Reading :: Culture and Thought

Culture and Thought: A Psychological Introduction
By Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner

Cole and Scribner published this book in 1974 for "the beginning student" who was interested in culture and cognition as well as "the advanced student and the professional" who have been suspicious about cultural psychology (p.v). To orient ourselves, this book was published two years before Luria's Cognitive Development (1976) and four years before the coauthors coedited Vygotsky's Mind in Society (1978). So the matters discussed here, though Vygotskian in orientation, were discussed without much of the published work that would underpin later efforts by the authors.

Side note: As sometimes happens, I had an unwelcome companion while reading the book: a previous reader, who left singularly unhelpful comments penciled in the margins. When Cole and Scribner describe Bartlett's (1932) characterization of South Africans (p.2), the comments read: "Holy shit what blind ignorance & eurocentrism!" And when Cole and Scribner criticize Bartlett's characterization on methodological grounds (p.3), the comments read: "Thank you." I was reminded of why I no longer go to movie theaters. Please don't leave comments in library books, everyone.

Back to the text. The authors note that anthropologists, philologists, and psychologists have developed separate definitions of "thinking" (p.2) and discuss these, concluding that their concern will be "to get beneath the performance shown in a particular situation to the psychological processes responsible for it" (p.5). "As yet there is no general theory or conceptual framework in psychology that would generate specific hypotheses about how culturally patterned experiences influence the development of cognitive processes in the individual" (pp.6-7). They propose to "discover a strategy of research that will help us to uncover how individual and cultural processes interweave with each other as the child develops and becomes integrated into society" (p.8).

The authors provide a brief history of this line of inquiry, ending with the Vygotsky-Luria line of inquiry (p.30). From there, they provide chapters on culture as it applies to language, perception,  conceptual processes, learning and memory, and problem solving. (The latter discusses Luria's Uzbek expedition, which at the time was discussed in only one 1971 article; p.161).

In a concluding chapter on culture and cognition, the authors use the language of higher mental functions and functional systems (via Luria 1966) to characterize the relationship between the two (p.192). They argue, "we are unlikely to find cultural differences in basic component cognitive processes" or what Vygotsky would call lower mental functions (p.193, their emphasis).

Overall, although this book was interesting, I did not find it as valuable as some of the later work by these authors. Partly that is due to the fact that I'm not especially interested in aspects such as perception (I similarly hit this wall when reading Soviet psychology last spring and summer). But partly it's due to the dearth of grounding for some of the more complex arguments: most of Vygotsky's work had not been translated yet, and Luria's book hadn't been published either. So, as a historical document, the book is valuable, but if I were to build arguments on cultural psychology, I'd reach for later work.

Nevertheless, if you're interested in cultural psychology's development, this book is a must. Pick it up—but please don't write marginal comments unless it's yours.