DOES CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY NEED THE CONCEPT OF ACTIVITY - A CHALLENGE TO RATNERS EXPOSITION (1996)

While being productive in its way of counteracting mentalism, Ratner's (1996) activity approach yields many problems that are critically dis cussed in the present paper. First, activity theorists' legitimate cla im that culture is more than interacting minds does not imply a mindle ss cultural psychology which overlooks the meaning of meaning, intenti onality and semiotic mediation. Instead of participating in endless ei ther-or fights, we could rather ask in which ways activity is semiotic ally mediated. In this context, it is especially interesting to analys e how the explicit absence of activities becomes a semiotic mediator f or the development of psychological phenomena. Second, it is necessary to define explicitly what is meant by activity and related concepts, especially when those are imported from other theoretical traditions ( here Bourdieu). Otherwise our theoretical thinking would take place in terms of what Vygotsky called pseudo-concepts. This may be helpful fo r the accumulation of symbolic capital in the field of science, but ce rtainly does not improve our understanding of cultural facets of psych ology. In addition, it has been problematic to put activity theory int o concrete empirical research practice. It is especially difficult to relate macro-level aspects of the social structure to the person in me aningful ways. Thus, though sharing the general conviction that psycho logical phenomena are grounded in concrete social and material context s, it is doubted that the concept of activity in its present state of elaboration is of key importance for our theoretical and empirical wor k in the field of culture and psychology.