Cultural change and human development.

Crosscultural studies of cognitive development preceded studies of cultural leaming. The former studies made an implicit assumption that culture is external whereas development is internal. Bruner’s cultural psychology (1990) and Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner’s cultural learning (1993) assume, by contrast, that culture is inside the individual, that human beings are intrinsically social and primed both to learn from and to teach their conspecifics. With this new assumption, the old dichotomy between biology as nature and culture as nurture breaks down. Culture becomes part of human nature. Most important for present purposes, the conception of culture as internal rather than external privileges the study of developmental processes of cultural appropriation, to use a term orignated by Saxe (1991). But studies of intergenerational cultural apprenticeship (Rogoff, 1990)