Culture and human development

Abstract

In this article I discuss two ways in which culture has been incorporated as a component in theories of human development. A first approach sees culture as a source of variation and is the usual approach in traditional cross-cultural research. A second approach defines culture as a constitutive element of human experience and development. In my discussion of each approach I argue in favor of the second view, which gives much more weight to cultural analysis in the study of human development. I close the article illustrating some of the consequences of this constitutive approach in two areas of study of developmental processes: early communication and the definition of educational exchanges.