Relating to Environments
A New Look at Umwelt
A volume in the series: Advances in Cultural Psychology: Constructing Human Development. Editor(s): Jaan Valsiner, Clark University.
Published 2009
Jakob von Uexkull founded Umwelt research with a clear idea – that humans are not qualitatively different than other species. Umwelt, literally “outer-world”, is the study of the organism in relation to the world around it, as well as the meaning that the world holds for that organism. Thus the world is a truly subjective place.
While von Uexkull’s theory has entered into the social sciences via semiotics, and biology via ethology, the authors of these chapters go between and beyond these disciplines to examine everything from cells to spiders to humans and culture. The authors adopt the framework of Umwelt theory to examine unique aspects of the natural world by relating the inner world of the subject and the objects to which that organism attends.
CONTENTS
Introduction, Rosemarie Sokol Chang. Series Editor’s Preface: The Culture of Relating. Part I: Pre-cultural Backgrounds: Environment as Linked to the Behaving Organism. From Cellular to Human Worlds, Brady Wagoner and Phillip Rosenbaum. Complexities, Confusion, Choices: Reencountering Uexküll, Roger Bibace. The Wisdom of the Web: Learning from Spiders, Jaan Valsiner and Emily Lescak. Part II: Turning to Humans: Culture Enters the Story. The Umwelt and Emotional Experience, Glenn Weisfeld. From Mother’s Mouth to Baby’s World and Back Again: Shaping
One’s Attachments Through Vocalization, Rosemarie Sokol Chang. The Mating Game: The Extension of Umwelt in the 21st Century, Sarah L. Strout and Leila Samii. Part III: The Meaning-making Minds on Social Borders. The Living, the Un-Living, and the Hard-to-Kill: Acting and Feeling on the Boundary, Alessandra Zimmerman and Jaan Valsiner. Signifying Girlhood: Cultural Images of Girlhood and Semiotic Meaning-making by Girls in the 21st Century United States, Jessica L. Willis. Heimweh or Homesickness: A Nostalgic Look at the Umwelt That No Longer Is, Rainer Diriwächter. A Unified Topological Approach to Umwelts and Life Spaces, Lee Rudolph. Conclusion, Rosemarie Sokol Chang. Contributor Biographies and Contact Information.
RELATED CATEGORIES
SOCIAL SCIENCE: Human Geography
EDUCATION: Educational Psychology
EDUCATION: Research
MORE TITLES IN THIS SERIES
Arguing and knowing: A Developmental Approach (In Development)
Becoming Other: From Social Interaction to Self-Reflection
Otherness in Question: Development of the Self
Transitions: Symbolic Resources in Development
Semiotic Rotations: Modes of Meanings in Cultural Worlds
Discovering Cultural Psychology: A Profile and Selected Readings of Ernest E. Boesch
Trust and Distrust: Sociocultural perspectives
Innovating Genesis: Microgenesis and the Constructive Mind in Action
Rethinking Language, Mind, and World Dialogically
Living in Poverty: Developmental Poetics of Cultural Realities
Methodological Thinking in Psychology: 60 Years Gone Astray?
Constructing Patriotism: Teaching History and Memories in Global Worlds
Apprentice in a Changing Trade
Cultural Psychology and Psychoanalysis: Pathways to Synthesis
Cultural Dynamics of Women's Lives
Researcher Race: Social Constructions in the Research Process
Culture and Social Change: Transforming Society through the Power of Ideas
Cultural Psychology of Human Values
Dialogic Formations: Investigations into the Origins and Development of the Dialogical Self
Interplays Between Dialogical Learning and Dialogical Self
Cross-Cultural Psychology: Why Culture Matters
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