that children with special needswere defective and could be fixed, Vygotsky viewed thequestion of their condition as a sociocultural ratherthan an organic or individual developmental phenom-enon (CCV, p. 334). Kozulin and Gindis find that

[t]he essence of Vygotskys approach to remedial educationis in addressing the secondary disability, that is, by counter-ing the negative social consequences of the primary disabil-

ity. Vygotsky believed that physical and mental impairmentcould be overcome by creating alternative but essential lyequivalent roads for cultural development. By acquiring thepsychological tools, disabled children transform their natu-ral abilities into higher mental functions as do their nondis-abled peers. (CCV, p. 345)

To Vygotsky, rather than fixing the defect in thechild, an educator should strive to minimize or elimi-nate any environmental factors that could amplify theeffects of the original point of concern. I imagine that


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The Culture of Vygotsky 91

this effort might focus on diminishing whatever stigmasfollow from being different; that is, it might attempt toeducate people in the setting about how to view thosewith nonnormative physical or mental makeups andtreat them respectfully and in light of their potential.A second approach would be to broaden the sign-and-tool systems available for mediation. Again, this tackwould require changes in the environment so that newtools become sanctioned, and new approaches to assess-ment become available to allow for alternative paths toperformance.

What I find so str iking about Vygotskys work inthis area is how fresh and relevant it sounds in the con-text of 21st-century schooling. Children of differencestill face negative social consequences of their condi-tions that lead to what Vygotsky called secondary dis-abilities, which in the long term might trouble themmore than the source of difference itself. The solutionis to change the setting: to change perceptions, to allowfor unconventional ways of thinking and acting, and to

otherwise construct a more supportive and empathiccontext for childrens development. The modern move-ment toward inclusion has made progress toward thisend. That Vygotsky was among the originators of thismovement and that his contributions are generally over-looked speaks to the breadth of his achievement andthe depths of reading that await anyone who wishes toclaim an informed perspective on his research.

Problems in TranslationAt present, there is a wealth of Vygotskian texts avail-able to the English-language reader: six volumes of col-lected works in publication, additional books from hisoeuvre available, key texts subjected to multiple trans-lations, and a major project now underway in Russiato make his entire output available to English-languagereaders. Yet, Vygotsky remains a complex figure anddifficult scholar to grasp, and for a variety of reasons. Inhis Translators Foreword and Acknowledgements toThe Collected Works, Volume 3, Ren van der Veer (1997)says,

I have not attempted to improve Vygotskys style of writingalthough it was at times difficult to refrain from doing so. Itis clear that Vygotsky...never rewrote a text for the sake ofimproving its style and readability. Hence the redundancy,the difficulty to follow the thread of his argument, the awk-ward sentences, etc. (p. v)

Meshcheryakov notes that Vygotsky produced 190works within the 10-year span that comprised his ca-reer, many of which were written very quickly, in al-most telegraphic style. Some works remain unfinished.It is certainly possible that some of the works that were

published posthumously were not yet intended for pub-lication (CCV, p. 155). Daniels et al. note that

It is difficult to reconcile some of the writing from the early1920s with that which was produced during the last 2 yearsof his life. These rapid changes, coupled with the fact thathis work was not published in chronological order, makesynthetic summaries of his work difficult. (CCV, p. 2)

So in addition to the inherent difficulty of theideas Vygotsky produced, his rendering of themmake for challenging reading, no matter how well-prepared the reader is.

Even those with extraordinary fluency in Vygotskyswork typically consult others to help with their under-standing. Van der Veer, a native of the Netherlands,relates in his translators introduction to the CollectedWorks, Volume 3 that After I had translated the wholevolume [from Russian to English] I carefully checkedmy translation against the German and Spanish trans-lations of the same volume (1997, p. v). With five

languages at play in his effort to translate Vygotskysalready-difficult prose and concepts (German, Spanish,Russian, English, and Dutch), Van der Veer furtherenlisted feedback from a host of colleagues (mostlyEuropean) to amend Vygotskys sloppy approach tocitation by providing appropriate references and foot-notes to add depth to the text.

Van der Veers (1997) meticulous approach to ren-dering Vygotsky into English suggests one key lessonto be learned from reading Vygotsky with insight: thatclaims to understanding or implementing his ideas mustbe undertaken with care and caution. I refer again to Van

der Veers work in underscoring the importance of read-ing more than just excerpts (or summaries of excerpts)from Mind in Society in claiming a Vygotskian perspec-tive. In a review of an Italian translation ofThinking andSpeech that postdates any version of the text availablein English, Van der Veer (1992) makes the remarkableobservation that

[u]nfortunately, neither in English nor in any other languagehas a reliable republication ofThought and Language beenavailable. Leaving aside the questions that can be raisedconcerning the original Soviet 1934 edition (Vygotskydid not see the book in print and the editor, Kolbanovsky,changed some of the wordings to make the book more palat-

able for the ideological leaders), we know that the later 1956and 1982 Soviet editions were marred by many mistakesand plain falsifications. All of the existing translations intoEnglish, or any other language, took these unreliable latereditions as their point of departure. As a result, readers un-able to read Russian or find a copy of the original 1934 edi-tion have had, until now, no authoritative text ofThoughtand Language available. (p. 83; cf. Van der Veer, 1987, for acritical review of Kozulins, 1986, translation ofThought andLanguage [Vygotsky, 1934/1986], which to Van der Veer ismore properly translated as Thinking and Speech)


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I am impressed that Van der Veer is now sufficiently flu-ent in at least six languages to read Vygotsky and thenmake this judgment; I am alarmed that he nonethelessstates that Vygotsky obviously preferred principled op-ponents, such as Pavlov, who made their own originalcontribution to science and invented their own scientif-ic vocabulary to mediocre university professors, such asthe present writer, who can only summarize what oth-ers have discovered (CCV, p. 37). After reading thatVan der Veer regards himself as a relative mediocr ity, Icringe yet further when I realize that even though I havebeen referencing Vygotsky in my own work for about 15years, I probably am basing my understanding on ques-tionable translations. It becomes important, then, forme and no doubt others to read the work of Vygotskianscholars who have read his Russian texts to develop aclearer grasp of the ideas that I am drawing on.

Tensions Between the Individualand the CollectiveA Marxist perspective emphasizes the collective, asmight be expected of a philosophy that guided theSoviet Union. In contrast, the United States has fromits founding celebrated the rights of individuals (se-lectively, of course, given the many years that it tookfor full citizenship to be extended to women, people ofcolor, and others outside the dominant mainstream).This tension between a focus on the individual and onthe collective remains at work in taking a Vygotskianperspective, an issue that emerges from reading across

the chapters in CCV.As Bakhurst notes,

Despite his emphasis on the sociocultural foundations ofpsychological development, Vygotskys thought remainscentered on the individual subject conceived as a discrete,autonomous self. A cultural-historical approach, however,ought rightly to stress the dialogical character of the self. Wedo not just become persons through our interaction withothers; we are ourselves only in relation to others. (CCV,p. 63)

Three chapters in particular work within this ten-sion between the individual and the collective, although

not entirely explicitly. Holland and Lachicotte compareand contrast Vygotsky with U.S. sociologist GeorgeHerbert Mead, who numbered among the pragmatistsat the University of Chicago and whose work resonateswith Vygotskys in many ways. Holland and Lachicottefocus on issues of identity, situating identify formationwithin its sociocultural context. I see their work fall-ing within the lines of my reading of Vygotskys proj-ect: to understand how individuals learn to think asa consequence of their activity in social transactions,

which themselves are situated in cultural and historicalpractices for solving the problems presented by specificenvironments (see Tulviste, 1991, for an extended ex-ploration of this issue).

This focus on the individual internalization offrameworks for thinking through engagement with so-cietal veterans and elders and their means of mediationcontributed to Vygotskys ultimate suppression follow-ing his death. As Holland and Lachicotte describe it,people

develop a higher order psychological functionan iden-titywhich personalizes a set of collectively developeddiscourses about a type and cultivates, in interaction withothers, a set of embodied practices that signify the person.They creatively direct the sets of collective meanings to theirselves. Through this orchestration, they come to be able toorganize and narrate themselves in practice in the name ofan identity, and thus achieve a modest form of agency. (CCV,p. 134)

Their emphasis, like that of Vygotsky, is to understandthe individual as a product of the goal-directed, tool-mediated action through which they engage with othermembers of a particular culture.

Edwards, like Holland and Lachicotte, focuses onMead as a way to think about Vygotsky. What struckme in reading her chapter is the ways in which thedisciplinary frameworks taken by Mead and Vygotskydirected their attention to different aspects of the de-velopment of mind. Vygotsky, as a psychologist, gravi-tated toward the individual mind and its tool-mediatedprocesses. Mead, as a sociologist, was focused not somuch on the mechanics as on the outcomes (Edwards,CCV, p. 89). Interestingly, the primary culture that di-rected their attention was not nationality but scholarlydomain; that is, the American Mead looked at collectivesocial processes, whereas the Soviet Vygotsky lookedat mind in society. Undoubtedly their predispositionsled them to one field and not the other. Their work intheir respective fields, however, led them to differentfoci while accepting many of the same premises.

Engestrm takes a different perspective on Vygotsky.Rather than focusing on Vygotskys emphasis on the in-dividuals development in social context, he takes upLeontievs (1981) shift to collective action as his unit of

analysis. Cole and Gajdamaschko note that

It is certainly plausible that Leontiev, like many others,sought to distance himself from ideas and associations thathad led to the deaths of colleagues and friends. However,given the evidence, it seems more plausible to see his re-formulation as an effort to place mediation in its culturalcontext. (CCV, p. 206)

through his shift to what is now known as activ-ity theory, a view that foregrounds the collective rather


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The Culture of Vygotsky 93

than the individual. Either to save his skin under thebrutal totalitarianism of Stalinist Russia or because hegenuinely embraced a more absolute Marxist perspec-tive, Leontiev was less concerned with individuals andmore focused on collectives and their joint activity. ThisMarxist strain of Vygotskys project becomes amplifiedin Engestrms claim to being the true inheritor of the

activity theory, unlike those such as Wertsch whom heclassifies as pursuing a sociocultural theory of mindrather than a true application of activity theory as out-lined by Leontiev (Engestrm & Miettinen, 1999).

Engestrms chapter in CCV details his ChangeLaboratory, an intervention used in Finnish workplacesin which groups of employees use Engestrms activitytriangle among other artifacts as a means to improvinghow they work together toward a common goal. Thistriangle has become a ubiquitous slide or overhead atcountless conference presentations I have attended andnumerous articles published in U.S. and internationaljournals. And yet I do not see in U.S. research, for themost part, its relevance to the issues under study, whichtend to lean more toward analyses of situated individu-als than investigations of group processes. In my view,the activity triangle, much like the oft-trivialized ZPD ofrecent years, has become for many a means of affiliationwith a fashionable theory rather than a conceptual toolfor conducting a rigorous activity analysis that followsfrom Leontievs move in focus from the individual tothe collective.

From a cultural perspective, I see activity theory be-ing a much more productive heuristic for scholars work-ing in relatively socialistic societies, such as Engestrms

Finland, than in overtly competitive capitalist nations,such as the United States. I seriously question the de-gree to which activity theory, at least as advocated byEngestrm, genuinely frames the majority of studies forwhich it is invoked in the United States. I have falleninto this trap myself (sans the triangle) by claiming anactivity theory perspective for research that looks at in-dividual internalization and externalization rather thancollective action; my critique here applies to my ownwork as much as it applies to anyone elses.

Bakhurst concludes that Vygotskys brilliance isthat he sees both the significance of autonomy and how

we owe our status as autonomous selves to history, cul-ture, and society (CCV, p. 74). How researchers situ-ate themselves in relation to the reciprocal processesinvolved in this dynamic ought to help them claim theappropriate stance and terminology with which theyposition their work. The conceptual importance of ter-minology is explored by Meshcheryakov in his CCVchapter, even if he does not explicitly take up this point.His analysis, however, suggests the importance of usingappropriate terms and understanding their conceptual

significance, an area in which literacy researchers havehad inconsistent success in taking up Vygotskys work.

The Ephemeral Quality ofVygotskys Conception of Mind

Bakhurst makes the point that Vygotskys brilliant por-trait of the minds place in nature far outruns the em-pirical data that prompted it.... [H]is legacy endures asa kind of prolegomenon to empirical psychology ratherthan an instance of it (CCV, p. 57). Meshcheryakov fur-ther quotes Vygotsky as claiming that, even as deathapproached, he had not yet fully defined his own terms,nor need he. Vygotsky wrote,

One might think that, in exploring the question of highermental functions, it is necessary to begin by giving a cleardefinition of higher mental functions and indicating whatcriteria enable us to distinguish them from elementaryfunctions. But it seems to me that a precise definition is notsomething that belongs to the beginning phase of scientificknowledge. Instead, I believe I can limit myself initiallymerely to empirical and heuristic definitions. (Vygotsky,19821984, pp. 367368; as cited in Meshcheryakov, CCV,pp. 160161)

Indeed, Vygotskys work, as explained in his publi-cations, reads more like a set of pilot studies than thesort of polished research published in modern jour-nals. Vygotsky took a different view of the practice ofresearch than do many current researchers, arguing inThinking and Speech (Vygotsky, 1987) that training ses-

sions are the most theoretically compelling periods ofactivity that take place during psychological research inthat they represent the occasions during which learningoccurs. In the training sessions, the participants learnhow to use the mediational tools according to the re-searchers definitions and goals; that is, the process ofappropriation takes place during training. To Vygotsky,this process is of infinitely greater theoretical impor-tance than the fully appropriated knowledge that is of-ten studied during psychological research.

Furthermore, Vygotsky is driven to understandphenomena that are not visible, such as inner speechand how it comes into being. This endeavor is entirely

inferential and only indirectly supportable through em-pirical evidence. To accept Vygotskys theory of the de-velopment of inner speechto some, the cornerstone ofhis broader argument that learning to think is a func-tion of internalizing speech-based concepts throughcultural practiceone needs to accept the plausibilityof his or her assembly of evidence from a broad rangeof observable phenomena, all of which ultimately reston the acceptance of a web of related inferences basedon research that does not quite meet 21st-century


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standards for reporting findings. Perhaps the absenceof empirical support in Vygotskys own work has con-tributed to the attempt by current scholars to conductnew investigations using many decades of accumulatedknowledge, new technologies for collecting and analyz-ing data, and continued insights from the growing bodyof Vygotskian studies.

Zinchenkos chapter in CCVstrikes me as very reveal-ing in terms of both Russian traditions for conductingscholarship and the elusive quality of the sociocogni-tive processes that Vygotsky sought to describe. BothZinchenko and Vygotsky freely draw on literatureformy purposes here, specifically poetryto illuminateaspects of a cultural theory of the development of con-sciousness. Poets, psychologists, and philosophers havebeen equally perplexed and metaphoric about the natureof thinking and speech. Although there is some attemptto make a stronger case for the role of arts and poeticsfor interpretive purposes in 21st-century research (see,e.g., Cahnmann, 2003), it remains out of the main-

stream; and I suspect that in the world of educationalpsychology, it is far out of the mainstream. I gather frommy reading of Vygotsky and Zinchenko, and also fromU.S.-based researchers such as Cole (1996) who work inthis tradition, that Russian scholarship has been histori-cally, and remains, more ecumenical in its search for vi-able sources than is allowed in most U.S. scholarship. InZinchenkos chapter, he includes references to Russianpoet and novelist Boris Pasternak, U.S. and British poetT.S. Eliot, Russian poet Nikolai Zabolotsky, Russianpoet and playwright Aleksandr Pushkin, and othersfrom the world of arts to attempt to capture the moreephemeral qualities of how people think. After quoting

Pasternak at length, Zinchenko notes that

No matter how far we move toward unraveling this mystery,we need to realize that there is an element of magic in thecreative act. According to Pasternak, this act is the tangiblesorcery or alchemy, which makes the work of art seem to bean accidentally broken off piece of the very density of beingor form making essence of being rather than reflection ordescriptions of life (Pasternak, 1990, pp. 366367).

It is a different question whether we can see this sorcery,whether we will be able to penetrate, see behind these pur-est forms the fringes of their internal forms, their sense andmeaning. This is already an issue of our aesthetic culture ortaste, an issue of the richness of poorness of our own innerform. (Zinchenko, CCV, p. 241; emphasis in original)

In relying on literary expression to make his points andopenly acknowledge the mysterious and magical natureof his enterprise, Zinchenko accepts the evanescentqualities of the workings of the mind, yet forges aheadnonetheless. [D]espite the possible, sometimes strikingdepth and transparency of thought, it is heterogeneousand syncretistic in its origins, he says. All the forcesof the soul participate in its birth (CCV, p. 239). Now,

that is one difficult claim to support empirically. Andyet if one turns to poets for plausible, if not verifiable,truths about the world, it provides some insight into thechallenge of developing a comprehensive psychology ofthe human mind and its development in its historical,social, cultural, and physical contexta context that, asthe reciprocal notion of context suggests, each human

in turns helps to construct.What I cannot avoid considering is that in an ex-plicitly atheistic, materialist, Marxist psychology, itsarchitects cannot escape the need for a degree of mysti-cism in their formulation. Even with an effort to groundtheir psychology in as scientific a foundation as pos-sible, Vygotsky and his colleagues and descendentsfind that at some level, they must locate the soul ofpsychology. In Soviet Moscow, religion was not a pos-sible source of the more mystic and magical elementsof an explanation of how people and their minds comeinto being, function, and develop, and so poetry, I infer,was consulted as a way to explain such acknowledgedmysteries. Anyone who knows me knows that I am notendorsing religion here. Rather, I am making the pointthat at its least visible levels, the human mind remainsan evanescent construct that can only take shape formany through nonscientific means. I take comfort inthe fact that some of the most brilliant minds of thelast century have had no more success in explainingthe mind empirically than I have. And at the same time,this mystic hole at the bottom of Vygotskys theory givesme and others something to attempt to continue to fill,if not sink into.

Open to InterpretationThis review, although undoubtedly too long, is far toobrief to do this book justice. What I have attempted todo is cover issues that I found particularly stimulatingin my reading of the chapters. Another reader mightprovide a different sort of review altogether, which Isee as a tr ibute to the richness that awaits those whoundertake this reading. Perhaps significantly, my ownorganization of major themes in the volume is quitedifferent from the editors organization of the chapters

into sections of the book. I see this divergence in ourview of the books schematic potential as a sign thatthis collection is open to multiple interpretations andreadings and that the chapters are sufficiently repletewith ideas that readers may reconstitute them to suittheir own purposes and interests. There is much to belearned from the CCVand much to be constructed inrelation to it. For those who are interested in using aVygotskian perspective in their own work, this volumeought to provide much more than companionship as


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