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 human kind’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 bring diverse analyses of self, body, emotions, culture and society and consider 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.

Gordana Jovanovic 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 arguing for necessity of historical foundations and critical responsibility of psychology.

Lars Allolio-Nacke is manager and scientific coordinator at the Zentralinstitut "Anthropologie der Religion(en)" at Friedrich-Alexander Universitat, 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 the theory and methodology for 4 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 and conducted research in China, India, and Saudi Arabia.