Enactivism and the experiential reality of culture: Rethinking the epistemological basis of cultural psychology

The key problem of cultural psychology comprises a paradox: while people be lieve they act on the basis of their own authentic experience, cultural psy chologists observe their behavior to be socially patterned. It is argued th at, in order to account for those patterns, cultural psychology should take human experience as its analytical starting point. Nevertheless, there is a tendency within cultural psychology to either neglect human experience, b y focusing exclusively on discourse, or to consider the structure of this e xperience to originate in an already produced cultural order. For an altern ative approach, we turn to the enactive view of cognition developed by Humb erto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Their theory of autonomy can provide th e epistemological basis for a cultural psychology that explains how experie nce can become socially patterned in the first place. Cultural Life forms a re then considered as consensually coordinated, embodied practices.