Tania Zittoun - Sociocultural Psychology on the Regional Scale: A Case Study of a Hill

• A timely report of state-of-the-art analytical techniques

• A bridge between new research results as published in journal articles and a contextual literature review

• A snapshot of a hot or emerging topic

• An in-depth case study or clinical example

• A presentation of core concepts that readers must understand to make independent contributions

This book reveals the intricacies of how human lives are interwoven with symbolic places created out of natural environments. Its author is on the forefront of our contemporary cultural psychologies movementbuilding new science of specificallyhumanpsychology (Yokohama ManifestoValsiner, Marsico, Chaudhary, Sato & Dazzani, 2016). In this new trans-disciplinary work, artificial borders between various sciencespsychology, geography, sociology, anthropology, history, and folklorevanish. Instead we have an image of a unique texture of human beings living in their self-constructed life-worlds embedded in community, society, andlast but not leastthe geological textures of their given natural environments. Wetemporary inhabitants of Denmarkhave often wondered about where these nice wide open fields end, desiring to see at least a glimpse of a mountain somewhere on the horizon. There is noneone needs to cross over to Sweden or Norway to feel at home with some granite formations rising up from the sea. In a similar wayour Danish friends visiting Switzerland have reported feeling ill at ease about being surrounded by mountains on all sides. Yet there is no way to escapethe mountains are there, and they stay. The human beings build meanings with the landscapes and seascapes of ones natural habitats.

As Tania Zittoun eloquently demonstrates in this book, p is not just a mountainand even not only a symbolic mountain for the Czech peoplebut it is also the real meaningful world for persons who live on and around it. It is the silent observer of life dramas brought by societal turmoils of politics during war and peace. Taking a perspective on the whole of human life courses naturally involves the study of life stories of older-age people whose wisdom in coping with all the complexities of the past would otherwise be lost. Most of psychology, driven by the social institutional prediction and control imperatives, has attempted to do what fortune tellers have been doing: predicting the future happiness of the now younger generation