ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the history of cultural psychology. It reveals that cultural psychology is a very young psychological project and has little to do with the Völkerpsychologie by Wilhelm Wundt. This is demonstrated in his method as well as his writings on religion. Rather, cultural psychology was imported from cultural anthropology into psychology for strategic and content reasons. Robert A. LeVine and Richard A. Shweder originally invented the term cultural psychology to revive the culture and personality studies under a new label. Therefore, cultural psychology is not a unity; rather it has a wide range of theoretical backgrounds as well as methods. Here five clusters can be found: (1) projects following the linguistic turn, (2) the tradition of the Cultural-Historical School, (3) genuine anthropological approaches, (4) independent German developments (e.g., Boesch), and (5) indigenous psychology. Only the focus on sense and meaning making is shared by the different projects.
