Culture and Mind: Their Fruitful Incommensurability

Abstract

Abstract I reflect here on the historical junctures where anthropology and psychology cross paths, creating foundations for a general cultural psychology in the present. 1 I am particularly attuned to those points of intersection that inform understanding of mind in culture and culture in mind. I focus on institutions as means for canonizing the ordinary, on narrative as a mode of positioning the extraordinary vis‐à‐vis mundane expectations, and on agency, each of which entails intersections of mind and culture. Recent encounters with U.S. legal culture provide a ground for illustrating these intertwining relations of subjects and their cultural milieux. [culture, mind, law, institutions, selectivity]