Chapter 2

Chapter Outline

Culture in Development

Martin Packer and Michael Cole

INTRODUCTION

Culture: Independent Variable or Constitutive Medium?

Three Psychological Theories of Development and a Cultural Practice Alternative

A Developmentally Relevant Conception of Culture: The Garden Metaphor

Conceptions of Culture

• Culture: Inside/Ideal Versus Outside/Material
• Cultural Practice as Unit of Analysis for the Study of Culture in Development
• Cultural Configurations and Cognitive Styles
• Analytic Versus Holistic Modes of Thought
• Modernity Versus Traditionalism

Summary

TRACKING A DYNAMIC SYSTEM OVER TIME

Prenatal Development: The Cultural Organization of Development

Birth: Evidence or a Universal Mechanism of Cultural Mediation

Infancy: Social From The Beginning

• The Future in the Present: A Cross-Cultural Example
• Getting On a Schedule
• From Sucking to Nursing

Toddlerhood: Novice Participant in Cultural Practices

• The Teleological Stance
• Attachment
• Language Acquisition

Early Childhood: The Role of Biology and Culture in Young Children’s Conceptual Development.

• Theory of Mind.
• Naive Biology
• The Future in the Present in Early Childhood

Middle Childhood: Apprenticeship in Adult Behavioral Capacities and Obligations

• Biological Changes in Middle Childhood
• The Proliferation of Activity Settings
• Schooling

• What is Distinctive about the Activity of Schooling?
• Schooling and the Development of Logical Thought 
• Cross-Cultural Studies of Schooling Using Piagetian Tasks
• Vygotskian Research on Schooling and the Development of Logical Thought
• Categorization
• Thinking about Language
• Cross-Generational Studies of Schooling Effects

Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood

• Stages or Transitions? Single or Multiple?
• Is Adolescence a Universal Part of the Life Cycle?
• The Evidence from Phylogeny and Cultural History
• Adolescent/Youth in Periods of Rapid Social Change

  CONCLUSIONS

Areas of Agreement

Challenges for the Future

 

Suggested readings

Berry, J. W., Poortinga, Y. H., Segall, M. H. & Dasen, P. R. (2002). Cross-cultural psychology: Research and applications (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. New York: Basic Books.

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Harvard.

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Greenfield, P. M. (2004). Weaving generations together: Evolving creativity in the Maya of Chiapas. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press.

Jahoda, G. (1993). Crossroads between culture and mind: Continuities and change in theories of human nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kitayama, S. & Cohen, D. (2007). Handbook of cultural psychology. New York: Guilford Press.

McGrew, W. C. (2002). The nature of culture: Prospects and pitfalls of cultural primatology. In de Waal, F. B. M. (Ed.), Tree of origin: What primate behavior can tell us about humans (pp. 229–254). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nelson, K. (1986). Event knowledge: Structure and function in development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. B. (1984). Language acquisition and socialization: Three developmental stories and their implications. In R. Shweder & R. Levine (Eds.), Culture theory: Essays on mind, self, and emotion (pp. 276–320). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1969). The psychology of the child. New York: Basic Books.

Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. New York: Oxford University Press.

Scribner, S., & Cole, M. (1981). The psychology of literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Serpell, R., & Hatano, G. (1997). Education, schooling, and literacy. In J. W. Berry, P. R. Dasen, & T. S. Saraswathi (Eds.), Handbook of cross-cultural psychology, Vol. 2: Basic processes and human development (2nd ed., pp. 339–376). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Glossary

Artifact: Species-specific features of shared and inherited material culture that mediate and coordinate human beings with the physical world and with each other.

Attachment: Biologically and culturally influenced system of interrelated social behaviors between caregiver and child that provide emotional security and encourage environmental exploration.

Bio-social-behavioral shifts: Qualitative rearrangements in the emergence and organization of behavior resulting from the synthesis of biological and social factors interacting over time within cultural contexts.

Bio-social-cultural change: A generalized cultural (or cultural-mediational) alternative to classical theories in which human development is seen as an emergent process of biological and social changes that interact within and are mediated by culture, the accumulated knowledge, experience, and learning of prior generations.

Co-regulation: “A form of coordinated action between participants that involves a continuous mutual adjustment of actions and intentions” (Fogel & Garvey, 2007) in which participants (e.g., child and adult) are best described as a single system rather than as two separate individuals.

Cross-cultural psychology: Research that explores the causes and consequences of cultural differences in which culture is treated as an antecedent or independent variable that acts on psychological processes.

Cultural evolution: Nineteenth-century anthropologists’ belief that cultures could be classified according to their level of development – characterized by the sophistication of their technology and the complexity of their social organization – which represented progressively advanced stages of the development of humankind.

Cultural practice: Recurrent ways of accomplishing valued social activities in concert with some group of one’s proximally circumscribed social unit.

Cultural psychology: An approach in which culture is treated as the species-specific medium of human life within which people acquire and share symbolic meanings and practices that contribute to the development of psychological processes within a given cultural group.

Culture: The residue in the present of past human activity in which human beings have variously transformed nature to suit their own ends and passed the cumulated artifacts down to succeeding generations in the form of tools, rituals, beliefs, and ways of conceiving of the world. Psychological and material aspects of culture are inextricably interconnected in a medium of conceptual systems, social institutions.

Developmental niche: An individual’s “life world” in which the complex set of socio-cultural-ecological relations form the proximal environment of development. Developmental niches consist of (1) the physical and social settings in which a child lives, (2) the culturally regulated childrearing and socialization practices of a child’s society, and (3) the psychological characteristics of a child’s parents, including parental theories about the process of child development and their affective orientation to the tasks of childrearing.

Garden metaphor of culture: A variant of the culture-as-medium view in which the heuristic value of conceiving of culture as the holistic and internally organized artificial environment-for-growing-living things based on that incorporates knowledge, beliefs, and material tools.

Ontogenesis: The developmental history of an individual, typically the object of psychological theory and research.

Phylogenesis: The developmental history of life on earth or, more specifically, a species that constitutes the biological history of the newborn individual.

Privileged domain: A core area of development believed to be largely innate that provide the basis for domain-specific knowledge and behavior.

Schooling effects: Research findings in which children who schooling experience exhibit behavior and levels of performance different than that children without schooling experience.

Schooling: Based on a nineteenth-century European model of education, a widely practiced and organized form of socialization typified by teaching-learning activities that are removed from contexts of practical activity, involve a distinct social structure, value system, and mediational means (writing).

Skeletal principle: Biological constraints that serve to bias developing children’s attention to relevant features of a behavioral domain yet also require infusion of cultural input to develop past a rudimentary starting point.

Theory of mind: A type of social cognition in which individuals construe others in terms of their mental states and traits, often investigated through the use of “false-belief” tasks.