The Development of Meaning: Ontogeny and Culture

If bio-cultural studies are to progress, we must find means of inserting the agency of human lives between the rival temporal schemes of evolution and history. This article starts from the neglected biological notion of ontogeny, and extends it to fit the sociality which is so essential to our life as a species. A viable model of human development must account for the life course in its entirety, including the aging process. It should view the life cycle not within the encapsulated notion of individuality, but within the context of the social relations of reproduction. The bio-cultural unit is not the static, modal, psychically integral, ungendered, ego-centred individual; it is a process within which persons are formed and dissolved, move between dependent impotence and independent authority, divide and multiply their being through relations with others, know more and less about the world, and acquire and lose the capacity to change it. This is the medium in which meanings, the stuff of culture, are formed, perpetuated and changed.