ABSTRACT
To understand why children participate in the contexts in which they actually participate to cultivate themselves, I synthesize in this chapter the cultural developmental thinking of Georg Simmel with the notion of “behavior setting” as it was introduced into developmental psychology by the Lewinian scholar Roger G. Barker. The two approaches, however, have developed separately; each has attracted attention, but no-one has tried to incorporate the contribution of the other to create an account of human developmental processes that recognizes the essential relation between individuals and their cultural settings with regard to identity formation. From the conceptual background of the previous chapters, behavior settings, individuals, and their development are interpreted as interrelated processes that constitute each other, and social scientists’ delimitations between components parts of persons, their development, and the world are intentionally blurred. The attempt to rethink development as cultivation leads to the question of what makes behavior settings attractive vehicles for the study of children’s cultivation.
