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. The topic chosen for the first volume is perhaps the most fundamental of all- motherhood. We are all here because at some unspecifiable time in the past, different women labored hard to bring each of us into this World. These women were not thinking of culture, but were just giving birth. Yet by their reproductive success-and years of worry about our growing 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 born needs 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 by coincidence 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 as a 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 child represents 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 a reticulated 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 at absences, shadows and ruptures rather than the normativeness of motherhood, cultural psychology can provide a theoretical model in explaining the cultural multifaceted nature of human activity.

The concept of intimacy puts forth important challenges to contemporary cultural psychology. Intimacy refers to a felt experience of interiority that although is intuitively comprehensible, does not have rigorously defined limits. Intimacy can refer to a content, an object, a person, ownership, or even a part of one's own body. A potentially problematic issue for cultural psychology is that acknowledging intimacy seems to bound the Self to areas disjointed from the social sphere. In a globalized world, we witness a developmental process where social life becomes sectioned, where people are involved in an identity search by foregrounding certain social roles. With this backdrop in mind, people redefine and rebuild their intimacy spaces and the ways they roam from these to the public and collective realm. Exploring the current historical situation leads us to consider intimacy as culture in the making; certainly, in the way it manifests itself, but particularly in how we approach and understand it. The lived (experienced) dimension of intimacy becomes truly important, since it casts new light on what we mean by intimacy in different spheres of the self's life, as well as life with others.

The second volume of Annals of Cultural Psychology is dedicated to the affective nature of human social relationships with the environment. The chapters here included explore the historical, theoretical and practical dimensions of the concept of affectivating originally introduced by one of us (Valsiner, 1999), as a potential tool of inquiry into the affective-sensitive dimension of psychological life within a cultural-psychological framework. The concept of affectivating involves two psychological dimensions often undervalued or even obliterated from contemporary cultural psychology, namely the affective involvement and the agentivity of people in their social encounters. Through several examples --`feeling-at-home', silence spaces and rituals, memorials, music and poetry, among others-- we show individual's concrete actions in mundane everyday life aim to give an affective personal sense to the world around. This focuses on the primary affective nature of human meaning construction that guides the person in one's continuing feeling-into-the-world. At a theoretical level the notion of affectivation challenges contemporary Cultural Psychology to rescue subjectivity, not only symbolism. Affectivation propounds a return to the long, but partially forgotten, organismic tradition, represented in the history by thinkers like Wilhelm Dilthey, Jakob von Uexkull and Kurt Goldstein. Cultural psychology has to bring semiosis back to the vital background of human experience.

The concept of intimacy puts forth important challenges to contemporary cultural psychology. Intimacy refers to a felt experience of interiority that although is intuitively comprehensible, does not have rigorously defined limits. Intimacy can refer to a content, an object, a person, ownership, or even a part of one's own body. A potentially problematic issue for cultural psychology is that acknowledging intimacy seems to bound the Self to areas disjointed from the social sphere. In a globalized world, we witness a developmental process where social life becomes sectioned, where people are involved in an identity search by foregrounding certain social roles. With this backdrop in mind, people redefine and rebuild their intimacy spaces and the ways they roam from these to the public and collective realm. Exploring the current historical situation leads us to consider intimacy as culture in the making; certainly, in the way it manifests itself, but particularly in how we approach and understand it. The lived (experienced) dimension of intimacy becomes truly important, since it casts new light on what we mean by intimacy in different spheres of the self's life, as well as life with others.

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. The topic chosen for the first volume is perhaps the most fundamental of all- motherhood. We are all here because at some unspecifiable time in the past, different women labored hard to bring each of us into this World. These women were not thinking of culture, but were just giving birth. Yet by their reproductive success-and years of worry about our growing 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 born needs 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 by coincidence 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 as a 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 child represents 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 a reticulated 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 at absences, shadows and ruptures rather than the normativeness of motherhood, cultural psychology can provide a theoretical model in explaining the cultural multifaceted nature of human activity.

The second volume of Annals of Cultural Psychology is dedicated to the affective nature of human social relationships with the environment. The chapters here included explore the historical, theoretical and practical dimensions of the concept of affectivating originally introduced by one of us (Valsiner, 1999), as a potential tool of inquiry into the affective-sensitive dimension of psychological life within a cultural-psychological framework. The concept of affectivating involves two psychological dimensions often undervalued or even obliterated from contemporary cultural psychology, namely the affective involvement and the agentivity of people in their social encounters. Through several examples --`feeling-at-home', silence spaces and rituals, memorials, music and poetry, among others-- we show individual's concrete actions in mundane everyday life aim to give an affective personal sense to the world around. This focuses on the primary affective nature of human meaning construction that guides the person in one's continuing feeling-into-the-world. At a theoretical level the notion of affectivation challenges contemporary Cultural Psychology to rescue subjectivity, not only symbolism. Affectivation propounds a return to the long, but partially forgotten, organismic tradition, represented in the history by thinkers like Wilhelm Dilthey, Jakob von Uexkull and Kurt Goldstein. Cultural psychology has to bring semiosis back to the vital background of human experience.