Chapter 14: Commentary—Cultural Psychology, Communities, and the Construction of Excluding Spaces: The Production of Foreigners

Culture is not a variable independent of the subjects who actively construct it. The subject is an active dimension of concrete embodied persons cultivated in a tradition. Before the subject, a tradition unfolds through the actions of people described in psychological systems. Unfolding a tradition, which uninterruptedly advances in the present, the person produces a recursive connection with the past, its ancestry. Advancing to the future, psychological systems actualize aspirations previously cultivated and impregnated in diverse mediational means (culture as structure) that constitutes a tradition. Actively transposing eventual conflicts that emerge in different levels of psychological experience, the person ensures the continuity of a tradition with small or meaningful changes. This can be understood in terms of culture as process.