Exploring Borders: Understanding Culture and Psychology

Description

The author of this work highlights and explores the ways in which culture acts as framework organizing our experience. He emphasizes the differences across and between cultures and examines the depths to which these can go. He also analyzes the functions of culture, including: mediation; meaning-making; and forming a repertory of values and principles. Finally, he considers some of the challenges raised by taking a cultural perspective and examines how these may be addressed in society.

Giuseppe Mantovani is Professor of Attitudes at the University of Padova, Italy. His Previous publications include New Communication Enviroments (Taylor & Francis).

..."[W]ritten with a wonderful touch: conceptually sophisticated and yet quite accessible...informative and yet entertaining; and finally, pressing the work of cultural psychology toward issues of pressing concern...would make a marvellous introduction to cultural psychology.."
-Kenneth Gergen, Swarthmore College
"I am pretty familiar with the general theme and many of the materials contained in this book, but I never felt as if I were reading something "over again..."By recontextualizing even familiar materials and by his lucid explanations of the lessons to be learned from taking the cultural dimension of human life seriously, Mantovani makes the entire topic come alive.."
-Michael Cole, University of California
"Mantovani has done an expert job at simplifying and illustrating what it means to raise our cultural embeddedness from assumption to critical perception. His writing style is refreshing and engaging, and he is quite humorous in a lighthearted way. In myexperience, these qualities surface infrequently in academic books, and the shift I was reqired to make while reading it was pleasant.."
-Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur, University of Queensland