An invitation to cultural psychology /
Jaan Valsiner.
- xiv, 290 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Introduction: Why Cultural Psychology? Making the human condition meaningful -- Human Experience through the Lens of Culture: An invitation to psychology in a new key -- What is culture? And -- why human psychology needs to be cultural? -- Co-constructing the Mind Socially: Beyond a communion -- Mutuality of Internalization and Externalization -- Creating Ourselves: Signs, myths, and resistances -- Sign Hierarchies: Their construction, use, and demolition -- How Culture is Made Through Objects -- Cultivating Environments: Over-determination by meaning -- Weaving Social Textures Together: Personal and collective culture in action -- Signs as Organizers: Maintaining and innovating tensions -- Epilogue: Cultural psychology as a science of universality of culture. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
"An Invitation to Cultural Psychology looks at the everyday life worlds of human beings through the lens of a new synthetic perspective in cultural psychology - that of semiotic dynamics. Based on historical work from many different fields in the social and behavioural sciences, and the humanities too, this perspective applied to cultural psychology suggests that human beings are constantly creating, maintaining and abandoning hierarchies of meanings within all cultural contexts they experience. It's a perspective that leans heavily on the work of the great French philosopher, Henri Bergson, only now being realised as a core basis for human cultural living."--Publisher's website.