ABSTRACT

Even within the fi eld of developmental psychology, however, Piaget’s contribution to a qualitative methodology has been eclipsed. This has been the case even where such a contribution might have been expected to have a continuing resonance, for example, the recent collection on Ethnography and Human Development (Jessor, Colby and Shweder, 1996) does not include any reference to Piaget. Two reasons for this eclipse can be identifi ed fairly easily. Firstly, the rise of Vygotskyian or “socio-cultural” approaches have emphasised the signifi cance of concrete contexts for the analysis of human development, a perspective which has been seen in contradistinction to what has been viewed as the abstract and decontextualised account found in Piaget’s analysis of cognitive development. As I have argued elsewhere (Duveen, 1997), such a way of contrasting Piagetian and Vygotskyian perspectives is misleading, since it undervalues Piaget’s engagement with social processes and overvalues the extent of Vygotsky’s account of the infl uence of social life on human development. However, for the present essay it is suffi cient to note that there has been a general tendency for the Vygotskyian perspectives to displace Piagetian perspectives in recent developmental psychology.