It’s been more than eight years since I first read “The concept of activity in Soviet Psychology” translated and edited by James V. Wertsch; and almost four years since the first time I introduced the concept of activity in discussions with Indonesian colleagues and students in my Cultural Psychology course. Until now I still encounter similar questions and misunderstandings about the place of the concept of activity in Indonesian psychology.
Several of the most frequently asked questions are “What has activity theory to do with Psychology?”, “In what sense is activity theory a psychology theory, since it does not deal with ‘inner’ psyche?” “In what way is activity a psychological construct?”, “Why do we need to introduce the concept to psychology in Indonesia?”
In his introduction to the book (Wertsch, 1981:3) he noted similar misunderstanding and difficulties in introducing Russian Psychology to American psychology scientific community. One of important reasons of such difficulties is the absence of knowledge or misunderstanding on the philosophical grounds that underlie Russian Psychology: Marxist philosophy.
In Indonesia, similar observation is valid. If we examine introductory textbooks used at psychology courses in Indonesian universities the last forty years, we can conclude that Indonesian psychology is very much influenced by American psychology. This may be attributable to political orientation of Soeharto regime that ruled Indonesia for more than 35 years from 1966 to 1998. The regime took everything that smells Marxism as taboo. This was combined with uncritical acceptance of the positivistic idea of progress and modernity adopted from western countries.
Such uncritical acceptance is prevalent in psychology community as well. Until now there are no systematic efforts to scrutinize the research and practice of psychology in Indonesia. Despite problems and stagnation felt in our discipline there are little efforts to critically question the approaches adopted in doing psychology research and practice. The positivist philosophy that underlies it remains taken for granted.
Why bother to question approaches adopted in doing psychology research and practices? Main concern is the growing gap between research and practice. Twenty years ago Polkinghorne (1988: ix) has expressed similar nagging concerns. Adopting an ideal integration of academic and professional enterprise, he works both as practicing psychotherapist and as academic researcher. Yet he did not find the academic psychology body of knowledge which is built based on academic research of much help in his work as clinician. In contrast, psychology practitioners seem to work with their own approaches to help their clients to solve real problems.
In Indonesia, the situation is not quite different. In my own professional life as corporate and product brand identity consultant my main task is to help clients to come up with strategies to develop and communicate their corporate and product brands so that they can establish meaningful connection with people. In order to do this, I need to understand the psychology of Indonesian people which become their target segments. I looked for some support from psychology research and find little that could help to understand Indonesian contemporary culture and people.
It seems to me that psychology research conducted by Indonesian academics is more of monologue with themselves and fails to establish dialogue with socio-cultural realities meaningful for Indonesian people. Positivistic approach adopted with uncritical attitude drives Indonesian academics to apply categories or concepts borrowed from some American or European authors and to treat people’s behavior merely as object (objekt) that has no conscious mind.
Categories and experiences meaningful in socio-cultural realities in which Indonesian people live left ignored. This is not to support extreme relativism to build indigenous psychology or to treat Indonesian people as an exotic object. What is asserted here is that there is a need to adopt a theoretical approach with solid philosophical grounds that helps to build psychology body of knowledge to understand meaningful lives of contemporary Indonesian people.
In this paper my aim is to introduce the concept of activity and its potential contribution to Indonesian psychology, to establish dialogue with socio-cultural realities in Indonesia, and to build meaningful body of knowledge of psychology.
To achieve the aim for Indonesian audience, it is necessary first to understand the crisis in psychology in early decades of 20th century. The crisis was much debated mostly among European continental authors (Teo, 2005: 28). Vygotsky is one of major figures in the debate. He and his followers have developed an approach based on Marxist philosophy that is aimed to overcome the crisis. Understanding of the crisis is an important background to understand activity theory.
Crisis in psychology
It is interesting to note that since its birth emancipated from philosophy, disputes about the way psychology as a young science should develop has become the hallmark of its development. The year 1874 had witnessed publication of two important and fundamental treatises for psychology: Franz Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint; and Wilhelm Wundt’s Principles of Physiological Psychology (Chisholm, Baumgartner, and Müller, 1995). As is well-known to any students of American-influenced psychology, the decade also witnessed the foundation of Wundt’s experimental psychology laboratory in 1879.
The two publications represent s two schools of thought in dispute: Brentano’s act-psychology that advocated phenomenological description of mind; and Wundt’s content-psychology that endorsed experimental method and sought to base the description of physical phenomena on the static concept of content of mind.
The two can be said as the founding fathers of modern psychology, and since then disputes on what psychology as science should aim has started. More schools of thought each with its own focus were established.
It was probably Rudolph Willy who first raised the alarm of crisis in psychology through his book The Crisis in Psychology in 1899 (Teo, 2005: 28). What he meant is the problem of synchronic missing unity of psychology so that it cannot be said a unified science. There are many psychologies and each live in its own silos. After Willy across the 20th century there are many authors who express similar concerns. Wundt (1921) himself later on in his life published five volumes of Völkerpsychologie in which he admits that experimental method cannot be used to study higher mental function process.
Teo (2005: 32-33) has identified three basic areas in discussions about the crisis: the problem of subject matter (ontological issue), problem of methodology (epistemological issue), and problem of ethics and relevance with practice. Disputes on the three basic problems would certainly hinder psychology from building any meaningful body of knowledge.
Vygotsky was among leading figures who agrees that such crisis exists and there are urgent needs to find solutions out of such situation. His article Historical meaning of the crisis in psychology: A methodological investigation (Vygotsky, 1927/ 1997) is a very serious study on the anatomy of the crisis.
Vygotsky’s students (Davydov and Radzikhovskii, 1985) noted that to understand Vygotsky’s ideas it is important to distinguish Vygotsky as methodologist and as psychologist. They argued that Vygotsky’s position in the article is more of a methodologist than a psychologist. The article is an effort to establish a general psychology to unite and generalize various schools of thought in psychology (p. 233). It is interesting to note that the methodology he employed is similar to sociology of knowledge analysis: studying psychology scientific ideas, its philosophical assumptions and their socio-historical contexts (p. 242-4).
Contemporary psychology at the time Vygotsky wrote the article in 1927 were dominated by three schools of thought:
1) Freud’s psychoanalysis with unconsciousness as its main concept;
2) Watson’s behaviorism and its Russian ally which share similar philosophical bases – Pavlov and Bekhterev’s reflexology; and
3) subjective psychology which at Vygotsky’s time was considered traditional psychology.
Vygotsky claims that if general psychology could not be established, the three schools of thought would develop into separate sciences each with its own fundamental concept and explanatory principle which are remote and incomprehensible to each other. Psychoanalysis would be a science of unconsciousness, behaviorism a science of behavior and reflexes, and subjective psychology a science of the mental and its properties (p. 238-9).
His analysis of actual development of psychological ideas leads Vygotsky to conclude that the existing schools of psychology have fallen into what Alex Kozulin (1990: p.83) terms “substantialist one-sidedness” in philosophical debate between idealism vs. materialism. As Vygotsky has observed at the end the schools of psychology can be reduced into just two types based on their psychological meta-theory assumptions:
1) natural-scientific explanatory psychology and
2) descriptive, philosophical-phenomenological psychology.
Those schools which adopt natural-scientific explanatory meta-theory tend to deny human mind as subjective and put behavior or reflexes as the only objective reality that should become subject-matter of psychology. Human mind is considered as a substance that is locked inside human subjectivity, and since science should deal with objective realities psychology as science should deny its existence. Any efforts to study human mind are claimed to fall into metaphysics. The consequence of such position is that natural-scientific psychologies fail to build reasonable account to explain higher mental functions that are uniquely human. This is the one-sidedness of natural-scientific schools of psychology.
Those which adopt descriptive phenomenological psychology put human mind as subject-matter but are trapped into subjectivism. As such the effort to explain mental properties would form a vicious circle in which a mental property is explained through another mental property which cannot be verified or falsified. Cognitive psychology would be a modern example of such subjectivism. For example, human thought as mental property is explained through concepts borrowed from computer as paradigm (short-term memory, long-term memory, central processing, etc) that refer to another mental properties. In Vygotsky’s words: “… to explain means to go out in search of an external cause. As soon as the idea as an explanatory principle coincides with the basic concept it ceases to explain anything.” (Vygotsky, 1927/ 1997: p.303). This is the one-sidedness of descriptive phenomenological psychology.
To paraphrase it in modern psychology terminology, the dispute is about explaining the R (response) part of the modern Stimulus(S)-Response(R) or Stimulus(S)-Organism (O)-Response (R) scheme of analysis. Natural scientific explanatory psychology such as behaviorism tends to deny the O part of the scheme and asserts that the R can be explained solely through S. Reflexology or modern neuropsychology accept the existence of O and seeks to explain R through conceiving O as reflex or neuron systems made of objective materials. Vygotsky claims that such an approach fails to explain R of higher mental processes, even when O is conceived as complex system of reflexes or neurons.
Descriptive phenomenological psychology seeks to describe R through O in subjective terms such as values, motives or personality that cannot be falsified and thus falls into subjectivism. There are modern psychologies that can be viewed as variants of such subjectivism. Cognitive psychology explains S-R relations through describing subjective cognitive processes inside O in terms borrowed from computer science. More recent social cognitive psychology tries to “socialize” cognitive psychology by conceptualizing S as social stimulus.
The situation in modern times seems to be not far different from Vygotsky’s time. Modern psychology still falls into substantialist one-sidedness. General psychology whose subject-matter is the actual development of psychological ideas should help in the future to construct a unified and methodologically coherent science of psychology that recognizes human mind and behavior; and is not trapped into subjectivism.
Vygotsky’s psychology, and Marxist philosophy
The motivation to build a unified science of psychology underlies consistently all his efforts from early times in his career in academic psychology until his timely death of tuberculosis on June 11, 1934. January 26, 1924 is the starting point of his career in psychology. A young man of 28 years-of-age coming from remote village in western part of Russia, Vygotsky presented his first paper at the Second Psychoneurological Congress in Leningrad in front of some grey-beard professors of reflexology.
His thesis in the paper is simple but important. Alex Kozulin formulates this thesis as follows:
“if reflexology was to become a general theory of behavior it must first accept the existence of consciousness and must incorporate the methods of psychological investigation. In the process of such incorporation the demarcation between reflexology and psychology will disappear, and a new scientific psychology of mind and behavior will emerge: Mind [psichika] without behavior does not exist, but behavior without mind does not exist either, because they are one.” (Kozulin, 1990: pp.73-4)
From the beginning, consciousness and higher mental processes associated with it is the main problem that occupied Vygotsky’s thinking. For him the study of human mind and behavior should start from what is uniquely human that differentiates it from animals and machines. The existence of consciousness as uniquely human should be accepted as subject matter of scientific study of human without falling into subjectivism.
How did Vygotsky deal with this problem? He noted that both reflexology and subjective psychology have similar assumption concerning the existence of consciousness. Both accept Cartesian dualism (Res Extensa and Res Cogitans) and assume that consciousness is an essence or a substance that exists spiritually in human subjectivity, which is essentially different from material substance.
Natural-scientific psychology asserts that such spiritual substance cannot become a subject matter of scientific study, and thus rejects the possibility to study consciousness scientifically. Descriptive phenomenological psychology asserts that such spiritual substance can become a subject matter of study, and thus falls into using pseudo-scientific method. Vygotsky asserts that there is a way out of the crisis if Cartesian dualism is rejected.
There are two aspects of this rejection. The first is rejection of substantialist assumption that assumes consciousness as independent substance in spiritual reality. Second is rejection of subject-object dichotomy that assumes the existence of two separate subjective and objective realities. Such dichotomy is the assumption based on which the problem of modern psychology is formulated, that is, the problem of modes of relation between subject and object; how subject is influenced by the object and object is change by the subject.
In the first rejection, following William James and Baruch Spinoza, he considers consciousness not as a substance but as a function. This is in line with what James wrote in Does consciousness exist?:
“I intend only to disclaim the sense of this word (consciousness), as an essence or substance, but I will insist on its significance as a function” (James, 1913: 120 in Davydov and Radzikhovskii, 1985: 45).
With such point of view, it can be claimed that Vygotsky’s position on consciousness is similar to Hilary Putnam’s functionalism which asserts that mental states are identified by what they do rather than by what they are made of. Such functionalism becomes the philosophical base of modern cognitive psychology which adopts computer as its model for explaining how human mind works.
Certainly there’s close affinity between Vygotsky’s and Putnam’s functionalism. But if Vygotsky lived in our modern time, he would have commented that though adopting functionalist point of view, cognitive psychology fell into subjectivism since it used concepts that refer to certain features of consciousness as explanatory principle for explaining consciousness itself.
The second rejection is formulated more by Vygotsky’s followers (Leontiev, Engestrom). Vygotsky himself did not explicitly write about the second rejection, but it is clear that for Vygotsky it would logically follow after the first.
The indication that Vygotsky rejected the subject-object dichotomy is reflected in his search of a stratum of reality that could explain consciousness. At this point Vygotsky points to Engels’ concept of human labor and tool use as the means by which human changes nature, and in so doing, transforms himself. He sees labor practices as explanatory principle that explains human consciousness and higher mental functions.
His followers formulate the second rejection based on Marx’s first theses on Feuerbach. Engestrom quotes the theses as follows:
"The chief defect of all previous materialism (...) is that things [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was set forth abstractly by idealism - which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such." (Marx 1976, 615-616 in Engestrom, 1987)
An important keyword to understand the above quote is Gegenstand. Gegenstand is a German word that is rather difficult to translate into English. The English translation of this word is object, but there are two sense of it. First, object means something material (Objekt in German). The other sense of the word is described by Merriam-Webster dictionary as follows: “something mental or physical toward which thought, feeling, or action is directed [an object for study] [the object of my affection].”
This second sense of the word “object” is what is meant by Marx as Gegenstand. It can be but is not necessarily in the form of objective material (Objekt). It is something simultaneously objective and subjective. Gegenstand is inconceivable without intentional mind[3] directed toward it. The other way around is also true: intentional mind is inconceivable without Gegenstand.
In Gegenstand-intentional mind dialectical relations the dichotomy of subject-object becomes blurred. What Marx refers to as sensuous human activity or practice is this Gegenstand-intentional mind dialectic. An object becomes a Gegenstand and a subject becomes intentional only when embedded in human practice in which human action is directed toward a Gegenstand, and in which it has meaning for an intentional mind.
Consciousness then can be conceived as modes of functioning of intentional mind directed toward Gegenstand embedded in human practice. Materialism does not know Gegenstand, it only knows object as something material (Objekt); and subject is viewed merely as mirror that passively reflect external objective reality. In contrast idealism recognizes intentional mind without Gegenstand, and thus it is locked inside human subjectivity.
Subject and object are conceived as two independent substances whose existence is assumed and which may influence each other. The modern psychology concept of stimulus is basically what material object from outside world “does” to the subject conceived as organism. Response, in turn, is what the subject as organism does to material object.
Thus in terms of this alternative scheme, for example, a field of rice is not experienced by a farmer as a set of stimulus in the form of light wave coming from the field, impinging on his visual senses. The field of rice is experienced meaningfully as such since it is a Gegenstand of his action towards it, for example, watering the field with the intention to harvest the rice in two months.
The action is not simply a response of an organism after a stimulus impinges on its senses. It is a realization of an intentional mind. In conducting his action he is experiencing himself as a farmer. The actions transform the subject into intentional mind. What makes a farmer a farmer is his actions as a farmer; what makes a rice field a rice field for a farmer is his action as a farmer as well.
Following functionalist point of view then we may conceive of consciousness as the modes of functioning of intentional mind directed toward Gegenstand. Consciousness is constituted by what it does, thus its functions in certain sensuous human activity, rather than what it is made of. Features of consciousness such as knowledge, values, motive, etc. are constituted by its function in certain sensuous human activity practiced in certain time and place.
At this point we may understand why Vygotsky is very much influenced by Marx’s theory of society (known as historical materialism). According to Marx, an analysis of society must be based on the knowledge of its socio-economic history. Historical changes in society and material life produce change in human nature. Analogous to this, Vygotsky would claim that an analysis of consciousness and higher mental functions must be based on the knowledge of its socio-economic history.
Another important aspect Vygotsky’s search for explanatory principle that can explain consciousness and higher mental function is the idea of tool-mediated action. This is important for explaining the genesis of higher mental function that differentiates it from the elementary one.
The question that logically comes to mind is how is such higher mental process possible? What kind of development and what kind of socio-cultural settings lead to such process? What kind of ‘historical changes’ makes higher mental process possible?
To answer these questions, once again, Vygotsky rely on Marxist tradition. He based his observation on Engels’ concept of human labor and tool use as the means by which man changes nature, and in so doing, transforms himself. For Vygotsky, what differentiates between animal and human, between elementary and higher mental function is that human action in sensuous activity is mediated by tools.
For Vygotsky, Marx’s idea about human nature provides him insights to find way out of the crisis in psychology. Kozulin (1990: p.99) formulates Vygotsky’s vision of psychology as science inspired by Marx: “since psychology had not been understood as a social and cultural theory, scientific psychology was identified as a natural science. But it would be the task of the future meta-theory to elucidate how psychology would be possible as a materialistic, scientific and at the same time social and cultural form of knowledge.”
Thus the way out of the crisis is that consciousness should be explained not through some metaphysical concepts, and not through biological or neurological realities, but through its socio-historical and cultural origins and development.
The socio historical determination of consciousness is discussed in the paper that was originally published in 1925: Consciousness as a problem of the psychology of behavior (Vygotsky, 1979). In this paper he identified three components of uniquely human experience that differentiates it from animals.
The first is historical character of human behavior and learning: “All our life, our labor and behavior draw broadly on the experience of former generations, which is not transmitted at birth from father to son. We may provisionally designate this as a historical experience.” (p. 13). Consciousness is not constituted only of individual experience in physical world, but also of the experience of former generations.
The second component which has very similar mechanism to historical one is the social nature of human experience (ibid., p.13). Individual experience becomes only one of several elements that constitute human consciousness. Although I have never traveled outside my own country, I can have knowledge about Sahara from other people’s experience. And this knowledge may constitute my consciousness when summer holiday is coming. Social nature of human experience is possible through participation in social activities. Speech plays a very important role in social activities to mediate individual human to other human being, to enable individual mind to access other people’s mind, and to transform other people’s experience into individual mind. In a broad sense, speech is the source of social behavior and consciousness.
The final component of uniquely human experience is the twofold nature of human experience as mental activity and as external behavior. Vygotsky certainly has in mind what Karl Marx has written in Capital: a Critique of Political Economy in chapter seven section one:
“We pre-suppose labor in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement.” (Marx, 1887)
According to Marx human labor as distinct from animal one is a double process. First human works in his imagination to build a structure, and then he erects it in reality.
This last component is the feature of consciousness that constitutes human capability of knowledge. It is made possible through symbol-mediated action. The following scheme describes the mediation of action through symbol.
Semiotic is a study of interpretation processes and how a symbol comes to have meaning, or referring to certain thoughts or objects[4]. Another model that is similar to Vygotsky’s is the Peircean triangle of representamen, interpretant, and object. In this model, Symbol may correspond to representamen, Gegenstand to interpretant, and objekt to object.
In Semiotics, whereas interpretant or the signified is the ‘idea’ in the mind of an interpreter, it is stressed that representamen or signifier need not be in a form of something material. Representamen can also be an ‘idea’ or images in the mind of a person.
One important insight from Semiotic is that the act of interpretation consists of the process where the signifier may become the signified, and vice versa. This could lead to a series of successive interpretant ad infinitum. The learning from Semiotics may give us insights of how human capability of knowledge is possible emerging from human activities.
Human production of knowledge starts when the symbol which in earlier stage mediates an action toward a Gegenstand becomes the Gegenstand itself mediated by another symbols in later stages.
At this point it is important to mention the difference between tool-mediated and symbol mediated action. While the result of tool-mediated action is the change in the objects in outside world, the effects that symbol-mediated action has is the change of the inner world of the subject. With the act of interpretation or the act referring the subjective mind change itself by expanding its knowledge.
Vygotsky aims to explain how higher mental functions are possible. One important aspect of distinctively human capability compared to animal is the capability of self-consciousness. This capability is important for human in structuring or controlling his own behavior. Vygotsky’s words: “consciousness is a problem of the structure of behavior” (Vygotsky, 1979: p.12).
The question is how such capability is possible. For Vygotsky the genesis of self consciousness starts from consciousness of other mind in social interaction:
“We are conscious of ourselves because we are conscious of others; and in an analogous manner, we are conscious of others because in our relationship to ourselves we are the same as others in their relationship to us. I am aware of myself only to the extent that I am as another for myself..” (Vygotsky, 1979: p.29).
Following the scheme of symbol-mediated action, consciousness of other minds as the first stage in cultural development may be described as putting other people as the Gegenstand of one’s symbol mediated social action.
Another important keyword for Vygotsky in his search of explanatory principle for a scientific psychology is the search for appropriate unit of analysis to avoid reductionist explanations of consciousness. The unit of analysis must be connected logically to the explanatory principle. Again at this point he learned from Marx’s Capital. Just like Marx builds his approach in Capital to study capitalist society, scientific psychology should build its own Capital to study human consciousness:
I want to find out how science has to be built, to approach the study of the mind having learned the whole of Marx’s method…. In order to create such an enabling theory-method in the generally accepted scientific manner, it is necessary to discover the essence of the given area of phenomena, the law according to which they change, their qualitative and quantitative characteristics, their causes. It is necessary to formulate the categories and concepts that are specifically relevant to them- in other words, to create one’s own Capital.
The whole of Capital is written according to the following method: Marx analyzes a single living ‘cell’ of capitalist society – for example, the nature of value. Within this cell he discovers the structure of the entire system and all of its economic institutions. He says that to a layman this analysis may seem a murky tangle of tiny details. Indeed, there may be tiny details, but they are exactly those which are essential to ‘micro-anatomy’. Anyone who could discover what a ‘psychological’ cell is – the mechanism producing even a single response – would thereby find the key to psychology as a whole. (Vygotsky, 1978: p.8)
Thus the key for such scientific psychology is to find this “psychological cell” and studying its “micro-anatomy”. The idea of “psychological cell” is discussed further by Vygotsky and his followers under the concept of unit of analysis. Basic requirement for such unit of analysis is that it preserves the properties of the whole. Zinchenko (1985: p.97-9) has listed down seven requirements that should be met for an appropriate unit of analysis:
- A unit must not be a diffuse, syncretic whole constructed of elements. Rather, it must be an integrated psychological structure.
- The unit must maintain the characteristics of the unified whole, though internal contradictions and oppositions may exist.
- These units, though preserving the structural characteristics of the whole, must be capable of development, including self-development.
- The unit must be a living part of the whole. It must also be a unified system that cannot be further decomposed. Decomposition of the whole into elements is possible, but it results in its destruction as a living and unified entity.
- Basic principle of research in psychology must involve the study of the development, functioning and structure of the unit.
- The analysis involving this unit must allow one to combine its results with the synthetic of the properties of any complex unit.
- The unit must not only reflect internal unity of mental processes. It must also permit the investigation of the relationship between a specific psychological function and the various critical function of consciousness.
Despite the importance of unit of analysis, along his career in academic psychology until his death he did not seem serious in formulating the right unit of analysis. He did not leave any well-developed account of his ideas about the units to be used in the analysis of mind (Zinchenko, 1985: p.94). His writings are focused more on formulating normative requirement for such unit of analysis.
The search for appropriate unit of analysis is explored more by Vygotsky’s followers. There are still debates concerning this. Current dominant interpretation of Vygosky’s psychology would claim tool-mediated action is the appropriate unit of analysis; and that human activity is the explanatory principle that explains consciousness and higher mental function.
What does Vygotsky’s psychology contribute to the way we build psychology in Indonesia? How can it help us to establish dialogue with socio-cultural realities in Indonesia? Instead of starting with metaphysical categories borrowed from foreign authors, following Vygotsky, the starting point must be through studying sensuous human activities in which meaningful actions, experiences and categories emerge.
It’s not that we reject all foreign categories. The point is that we must start from categories that are really meaningful for Indonesian. The concept of sensuous human activity itself is borrowed from foreign author, but it enables us to start from concrete meaningful experiences without falling into materialism or subjectivism.
From my point of view, human activity is not a metaphysical concept that cannot be falsified. It is a concept that refers to concrete experience of real people. Through studying human activities in Indonesian context, we may arrive at some categories that are meaningful for Indonesian people.
Literature
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Davydov, V. and Radzikhovskii, L. (1985). Vygotsky’s theory and the activity-orientated approach in psychology. In J.Wertsch (ed.), Culture, communication and cognition: Vygotskian perspectives (pp. 35–65). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding: an Activity Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research. Helsinki, Finland: Orienta-Konsultit Oy.
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Vygotsky, L. (1979). Consciousness as a problem of psychology of behavior. Soviet Psychology, 17, 5–35. (Original work published 1925).
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Vygotsky, L. S. (1927/ 1997). The historical meaning of the crisis in psychology: A methodological investigation (R. Van der Veer, Trans.). In R. W. Rieber & J. Wollock (Eds.), The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky, Vol. 3: Problems of the theory and history of psychology (pp. 233–343). New York: Plenum.
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Wundt, W. (1921). Völkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte. Erster Band: Die Sprache; erster Teil (4. Auflage) [Folk psychology: An investigation of the developmental laws of language, myth, and custom. Volume 1: Language, first part (4th ed.)]. Stuttgart: Kröner.
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About the author
For more than 10 years now, Eric spends most of his time living in two worlds: the academia and industry. He teaches Quantitative and Qualitative as Research Methodologies, Cultural Psychology, and Cultural Change Strategy, among others, at a renowned university in Jakarta.
He is also a freelance consultant in the capacity of a research technical advisor, strategic planner and brand consultant. He has worked with clients from various industries – mostly consumer goods, media that includes the internet, television and print; microfinance, mobile services.
His passion lies in exploring how products, brands and archetypal narratives may become meaningful for certain communities or segments of society. And Eric has a solid experience in doing this in both qualitative as well as quantitative research.
[1] The term “Russian Psychology” is a substitute for “Soviet Psychology”. Since Soviet Union no longer exists “Russian Psychology” is more appropriate for referring to psychologies developed by Vygotsky and his contemporary in former USSR.
[2] The author is a market ethnographer, strategic planner, and brand consultant; He teaches Cultural Psychology, Social Change Management, and Qualitative Research Method at Atma Jaya Catholic University; He is also the founder of PT Bina Bisnis Lestari; Contact: eric.santosa@gmail.com or eric@omahsimbok.com
[3] This idea is similar to Brentano’s concept of mind as intentionality.
[4] For those who are new to semiotics, Daniel Chandler’s book “Semiotics: the basics” is a very good introduction
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