The Primacy of the Social and Sociogenesis

It has become a truism to state that cultural characteristics (knowledge, identity, practices) are "socially constructed." However, critics point out that the social overwhelmingly is understood as a context-a trivial sense of the social-and that the real social nature of human practices tends not to be shown. The Russian social psychologist L. S. Vygotsky assumes in his late work a primacy of the social such that all higher psychological functions are social relations between people before they are functions. As a result, human development occurs in and as sociogenesis. Grounded in an ethnomethodological take on the social, the purpose of this article is to articulate and develop this unrecognized and unheeded, radical aspect of the late Vygotskian theory, thereby going beyond wrote and may have intended.