An invitation to cultural psychology / Jaan Valsiner.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Valsiner, Jaan, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethnopsychology.

Physical Description:

1 volume ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Los Angeles : SAGE, 2014.

Summary:

An Invitation to Cultural Psychology represents an invitation to look 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, yet only now being realised as a core basis for human cultural living. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Human Experience through the Lens of Culture: An invitation to psychology in a new key 5

Why is psychology in trouble? 7

Psychology: A science of the zone between the existing and the possible 8

The roadmap of cultural psychology 11

The nature of the core of the human psyche: The stem concepts 18

The Self as culturally regulated: Meaning hierarchies in action 22

Conclusion: Why psychology in a new key? 25

2 What is Culture? And why human psychology needs to be cultural? 26

History of European "culture-talk" 28

Constructing the Nihon bunka 31

Sharing food: The primary context of contrasting Self with the Other 32

Varieties of culture: Crossroads of meanings and ideologies 33

Psychology and culture: Behavior resisting cultivation 35

Psychology's rigidity: Overlooking culture 35

Psychology's chance: Where to (re)discover culture? 36

Transcending the common sense: Culture as a process, not an entity 38

Culture's landscapes 43

The importance of borders within the semiosphere 44

Culture is in-between 47

From culture to agency: The culture-maker 49

3 Co-constructing the Mind Socially: Beyond a communion 50

Living ahead: Between two intersubjectivities 51

The communication act: Negotiating meaning 53

Generalization through abstraction 56

Conclusion: Going beyond the communion 62

4 Cultural Processes on the Borders: Constructive internalization and externalization 63

Processes of internalization and externalization 64

Layers in the internalization/externalization processes 70

Internalization/externalization and the semiosphere 79

Back to the body: Texts of sensuality, heterosensuality, and ascetic purity 82

Conclusion: Moving through the body into the semiosphere by way of internalization/externalization 85

5 Creating Ourselves: Signs, myths, and resistances 87

Signs: Their production, use, and transformation 89

Types of signs: The system developed by C. S. Peirce 90

From sign types to sign complexes 93

Sign complexes: Myths, counter-myths, and mass media 100

The power of signs: Mutual emulation 105

Conclusion: Human beings construct both their unique subjectivities and collective illusions through signs 106

6 Sign Hierarchies: Their construction, use, and demolition 108

The nature of hierarchical models: Static vs dynamic 108

Conditional rupture in intransitive structures: Where novelty emerges 110

Constructing sign hierarchies by the mind 113

Signs in time: Duality of the act 116

Dynamic movement of semiotic fields 122

The SWIB (sign with infinite border) 123

Levels of affective semiosis 125

Conclusion: Why hierarchies matter 133

7 How Culture is Made through Objects 135

Paradoxes in value construction: Commoditization and singularization 136

Trust and commoditization 137

The functional role of things-and their value 141

Affordances for the future: Constructing goal-orientations 146

Functional life courses of objects 147

Acting upon objects: Constructing through the VALUE<>non-VALUE tension 149

Hyper-generalized values of objects: Post-utilitarian uses 151

Things and objects: Turning a thing into Gegenstand 153

The Gegenstand and the sign classes of C. S. Peirce 154

The ownership of the self through another: Control and responsibility 155

Quality of objects: Dynamics within Gegenstand 156

When the actor is the object: The human body as Gegenstand 163

The sensuality of bodily pain 168

Wrapping our bodies: Clothes as objects 170

Conclusion: Relating to objects-relating to oneself 172

8 Cultivating Environments: Over-determination by meaning 174

What is symbolic remove? 175

Places we make: The future and past in the present 177

How can landscapes become sacred? 179

Cultivating nature: The nature of gardens 181

Home and non-home: Creating home outside of home 186

Homes for the dead-away from home 188

Architectural forms: Perceptual suggestion for cultural values 191

Meanings under construction, and decay 196

Summary: Cultural structuring of human life environments 200

9 Weaving Social Textures Together: Personal and collective culture in action 205

Society and its dynamics 209

Personal culture, collective culture, and their relations 213

The collective culture 214

Collective<>personal culture relations 215

Social participation and personal culture 225

Conclusion: Relations of personal and collective cultures 228

10 Signs as Organizers: Maintaining and innovating tensions 230

Super-normality in fashion design 232

Tensions generated at distinction borders 234

The general theoretical focus: Tensional unity of opposites 238

Regulating tensions: Schematization and pleromatization 238

The pleromatic pathway: The hidden side of our selves 243

Tensions, their maintenance, and transformation 245

From monologic to dialogic perspective: For every sign there is a counter-sign 245

Breaking out of the cycle: From dialogical dynamics to dialectical synthesis 249

Conclusion: Tension is the norm that allows for its own modification 254.

ISBN:

9781446248775

1446248771

9781446248782

144624878X

OCLC:

890900587