Cultural Area as a Guide in the Construction of the Person: the Case of Adjatado of Dogbo in Benin

Abstract

How does the culturally organized space participate in the construction of the person? Departing from short descriptions of funerary rites from Fon (Name of the people located in the south of Benin) and Adjatado (Name of the Adja people located in the village of Tado, in southeastern Benin) cultures in Benin, Africa, the present article proposes to articulate the concept of cultural area with notions from a semiotic-cultural approach in psychology. The paper continues with a discussion on the notion of cultural area, originally constructed in the field of ethnological and geographical studies, then presents the Adjatado cultural area. Afterward, some notions from cultural psychology, such as the action field (Boesch 1995) and personal and collective culture (Valsiner 2012), will be focused, showing how psychological processes related to the construction of the person in the Adjatado region are embraced in diverse aspects of the cultural area. Therefore, the concept of cultural area may help to understand the transmission and maintenance of socially shared values through tradition, addressing how a tradition’s spatiality guides personal and collective culture, and consequently, the construction of the person.