This innovative textbook is the ideal introduction to cultural psychology. It focuses on a holistic approach to cultural psychology, which emphasises that culture is created and shared by people and society.
Organised around short core concept chapters, the book encourages students to think critically about culture and the theories around it. Chapters explore what cultural psychology is, forms of knowing, how cultural psychology can be used to understand higher psychological functions and the human psyche. Each chapter contains definitions of key concepts, real-world examples from everyday human activities, reflection questions, short biographies of key figures relevant to cultural psychology, and chapter summaries. There are also links to video interviews from leading international scholars which provide critical reflections on core concepts in cultural psychology.
This is the essential introductory book for students of cultural psychology, as well as cultural studies and anthropology. It will be useful for anyone looking to learn more about the history of ideas, the human mind and its historical and material relationship with culture.
Foreword
Introduction
• The perspective of the book
• Structure of the volume
• How to use this book
• References
1. Basic Concepts
• Beyond Binaries: The Cogenetic Logic
• Concepts as Systems in Cultural Psychology
• The Human Being as Meaning-Maker
• Surplus of meaning
• Group activity for instructor: Different types of signs
• Signs and semiosis
• Signs and meaning-making
• Mediation
• Activity and artefact
• From the world to the psyche and back: internalization/externalization cycle
2. The Forms of Knowing
• Temporality
• Irreversible time
• Time as context
• Dialogicality
• Narrativity
• Qualitative methods to study developing living systems
3. What is Cultural Psychology
• Culture as cultivation: the Norwegian house
• Do we need culture?
• First, second, and third nature
• Cultural Psychology
• A bit of history
• Collective culture and personal culture
• Window of acceptable possibilities
• In-between cultures
• Decolonizing the study of cultures
• An ecological approach to mind and culture
• The Zone of Potential Estrangement
4. Imagination
• Do we know or do we imagine?
• Knowing by imagining
• Imagination as uncoupling
• Imagining future worlds: mental experiments and utopias
• Expansive and reductive imagination
• The theory of imaginative process as higher mental function
• The sociogenesis of imagining
• Educating imagining
• Imagining as higher mental function
5. Borders
• Borders and bordering in the environment and in the mind
• Cultural psychology of borders
• Borders and mind
• Borders and signs
• The developmental function of borders: the concept of Gegenstand
• Selective Internalization of borders
• The general genetic law of bordering development
6. The psyche as dynamic totality
• Are human beings coherent?
• Dilemmas
• Ambivalence
• The semiotics of ambivalence
• Tensegrity
• Affective logic
Biography
Luca Tateo is Professor in Epistemology, Theory and Methodology of Qualitative Research at the University of Oslo, Norway, and Visiting Associate Professor at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. He is co-editor in chief of the Journal Human Arenas: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Psychology, Culture, and Meaning.
"Luca Tateo’s Fundamentals of Cultural Psychology is a rare achievement: It is both student-friendly and inviting at the same time that it is an intellectually challenging contribution to this rapidly growing field of study."
–Michael Cole, Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus at UCLA San Diego
"This text book about the fundamentals of cultural psychology is bound to be a classic. Professor Luca Tateo offers a new, clear, and compelling vision of cultural psychology that transcends disciplinary boundaries and geographies. The story of cultural psychology narrated here is drawn from philosophy, history, medicine, sociology, anthropology, art, and humanities, and theology. This textbook achieves a rare feat of creating a truly mind-opening learning experience for beginning and advanced students of psychology. This book offers a valuable resource for anyone who is genuinely interested in deepening their inquiry and transforming their understanding of the field of cultural psychology. "
- Sunil Bhatia, Lucy Marsh Haskell '19 Professor of Human Development at Connecticut College
