Great remedial suggestions for the problem of reification of culture

http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00392/full

As an antidote to problematic reifications of culture and self, the mutual constitution framework emphasizes the ongoing, dynamic production of culture and mind. From this perspective, cultural participation is less about conscious indoctrination into bounded systems of timeless traditional values than it is engagement with particular cultural-ecological patterns: that is, the structures of everyday worlds—including institutions, practices, artifacts, and discursive tools—that scaffold psychological experience Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952). At the same time, cultural worlds are not static, timeless entities, but reflect and require culturally grounded actors who continually reproduce them with the psychological charge of their particular desires and beliefs. Rather than confine people in invented traditions (e.g., Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) of imagined racial communities (e.g.,Anderson, 1983), this articulation provides a more productive conception of culture adequate for Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. This conception promotes “cultural understanding” not by rehearsing problematic ethnic stereotypes, but instead by revealing the broader historical processes at work in the production of “normal” scientific standards.