Table Of ContentBrady Wagoner
Bo Allesøe Christensen
Carolin Demuth
Editors
Culture
as Process
A Tribute to Jaan Valsiner
Culture as Process
Brady Wagoner
Bo Allesøe Christensen • Carolin Demuth
Editors
Culture as Process
A Tribute to Jaan Valsiner
Editors
Brady Wagoner Bo Allesøe Christensen
Communication and Psychology Communication and Psychology
Aalborg University Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark Aalborg, Denmark
Carolin Demuth
Communication and Psychology
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
ISBN 978-3-030-77891-0 ISBN 978-3-030-77892-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77892-7
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Foreword
Jaan Valsiner, A Quest for the Whole
Characterizing Jaan Valsiner’s academic endeavor as a quest for the whole, may at
first glance seem a bit too easy, casual, or even trifled. For is such characterization
not reached by merely combining phrases from the titles of some of Jaan’s co-
authored works, more exactly from Striving for the whole (Diriwächter & Valsiner,
2008) and A quest for synthesis” (Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991)? But, nonetheless,
we actually think this kind of bricolage captures the essence of Jaan’s pursuit, not
only as a researcher, but also as a colleague and – not least – as a human being. As
several testimonials in this book attest, Jaan has adamantly pursued the whole for
the last many years.
There is really nothing easy or superficial about quests. As a matter of fact, the
quest is one of the seminal motives in world literature as well as in modern fiction
(e.g., computer games). La queste is at the heart of the Arthurian epos, most notably
in Chrétien de Troyes’ unfinished Perceval ou le Conte de Graal (ca. 1180 1190)
–
and the anonymous Les aventures ou la queste del Saint Graal (Busby, 1993;
Sommer, 1913). But this motive is older and much more widespread than medieval
France. The adventures of Ulysses in Homer’s Odysseus, the longings of Vergil’s
Aeneas for a place to call his own, Jason and his Argonauts searching for the Golden
Fleece, but also the Bildungsroman (e.g., Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister) and the tale of
Beren and Lúthien (Tolkien, 1977), these are all captivating stories of quests
addressing some deep strata in the human mind, while reveiling the protagonist’s
personality, morals, successes, and perils.
A quest is a striving, and synthesis aims for the whole. These phrases replicate
one another, but being used almost 20 years apart, they also indicate continuities in
Jaan’s academic career. It has been and still is a quest. Every quest has an object,
and this object – the Grail – is precious but hard to obtain. It is either hidden or has
been lost, or can, at its worst, even be unobtainable. The “Whole” is such an object.
Jaan’s two books, that we have alluded to, are precursors in this quest. And this
points to one important feature of Jaan’s own project or quest if you will: his
v
vi Foreword
insistence on the value of tradition and his instruction to recognize and respect this
value by studying, emulating, and elaborating on it. This demand may seem curi-
ously at odds with present standard practices in academia with its tendency to treat
older contributions as obsolete and outdated. But is not striving for synthesis in
itself at odds with the academic urge to specialize? Narrowing your field of research
may further your career, but it also contributes to fragmenting the field into innu-
merable sub-fields, apparently unrelated to one another.
Cultural psychology, the vessel of Jaan’s quest, is instrumental in repairing what
has been splintered and re-discovering what has been lost – the whole. Cultural
psychology is not yet another sub-field of psychology, related to, for example,
developmental psychology (as a sub-discipline) or to cross-cultural psychology.
Instead, it is a significant, rather radical broadening of the field, well beyond the
confines of modern psychology. Because Jaan is also insistent when it comes to
integrating psychology with other disciplines: with anthropology, sociology, lin-
guistics, semiotics, history, philosophy, you name it. The aim of cultural psychology
is radical. It is to understand the condition of human existence in its totality. In that
sense the quest is a search for the meaning of the whole.
Going against the grain of mainstream psychology is hazardous. In addition to
being difficult, quests are also dangerous. They are full of obstacles, of dragons,
sirens, and other hideous monsters. It takes courage, will, and enormous intelli-
gence – and perhaps also a dose of luck – to avoid these trappings. It also takes the
help of others: of fellow travelers, fellow searchers, and researchers. Quests are
always prolonged, going on for years, decades, forever. And they may lead the hero
to unforeseen places in faraway lands. Jaan and his ideas have travelled the world
during this long search, and along the road he has found many scholars willing to
follow him on his journey. This journey has become a collective enterprise, which is
evident when reading the contributions in this volume. It is an endeavor, shared by
a group of colleagues that have turned into a group of friends. Actually, the most apt
designation for this group might probably be that of a globally extended family,
united not at some court’s mythical Round Table but at one of the most familiar,
humble but nonetheless affective places of all: i.e., in the “kitchen,” collectively
sharing, probing, and developing ideas – operating as a tightly knit unit, a whole.
It is not only because of his eminent scholarship nor by some unusual oratorical
skills that Jaan has been able to assemble this “family.” It is very much due to his
personality. Jaan is as curious about ideas as he is about people. About the perspec-
tives, opinions, and experiences of others. And he is interested in developing and
propagating the ideas of others, not less than his own ones. He invites ideas and
encourages curiosity, and while doing so he invites the bearers of these ideas into his
world. To many of us, he may serve as a mentor, but he has also – and more impor-
tantly – become a friend and thereby he has made us part of his extended family.
In 2013 it was our good fortune that the vessel of Cultural Psychology – probably
quite unforeseen by Jaan himself – landed in Denmark, at Aalborg University. Jaan
went ashore, and with him a constant flow of fellow cultural psychologists from
near and afar followed. Since then, we have benefited tremendously from Jaan’s
preoccupation with “the whole.” It has given us a much broader outlook. It has
Foreword vii
increased our productivity and strengthened our international reputation. Most sig-
nificantly for us, though, Jaan’s arrival has given us a friend and made us part of his
“family.” For those fortunate enough to be part of the family, most have experienced
Jaan’s hospitality, curiosity, and mild-mannered persistent side. His hospitality is
well known – from his travels he brings gifts and things he believes others will enjoy
or find as amusing as he does. But Jaan also expects much from his family, but that
is only because of his genuine interest in others. As such family members have even
found themselves the objects of his articles and books; this is where one tends to
rely on his own sentiment, that he is “not that kind of psychologist.”
While the hero of most quests relies on strength, strong morals, and intelligence,
many heroes also rely on luck and on trusting other people. We will not be the
judges of whether Jaan has been lucky or not, but we can certainly testify that his
trust in others is immense. As an avid believer in the potential of others, Jaan will do
his upmost to help promote and develop these capacities. This is probably one of the
finest sides of any research leader.
A quest is a noble endeavor. The word quest is derived from medieval French la
queste, itself derived from the Latin verb quaerere, meaning to ask (cf. question) or
to search. A quest is thus at the core of research understood as a persistent search by
perpetually asking questions, whose definite answers might very likely be indefi-
nitely postponed. The aim of academia is not to find unequivocal answers or clear
solutions, but rather to embark on difficult, sometimes dangerous and always pro-
longed searches for a precious object and to undertake such journeys not for the
sake of the (re)searcher but for humanity as a whole. Jaan Valsiner’s greatest contri-
bution to academia during his long and impressive career is therefore to show us
what conducting academic life might otherwise make us forget: the nobility of the
quest and its goal. In Jaan’s case this goal is “the whole,” not only in a theoretical
but first and foremost in a profoundly human sense.
Aalborg, Denmark Christian Jantzen
Mikael Vetner
References
Diriwachter, R., & Valsiner, J. (Eds.). (2011). Striving for the whole: Creating theoretical synthe-
ses (Vol. 1). Transaction Publishers.
Keith Busby, K. (1993). Le roman de Perceval ou le conte du Graal: Edition critique d'après tous
les manuscrits. Niemeyer.
Sommer, H. O. (1913). The Vulgate version of the Arthurian romances: Les aventures ou la queste
del Saint Graal. Le mort le roi Arthur. Carnegie Institution.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1977). The Silmarillion. George Allen & Unwin.
Van der Veer, R., & Valsiner, J. (1991). Understanding Vygotsky: A quest for synthesis. Blackwell
Publishing.
Contents
The Mind of a Persistent Innovator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Brady Wagoner, Carolin Demuth, and Bo A. Christensen
Part I Reimagining the History of Psychology
Jaan Valsiner: A Ganzheitspsychologist? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Rainer Diriwächter
Rising up to Humanity: Towards a Cultural Psychology of Bildung . . . . . 29
Svend Brinkmann
The Self Inside of Us: Biologism, Internalization,
Quantification, and Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Martin Dege
Valsiner and Van der Veer: A Case of Intellectual Interdependency . . . . . 49
Rene van der Veer
Part II D evelopmental Science in the Making
The Dynamics of Agency and Context in Human Development:
Holism Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Nancy Budwig
The Trajectory of Jaan Valsiner’s Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
James V. Wertsch
Forever Feeding Forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Tania Zittoun
Cultural Processes from the Inside: What Happens
During and After a Movement? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Boulanger Dany
ix
x Contents
The Bounded Indeterminacy of Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Lívia Mathias Simão
Part III The Semiotic Mind
A Stroll Through the Birthplace of Signs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Carlos Cornejo
Expansive and Restrictive Semiosis: Exploring the Process
of Cultural Guidance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Alex Gillespie
Hypergeneralized Affective-Semiotic Fields: The Generative
Power of a Construct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Angela Uchoa Branco
Unfolding Semiotics: The Field of Mediated Activity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Marie-Cécile Bertau
Interpersonal Psychoanalysis as a Culturally Unique Field:
A Semiotic Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Philip J. Rosenbaum
Part IV Cultural Transmission and Transformation
Culture as a Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Vlad P. Glăveanu
The Carnivalesque Pedagogy: Jaan as a Pedagogist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Kyoko Murakami
Overcoming the Binary Logic in Biculturalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
Elke Murdock
The Sense of Belonging in the Context of Migration:
Meanings and Developmental Trajectories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Isabelle Albert and Stephanie Barros
Political Plasticity and Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Fathali M. Moghaddam
Part V Aesthetics in Culture and Mind
Aesthetic Notes on Ornamented Lives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
Robert E. Innis
Pleromatization: Bringing Cultural Psychology
Closer to Human Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
Sven Hroar Klempe and Olga Lehmann
Contents xi
The Vorbild in Donor Portraits and Cultural Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Lucas B. Mazur
Intimacy in Irreversible Time: Poetic Genesis
as a Special Case of Boundary Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
Emily Abbey and Ana Cecília Bastos
The Fabric of (Faked) Behavior Shows in Theatre Rehearsals:
An Exploration on How Body Movements Turn into Signs
for Experiencing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
Alberto Rosa
Part VI P sychology as a Global Science
Local Ideas for a Global Science: The Journey
from Indian Psychology to Cultural Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
Nandita Chaudhary
The Collective Making of a General Psychology of Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
Jakob W. Villadsen and Pernille Hviid
The Relationalism of Jaan Valsiner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
Danilo Silva Guimarães
Jaan Valsiner, a Keen Perceiver and Creator of Cultural Ecology . . . . . . . 327
Shuangshuang Xu, Aruna Wu, and Xiaowen Li
Part VII Epistemological Foundations of Psychology
The Science of Psyche: Jaan Valsiner’s Way at the Frontiers . . . . . . . . . . . 339
Aaro Toomela
Ideas and Challenges for Cultural Psychology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
Sergio Salvatore
Action-Theoretical Cultural Psychology and the Decentred Subject . . . . 363
Jürgen Straub
Valsiner on Facts: Making Culture Explicit? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
Bo A. Christensen
Bridging: Some Personal Reflections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389
Jens Mammen
Part VIII Innovating Methodology
Developing Dynamic Methodologies: Jaan Valsiner’s
Influence on the Methodological Thinking in Cultural
Psychology and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401
Mariann Märtsin
