Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline

by Michael Cole

The distinguished psychologist Michael Cole, known for his pioneering work in literacy, cognition, and human development, offers a multifaceted account of what cultural psychology is, what it has been, and what it can be. A rare synthesis of the theory and empirical work shaping the field, this book will become a major foundation for the emerging discipline.

Genres: Psychology, Anthropology, Nonfiction

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

MICHAEL COLE is university professor of communication and psychology at the University of California, San Diego.

Reviews

[Bob Newman]

Looking for Mr. Discipline

In Anthropology, the word "culture" still has a certain resonance, even if it has resonated a bit too much over the last century ! So, as an anthropologist with a very imperfect grasp of psychology and zero experience of practical research in it, I took up this book in order to widen my horizons. I thought I would discover a link between two fields that should be closer. After all, I shared Cole's feeling that the more or less artificial nineteenth century division of social and humane sciences has run its course. I hoped Cole would somehow connect studies in psychology to anthropological work that I knew, for example, the work of Robert I. Levy on Tahiti, and the works of Sudhir Kakar, Reynaldo Maduro, Morris Carstairs, and Stanley N. Kurtz on India. I did not find any reference to these or other such work. I could not find any real connection to current anthropology whatsover, though Cole summarizes old concerns and old conclusions very well. He also provides a very insightful chapter on the evolution of thought, language and culture via studies of primates. So, while, I found interesting material, I couldn't really connect it to cultural anthropology as we know it today in any strong sense. Much of the book concerns constructed laboratory experiments with school kids around the topic of cognitive development and the task of overcoming learning disabilities. While useful and relevant work to society, I could not link this with "culture" in any real sense, because what the experiments tended to do was try to escape the participants' normative culture and build instead an entirely artificial, controllable, measurable culture. Cole says at one point (p.176) that some researchers assume that "when one abstracts activities from their cultural context there is a meaningful sense in which they can be considered the same activity." It seems to me he then questions the validity of this, but in my view he could not escape making that assumption in his own work after all. I admit that these so-called "shortcomings" are the result of my personal approach to the book, not really those of the author. Methodological concerns may divide Anthropology and Psychology as much as anything, as Cole himself says. Still, CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY deals almost purely with the concerns of psychology, much less with culture or history.

Cole is concerned about the directions his field has taken. He wants to bring culture to a more central role in Psychology and designates his wide study "Cultural Psychology" to emphasize this. In order to back up his argument, he reviews a tremendous amount of literature on many topics. This would be very useful for anyone with an interest in this general area. He brings in the work of Russian psychologists whom, I suspect, are little known in the West. But, strangely, though he says he's using their work as a principal building block of his new Psychology, he criticizes a lot of their assumptions. I could not isolate their main contribution to his argument, other than to say that they considered culture and history important parts of the cognitive development of every human. In short, CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY is an attempt to establish a branch discipline of psychology and become a textbook for that discipline. It is not easy reading, but written with honesty and wide-ranging research. I will leave it to others, more qualified than I, to say whether it succeeds or not, but it certainly provoked a lot of thought in the brain of an anthropologist. That's never bad.

[Matthew J Brown]

Still a classic of the genre. I hadn't remembered just how much of this book was focused on the HISTORY of the issue, nor how focused Cole is on methodological circumspection. Well worth the read.

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This is my 3rd time through the book, probably. I'm teaching it in my "Cognition, Culture, Communication" course.

[Collin]

Michael Cole synthesizes psychology and sociology by analyzing how culture influences learning. He seeks to lay the foundations of an entirely new branch of psychology dedicated to this socio-psychological interplay.

The concepts are rooted in the Soviet psychologist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky’s pioneering work on childhood literacy and language acquisition. Concepts such as Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, which defines what a child can learn on their own, what they can learn with assistance from an adult, and what is beyond their capacity, have been rediscovered in contemporary American education psychology, and both Vygotsky’s original work and Cole’s extensions of it in this book are foundational to what practitioners of education call “culturally relevant/responsive”. Anyone who has formally studied education will understand just how important that term is.

I personally feel this book is a corner stone of an extremely important field of study, as Cole interrogates the concept of norms by investigating how they are acquired differently across cultures. This is a must read for anyone who will engage in any work which will put you into contact with people from different cultural backgrounds (which is basically all work with how globalized the world has become).

If you want to speak authoritatively on sociology, psychology, education, and/or international relations, you must read this.

[Noa]

Dear Gramcracker,
This week’s book was lovely. I enjoy spending time in the minds of kind people. While I’ve never met him, I imagine the author I read this week to be a good guy...mostly because of the way he talked about others without talking about others. While he acknowledged that people with power and sway in our country drive a pretty exclusive conversation surrounding gender or race, he never allowed it to be normal in his references. I liked that.
There was a really neat comparison about how so many elements of who we are and how we develop as people are interwoven like strands in a rope. For example, the elements of our body or genetics? Weave it in. The way people create what is important in our homes or schools? Weave that in. How do our bodies work within the stories people tell each other about how we should organize ourselves and build or break down each other? Weave allllll of that in.
Gramma. Wake up.
Stop falling asleep when I’m writing you.
Love you, Weegie.