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Author: Claudia Strauss Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521595414 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
'Culture' and 'meaning' are central to anthropology, but anthropologists do not agree on what they are. Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn propose a new theory of cultural meaning, one that gives priority to the way people's experiences are internalized. Drawing on 'connectionist' or 'neural network' models as well as other psychological theories, they argue that cultural meanings are not fixed or limited to static groups, but neither are they constantly revised and contested. Their approach is illustrated by original research on understandings of marriage and ideas of success in the United States.
Author: Claudia Strauss Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521595414 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
'Culture' and 'meaning' are central to anthropology, but anthropologists do not agree on what they are. Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn propose a new theory of cultural meaning, one that gives priority to the way people's experiences are internalized. Drawing on 'connectionist' or 'neural network' models as well as other psychological theories, they argue that cultural meanings are not fixed or limited to static groups, but neither are they constantly revised and contested. Their approach is illustrated by original research on understandings of marriage and ideas of success in the United States.
Author: Bradd Shore Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195352092 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 447
Book Description
Despite the recognized importance of cultural diversity in understanding the modern world, the emerging science of cognitive psychology has relied far more on experimental psychology, neurobiology, and computer science than on cultural anthropology for its models of how we think. In this exciting new book, anthropologist Bradd Shore has created the first study linking multi-culturalism to cognitive psychology, exploring the complex relationship between culture in public institutions and in mental representations. In so doing, he answers in a completely new way the age old question of whether humans are basically the same psychologically, independent of cultures, or basically diverse because of cultural differences. The first half of the book emphasizes cultural models, from Australian Aboriginal rituals and Samoan comedy skits, to more familiar terrain, including a study of baseball as a cultural model for Americans. Along the way, the author sheds new and novel light on many familiar institutions, from educational curricula and shopping malls to modular furniture and cyberpunk fiction. These observations are then linked to theoretical developments in linguistics, semiotics, and neuroscience, creating a bold new approach to understanding the role of culture in everyday meaning making. The author argues that culture must be considered an intrinsic component of the human mind to a degree that most psychologists and even many anthropologists have not recognized. This new position of cultural models will make absorbing reading for psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, and philosophers, and to anyone interested in the issues of cultural diversity, multiculturalism, or cognitive science in general.
Author: Giovanni Bennardo Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199908044 Category : Medical Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
This book is about cultural models. Cultural models are defined as molar organizations of knowledge. Their internal structure consists of a 'core' component and 'peripheral' nodes that are filled by default values. These values are instantiated, i.e., changed to specific values or left at their default values, when the individual experiences 'events' of any type. Thus, the possibility arises for recognizing and categorizing events as representative of the same cultural model even if they slightly differ in each of their specific occurrences. Cultural models play an important role in the generation of one's behavior. They correlate well with those of others and the behaviors they help shape are usually interpreted by others as intended. A proposal is then advanced to consider cultural models as fundamental units of analysis for an approach to culture that goes beyond the dichotomy between the individual (culture only in mind) and the collective (culture only in the social realm). The genesis of the concept of cultural model is traced from Kant to contemporary scholars. The concept underwent a number of transformations (including label) while it crossed and received further and unique elaborations within disciplines like philosophy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. A methodological trajectory is outlined that blends qualitative and quantitative techniques that cross-feed each other in the gargantuan effort to discover cultural models. A survey follows of the extensive research about cultural models carried out with populations of North Americans, Europeans, Latino- and Native-Americans, Asians (including South Asians and South-East Asians), Pacific Islanders, and Africans. The results of the survey generated the opportunity to propose an empirically motivated typology of cultural models rooted in the primary difference between foundational and molar types. The book closes with a suggestion of a number of avenues that the authors recognize the research on cultural models could be traversing in the near future.
Author: Roy G. D'Andrade Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521459761 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
In an historical account of the growth and development of the field of cognitive anthropology, Roy D'Andrade examines how cultural knowledge is organised within and between human minds. He begins by examining the research carried out during the l950s and l960s which was concerned with how different cultures classify kinship relationships and the natural environment, and then traces the development of more complex and sophisticated cognitive theories of classification in anthropology which took place in the l970s and l980s. In an analysis of more recent developments, the author considers work involving cultural models, emotion, motivation and action. He concludes with a summary of the theoretical perspective of cognitive anthropology.
Author: Norbert Ross Publisher: SAGE ISBN: 076192907X Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 215
Book Description
"Recommended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, and researchers in the fields of Psychology and Anthropology."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Laurence J. Kirmayer Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108580572 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 683
Book Description
Recent neuroscience research makes it clear that human biology is cultural biology - we develop and live our lives in socially constructed worlds that vary widely in their structure values, and institutions. This integrative volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from the human, social, and biological sciences to explore culture, mind, and brain interactions and their impact on personal and societal issues. Contributors provide a fresh look at emerging concepts, models, and applications of the co-constitution of culture, mind, and brain. Chapters survey the latest theoretical and methodological insights alongside the challenges in this area, and describe how these new ideas are being applied in the sciences, humanities, arts, mental health, and everyday life. Readers will gain new appreciation of the ways in which our unique biology and cultural diversity shape behavior and experience, and our ongoing adaptation to a constantly changing world.
Author: N. Quinn Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137058714 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 277
Book Description
This edited collection presents a range of heretofore unpublished, unavailable methods for the systematic reconstruction of culture from interviews and other discourse. Authors set the design and evolution of their methods in the context of their own research projects, and draw general lessons about investigating culture through discourse. These methods have largely grown out of the work of the cultural models school, and represent the approaches of some of the very best methodologists in cultural anthropology today. An impetus for the volume has been inquiries from researchers, many of them graduate students, about how to conduct the kind of research that cultural models theorists do. This is not a linguistics book; unlike approaches to discourse analysis from linguistics, this volume focuses on culture, treating discourse as a medium especially rich in clues for cultural analysis, and hence a window into culture.
Author: Cecilia Heyes Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674985133 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts. Unlike other living animal species, we are born with complicated mechanisms for reasoning about causation, reading the minds of others, copying behaviors, and using language. Cecilia Heyes agrees that adult humans have impressive pieces of cognitive equipment. In her framing, however, these cognitive gadgets are not instincts programmed in the genes but are constructed in the course of childhood through social interaction. Cognitive gadgets are products of cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution. At birth, the minds of human babies are only subtly different from the minds of newborn chimpanzees. We are friendlier, our attention is drawn to different things, and we have a capacity to learn and remember that outstrips the abilities of newborn chimpanzees. Yet when these subtle differences are exposed to culture-soaked human environments, they have enormous effects. They enable us to upload distinctively human ways of thinking from the social world around us. As Cognitive Gadgets makes clear, from birth our malleable human minds can learn through culture not only what to think but how to think it.
Author: Jesper Sørensen Publisher: Rowman Altamira ISBN: 9780759110403 Category : Body, Mind & Spirit Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
Magic is a universal phenomenon. Everywhere we look people perform ritual actions in which desirable qualities are transferred by means of physical contact and objects or persons are manipulated by things of their likeness. In this book S rensen embraces a cognitive perspective in order to investigate this long-established but controversial topic. Following a critique of the traditional approaches to magic, and basing his claims on classical ethnographic cases, the author explains magic's universality by examining a number of recurrent cognitive processes underlying its different manifestations. He focuses on how power is infused into the ritual practice; how representations of contagion and similarity can be used to connect otherwise distinct objects in order to manipulate one by the other; and how the performance of ritual prompts representations of magical actions as effective. Bringing these features together, the author proposes a cognitive theory of how people can represent magical rituals as purposeful actions and how ritual actions are integrated into more complex representations of events. This explanation, in turn, yields new insights into the constitutive role of magic in the formation of institutionalised religious ritual.
Author: David B. Kronenfeld Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 111911165X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 624
Book Description
A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology offers a comprehensive overview of the development of cognitive anthropology from its inception to the present day and presents recent findings in the areas of theory, methodology, and field research in twenty-nine key essays by leading scholars. Demonstrates the importance of cognitive anthropology as an early constituent of the cognitive sciences Examines how culturally shared and complex cognitive systems work, how they are structured, how they differ from one culture to another, how they are learned and passed on Explains how cultural (or collective) vs. individual knowledge distinguishes cognitive anthropology from cognitive psychology Examines recent theories and methods for studying cognition in real-world scenarios Contains twenty-nine key essays by leading names in the field
Author: Claudia Strauss
Author: Claudia Strauss
Author: Bradd Shore
Author: Giovanni Bennardo
Author: Roy G. D'Andrade
Author: Norbert Ross
Author: Laurence J. Kirmayer
Author: N. Quinn
Author: Cecilia Heyes
Author: Jesper Sørensen
Author: David B. Kronenfeld