Culture and the Individual

In this paper, I want to suggest a framework for the study of action that does not turn ‘culture’ and ‘psychological phenomena’ into two sides of a dichotomy, but which is sensitive to the context of action. This is called for in view of what seem to be genuinely interesting developments in our thinking about ourselves: for example, theoretical and empirical attempts to re-unite brain, body, words and world in such a way that it is no longer interesting to speculate merely about what is ‘in’, and opposed to what is ‘outside’, the individual. Briefly, I propose a definition of culture that seems to offer productive empirical possibilities. After this I suggest an empirical focus on task, participant(s) and situation, by way of explicating the resources and constraints operating during action-in-context.