Growing into rules

In this chapter I shall explore the ways in which the child grows into an understanding of these grammars, and the ways they are presented to the child in her interaction with the world. I shall draw examples from anthropology and from social and developmental psychology. Specifically, I shall look at three areas of psychological research in which both social and developmental psychologists have worked, and I will consider how, by putting these different approaches together, we can understand individual development within a social and cultural context. These fields of work are, firstly, the development of understanding of moral and conventional rules, secondly, the development of map-making and the rules for representation of three-dimensional space and, thirdly, the grammar for conceptual differentiation of health and illness.