BOOK REVIEW: Sociocultural Psychology Is Now in Maturity

This volume, one from the well known series of Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives, consists of 10 individual chapters related to the issue of literacy in the broad sense, plus an editors’ introduction. According to the editors, most of the chapters are based on papers presented at the 1996 conference in Chicago titled “A Vygotskian Centennial: Vygotskian Perspectives on Literacy Research.” The authors use Vygotskian ideas to frame their analyses of literacy practices and schooling, and extend these ideas to consider contemporary American issues including race, ethnicity, and language variations. The 10 chapters are unevenly divided into two parts. Part 1, entitled “Paradoxes in Vygotsky’s Account of Development,” includes two chapters that examine apparent confusions and contradictions in Vygotsky’s writings. Both chapters are theoretically intriguing, although not directly relevant to literacy. JimWertschdiscussesVygotsky’s twoaccountsofmeaning:“meaningas reference and abstraction” and “meaning as contextualized, personal sense.” Wertsch does not try to integrate these accounts, but attributes them to two philosophical conceptualizations of language that were powerful during Vygotsky’s time; namely, the designative and expressive approaches. Vera John-Steiner and Teresa Meehan investigate how human creativity can be explained within the Vygotskian framework. This seems quite a challenging task, because we often assume that, when more capable and less capable members of the community collaborate, the latter gradually internalize the skills and knowledge of the former. That is, less capable members are assumed to reproduce the skills and knowledge that are already owned by those with greater competencies. John-Steiner and Meehan point out that the Vygotskian notion of “from intermental to intramental” must be interpreted with caution, not as “from social being to an autonomous individual” (p. X). They aptly emphasize that the knowledge of multiple other members of the community is partially and selectively appropriated by individual learners, and those pieces of knowledge are integrated both intermentally and intramentally. As a result, new pieces of knowledge are created socially and interactively, as illustrated in their chapter by several highly creative persons such as Einstein and Mozart. MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 12(2), 152–156 Copyright © 2005, Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition