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The Cultural Nature of Human Development. Barbara Rogoff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. xiii + 434 pp.
Central in Barbara Rogoff's exciting and groundbreaking work on the cultural nature of human development is the dialectical relationship between the individual and society. Rogoff develops her own theory about human development as a cultural process, taking her theoretical inspiration from Lev S. Vygotskij and Alexej N. Leont'ev in the development of their cultural-historical and activity theories. The author's methodological tools are based on her training in psychology and anthropology, with the latter's emphasis on ethnographic fieldwork and participant-observation in small local communities. Vygotskij and Leont'ev both applied the dialectics of Marxism to explain the relationships between the cognitive development of the individual and the changing elements and institutions of the community in which the individual is an active member. Barbara Rogoff takes these important ideas and uses them as a starting point for a breathtaking tour of many cultures on many continents, and gives us wonderful illustrations, both in words and images, of how individuals and their cultural practices interact and change in emerging dynamic participation.
In the first part of the book (chapters 1, 2, and 3),...