ED ITORS ’ INTRODUCT ION Contemporary Socio - Cultural Research

An area of knowledge creation can be said to come of age when it becomes integrated through publishing a handbook. The readers are the beneficiaries of that act, initiated by the Cambridge University Press in recognition of the vastly growing and socially important area. The world is filled with symbolic places in relation to which meaningful actions – tourist trips, pilgrimages, homecomings,war efforts, and the like – are undertaken. New cultural places and myths of their meanings are constructed. Countries as well as spouses quarrel about resources, rights of access to them, and public images. Persons feel sad, angry, or jealous in culturally constrained and personally escalated ways. Our human world, in short, is a culturally constituted world of the relationship of the human species with their constantly re-constructed environments. Since the end of the 1980s, one can observe rapid development of a synthesis of psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, and medical sciences in the field that has become labeled socio-cultural psychology. The roots of this new perspective are deeply in the fertile grounds of everyday social reality. Socio-cultural psychology deals with psychological phenomena that happen because of the socio-cultural aspects of human lives in varied social contexts – peace or war, famine or purposeful avoidance of overweight by dieting, poverty, or affluence. This makes socio-cultural psychology to be a part of human psychology. In parallel, the proliferation of the branch of the social sciences called cultural studies has proliferated. As all quickly developing areas, socio-cultural psychology is in need of consolidation of its expertise and creating a solid base for its further development. ThisHandbook ismeant to accomplish these functions. This present recognition of the area has burgeoning recent history The pioneering effort in the initial promoting of the field was a series of conferences on Socio-Cultural studies (1992 inMadrid, 1996 inGeneva, and 2000 in Campinas), as well as the establishment of the journal Culture & Psychology in 1995 (Valsiner, 2001). In its original development, the field of Socio-Cultural Studies was built on the initiatives of Spanish researchers in collaboration with colleagues