Culture Reexamined Broadening Our Understanding of Social and Evolutionary Influences

"In the last 3 decades, cultural psychology has come of age, and this remarkable volume celebrates that fact. The transition from a culture-blind psychology to a culture-contingent psychology has been a rocky one and is far from complete. Yet hundreds of experiments, simulations, surveys, and analyses of cultural products and practices now provide increasingly robust support for Geertz's (1973) assertion that "there is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture" (p. 49) as well as for Bruner's (1990) claim that "it is impossible to construct a human psychology on the basis of the individual alone" (p. 12). People, the essays collected here explain, require the public and shared meanings and practices of their various communities and activities to become people. Moreover, there is an ongoing mutual constitution between people and their many cultures. People are culturally shaped shapers. This is their human nature.