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8 - The Velvet Revolution of Land and Minds

from Part II - Evolution and Involution in Social Transformations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2018

By
Tania Zittoun
Edited by
Brady Wagoner ,
Fathali M. Moghaddam  and
Jaan Valsiner
Brady Wagoner
Affiliation:
Aalborg University, Denmark
Fathali M. Moghaddam
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
Jaan Valsiner
Affiliation:
Aalborg University, Denmark
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Summary

This chapter approaches revolution as sociopolitical phenomena, defined as “any major social and political transformation, sufficient to replace old institutions and social relations, and to initiate new relations of power and authority” (Blackburn, 2014). What can a social and culturally sensitive psychology say about such phenomenon? It invites us to consider people within their webs of social relationships, as they interact with material and symbolic objects, in specific social and cultural settings, as well as their relation to less visible cultural phenomena such as fiction and religion. A sociopolitical revolution is, from that perspective, simply another type of cultural phenomena (Valsiner, 2014c). As any other, it is deeply historical – it happens at a specific moment of people and groups’ lives, it unfolds through time, and mostly demands an acceleration of changes normally taking places; it is determined by activities and meanings conferred to situations by people; and it is socially and culturally situated. The main challenge, for psychologists, is however to be able to combine an analysis of changes in the social and cultural field – for instance, the revolution that changes a political or economic system – and an analysis of how people experience the world (Ratner, 2012). For, if our sociocultural analysis still claims to be a psychology, it has to give us access to how specific persons live these changes, and how sociocultural changes and human development mutually constitute each other (Hviid, 2015; Rosa, 2007; Zittoun et al., 2013). In this chapter, I propose to examine the so-called Velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989. I will briefly sketch a history of the country, and present the revolution itself. I will then propose a few theoretical elements which allow us to read the conditions in which the Velvet revolution took place. Looking at some of its consequence in people’s lives, I thus hope to identify some features of a sociocultural psychology of revolution.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Psychology of Radical Social Change
From Rage to Revolution
 , pp. 140 - 158
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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