This book is a landmark in contemporary cultural psychology. Ernest
Boesch's synthesis of ideas is the first comprehensive theory of culture in
psychology since Wilhelm Wundt's Völkerpsychologie of the first decades of
the twentieth century. Cultural psychology of today is an attempt to
advance the program of research that was charted out by Wundt-yet at
times we are carefully avoiding direct recognition of such continuity.
While Wundt's experimental psychology has been hailed as the root for
contemporary scientific psychology, the other side of his contribution-
ethnographic analysis of folk traditions and higher psychological functions-
has been largely discredited as something disconnected from the
scientific realm. As an example of "soft" science-lacking the "hardness"
of experimentation-it has been considered to be an esoteric hobby of the
founding father of contemporary psychology. Of course that focus is profoundly
wrong-the opposition "soft" versus "hard" just does not fit as a
metalevel organizer of any science. Yet the rhetoric discounting the
descriptive side of Wundt's psychology is merely an act of social guidance
of what psychologists do-not a way of creating knowledge.