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The project had been planned by Lev Vygotsky and Luria together, but Vygotsky was not well enough to travel.

In Uzbekistan, Luria and his research team tested the conceptualizing capacities of two groups of people. The first group consisted of illiterate peasants living in remote villages, where women were still isolated from social life by what Luria characterizes as the conservative teachings of Islam.

The second group consisted of people who, after the revolution, had become workers on the new, self-managed collective farms and who had participated in the social planning of production and also undertaken some formal education, if only short courses.⁸¹ These were men and women who, “by participating in the socialist economy had gained access to the new forms of social relations and the new life principles accompanying the changes, [and so] had experienced the conditions necessary to alter radically the content and form of their thought.”⁸²

Rakmat, age thirty-nine, an “illiterate peasant from an outlying district; has seldom been in Fergana [a nearby town], never in any other city.” He was shown pictures of a hammer, saw, log, and hatchet. Which is a different kind of thing? he was asked. The conceptualizing answer: hammer, saw, and hatchet are “tools.”

But no, he said:

“They are all alike. I think all of them have to be here.”

“Which of these things could you call by one word?”

“How’s that? If you call all three of them a ‘hammer,’ that can’t be right either.”

“But one fellow picked three things – the hammer, saw, and hatchet – and said they were alike.”

“A saw, a hammer, and a hatchet all have to work together. But the log has to be there too!”

“Why do you think he picked these three things and not the log?”

“Probably he’s got a lot of firewood, but if he left without firewood, we won’t be able to do anything.”

This is what Luria and Vygotsky characterized as complex or associative thinking, or thinking in terms of juxtaposed instances of things – this log, this saw – without being able to move forward via generalization and abstraction to the concept of “tool.”⁸³

Rejecting “the Cartesian notion of the primacy of self-consciousness” and focusing instead on meanings “shaped through social activity,” Luria traced “fundamental psychological shifts that had occurred in human consciousness during a vigorous revolutionary realignment of social history – the rapid uprooting of class society and a cultural upheaval creating hitherto unimagined perspectives for social development.”⁸⁴ For Luria, socialism was a higher form of human development, so illustrating its role in “the transition from sensory to rational consciousness, a phenomenon that the classics of Marxism regard as one of the most important in human history.”⁸⁵

Or, in the words of Nurmal, an “eighteen-year-old girl from an outlying village [who] had taken courses designed to overcome illiteracy, but was barely able to read and write”:

L: What is freedom?

N: I have heard that women have got their freedom, but that’s all I know. It means that the landowners oppressed them before but now they have escaped from their misery.⁸⁶

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⁸¹ Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, ed. 1974 [1976], Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 15.

⁸² Michael Cole, Karl Levitin, and Alexander R. Luria, 1979 [2006], The Autobiography of Alexander Luria: A Dialogue with the Making of Mind, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, p. 62.

⁸³ Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, 1981, Language and Cognition, New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 55–56.

⁸⁴ Ibid., p. 19.

⁸⁵ Michael Cole, Karl Levitin, and Alexander R. Luria, 1979 [2006], The Autobiography of Alexander Luria: A Dialogue with the Making of Mind, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, p. 74.

⁸⁶ Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, 1981, Language and Cognition, New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, p. 88.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 108-109. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Aleksandr Luria in Uzbekistan §MS1.1.3d