Cultural psychology today: Innovations and oversights

Abstract

Culture & Psychology has developed from a small start-up journal in 1995 into the key trend-setter in the field. This editorial analysis continues the tradition of inquiry started in previous efforts (Valsiner, 2001, 2004a) and extends it to the needs of psychology as a whole for the study of dynamic, meaning-making human beings. Cultural psychologyĝ€"using the term culture as a generic term in various versionsĝ€"continues to be an arena where innovations can occur. Separate research fieldsĝ€" such as the dialogical self, social representation processes, semiotic mediation, symbolic action, and actuation theoriesĝ€"have all been co-participants in this new advancement of ideas. Yet the central problemĝ€"an innovation of empirical research methodology which would appropriately capture human active meaning-makingĝ€"has not been solved. Likewise, cultural psychology has only marginally touched upon the lessons from indigenous psychologiesĝ€"the richness of folk psychological terms, and the cultural over-determination of objects used in human everyday living. Contemporary cultural psychology turns increasingly towards the study of objects as cultural constructs. Editing a journal is itself an act of construction of a cultural object, and the current state of contemporary scientific journals indicates a re-construction of the social nature of knowledge. Moving beyond its postmodernist and empiricist confines, psychology is set to return to the level of an abstracted generalization of its culture-inclusive theories. Cultureĝ€"in terms of semiotic mediators and meaningful action patternsĝ€"is the inherent core of human psychological functions, rather than an external causal entity that has 'effects' on human emotion, cognition, and behavior. © 2009 SAGE Publications.