Development as Transformation of Participation in Cultural Activities

Some decades ago, psychologists interested in how cultural processes contributed to human thinking were puzzled by what they observed. Their puzzlement came from trying to make sense of the everyday lives of the people they visited by using the prevailing concepts of human development and culture. Many of these researchers began to search for more useful ways to think about the relation of culture and individual functioning. In this chapter, I discuss why then-current ideas of the relation between individual and cultural processes made these researchers’ observations puzzling. A key issue was that “the individual” was assumed to be separate from the world, equipped with basic, general characteristics that might be secondarily “influenced” by culture. An accompanying problem was that “culture” was often thought of as a static collection of characteristics. After examining these assumptions, I discuss the cultural-historical theory that helped to resolve the researchers’ puzzle, focusing on my own version of it. In my view, human development is a process in which people transform through their ongoing participation in cultural activities, which in turn contribute to changes in their cultural communities across generations. Together, Chapters 2 and 3 argue for conceiving of people and cultural communities as mutually creating each other. Chapter 2 focuses on concepts for relating cultural processes to the development of individuals. Chapter 3 addresses the companion issue of how we can think of cultural