Page 32 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURE OF THE MIND

occasions. Meaning making involves situating encounters with the
world in their appropriate cultural contexts in order to know ‘what
they are about.’ Although meanings are ‘in the mind,’ they have their
significance in the culture in which they are created. It is this cultural
situatedness of meanings that assures their negotiability and, ultimately,
their communicability.
(Bruner 1996: 3)

A second point of interest is that artifacts function in cultural mediation in

a mode of developmental change in which the activities of prior
generations are cumulated present as the specifically human part of the
environment. This form of development, in turn, implies the special
importance of the social world in human development, since only
other human beings can create the special conditions needed for that
development to occur.
(Cole 1996: 145)

The division of mind/brain, mind/body, or individual/society has been a
thorn in the side of Western scientists and philosophers, dimming their
vision of the reality of the mind. Social scientists have failed to understand or
explain culture well because they have thought about human behavior as if
only single-coded, pure cognition mattered. The dual nature of artifacts
eliminates the dichotomy of individual/society, and restores double coding
to culture. Both the individual and the group are simultaneously incorpor-
ated in artifacts that mediate interpersonal interaction and the evolution of
culture. Finally, the individual mind emerges as a social product in the
ongoing process of cultural evolution. Like a tide that emerges from the deep
ocean, flows in to cover the shore, then ebbs out to reveal marks left behind
on the sand, the mind is a tide and an ocean at the same time. The tide’s ebb
and flow are subject to the general laws of gravity, and to the action of the
sun and the moon, but the nature of the local tide can be known only from
how the wind, ocean floor, and shoreline govern the ebb and flow on each
meeting of water with land. Tide and ocean are the same, but double-coded
like human consciousness in sensations of the body and perceptions of the
world.
Returning briefly to the Hannerz passage cited on p. 19, his claim that
‘culture is in some way collective’ stresses what Vygotsky called the social
origin of human thought processes and the social essence of all tools (Cole
1996: 110). But Hannerz’s definition of culture then ends with the quixotic
statement, ‘For culture is the meanings which people create, and which create
people’. The implications of such an assertion are truly profound. Culture is the
medium through which we think and feel and, simultaneously, it is an object of
thought.

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