Cultural Psychology : Essays on Comparative Human Development

This book raises the idea of a distinct discipline of cultural psychology, the study of the ways that psyche and culture, subject and object, and person and world make up each other. Cultural Psychology is a collection of essays from leading scholars in anthropology, psychology, and linguistics who examine these relationships with special reference to core areas of human development: cognition, learning, self, personality dynamics, and gender. The chapters critically examine such questions as: Is there an intrinsic psychic unity to humankind? Can cultural traditions transform the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion? Are psychological processes local or specific to the sociocultural environments in which they are embedded? The volume is an outgrowth of the internationally known Chicago Symposia on Culture and Human Development. It will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience of anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, historians, philosophers and hermeneutists interested in the prospects for a distinct discipline of cultural psychology.