Abstract
Reviewed by: Patrizia Meringolo, Department of Education and Psychology, University of Florence, Italy
Cultural psychology has become popular in the past two decades. Its importance is often outlined as a way to better understand changes in our society, which faces relevant phenomena such as migrations and cohabitation of different ethnic groups.
The book by Valsiner is much more than an explication of how cultural interpretation may be created and co-constructed in social contexts. It is a powerful work, theoretical and well-documented, founding a new direction, aimed at deepening our understanding of the cultural psychology of semiotic dynamics.
This text is addressed firstly to researchers interested in how the everyday world may be considered from a cultural point of view, but it is also a stimulating book for a larger reading public. The author, in fact, provides a scientific work that not only links developmental and social psychology, but also anthropology, history, sociology, and sociolinguistics.
The first proposed subject concerns how human beings make themselves and their whole world meaningful, starting from their bodies and extending the construction to the complexity of their lives.
From this point of view human behavior is redefined not as objective, but subjective, through the meanings related to it. Behavior is therefore a conduct, “action in the world that is made meaningful by the acting human being” (p. 25).
Some suggestions are offered to attentive readers, improving their knowledge and reflection about the actions aimed to make sense of reality; transcending common sense, culture is seen as a process, not as an entity. In the relationships between the active person and their world, the traditional view (for instance that of Parsons) is outdone, and culture, rather than transmitted, is co-constructed; rather than learned, is internalized or externalized; rather than shared, is coordinated.
Cultural processes may happen in the “borders”, where constructive internalization and externalization have the human body as an arena for experiencing inside and outside situations, as well as in the surrounding world, moving “through the body into the semiosphere” (p. 85).
Particular attention is paid to how human beings construct their subjectivities through signs, which have hierarchical structures and a dynamic self-regulation. Hierarchical order provides the basis for both “the stability and transformability of a system” (p. 133).
An interesting deepening of understanding regards how culture is made through objects. Our everyday life is full of things, with different functions, sometimes useful and sometimes indispensable not only for their use, but also for the individuals’ involvement that may lead to their hyper-generalized value.
Environment is an important focus of the book, with particular attention paid to places, and to how individuals in specific settings ascribe different meanings to material and immaterial things. We can notice how this emphasis may become particularly relevant for social interventions in environmental researches. Places, therefore, are not merely behavior settings—as in the past studies by Barker—but are “arenas for meaning-making” (p. 177).
In many cultures there are sacred landscapes, connoted by signs. And moreover, in all settings, individuals are used to intervene on the environment to express (by means of nature modification) their signs, their wishes and their need to achieve well-being.
We may, besides, talk about political places and their connotations, or even, in everyday life, private or collective or community gardens, where cultivated nature allows recognizing the habits and the hopes of inhabitants. These examples are discussed and clarified at length in the text.
For a social psychologist and a community psychologist the focus on structuring human life environments is crucial, especially when it is important to outline the relation between internal and external sites (home and non-home, person and his/her world, and finally the possibility to create home outside of home).
Reflections about culture and about relations between personal and collective cultures are relevant issues that may contribute to all our studies about immigration, or about gender differences, toward a “dialectical synthesis” (p. 249).
The book is a really useful instrument for scientists, students and anyone interested in deepening cultural phenomena and in evaluating the importance of signs in constructing (and co-constructing) the social world; signs that may consist in an object, an event, a place that represents what we want, we need and after all what we are.
When we compare two or more cultures—not only among different people coming from different countries, but also among gender and generations—despite our pursuit of an emic approach (according to Berry’s distinction between the etic and emic approach in understanding cultures), we often restrict ourselves in a description of manifest actions, even with a historical and ethnic point of view, but sometimes without a real knowledge of their value as signs coming from a cultural (and perhaps latent for us) background.
This contribution may fill a gap in the social and community psychology approach, allowing us to carry out more meaningful studies.
Community psychologists, particularly, pay attention to caring that their studies raise a shared sense for all participants, both people involved and recruited for these studies, and researchers who want to be—through a co-construction of aims and findings of their work—“participant conceptualizers,” a phrase that outlines how research has to find a sense within the investigated settings.