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An Invitation to Cultural Psychology
August 2014 | 304 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
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.
Jaan Valsiner is the founding editor of the major journal in the field, Culture & Psychology, and Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology. He is the first Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University in Denmark, where he leads Europe's first Research Centre on Cultural Psychology.
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.
Jaan Valsiner is the founding editor of the major journal in the field, Culture & Psychology, and Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology. He is the first Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University in Denmark, where he leads Europe's first Research Centre on Cultural Psychology.
Introduction: Why Cultural Psychology? Making the human condition meaningful
Chapter 1: Human Experience through the Lens of Culture: An invitation to psychology in a new key
Chapter 2: What is culture? And -- why human psychology needs to be cultural?
Chapter 3: Co-constructing the Mind Socially: Beyond a communion
Chapter 4: Mutuality of Internalization and Externalization
Chapter 5: Creating Ourselves: Signs, myths, and resistances
Chapter 6: Sign Hierarchies: Their construction, use, and demolition
Chapter 7: How Culture is Made Through Objects
Chapter 8: Cultivating Environments: Over-determination by meaning
Chapter 9: Weaving Social Textures Together: Personal and collective culture in action
Chapter 10: Signs as Organizers: Maintaining and innovating tensions
Epilogue: Cultural psychology as a science of universality of culture
This book is beyond the level of the students and while it covers some very interesting ground it does not tie in with the course.
CELFS, Bristol University
November 7, 2015
a strong overview of a complex field of inquiry
AEBLS, Havering College of FE & HE
November 19, 2015
