Mind As Action / Edition 1

by James V. Wertsch

Overview

Contemporary social problems typically involve many complex, interrelated dimensions—psychological, cultural, and institutional, among others. But today, the social sciences have fragmented into isolated disciplines lacking a common language, and analyses of social problems have polarized into approaches that focus on an individual's mental functioning over social settings, or vice versa.
In Mind as Action, James V. Wertsch argues that current approaches to social issues have been blinded by the narrow confines of increasing specialization in the social sciences. In response to this conceptual blindness, he proposes a method of sociocultural analysis that connects the various perspectives of the social sciences in an integrated, nonreductive fashion. Wertsch maintains that we can use mediated action, which he defines as the irreducible tension between active agents and cultural tools, as a productive method of explicating the complicated relationships between human action and its manifold cultural, institutional, and historical contexts. Drawing on the ideas of Lev Vygotsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Kenneth Burke, as well as research from various fields, this book traces the implications of mediated action for a sociocultural analysis of the mind, as well as for some of today's most pressing social issues. Wertsch's investigation of forms of mediated action such as stereotypes and historical narratives provide valuable new insights into issues such as the mastery, appropriation, and resistance of culture. By providing an analytic unit that has the possibility of operating at the crossroads of various disciplines, Mind as Action will be important reading for academics, students, and researchers in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, sociology, literary analysis, and philosophy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195117530
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/08/1998
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	750,150
Product dimensions:	6.48(w) x 9.48(h) x 0.73(d)
Lexile:	1460L (what's this?)

About the Author

James V. Wertsch is Professor and Chair of the Department of Education at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri.

Table of Contents

1. The Task of Sociocultural Analysis2. Properties of Mediated Action3. Narrative as a Cultural Tool for Representing the Past4. Mediated Action in Social Space5. Appropriation and Resistance6. EpilogueReferencesSubject IndexName Index

Editorial Reviews

"For all of us in psychology (cognitive or cultural) and education, it's tempting to avoid hard to understand relationships for example, between subjective agency and objective cultural tools, internalization and appropriation, creativity and conventions. Drawing on literary theorist Kenneth Burke as well as more familiar Bakhtin and Vygotsky, Wertsch shows us why we can't either avoid these issues, or resolve them neatly on one side or the other. With rich examples from teaching and curriculum, he simply won't let us off the hook."—Courtney Cazden, Harvard Graduate School of Education

"Jim Wertsch's Mind as Action carries the study of mind in relation to its cultural, institutional, and historical contexts into important new territory. Must reading for anyone interested in sociocultural approaches to human nature."—Mike Cole, Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, University of California, La Jolla

From the Publisher

Wertsch (education, Washington U.) asserts that the human sciences are dominated by a focus on the agent, and ignore the importance of mediational means in human action. Drawing on the ideas of Lev Vygotsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Kenneth Burke, he traces the implications of mediated action for a sociocultural analysis of the mind. Using a method of analysis that connects the various perspectives of the social sciences in an integrated, nonreductive fashion, he looks at such mediated actions as stereotypes and historical narratives. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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