Jaan Valsiner 
An Invitation to Cultural Psychology 

An Invitation to Cultural Psychology looks at the everyday life worlds of human beings through the lens of a new synthetic perspective in cultural psychology – that of
semiotic dynamics.



Based on historical work from many different fields in the social and behavioural sciences, and the humanities too, this perspective applied to cultural psychology suggests that human beings are constantly creating, maintaining and abandoning hierarchies of meanings within all cultural contexts they experience. It’s a perspective that leans heavily on the work of the great French philosopher, Henri Bergson, only now being realised as a core basis for human cultural living.




Jaan Valsiner is the founding editor of the major journal in the field,
Culture & Psychology, and Editor of the
Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology. He is the first Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University in Denmark, where he leads Europe′s first Research Centre on Cultural Psychology.

Table of Content

Introduction: Why Cultural Psychology? Making the human condition meaningful

Chapter 1: Human Experience through the Lens of Culture: An invitation to psychology in a new key

Chapter 2: What is culture? And — why human psychology needs to be cultural?

Chapter 3: Co-constructing the Mind Socially: Beyond a communion

Chapter 4: Mutuality of Internalization and Externalization

Chapter 5: Creating Ourselves: Signs, myths, and resistances

Chapter 6: Sign Hierarchies: Their construction, use, and demolition

Chapter 7: How Culture is Made Through Objects

Chapter 8: Cultivating Environments: Over-determination by meaning

Chapter 9: Weaving Social Textures Together: Personal and collective culture in action

Chapter 10: Signs as Organizers: Maintaining and innovating tensions

Epilogue: Cultural psychology as a science of universality of culture

About the author

Jaan Valsiner is Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is the founding editor (1995) of the Sage journal, Culture & Psychology.  And of The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology (2012). He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Sciences  (Springer, from 2007). In 1995 he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize in Germany for his interdisciplinary work on human development, and Senior Fulbright Lecturing Award in Brazil 1995-1997. He has been a visiting professor in Brazil, Japan, Australia, Estonia. Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.