Culture as socially distributed knowledge
Recent work by anthropologists and cultural psychologists (Lave and Wenger 1991; Resnick, Levine, Teasley 1991; Suchman 1987) on how people think in real life situations has provided another perspective on culture as knowledge. For these researchers, knowledge is no longer something exclusively residing in a person’s mental operations. As succinctly stated by anthropologist Jean Lave (1988: 1), when we observe how people problem-solve in everyday life, we find out that cognition is “distributed – stretched over, not divided – among mind, body, activity and culturally organized settings (which include other actors).” To say that cultural knowledge is socially distributed means to recognize that (i) the individual is not always the end point of the acquisition process, and (ii) not everyone has access to the same information or uses the same techniques for achieving certain goals. The first point implies that knowledge is not always all in the individual mind. It is also in the tool...