Author: Nandita Chaudhary
Publisher: Sage Publications
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 236
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0761932011
Description
Research in the social sciences in India continues to be characterized by a deep reliance on formal methods and tools such as questionnaires, paradigms and models. In doing so, it avoids the everyday and the ordinary, which are invaluable repositories of culture.
This absorbing book presents everyday cultural activity in Indian family and community life in order to demonstrate why and how such activity must be encompassed in the study of individuals and collectives. The author explores the rich world of everyday talk-in families, with children, between friends, at the work place-and shows the significance of this domain of social activity for an understanding of culture.
A distinguishing feature of this book is its openness wherein the author reveals her inner dialogues. This frank approach underscores some of the dilemmas of the research process when undertaken in the complex social setting characterizing India. Nandita Chaudhary uses this process to articulate certain principles of cultural activity and draws attention to the challenges posed by everyday life phenomena.
With its refreshing and innovative approach, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of cultural psychology, child development, social and cross-cultural psychology, cultural studies, sociology and social anthropology. It will also be of interest to the general reader grappling with what it means to be Indian.
REVIEW
This book is a delicately woven magic carpet of cultural-psychological reality and of the ways of its study. It is created from threads of multifaceted features of dynamic social living, (Nandita Chaudhary brings) the realities of Indian life to the attention of all of psychology.
-Jaan Valsiner (from the foreword)
Contents
FOREWOD BY JAAN VALSINER
PREFACE
CHAPTER 1
Approaching Cultural Realities
CHAPTER 2
Cultural Terrains and Language Activity:
Interactively Constructed Domains
CHAPTER 3
Children and Cultural Continuity: Family, Childhood and Socialisation Culture, Family and Selfhood
CHAPTER 4
Investigating Reality: Methodological Predicaments
CHAPTER 5
The Cultural Setting:
Dominant Themes of Childhood in India
CHAPTER 6
Taxonomy of Personhood in Conversations
CHAPTER 7
Domains of Heightened Activity
CHAPTER 8
Principles of Cultural Activity
CHAPTER 9
Concluding Remarks
Bibliography
Index
About the Author