In order to do anything, we need to use certain tools. To convey ideas to another person, for example, we need language or some
other system of communication. To cook a meal, we need certain kinds of pots and pans and other implements. To a large extent the
kinds of ideas we can convey and the way we can convey them depend on the kinds of communication systems we have available to
us. Similarly, the kinds of meals that we can cook depend on the equipment that we have in our kitchen. Not everybody has the same
tools available to them, and even when they do, not everybody uses them in exactly the same way. These tools come from the different
groups that we belong to – families, communities, institutions like schools and workplaces – and when we use them we are not only
getting a certain job done in a certain way, we are also showing that we are members, to one degree or another, of the social groups
that provided us with these tools. At the risk of overusing the word “culture,” we will be calling these tools “cultural tools.” They include
physical things like forks and chopsticks, articles of clothing, and technologies like mobile telephones, but also more abstract things
like languages, certain kinds of texts, conventional ways of treating people, social institutions and structures, and even concepts like
“freedom” and “justice.”