Mind, Culture, and Activity, 22: 78–84, 2015 Copyright © Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition ISSN 1074-9039 print / 1532-7884 online DOI: 10.1080/10749039.2014.990038 REVIEW ESSAY Confronting the Home-Field Disadvantage Book under review: Who’s Asking: Native Science, Western Science, and Science Education, by Douglas L. Medin and Megan Bang, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014, 304 pp., $35.00 (hardcover). Reviewed by Michael Cole University of California, San Diego Shirin Vossoughi Northwestern University This book provides a broad, historically informed, methodologically sophisticated argument for diversity in the conduct of psychological and anthropological research that seeks to under- stand the relationship between culture and thought. The authors’ focus is on the role of culture in human development, particularly contrasting orientations to nature between rural and urban Native American groups (the Menominee in Wisconsin and the American Indian community of Chicago) and European Americans from the same two kinds of settings. Supplemented by evidence from studies of the history of science and sciences studies, as well as other relevant cross-cultural research, their basic message extends to the enterprise of scientific inquiry broadly conceived. The book is written in an accessible and engaging manner that makes it an important resource for teaching, as well as research. A bit of history can help to explain why this book is so timely and why we have been allowed to devote a good deal of space to summarize its contents. BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS The shortcomings of a Psychology founded on samples of human beings who are largely Caucasian, highly educated, relatively affluent, mostly college-going young adults have been complained about loudly and articulately by cross-cultural psychologists ever since cross- cultural research began late in the 19th century. This complaint has been a regular feature of texts and handbooks devoted to cross-cultural psychology for the past half century (Lonner, 1989). However, until recently their arguments have largely fallen on deaf ears. Experimental Downloaded by [Mr Michael Cole] at 13:10 08 March 2015