Becoming a Cultural Being: A Dynamic Systems View of Human Development

This paper introduces a dynamic systems-based account of human cultural development, grounded in a process-relational worldview. In contrast to mechanistic approaches that treat culture as an external influence, this framework conceptualizes culture and development as inseparable, co-constituting processes unfolding across situational, ontogenetic, and sociocultural levels. Drawing on a real-life infant–caregiver interaction as a “slice of life” example, we illustrate how routines emerge and stabilize through self-organization, and how historical and material-cultural aspects afford and constrain developmental trajectories. We apply key concepts from the dynamic systems approach—including emergence, self-organization, attractor stabilization, circular causality, and historical constraint—to explain human cultural development. The emergent structures of processes are treated as a formal causes, and we adopt an explanatory pluralism. Inspired by the work of Vygotsky, Rogoff, and dynamic systems theorists, the proposed perspective serves as a thinking tool for systematising and advancing integrative, process-oriented explanations of human cultural development.