Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and its Contemporary Import: Ideas Emerging in Context and Time.

Abstract

Alexey N. Leontiev’s legacy – as part of cultural-historical activity theory – is discussed as an open-ended, dynamic, and continuously emerging system of ideas. The meaning and import of these ideas are becoming transparent in the context of contemporary conceptual revolution in psychology. Various trends within this cutting-edge movement have converged on the notion of relationality – in opposition to traditional “substance” metaphysics that posits self-contained, independent entities as the exclusive analytical focus. CHAT is revealed to be a pioneer in this conceptual revolution, contributing conceptual advances such as on embodied, situated, distributed, and enacted cognition/mind and on a (non-dual) “natureculture.” In CHAT, human development is an open-ended, dynamic, non-linear, and ever-unfolding, that is, emergent process with no preprogrammed blueprints. This process is composed of embodied bi-directional interactivities of persons-acting-in-the-world, embedded in fluid contexts – soft assemblages contingent on situational demands and affordances. Moreover, CHAT foregrounds collective dynamics of meaningful shared activities extending through history as a unified onto-epistemology of human development and mind. In addition, CHAT also offers, in outlines, steps to move beyond the relational paradigm towards a transformative worldview premised on the notion of a simultaneous persons-and-the-world co-realizing.