ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the cultural process through which intuitions about the joint construction of conditions for future action are transformed back into the commonsense cliche that "everything depends on what each participant knows or feels." It begins with a version of cultural psychology that shows, despite a contemporary rhetoric about culture and human agency, how easy it is to fall back into the most discredited approaches to culture and personality. In the past decade, psychology has discovered culture, and the struggle to weigh the respective roles of the social and the individual and their interconnection is again front and center. The chapter looks at two sophisticated versions of this struggle, one focusing on intentionality, in the work of Richard Shweder and Shirley Brice Heath, and the other on practice, in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu insists that the cultural arbitrariness operates at all levels of educational practice from the most general, national levels to the most local.
