Culture Society And Cognition

This theoretically motivated approach to pragmatics (vs. semantics) produces a radically new view of culture and its role vis-a-vis society. Understanding what words mean in use requires an open-ended recourse to pragmatic cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge makes up a productive conceptual system. Members of a cultural community share the system but not all of the system's content, making culture a system of parallel distributed cognition. This book presents such a system, and then elaborates a version of "cultural models" that relates actions to goals, values, emotional content, and context, and that allows both systematic generative capacity and systematic variation across cultural and subcultural groups. Such models are offered as the basic units of cultural action. Culture thus conceived is shown as a tool that people use rather than as something deeply internalized in their psyches.

A multidisciplinary collaboration exploring the role of cultural knowledge in everyday language and understanding.

Modes of Thought addresses a topic of broad interest to the cognitive sciences. Its central focus is on the apparent contrast between the widely assumed 'psychological unity of mankind' and the facts of cognitive pluralism, the diverse ways in which people think and the developmental, cultural, technological and institutional factors which contribute to that diversity. Whether described in terms of modes of thought, cognitive styles, or sensibilities, the diversity of patterns of rationality to be found between cultures, in different historical periods, between individuals at different stages of development remains a central problem for a cultural psychology. Modes of Thought brings together anthropologists, historians, psychologists and educational theorists who manage to recognise the universality in thinking and yet acknowledge the cultural, historical and developmental contexts in which differences arise.

What is thought and how does one come to study and understand it? How does the mind work? Does cognitive science explain all the mysteries of the brain? This collection of fourteen original essays from some of the top sociologists in the country, including Eviatar Zerubavel, Diane Vaughan, Paul Dimaggio and Gary Alan Fine, among others, opens a dialogue between cognitive science and cultural sociology, encouraging a new network of scientific collaboration and stimulating new lines of social scientific research. Rather than considering thought as just an individual act, Culture in Mind considers it in a social and cultural context. Provocatively, this suggests that our thoughts do not function in a vacuum: our minds are not alone. Covering such diverse topics as the nature of evil, the process of storytelling, defining mental illness, and the conceptualizing of the premature baby, these essays offer fresh insights into the functioning of the mind. Leaving the MRI behind, Culture in Mind will uncover the mysteries of how we think.

Originally published in 1974, studies of cultural influences on cognition, carried out from a variety of theoretical and methodological stances, were collected for the first time in this volume. The editors placed particular emphasis on selecting material by authors from many countries who had been working with people from a wide range of cultures. In a general introduction they provide an historical overview of the major issues, and draw together the most recent attempts to bring methodological sophistication to this difficult area of enquiry. Suggestions for future research on basic problems are to be found in an epilogue, along with a consideration of some possible applications of these studies to problems of education and social change. A comprehensive bibliography with over 600 entries is included in the volume.

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.

Culture as Embodiment utilizes recent insights in psychology, cognitive, and affective science to reveal the cultural patterning of behavior in group-related practices. Applies the best of the behavioural sciences to contemporary issues of behavioural cross-fertilization in global exchange Presents an original theory to be used in the gender and integration debates, about what the acceptance of newcomers from different cultural backgrounds really entails Presents a theory that is also applicable to youth culture and the split in modern society between underclass, modal class, and the elite Contains an original approach to the persistence of religion, and relates religious thought to the cognitive capacity of generic belief