Before proceeding further, we need to put down a foundation for the topics we will take up subsequently. We provide brief discussions of several key ideas. These include culture, humans as meaning-makers, and knowledge as socially and historically situated. What do we mean by “culture” and what is its part in human psychology and social relations? How are meaning-making and language part of human experience, social relations, and cultural life? How is language related to culture, power, and meaning-making?

Culture and human psychology

Culture is an inextricable part of mental life. Culture must be seen as an inseparable part of people's psychological functioning, not something that can be added onto an individual. Seeing culture as in psychology has several consequences for psychological practice and research. Throughout this book, we describe many such consequences. In this section, we describe concepts and terms that are central to the ways of thinking about culture in psychology presented in this book. All of these ways share the conviction that meaning is central to human psychology. Moreover, meaning is unavoidably social; there could be no other kind of meaning (Mishler, 1979). No matter how private or unique a person's experiences may feel, meanings are not wholly created in an individual's mind, nor determined by biological drives. As soon as one invokes meaning, one has to begin to think about culture (Mattingly, 2008; Mattingly et al., 2008). Meanings are based on a common or shared framework and a shared language. Such a shared framework is necessary if meanings are to be intelligible to others. Any psychological theorizing about meaning necessarily must take culture as one of its starting points.