Review Essay: Weaving Sociocultural Change and Cognitive Development Together

In Weaving Generations Together, Greenfield describes a long-term project spanning two generations of mothers teaching their daughters how to weave. The author considers the economic and social changes that took place in the Mayan village of Nabenchauk between the 1970s and the 1990s, and explains how they affected weaving apprenticeship and the creative and cognitive processes involved in it. We sympathize with this situated analysis of learning, creativity and cognition, and applaud Greenfield's unique contribution to the understanding of human development under shifting socioeconomic circumstances. At the same time, we highlight the need to enrich the author's account in two distinct ways: (1) by favoring a developmental perspective to the study of changes in practices and psychological phenomena that involves the analysis of processes of transformation and not only the description of differences observed across time; and (2) by specifying the relationship between cultural practices and internal processes. A call is also made to further the discussion about the assumptions that underlie the author's sociocultural approach.