ABSTRACT

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 culture

This 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.

chapter |9 pages

Introduction

Abstract ideas and everyday lives

part I|35 pages

Social presentation in culture

chapter 1|10 pages

Introspections on culture

Updating the perspectives

chapter |5 pages

Commentary

part II|67 pages

Representing relations

chapter 3|20 pages

Negotiations with patriarchy

Gender and childhood in India

chapter |8 pages

Commentary

Representing relations in a changing world – the paradoxical connections between the local and the global

part III|87 pages

Children and youth in culture

chapter 6|18 pages

‘I have a family, therefore I am'

Children's understanding of self and others

chapter 8|23 pages

Challenging tradition and negotiating modernity

The lives of contemporary Indian youth 1

chapter |11 pages

Commentary

Culture and identity – concepts not easily grasped in theory and research

chapter |20 pages

General conclusion

Learning to understand humanity—looking from India, and beyond