Imagining Culture Science: New Directions and Provocations

In the early 1990s, contemporary cultural psychology was launched by several seminal papers. Prominent among them were two essays by Richard Shweder, imagining cultural psychology as an interdisciplinary meeting ground for various subfields concerned with the mutual constitution of culture and mind--e.g., cross-cultural and cultural-historical psychologies, psychological and cognitive anthropologies. More recently, the brain has become increasingly central to some of this work, generating additional subfields--e.g., cultural neuroscience and neuroanthropology. Philosophy, psychiatry, sociology, linguistics, and other disciplines have also made contributions but, contrary to the original vision, they continue to work largely in isolation from one another.

The goal of this Research Topic is to bring together contributions from across these various subfields, looking beyond the narrow definition of cultural psychology as a subfield of a single discipline towards an interdisciplinary science of culture, mind, and brain. We are particularly interested in theory reviews that introduce readers to subfields with which they may not be familiar and/or that offer critiques of cultural psychology as it is currently practiced. We are also interested in empirical studies--quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods--that push the methodological envelope, introducing readers to new approaches. Finally, we encourage submissions that push the definitional boundaries of 'culture', 'mind', and 'brain', for example: 'culture' as including religion and social class; 'mind' as including extension to cognitive tools and close others; 'brain' as including hormones and genetics. We believe this collection will contribute to the conversation about how the next thirty years of cultural psychology--by whatever name--ought to look.