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Abstract
We introduce a special issue of Ethos devoted to the work of Jerome Bruner and his careerlong attempts to seek innovative ways to foster a dialogue between psychology and anthropology. The articles in this special issue situate Bruner's meaning-centered approach to psychology and his groundbreaking work on narrative in the broader context of the developmental trajectory of both of fields of inquiry. Bruner's work has been enormously influential in the subfields of cultural psychology and psychological anthropology, especially because of his important contributions to our understanding of the intimate relationship between culture and mind. We examine Bruner's past and ongoing engagement with such luminary figures as Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, Alfred Kroeber, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Clifford Geertz to highlight points of convergence and tension between his version of cultural psychology and contemporary theorizing and practice in psychological anthropology. We also review his practical and theoretical contributions to the fields of medicine, law, and education. [Jerome Bruner, cultural psychology, psychological anthropology, meaning, narrative, mind, culture]
Although Jerome Bruner has bemoaned the historical separation of anthropology and psychology, throughout his lengthy and distinguished career as a psychologist his work has had much impact on bringing these two disciplines together. The articles in this special issue of Ethos reflect the impact of psychology on anthropology and vice versa. They do so through a focus on the contributions of Bruner and the influence his work has had on anthropologists, as well as the ways in which his development of the subfield of cultural psychology has been influenced by anthropology.
For more than half a century, Bruner has insisted on the place of meaning in any psychological study of human activity and the human psyche. This fundamentally interpretive perspective is at the heart of the cognitive revolution he played a pivotal part in mounting in the late 1950s. His story of what inspired such a revolution is that psychology during this period was dominated by a behaviorism built on a stimulus response theory of human action. The meaning-centered psychology Bruner and his colleagues proposed was meant as a counter to this reductionist framework. He puts it this way: the aim of the cognitive revolution "was to discover and to describe formally the meanings that human beings created out...