Making Meaning, Making Motherhood

A volume in Annals of Cultural PsychologySeries Editors Carlos Cornejo, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; Giuseppina Marsico,University of Salerno, Italy; and Jaan Valsiner, Aalborg University, DenmarkThis volume is the firstborn of the Annals of Cultural Psychology-- a yearly edited book series in the field of CulturalPsychology. It came into being as there is a need for reflection on where and what the discipline needs to furtherdevelop, in such a way, the current frontiers and to foster the elaboration of new fruitful ideas.The topic chosen for the first volume is perhaps the most fundamental of all- motherhood. We are all here because atsome unspecifiable time in the past, different women labored hard to bring each of us into this World. These women werenot thinking of culture, but were just giving birth. Yet by their reproductive success-and years of worry about ourgrowing up-we are now, thankfully to them, in a position to discuss the general notion of motherhood from the angle of cultural psychology. Each person who is bornneeds a mother-first the real one, and then possibly a myriad of symbolic ones-from my mother to mother superior to my motherland. Thus, it is not bycoincidence if the first volume of the series is about motherhood. We the editors feel it is the topic that links our existence with one of the universals of human survival asa species.In very general terms what this book aims to do is to question the ontology of Motherhood in favor of an ontogenetic approach to Life's Course, where having a childrepresents a big transition in a woman's trajectory and where becoming (or not becoming) mother is heuristically more interesting than being a mother. We here present areticulated work that digs into a cultural phenomenon giving to the readers the clear idea of making motherhood (and not taking for granted motherhood). By looking atabsences, shadows and ruptures rather than the normativeness of motherhood, cultural psychology can provide a theoretical model in explaining the cultural multifacetednature of human activity.