Books about Wertsch from Amazon.com

This is the ground-breaking book that launched the movement for military brat cultural identity. Based on five years of research, including in-depth interviews with scores of adult military brats as well as psychologists, researchers, teachers, and others, this book examines the military as the home culture for the millions of children who were born into it, shaped by it, and decades later continue to bear its stamp. Military Brats not only defines America's most invisible minority for the first time, it also passionately exhorts those grown children to come to terms with their negative Fortress legacies so that they might take full advantage of the positive endowment that is also their birthright. For those who always considered themselves rootless, this book is a revelation of cultural identity that informs and liberates. Novelist Pat Conroy, raised in a Marine family, provides a passionate introduction..
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In Voices of the Mind, James Wertsch outlines an approach to mental functioning that stresses its inherent cultural, historical, and institutional context. A critical aspect of this approach is the cultural tools or "mediational means" that shape both social and individual processes. In considering how these mediational means--in particular, language--emerge in social history and the role they play in organizing the settings in which human beings are socialized, Wertsch achieves fresh insights into essential areas of human mental functioning that are typically unexplored or misunderstood.

Although Wertsch's discussion draws on the work of a variety of scholars in the social sciences and the humanities, the writings of two Soviet theorists, L. S. Vygotsky (1896-1934) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), are of particular significance. Voices of the Mind breaks new ground in reviewing and integrating some of their major theoretical ideas and in demonstrating how these ideas can be extended to address a series of contemporary issues in psychology and related fields.

A case in point is Wertsch's analysis of "voice," which exemplifies the collaborative nature of his effort. Although some have viewed abstract linguistic entities, such as isolated words and sentences, as the mechanism shaping human thought, Wertsch turns to Bakhtin, who demonstrated the need to analyze speech in terms of how it "appropriates" the voices of others in concrete sociocultural settings. These appropriated voices may be those of specific speakers, such as one's parents, or they may take the form of "social languages" characteristic of a category of speakers, such as an ethnic or national community. Speaking and thinking thus involve the inherent process of "ventriloquating" through the voices of other socioculturally situated speakers. Voices of the Mind attempts to build upon this theoretical foundation, persuasively arguing for the essential bond between cognition and culture.

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L. S. Vygotsky was an early twentieth century Russian social theorist whose writing exerts a significant influence on the development of social theory in the early twenty first century. His non-deterministic, non-reductionist account of the formation of mind provides current theorietical developments with a broadly drawn yet very powerful sketch of the ways in which humans shape and are shaped by social, cultural, and historical conditions. The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky is a comprehensive text that provides students, academics, and practioners with a critical perspective on Vygotsky and his work..
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In a book of intellectual breadth, James Wertsch not only offers a synthesis and critique of all Vygotsky's major ideas, but also presents a program for using Vygotskian theory as a guide to contemporary research in the social sciences and humanities. He draws extensively on all Vygotsky's works, both in Russian and in English, as well as on his own studies in the Soviet Union with colleagues and students of Vygotsky.

Vygotsky's writings are an enormously rich source of ideas for those who seek an account of the mind as it relates to the social and physical world. Wertsch explores three central themes that run through Vygotsky's work: his insistence on using genetic, or developmental, analysis; his claim that higher mental functioning in the individual has social origins; and his beliefs about the role of tools and signs in human social and psychological activity Wertsch demonstrates how the notion of semiotic mediation is essential to understanding Vygotsky's unique contribution to the study of human consciousness.

In the last four chapters Wertsch extends Vygotsky's claims in light of recent research in linguistics, semiotics, and literary theory. The focus on semiotic phenomena, especially human language, enables him to integrate findings from the wide variety of disciplines with which Vygotsky was concerned Wertsch shows how Vygotsky's approach provides a principled way to link the various strands of human science that seem more isolated than ever today.

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Price: $23.91 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This book draws on psychology, history, literary theory, semiotics, sociology, and political science to provide a comprehensive review of collective memory. It outlines a particular way that narratives produced by the modern state are consumed by individuals. These issues are examined with the help of examples from the transformation Russia has undergone as it entered its post-Soviet era. This is a case study of how a modern state can lose control of collective memory and how memory can be regenerated in unique ways..
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Sociocultural Studies of Mind addresses the question of how mental functioning is related to the cultural, historical, and institutional settings in which it takes place. There are three unifying ideas that run through the volume: 1) one of the basic ways that sociocultural setting shapes mental functioning is through the cultural tools employed, 2) mediation provides a formulation of how this shaping occurs, and 3) in order to specify how cultural tools exist and have their effects, it is essential to focus on human action as a unit of analysis. This landmark volume defines a general approach to sociocultural psychology--one that the authors hope will be debated and redefined as the field moves forward. Sociocultural Studies of Mind will be crucial for researchers and graduate students in cognitive science, philosophy, and cultural anthropology..
Price: $29.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In Mind as Action, James V. Wertsch argues that current approaches to social issues have been blinded by the narrow confines of increasing specialization in the social sciences In response to this conceptual narrowness, he proposes a method of sociocultural analysis that connects various perspectives in an integrated, nonreductive fashion. Drawing on the ideas of Lev Vygotsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Kenneth Burke, the book traces the implications of mediated action for a sociocultural analysis of the mind as well as for some of todays most pressing social issues..
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This text introduces students, scholars, and interested educated readers to the issues of human memory broadly considered, encompassing both individual memory, collective remembering by societies, and the construction of history. The book is organized around several major questions: How do memories construct our past? How do we build shared collective memories? How does memory shape history? This volume presents a special perspective, emphasizing the role of memory processes in the construction of self-identity, of shared cultural norms and concepts, and of historical awareness. Although the results are fairly new and the techniques suitably modern, the vision itself is of course related to the work of such precursors as Frederic Bartlett and Aleksandr Luria, who in very different ways represent the starting point of a serious psychology of human culture..
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