In the present volume, the third of the series Annals of Cultural Psychology, Giuseppina Marsico and Luca Tateo present us the surprisingly complex semiotic reality of the material things surrounding us. These wide set of objects and stances thoroughly overspread our immediate environment. From the sounds that compose our speech, to our clothing; from our pen to the music we hear; money and the windows. Most familiar aspects of our environment —precisely those aspects that we in normal circumstances take for granted— involve the manipulation of or merely the confrontation with things. Already the pervasiveness of material things in our social world would be a reason to have, and even since a long time, a psychology of things. Curiously enough, as the editors in their introduction show, such a topic should be justified for the contemporary psychology. Since its origins psychology has leaned to abstraction edifying models of mind settled by inmaterial instances, or rather, virtual entitites whose materiality (or inmateriality) is not an question. As these objects are abstract (representations, concepts, ideas, etc.), they are not part of the concrete world where people live in. Psychology’s predilection for extraordinary things (and the consequently oblivion of ordinary things) is deeply rooted in the long tradition of philosophical detachment from the concreteness —a tradition that invented the imperceptible thing-in-itself, perhaps the best example of abstracting from the mundane world.
Valsiner, J. Cornejo C., Marsico G .(2019). How can things be ordinary? In G. Marsico & L. Tateo (Eds). Ordinary Things and their Extraordinary Meanings. Annals of Cultural Psychology: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind and Society, Volume 3, pp. vii-x, Charlotte, N.C. USA: Information Age Publishing
Giuseppina Marsico
Writing – Original Draft Preparation
2019-01-01
Abstract
In the present volume, the third of the series Annals of Cultural Psychology, Giuseppina Marsico and Luca Tateo present us the surprisingly complex semiotic reality of the material things surrounding us. These wide set of objects and stances thoroughly overspread our immediate environment. From the sounds that compose our speech, to our clothing; from our pen to the music we hear; money and the windows. Most familiar aspects of our environment —precisely those aspects that we in normal circumstances take for granted— involve the manipulation of or merely the confrontation with things. Already the pervasiveness of material things in our social world would be a reason to have, and even since a long time, a psychology of things. Curiously enough, as the editors in their introduction show, such a topic should be justified for the contemporary psychology. Since its origins psychology has leaned to abstraction edifying models of mind settled by inmaterial instances, or rather, virtual entitites whose materiality (or inmateriality) is not an question. As these objects are abstract (representations, concepts, ideas, etc.), they are not part of the concrete world where people live in. Psychology’s predilection for extraordinary things (and the consequently oblivion of ordinary things) is deeply rooted in the long tradition of philosophical detachment from the concreteness —a tradition that invented the imperceptible thing-in-itself, perhaps the best example of abstracting from the mundane world.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
