http://www.cepaosreview.cjb.net/
VOLUME 1
Number 3, June, 2002
Número 3, Junho, 2002
Cultural Psychology:Theory & Method - Introduction
Carl Ratner
After many decades of self-imposed insulation from cultural issues,
psychologists belatedly and reluctantly have been forced to recognize
that psychological phenomena are constituted in certain ways by cultural
processes. This recognition has led to the development of a field of
studies called cultural psychology. Broadly conceived, it seeks to
comprehend the ways in which psychological phenomena are part of
cultural life and are interdependent with other cultural phenomena. In
1910 Dewey wrote a statement that expresses a central tenet of cultural
psychology. He said that the processes that animate and form
consciousness lie outside it in social life. Therefore, the objective
for psychologists is to use mental phenomena (e.g., perception,
emotions) as clues for comprehending the life processes that they
represent. This task resembles the paleontologist's who finds a number
and variety of footprints. From these he goes to work to construct the
structure and the life habits of the animals that made them. Just as the
paleontologist would be remiss to restrict his attention to describing
footprints themselves, analyzing their elements, comparing them to each
other, and discovering the laws of their arrangement in space—while
failing to explore the living organisms and habits that they epresent—so
psychologists are remiss in restricting their attention to describing
states of consciousness, their elements, and interactions, while failing
to link consciousness to real-life processes of human beings. "The
supposition that these states [of consciousness] are somehow existent by
themselves and in this existence provide the psychologist with readymade
material is just the supreme case of the 'psychological fallacy'"
(Dewey, 1910, p. 250; see also Vygotsky, 1997a, pp. 272–273, 327 for a
remarkably similar statement).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jan 01 2003 - 01:00:07 PST