Nandita Chaudhary – författare

All psychological processes—like biological and social ones—are dynamic. Phenomena of nature, society, and the human psyche are context bound, constantly changing, and variable. This feature of reality is often not recognized in the social sciences where we operate with averaged data and with homogeneous stereotypes, and consider our consistency to be the cornerstone of rational being. Yet we are all inconsistent in our actions within a day, or from, one day to the next, and much of such inconsistency is of positive value for our survival and development. Our inconsistent behaviors and thoughts may appear chaotic, yet there is generality within this highly variable dynamic.

The task of scientific methodologies—qualitative and quantitative—is to find out what that generality is. It is the aim of this handbook to bring into one framework various directions of construction of methodology of the dynamic processes that exist in the social sciences at the beginning of the 21st century. This handbook is set up to bring together pertinent methodological scholarship from all over the world, and equally from the quantitative and qualitative orientations to methodology. In addition to consolidating the pertinent knowledge base for the purposes of its further growth, this book serves the major educational role of bringing practitioners—students, researchers, and professionals interested in applications—the state of the art know-how about how to think about extracting evidence from single cases, and about the formal mathematical-statistical tools to use for these purposes.

Cultural Realities of Being offers a dialogue between academic activity and everyday lives by providing an interface between several perspectives on human conduct. Very often, academic pursuits are arcane and obscure for ordinary people, this book will attempt to disentangle these dialogues, lifting everyday discourse and providing a forum for advancing discussion and dialogue.

Nandita Chaudhary, S. Anandalakshmy and Jaan Valsiner bring together contributors from the field of cultural psychology to consider how people living within social groups, regardless of how liberal, are guided by collective reality and interconnected with life circumstances. The book discusses experiences and events in the lives of people of Indian cultures covering topics including family, food, pilgrimages, social dynamics and truth, in order to expand the material on human phenomena under the broad frame of cultural psychology.

The book builds upon rich cultural traditions present in India, and precisely because of this focus, the book has much larger implications and relevance to the field and aims to orient the academic reader from around the world to viewing India and Indian society as a valuable area for research. Divided into three sections, the book covers:• Social presentation in culture• Representing relations• Children and youth in cultureThis book includes commentaries from expert academics from outside of India, providing a bridge between academic reality and cultural discourse and throwing fresh light on the everyday events presented in the text. Cultural Realities of Being will be essential reading for those studying Cross Cultural Psychology as well as those interested in social representation and identity.

Cultural Realities of Being offers a dialogue between academic activity and everyday lives by providing an interface between several perspectives on human conduct. Very often, academic pursuits are arcane and obscure for ordinary people, this book will attempt to disentangle these dialogues, lifting everyday discourse and providing a forum for advancing discussion and dialogue.

Nandita Chaudhary, S. Anandalakshmy and Jaan Valsiner bring together contributors from the field of cultural psychology to consider how people living within social groups, regardless of how liberal, are guided by collective reality and interconnected with life circumstances. The book discusses experiences and events in the lives of people of Indian cultures covering topics including family, food, pilgrimages, social dynamics and truth, in order to expand the material on human phenomena under the broad frame of cultural psychology.

The book builds upon rich cultural traditions present in India, and precisely because of this focus, the book has much larger implications and relevance to the field and aims to orient the academic reader from around the world to viewing India and Indian society as a valuable area for research. Divided into three sections, the book covers:• Social presentation in culture• Representing relations• Children and youth in cultureThis book includes commentaries from expert academics from outside of India, providing a bridge between academic reality and cultural discourse and throwing fresh light on the everyday events presented in the text. Cultural Realities of Being will be essential reading for those studying Cross Cultural Psychology as well as those interested in social representation and identity.

The volume revolves around the theme ‘inclusive oppositions’ in social sciences that address the issue of making of distinctions and create artificial dichotomies and dualistic view of society. It is set against the currents of systematic reduction of anthropodiversity and psychodiversity, which appears as a pathology of the current neo-liberalist and colonialist model of development. The volume is an attempt to overcome the colonial tendencies and forces to ‘standardize’ and ‘homogenize’ various categories and institutions in society by establishing structural relationality and intersectionality between the parts of the whole ecosystem where in the human and non-human intersect and interact.

The volume brings together a unique collaboration in the field of Cultural Psychology and offers the intellectual tools to grasp how a syncretic understanding of Identity and Culture unfolds, particularly in the key domain of gender. The chapters and commentaries uncover cultural dynamics and identity formation from a specific location, the region of Kerala in south-western India. The chapters and commentaries in this volume illustrates that Kerala is a cultural micro-cosmos, in which gender, identity, religion, ethnicity, caste, global market and tradition intersect to create complex and multiple subjects that do not fit in binary categorizations.

The compiled volume will be of great value to scholars, researchers and academicians in Social Sciences, particularly Cultural Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociology, Social Work, Political Science, Philosophy, Anthropology and Economics.

Cultural Psychology studies how persons and social-cultural worlds mutually constitute one another. It is premised on the idea that culture is within us—in every moment in which we live our human lives, in the meaningful worlds we have created ourselves. In this perspective, encounters with others fundamentally transform the way we understand ourselves. With the increase of globalization and multicultural exchanges, cultural psychology becomes the psychological science for the 21st century. No longer can we ignore questions about how our cultural traditions, practices, beliefs, artifacts and other people constitute how we approach, understand, imagine and remember the world. The Niels Bohr Professorship Lectures in Cultural Psychology series aims to highlight and develop new ideas that advance our understanding of these issues.

This second volume in the series features an address by Tania Zittoun and Alex Gillespie, which is followed by commentary chapters and their response to them. In their lecture, Zittoun and Gillespie propose a model of the relation between mind and society, specifically the way in which individuals develop and gain agency through society. They theorise and demonstrate a two-way interaction: bodies moving through society accumulate differentiated experiences, which become integrated at the level of mind, enabling psychological movement between experiences, which in turn mediates how people move through society. The model is illustrated with a longitudinal analysis of diaries written by a woman leading up to and through the Second World War. Commentators further elaborate on the issues of (1) context and history, (2) experience, time and movement, and (3) methodologies for cultural psychology.