The present book has been rich in theoretical elaborations and presentation of selected phenomena. The latter were to serve the interests of the former, rather than the reverse. It is through the tension between theory construction and the phenomena that methodological innovation can come about. Without such innovation, the different efforts of the late twentieth century to build cultural psychology would pass without basic breakthroughs—similarly to their predecessors about a century before. Yet it would be a pity to have another miscarriage in this promise of psychology’s procreation. Cultural psychology has over its first three decades given interesting theoretical leads for the future of psychology as a human science. These leads need careful cultivation so as not to be crushed by the fashion-dominated tsunamis of research practices in psychology and other social sciences. Science is part of society’s self-organizing discursive activities led by political and economic ideologies. This chapter brings in a fundamental change in the focus of investigation in psychology—the periphery becomes central. The domains that have been dismissed as vague or unclear—liminality zones—become the central domain for investigation. Making liminality central for psychology—investigating the borders and conditions of border crossings—would be an effort that makes all of psychology developmentally oriented, dynamic, systemic—a change that psychology in the past century has insistently been avoiding. Cultural Psychology, as a new perspective, has the open epistemological view to make this change possible.

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General Conclusion: Culture in Minds and Societies

  • Jaan Valsiner

摘要

The present book has been rich in theoretical elaborations and presentation of selected phenomena. The latter were to serve the interests of the former, rather than the reverse. It is through the tension between theory construction and the phenomena that methodological innovation can come about. Without such innovation, the different efforts of the late twentieth century to build cultural psychology would pass without basic breakthroughs—similarly to their predecessors about a century before. Yet it would be a pity to have another miscarriage in this promise of psychology’s procreation. Cultural psychology has over its first three decades given interesting theoretical leads for the future of psychology as a human science. These leads need careful cultivation so as not to be crushed by the fashion-dominated tsunamis of research practices in psychology and other social sciences. Science is part of society’s self-organizing discursive activities led by political and economic ideologies. This chapter brings in a fundamental change in the focus of investigation in psychology—the periphery becomes central. The domains that have been dismissed as vague or unclear—liminality zones—become the central domain for investigation. Making liminality central for psychology—investigating the borders and conditions of border crossings—would be an effort that makes all of psychology developmentally oriented, dynamic, systemic—a change that psychology in the past century has insistently been avoiding. Cultural Psychology, as a new perspective, has the open epistemological view to make this change possible.