Page 30 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURE OF THE MIND

authored by Hannerz, a narrative which emphasizes five basic principles that
are also present in culture as it was imagined years ago by the famous Russian
psychologist, L. S. Vygotsky. Hannerz observes:
in the recent period, culture has been taken to be above all a matter of
meaning. To study culture is to study ideas, experiences, feelings, as
well as the external forms that such internalities take as they are made
public, available to the senses, and thus truly social. For culture, in the
anthropological view, is the meanings which people create, and which
create people, as members of societies. Culture is in some way
collective.
(Hannerz 1992: 3)

This narrative of culture as a ‘matter of meaning’ begins inside the mind
where it takes the form of perceived ‘ideas, experiences, feelings’. When such a
description is made more explicit, it includes language and attention, and the
word ‘consciousness’ is sometimes used. Cross-cultural psychologists have
referred to these ‘internalities’ as ‘subjective culture’ (Triandis 1972), a phrase
we can profitably use to refer to the psychological side of culture.
The central process in the mind is perception. Meaning, when psychologists
talk about it, refers to processes people use to organize information impinging
on their sensory organs about experiences with objects and events in the
external world. Psychologists also commonly emphasize that perception is not
a passive process that dutifully receives a ‘hard copy’ of the external world and
replicates it, but an active operation that transforms neural information of the
external world picked up by the sensory organs into mental reconstructions in
the mind. Psychologists variously call these ‘products of the mind’, ‘impressions’,
‘feelings’, ‘emotions’, ‘images’, ‘concepts’, and the like.
Ideas, experiences, and feelings are transformed into language not only in the
audible sounds of speech, but in the signs that make up all forms of communi-
cation – expressions seen on the face, the love felt in an embrace, the pain
endured from blows delivered. Central to the thought of Vygotsky are the com-
municative mechanisms which are used to transform ghostly forms residing
inside the mind into observable actions. He called such mechanisms ‘tools’, but
other writers have used the word ‘artifact’.
The basic premise about tools or artifacts is that cultural evolution is the
medium in which the tool or artifact as ‘Human psychological processes
emerged simultaneously with a new form of behavior in which humans
modified material objects as a means of regulating their interactions with the
world and one another’ (Cole 1996: 108). All artifacts possess a ‘dual material-
conceptual nature’ (Cole 1996: 117). The material side is hard and clear in
examples of a pitcher, a loom, or a bow and arrow. Each of these ‘tools’ is
available to the senses. Simultaneous with the material side, the ideal (con-
ceptual) side regulates how the artifacts function in everyday human activities.

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