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Culture in Minds and Societies: Foundations of Cultural Psychology presents a new look at the relationship between people and society, produces a semiotic theory of cultural psychology and provides a dynamic treatment of culture in human lives. This book makes a decisive break from the post-modernist theoretical framework that considers knowledge as local and situation-specific. It restores the goal of construction of general knowledge to the social sciences. While recognizing the uniqueness of all human personal experience from birth to death, it emphasizes the universality of cultural organization of human minds and societies.
List of contents
Part I. Setting the stage: Culture- where is it?.- Chapter 1. Approaches to Culture Beyond the Common Language.- Chapter 2. Culture as Semiosis.- Chapter 3. Signs, Society and Community.- Chapter 4. Social Structures and their Differentiation.- Part II. Semiotic Dynamics in Societies.- Chapter 5. Minimal Communities and Their Organization: Kinship groups, families, and marriage forms.- Chapter 6. Cultural Wholes on the Move: Maintenance and Crossing of Boundaries in the Semiotic Universes.- Chapter 7. Making Oppositions: Dualities in Meaning Making and the Polyphonic System of the Soul.- Chapter 8. Thinking as a cultural process.- Part III. The role of person in cultural psychology.- Chapter 9. Semiotic fields in action: Affective guiding of the psyche.- Chapter 10. Constructive internalization and externalization.- Part IV. Methodology of cultural psychology.- Chapter 11. Creating basic knowledge: the Methodology Cycle in Cultural Psychology.- Chapter 12. Microgenetic Methods for Cultural Psychology.- Chapter 13. Transmodal methodology.- Chapter 14. Culture in minds and societies.
About the author
Jaan Valsiner,
born in Tallinn, Estonia in 1951, is a cultural psychologist with a consistently developmental axiomatic base that is brought to analyses of any psychological or social phenomena. He is the founding editor (1995-2025) of the Sage journal,
Culture & Psychology
and Editor-In-Chief,
Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science
(Springer, 2007-2026). After working for over three decades in USA at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Clark University, he accepted in 2013 the position of
Niels Bohr
Professor of Cultural Psychology
at Aalborg University, Denmark. Valsiner is the Head of the
Competence Center on Cultural Psychology
at University of Tallinn, Estonia. He focuses on theoretical innovation, with monographs
The guided mind
(Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1998,
Ornamented Lives
(Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers, 2018) and
Sensuality in Human Living
(Springer, 2020). He has also published a major theoretical treatise
General Human Psychology
(t2021 by Springer) that would synthesize William Stern’s personology with his Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics.
Jaan Valsiner has been awarded major research prizes in Europe-- the
Alexander von Humboldt Prize
of 1995 in Germany, and the
Hans-Kilian-Preis
of 2017. As part of his credo for building psychology on an international and trans-cultural basis, he has been a visiting professor in Brazil, Japan, Australia, Estonia. Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Since 2017 he is a
Foreign Member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences
.
Summary
Culture in Minds and Societies: Foundations of Cultural Psychology
presents a new look at the relationship between people and society, produces a semiotic theory of cultural psychology and provides a dynamic treatment of culture in human lives. This book makes a decisive break from the post-modernist theoretical framework that considers knowledge as local and situation-specific. It restores the goal of construction of general knowledge to the social sciences. While recognizing the uniqueness of all human personal experience from birth to death, it emphasizes the universality of cultural organization of human minds and societies.
