Cultural People and Cultural Contexts: Comments on Cole (1995) and Wertsch (1995)

Abstract

The issue of 'cultural relativism' that has framed much of cross-cultural psychology or social and cultural anthropology poses interesting problems which are analysed as triggered by the papers by Cole (1995) and Wertsch (1995). Cultural psychology may benefit from a consistent assertion that people are basically the same, that they have the same basic cognitive processes, despite different forms of cultural experience. This, of course, supposes an ontological distinction between mind and society. Comparing cultures in terms of manifest performance of persons may be a misguided venture based on essentially unproductive concepts of both mind and culture. In the approach offered here, /culture' becomes conceived as the process that transforms individuals in social, institutional and historical contexts just as much as it is the process whereby individuals transform those contexts; it is the process whereby universal historical constraints make the development of mind possible