1st Edition
The Challenges of Cultural Psychology Historical Legacies and Future Responsibilities
This book considers cultural psychology from historical, theoretical, and epistemological perspectives, building an understanding of cultural psychology as a human science and moving beyond the nature-culture dichotomy. The unique collection of chapters seeks to advance the field of cultural psychology by reviving its historical legacies and arguing for its social responsibility in future historical developments.
It considers European legacies for cultural psychology as developed by leading figures such as Giambattista Vico, Wilhelm Wundt, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Ernst Cassirer in order to provide insights into a long tradition of thinking from a cultural psychology perspective. The book discusses historical pathways in the rise and repression of cultural psychology and its different historical forms, arguing for the necessity of decolonizing psychology, securing a place for culture in it, and developing an epistemology suited to humankind’s meaning-making processes in mutual shaping of psyche and culture. It provides an integrative and historical understanding of the subject and uses the diversity and heterogeneity within the field to offer critical reflections on its achievements. The thoroughly international group of contributors brings diverse analyses of self, body, emotions, culture, and society and considers the future of cultural psychology.
The volume is a stimulating read for scholars and students of cultural and theoretical psychology and related areas including philosophy, anthropology, and history.
Part I: Cultural Psychology as a Human Science
1. Cultural Psychology as a Human Science
Gordana Jovanović
2. Natureculture in a Transformative Worldview: Moving beyond the "Interactionist Consensus"
Anna Stetsenko
Part II: Reviving Historical Legacies for Cultural Psychology
3. Nature Unveiling Herself before Science: The Relationship between Mind and Culture in the Perspective of Giambattista Vico
Luca Tateo
4. Völkerpsychologie as Cultural Psychology: The Place of Culture in Wundt’s Psychological Project
Saulo de Freitas Araujo
5. Wilhelm Dilthey’s Conception of a Descriptive and Comprehensive Psychology
Hans-Ulrich Lessing
6. Ernst Cassirer’s Cultural Theory: Culture as Symbolical Practice
Jan Weyand
Part III: Vicissitudes of Cultural Psychology
7. Roots and Rise of Cultural Psychology
Lars Allolio-Näcke
8. Culture and Personality: A Once and Future Research Program?
Christian G. Allesch
9. Bruner’s Lectures: Cultural Psychology in statu nascendi
William R. Woodward
10. Ernst E. Boesch and his Symbolic Action Theory
Lars Allolio-Näcke
11. The Repression of Cultural Psychology in the History of Psychology
Gordana Jovanović
Part IV: Epistemological Challenges of Cultural Psychology
12. Contingent Universals as the Expression of a Culture
Rom Harré and Jean-Pierre Llored
13. The Place of Culture in Psychology: A Social Constructionist Standpoint
Kenneth Gergen
14. Light through a Cultural Lens: Decolonizing the History of Psychology and Resilience
Wade E. Pickren
15. Narrative Psychology as Cultural Psychology
Csaba Pléh
16. Towards Cultural (African) Psychology: Links, Challenges and Possibilities
Kopano Ratele
Part V: Cultural Psychology of Self, Body, Culture and Society
17. The Self in Japanese Culture from an Embodied Perspective
Shogo Tanaka
18. The Moving Body
Elisa Krause-Kjær, Jensine I. Nedergaard, & Jaan Valsiner
19. Toward a Vygotskian Analysis of Emotions: Theoretical and Methodological Bases for a Critical Social Psychology
Gisele Toassa
20. Aesthetics and Cultural Psychology
Christian G. Allesch
21. Let One Person’s Tears not be Infectious: Efik Proverbs as Emotion Regulation Exemplars
Vivian Dzokoto, Eyo Mensah, Eunsoo Choi, and Melissa Washington-Nortey
22. Cultural-historical Hyperobjects
Cathrine Hasse
23. The Genesis of Macro Cultural Psychology’s Culture Theory from Traditional Cultural Psychology
Carl Ratner
24. The Genesis of Macro Cultural Psychology’s Political Orientation from other Approaches to Cultural Psychology
Carl Ratner
Part VI: Thinking with Cultural Psychology about the Future
25. Thinking with Cultural Psychology about the Future
Gordana Jovanović, Luca Tateo, and Csaba Pléh
Biography
Gordana Jovanović is Professor of Psychology at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, Serbia. She is committed to psychology understood as a human science closely related to other human sciences and philosophy. Her research is theoretically driven, epistemologically reflected and argues for the necessity of historical foundations and the critical responsibility of psychology.
Lars Allolio-Näcke is manager and scientific coordinator at the Zentralinstitut "Anthropologie der Religion(en)" at Friedrich-Alexander Universität, Erlangen, Germany. His main interests include philosophy of subjectivity, historical anthropology, cultural psychology, psychology of religion, and philosophy of science.
Carl Ratner has been developing a new theory and methodology for four decades under the title "macro cultural psychology." Ratner emphasizes the political character of culture and psychology and uses it to develop social and psychological enrichment. Ratner has lived in and conducted research in China, India, and Saudi Arabia.
