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 openended, 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