Culture in Minds and Societies

Jaan Valsiner, born in Tallinn, Estonia in 1951, is a cultural psychologist with a consistently developmental axiomatic base that is brought to analyses of any psychological or social phenomena. He is the founding editor (1995-2025) of the Sage journal, Culture & Psychology and Editor-In-Chief, Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science (Springer, 2007-2026). After working for over three decades in USA at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Clark University, he accepted in 2013 the position of Niels Bohr  Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark.  Valsiner is the Head of the Competence Center on Cultural Psychology at University of Tallinn, Estonia. He focuses on theoretical innovation, with monographs The guided mind (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1998, Ornamented Lives (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers, 2018) and Sensuality in Human Living (Springer, 2020). He has also published a major theoretical treatise General Human Psychology (t2021 by Springer) that would synthesize William Stern’s personology with his Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics.  Jaan Valsiner has been awarded major research prizes in Europe-- the Alexander von Humboldt Prize of 1995 in Germany, and the Hans-Kilian-Preis of 2017. As part of his credo for building psychology on an international and trans-cultural basis, he has been a visiting professor in Brazil, Japan, Australia, Estonia. Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.  Since 2017 he is a Foreign Member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences.

• Part I. Setting the stage: Culture- where is it?.- Chapter 1. Approaches to Culture— Beyond the Common Language.- Chapter 2. Culture as Semiosis.- Chapter 3. Signs, Society and Community.- Chapter 4. Social Structures and their Differentiation.- Part II. Semiotic Dynamics in Societies.- Chapter 5. Minimal Communities and Their Organization: Kinship groups, families,  and marriage forms.- Chapter 6. Cultural Wholes on the Move: Maintenance and Crossing of Boundaries in the Semiotic Universes.- Chapter 7. Making Oppositions: Dualities in Meaning Making and the Polyphonic System of the Soul.- Chapter 8. Thinking as a cultural process.- Part III. The role of person in cultural psychology.- Chapter 9. Semiotic fields in action: Affective guiding of the psyche.- Chapter 10. Constructive internalization and externalization.- Part IV. Methodology of cultural psychology.- Chapter 11. Creating basic knowledge: the Methodology Cycle in Cultural Psychology.- Chapter 12. Microgenetic Methods for Cultural Psychology.- Chapter 13. Transmodal methodology.- Chapter 14. Culture in minds and societies.