Culture and Human Development

Jaan Valsiner

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780761956846, 9780761956839
• eBook ISBN: 9781446239896
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This major new textbook by Jaan Valsiner focuses on the interface between cultural psychology and developmental psychology. Intended for students from undergraduate level upwards, the book provides a wide-ranging overview of the cultural perspective on human development, with illustrations from pre-natal development to adulthood.A key feature is the broad coverage of theoretical and methodological issues which have relevance to this truly interdisciplinary field of enquiry encompassing developmental psychology, cultural anthropology and comparative sociology.

The text is organized into five coherent parts:

Part 1: Developmental theory and methodology;

Part 2: Analysis of environments for human development

Part 3: Cultural organization of pregnancy and infancy;

Part 4: Early childhood development; and Part 5: Entering the world of activities - culturally ruled.

PART ONE

DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY AND METHODOLOGY

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1

STABILITY AND FLOW IN HUMAN EXPERIENCE: PHILOSOPHICAL PRELIMINARIES

Strange how people are under the impression that making a bed is exactly the same thing as making a bed, that to shake hands is always the same as shaking hands, that opening a can of sardines is to open the same can of sardines ad infinitum.

Julio Cortazar (1967, p. 248)

All human life is constantly novel as long as it lasts. There is no repetition of the same experience – each new occasion of making a bed, shaking hands, or opening a can is a qualitatively new event – even if it is similar to some previous, analogical, event. Yet, at the same time, we all live a relatively stable life. We do not doubt our identity as the given person from one morning’s waking up to the next. We take for granted that the ways we move, talk, write etc. are in principle understandable for others (and remain ‘typically ours’ over time). Thus, the constant novelty of our life experiences is paralleled by our psychological construction of stability at the same time.

This unity of stability and change has been the philosophical puzzle for human thought over its history. Philosophers have either emphasized the stability of the world (Plato, Aristotle) or the process of change (Heraclitus). The science of developmental psychology that emerged in the nineteenth century on the basis of embryology, has had to face the tension between the notions of sameness and never-sameness since its beginning. In the context of the present exposition, it is important to look at the basic philosophical oppositions that drive the thinking of psychologists about development.

GENERAL FOUNDATIONS FOR THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN DEVELOPMENTAL AND NON-DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVES

The distinction between developmental and non-developmental perspectives is based on a set of general philosophical assumptions. Such assumptions are relevant parts of scientific methodology (see below, Chapter 5). Such different perspectives are made possible by the positioning of the researcher in some relation to the phenomena under study. It is the goal orientation of the researcher that makes him or her assume a perspective, accepting some axiomatic presuppositions rather than others, and never considering further possible assumptions. For example, all scientists would reject axioms that underlie religious conceptual systems (existence of deities, their ‘influence’ on the world) – even if in their personal lives the scientists are religious themselves. Within the domain of their sciences, the religious ‘fixed truths’ do not apply. This does not mean that scientists refuse to create explanatory concepts of a general kind as an axiomatic basis for their work. In fact, many general concepts used widely in sciences – ‘energy’, ‘evolution’ – are in a general nature not different in level than the posited axiomatic ‘causal movers’ in the sphere of religions. A good example is the propagation of the energy concept as if it were a generic ‘first mover’ of the universe – largely through the efforts of Wilhelm Ostwald (see Hakfoort, 1992). It is by social convention that scientists rule in or out one or another axiomatic statement about the origins of the phenomena they look at. Consider some obvious examples:

• Axiom 1: ‘Human psyche is created by God’ (rejected by science).
• Axiom 2: ‘Human psyche is created by evolution’ (accepted by science).
• Axiom 3: ‘Evolutionary processes are the creation of a God’ (accepted by some scientists – who may accept Axiom 2 and reject Axiom 1; and vehemently rejected by others).
• Axiom 4: ‘Evolution operates by Natural Selection’ (accepted by those scientists who reject Axiom 3).
• Axiom 5: ‘Natural Selection is created by the spirits of the ancestors of the scientists who believe in it’ (vehemently rejected by all!).

This little exposition of axioms demonstrates the relevance of subjectively set boundaries (by scientists and laypersons, alike) on the general starting points for scientific investigation. The beginning of any research effort is the researcher’s subjective position in philosophical issues. This is the basis for constructing a concrete research programme, which is oriented towards arrival at generalized knowledge. Generalization of knowledge in scientific domains entails work on highly abstract levels, and terminological construction that is in principle independent of empirical work. Yet these constructions become linked with empirical efforts (see discussion of methodology in Chapter 5).

Common sense and science

In order to outline the philosophical bases of the developmental perspective, and contrast it with its non-developmental counterpart, the following contrasts are relevant. In each of the pairs, the ordinary mental lives of persons – which could be called common sense – give preference to one over the other. Since all science depends upon persons who do it, all science is in one way or another situated within the common sense of the given society at the given time. Common sense is based on the fundamental information that human beings get through their vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell etc. about the specific context, as well as on the internalized beliefs about one or another aspect of such sensory experiences.

Common sense exists as a device for ordinary human beings to live their lives. Hence it is oriented towards coping with the uncertainty of life through creating moments of stability, and explaining them. This makes it an opponent for the developmental orientation in science – assumptions of the developmental perspective are easily overrun by the common sense efforts to create a mental picture of a fixed universe. Hence, the developmental perspective transcends the common sense reflection upon the world. Making the assumptions accepted by common sense clear, and rejecting those in the building of a science, is a relevant practice for any science.

The matter of perspective: does the Earth circle the Sun, or vice versa?

Many other sciences have gone through this rejection of common sense in the past. For instance, astronomy made that break with common sense assumptions when the Copernican model of the planetary system (all planets, including the Earth, circulate around the Sun) became accepted, and as the Ptolemaic system (which made the Earth the centre around which the Sun, among others, circulates). The Ptolemaic system was built in accordance with the common sense. Thus, from the viewpoint of our common sense perception and reasoning about the Sun (which, as we say, ‘rises in the morning’ and ‘sets in the evening’, moving around us during the day), it is the Ptolemaic model that is in agreement with our everyday experiences. Yet, this common sense experience – immediate and undoubtable as it is for our perceptual and cognitive systems – is proven wrong by science, which goes beyond the immediately available information and creates a model that explains the planetary system as a whole (not merely the Sun’s trajectories) in ways that set the Sun to be the centre of the system. Without doubt, this overcoming of the common sense view in science was ideologically complicated – for decades the power of the Catholic Church in Europe was used to persecute scientists who went against the socially accepted view of the ‘rightness’ of the Ptolemaic system.

In a similar vein, chemistry transcended understanding based on the common sense in its development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as it moved away from alchemy to become modern chemistry. The practices of alchemy were based on the immediately perceivable qualities of substances (for example, ‘salts’ being ‘salty’ etc.), combined with socially desirable practical goals for investigation (for example, turning other substances into gold). Different moments of magical beliefs (internalized common sense notions) were seen as participating in the alchemic transformation process.

Entification: turning processes into static entities

Both alchemists and developmental researchers have had to cope with a difficult problem of reflecting upon transforming phenomena – human language itself is oriented towards turning dynamic processes into static entities. Hence using language to depict a process easily leads to entification – the turning of a process description into an implied causal entity.

Consider the example of explaining some accomplishment of an organism through the notion of ‘learning’. At first, the process by which the organism reaches a new state can be described as trying, getting feedback, trying again in a new way etc. This is description of the process by which the organism moves towards that new state. Since repeated verbal description of the process is cumbersome, a generic label – ‘learning’ – is attached to it. That label is at first merely descriptive; it is a short-hand reference to the process it stands for. Yet its use in discourse soon leads it to acquire a new (surplus) nuance – it becomes used as a causal entity (for example, ‘the child acquires skill X by learning’, or ‘learning causes development’). The temporal-descriptive facet of the original use of the word ‘learning’ becomes lost, and ‘learning’ becomes one of the categories of attribution. As we will see throughout this book, turning dynamic processes of development into static use of language descriptors, followed by giving the latter some causal flavour, is a conceptual obstacle developmental science has had to face during all of its existence.

In order to transcend the stability-oriented meanings of common sense and common language, developmental orientation needs to consider the basic assumptions on which both the non-developmental and developmental orientations are built. These basic assumptions take the form of oppositions of general concepts, which can be clarified by looking at the implications that the one and the other provide for our general thinking.

Assumptions about time: unsavable resource, or irreversible flow?

The central basis for any understanding of the biological world is the notion of time. In human cultural history, two views on time have emerged. First, there is the treatment of time as an independent dimension within which objects are located (the fourth dimension, added to the three dimensions of space). Such a view of time allows the thinker to locate objects in time–space, without any assumption about the nature of the objects’ own interdependence with the time. Time here is not an inherent feature of the object, but an external dimension within which the object can be located. A statement like ‘I saw a pig swimming inside Fontana di Trevi yesterday from 1 to 3 p.m.’ indicates this kind of use of time. The fact of the observation is recorded in ways similar to the three-dimensional features of the object (for example, ‘the pig was 67 cm long, 23 cm wide, and 34 cm high’), only here mentioning the time (from–to). The role this 2-hour long period may have played in the life of the swimming pig is not assumed to be of any relevance here.

The second perspective on time is based on the inherent dependency of biological organisms with the time of their growth. This perspective entails the notion of duration (a concept of Henri Bergson, 1907) that moves from the infinite past towards the infinite future, and can be experienced only in the form of a person’s relations with the world in the immediate present – an infinitely small time period that unites the past (which is vanishing) and future (which is approaching). This notion of time is that of irreversible time – no time moment ever repeats itself, and time cannot be ‘forced’ to ‘turn back’. Measuring time in units (second, minute, hour etc.) here entails determination of non-comparable units (year 1 in a person’s life is not the same as the year that follows). Developing organisms do not develop in time, but with time.

In this philosophical realm, development entails constructive linking of the past with the future in the present. In the development of the human species, this has resulted in various reflections upon time, all of which – necessarily – depict time in the form of stabilized, relatively static means. It would be impossible to depict irreversible time in ways similar to its actual flow – any depiction of that kind would be as fluid as time itself, and hence cannot be described! Yet there can be models that retain the irreversible nature of time in their depiction, or attempt to translate time into forms where irreversibility is eliminated, or at least lessened.

Ordinary ways of discourse about time

Common language uses reflect these transformations of time in ways that emphasize the non-developmental aspect of common sense. Thus, we talk about ‘saving time’ (in analogy with ‘saving money’ – yet the hour you ‘save’ today cannot be put into a ‘time bank’ to be used tomorrow, it would not gain interest, or disappear through inflation!), ‘using time’ (but time cannot be ‘taken’ from one period to be ‘used’ in another, you cannot ‘use’ the hour from 11–12 a.m. in your life at 5 p.m.’). Time is inherently tied to the activities in which the person is involved. Talk of ‘allocating’, ‘saving’, ‘using’ time is actually talk about decisions to be involved in one or another kind of activity.

Yet, human cultural inventions have come to provide stabilizing representations for time in the form of time-measurement devices. Cyclicity in physical and biological processes is often used to build measurements of time. The day/night cycle provides the measurement unit of ‘day’, church clocks and wristwatches divide that cycle into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes, each minute into 60 seconds. It is here that the 60-based measurement stops – counting of milliseconds is 100-based. At the macroscopic end, the ‘year’ is a vastly imprecise unit (requiring alteration ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Introduction: How Do We Create Knowledge About Cultural Human Development?
• Part One: Developmental Theory and Methodology
• Part Two: Analysis of Environments for Human Development
• Part Three: Cultural Organization of Pregnancy and Infancy
• Part Four: Early Childhood Development
• Part Five: Entering the World of Activities – Culturally Ruled
• Epilogue: Culture in Develeopment within Semiotic Demand Settings
• References
• Index