ABSTRACT
I began this volume with a concern to probe the relations between cognitive development and culture. The problem is one of the most complex in the social and behavioral sciences and one that cuts across a range of academic disciplines, including psychology, anthropology, and education. In its complexity, one discovers a labyrinth of choices in structuring methods of approach and interpretive directions. So often, researchers have defined the constructs of cognition and culture as entirely independent of one another, one located in the individual and the other in the environment. We see this clearly both in approaches that focus primarily on cognitive processes like information-processing approaches (Greeno, Riley, & Gelman, 1984; Klahr & Wallace, 1975) as well as approaches that are concerned with relations between sociocultural and cognitive developmental ones, including Piaget-based accounts (Dasen, 1977, 1985; Hallpike, 1979), ecocultural accounts (Berry, 1966, 1974, 1984), and socialization accounts (Hess & Shipman, 1965). In these approaches, analytic categories are cast in acultural terms and then processes of “social transmission” are often examined to determine the effects of culture on the measurement of cognitive constructs. I have argued, in Part I, that such an analytic tack ends in limited treatments of relations between the two constructs. In Vygotsky’s terms, we end with analysis of “external connections” where, from the psychological point of view, the problem is to understand intrinsic relations. Indeed, consider what the results might have been from the present study of candy sellers had the investigation use solely measures linked to Piagetian or more eclectic treatments of cognitive development.
