ABSTRACT
In this chapter I begin the process of reconstructing the cultural-historical approach to development by elaborating on the notion of tool mediation, and by retaining some features of the Russian approach while changing others. I initially found the Russian cultural-historical psychologists’ ideas about culture attractive because they seemed to offer a natural way to build up a theory of culture in mind that begins from the organization of mediated actions in everyday practice. This was the same point to which our cross-cultural research had brought my colleagues and me, so it was an obvious point of convergence. But our crosscultural experience had also induced a profound skepticism about concluding, on the basis of interactional procedures treated as if they were free of their own cultural history, that nonliterate, “nonmodern” people think at a lower level than their modern, literate counterparts. In their belief in historical and mental progress, the Russians were led into many of the same methodological traps we had fallen into in our own cross-cultural work (Cole, 1976).
