Jerome Bruner: Language, Culture, Self

Canadian Psychology, Feb 2003 by Leendert Mos

In their essay, "The House that Bruner Built" (chap. 3), Stuart Shanker and Talbot Taylor examine Bruner's "scaffolding" metaphor as one of the leading ideas integrating interactionist and cultural views in the study of language acquisition. Originally Bruner proposed the behavioural formats of scaffolding as precursors to the generativist program of language acquisition, but the authors suggest that this approach is epistemologically incompatible with the interactionist program. Instead, from within an evolutional perspective and with due consideration for prolonged immaturity, the authors review literature that suggests that the infant comes biologically prepared for dyadic interaction and that language eventually emerges out of preverbal socio-affective forms of interaction or communication. Thus, the authors argue that although social interaction, especially child directed speech, is vital to all development, such interaction, as Shotter would readily agree, is a process joint action wherein socialization is essentially enculturation - a participation in the "normative techniques of culture"(p. 59). What is at stake here is the view that the generativist program need merely be supplemented by a scaffolding theory in an account for language acquisition. Rather, as Bruner already understood, "the child's socialization into language demands a transformation into a cultural agent" (p. 59).

The acquisition of language is then not an epistemological problem to be solved through innate or experiential learning or some combination of the two, but one of the child's habitual participation in performances of culture. Language acquisition is, following Wittgenstein and others, an integral part of the development of cultural competence and so has an essentially reflexive character in that "knowing how to do things with words is knowing the kinds of 'things' we do with words..." (p. 64). The authors argue that this reflexive enculturation makes possible not only participation in common meanings and expressions but also in our "linguacultural practices" (p. 66) occasional or particular meanings. In contrast to a generative or, for that matter, an interactionist account, development conceived of as reflexive enculturation makes evident human agency and normativity not as external scaffolding but as inherent to the building of language itself. In this we are back to an historical thesis, and perhaps a little more enlightened regarding the constructivist nature of habitual behaviour.

The cultural reality of mind and the social production of meaning tie Bruner's concerns for developmental studies to educational theory and policy, and so to many other disciplines, in an intensive concern for understanding ourselves, others, and the worlds wherein we live. Clifford Geertz' opening chapter, "Imbalancing Act," is a fitting tribute to Bruner's breadth of scholarship but it is also a sympathetic anthropologist's challenge to Bruner's eclecticism:

To argue that culture is socially and historically constructed, that narrative is a primary mode of knowing, that we assemble our 'selves'... and develop 'a theory of mind' to comprehend the selves of others, that we act not directly on the world but on belief we hold about the world...., all this amounts to adopting a position that can fairly be called radical, not to say subversive. (p. 25)