KULTUURIPSÜHHOLOOGIA
Cultural Psychology

Summary/Abstract: Culture is the center of human life – which has been viewed in psychology in two ways. The newly developing cultural psychology views culture as inherent socially constructed organizer of each and every human mind in its social relations (it belongs to the general psychology). Cultural psychology is situated at the intersection of social and developmental psychology on the one hand, and cultural anthropology on the other; it is an effort to create a general social science where human orientation towards changing the world is included in the domain of science. As culture is a result of evolutionary process – it is one where the biological evolution has overcome itself. It has given way to cultural construction of out environments – and through that – of ourselves. Human beings orient themselves towards the future, create images of the future that become goals, and handle the possibilities of both reaching and failing to reach these goals. This is accomplished through tools of ideal kind—signs that are linked with different material carriers – and constitute the semiotic mediation perspective within cultural psychology. The semiotic perspective in cultural psychology focuses researchers’ interests on self-organizing sign systems – as cultural regulators of the human mind. Such regulators orient the mind towards its encounters with the always uncertain future, and are thus the core for making sense of human development. Human flexibility of invention of new ways of being is the result of such cultural regulation. As is to be expected in the real world – the efforts to control our selves turn into their opposite – to liberate ourselves from previous convenient confines. That dialectical process leads to new confines – from which we move on to become free, only to find yet new self-limits which we need in order to proceed. We live culture in each and every moment of our human existence.

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