Culture and Human Development

Abstract

‘Culture’ used to be thought of as a whole, internally consistent system of symbols and values held in common by members of bounded social groups, including whole societies. That view is changing among anthropologists currently. This article traces the intellectual history of those changes, across the earlier perspectives of functionalism and conflict theory, through recent perspectives on culture as residing in the practices of local communities of practice. Both those local social groups and the persons within them are presumed currently to be multicultural rather than monocultural. Implications of this for the study of human development are that (1) acquisition of culture involves apprentice-like interaction in specific communities of practice, and that (2) a key unit of analysis in the study of the acquisition of culture is the indiviudal''s encounters with various specific communities of practice in that individual''s distinctive daily round. Patterns of culture in whole societies in relation to those in local communities of practice are currently undertheorized.

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