Chapter 1: Motherhood: A Cultural Arena for the Meaning-Making Process

This volume is the firstborn of the Annals of Cultural Psychology— a yearly edited book series in the field of Cultural Psychology. It came into being as there is a need for reflection on “where and what” the discipline needs to fUrther develop, in such a way, the current frontiers and to foster the elaboration of new fruitful ideas. This is an indicator of a rapidly developing research area. But any rapid expansion is dangerous—it can proliferate directions for new research that set the field up in a cycle of fashionable yet noncreative discourses. The basic polysemy of the notion of culture is a most likely target for such conceptual stalemates—easy to use as a term, seemingly understandable … but … in at least 200 different ways. Cultural psychology is thus the prime target of making itself mundane—due to the use of its core term, culture. A paradoxical situation that needs to be avoided.