Download or read book A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning written by Claudia Strauss and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '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.
Download or read book Cultural Models written by Giovanni Bennardo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Culture Mind and Brain written by Laurence J. Kirmayer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-24 with total page 683 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Culture and Cognition written by Norbert Ross and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2004 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Recommended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, and researchers in the fields of Psychology and Anthropology."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Culture in Mind written by Bradd Shore and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-29 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Finding Culture in Talk written by N. Quinn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-23 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Development of Cognitive Anthropology written by Roy G. D'Andrade and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-01-27 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Handbook of Risk Theory written by Rafaela Hillerbrand and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 1209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Risk has become one of the main topics in fields as diverse as engineering, medicine and economics, and it is also studied by social scientists, psychologists and legal scholars. But the topic of risk also leads to more fundamental questions such as: What is risk? What can decision theory contribute to the analysis of risk? What does the human perception of risk mean for society? How should we judge whether a risk is morally acceptable or not? Over the last couple of decades questions like these have attracted interest from philosophers and other scholars into risk theory. This handbook provides for an overview into key topics in a major new field of research. It addresses a wide range of topics, ranging from decision theory, risk perception to ethics and social implications of risk, and it also addresses specific case studies. It aims to promote communication and information among all those who are interested in theoetical issues concerning risk and uncertainty. This handbook brings together internationally leading philosophers and scholars from other disciplines who work on risk theory. The contributions are accessibly written and highly relevant to issues that are studied by risk scholars. We hope that the Handbook of Risk Theory will be a helpful starting point for all risk scholars who are interested in broadening and deepening their current perspectives.
Download or read book Cognitive Gadgets written by Cecilia Heyes and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-16 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Cognitive Theory of Magic written by Jesper Sørensen and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2007 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology written by David B. Kronenfeld and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Cognition in the Wild written by Edwin Hutchins and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996-08-26 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation—its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory—"in the wild." Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen in the cracks between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that are different from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them. Each action for bringing a large naval vessel into port, for example, is informed by culture: the navigation team can be seen as a cognitive and computational system. Introducing Navy life and work on the bridge, Hutchins makes a clear distinction between the cognitive properties of an individual and the cognitive properties of a system. In striking contrast to the usual laboratory tasks of research in cognitive science, he applies the principal metaphor of cognitive science—cognition as computation (adopting David Marr's paradigm)—to the navigation task. After comparing modern Western navigation with the method practiced in Micronesia, Hutchins explores the computational and cognitive properties of systems that are larger than an individual. He then turns to an analysis of learning or change in the organization of cognitive systems at several scales. Hutchins's conclusion illustrates the costs of ignoring the cultural nature of cognition, pointing to the ways in which contemporary cognitive science can be transformed by new meanings and interpretations. A Bradford Book
Download or read book Culture Self and Meaning written by Victor de Munck and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2000-07-14 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this highly informative and interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between culture and psyche, de Munck provides a substantive introduction to pertinent issues, theory, and empirical studies that lie at the junction of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. This engagingly written text reviews various approaches to such questions as: Where is culture locatedinside or outside the head? What is the selfis there a single, unified self or do many selves inhabit the body? Do institutional structures form to meet our needsor are our everyday lives simply a result of institutional structures? What is meaning and how do we study it? de Muncks examination of these different approaches illuminates the importance of the topic, expands readers understanding of human life, and points to psychological anthropologys relevance in affecting public policies.
Download or read book From Body to Meaning in Culture written by Ning Yu and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the perspective of Cognitive Semantics and Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this collection of papers looks at the relationship between language, body, culture, and cognition. In particular, it looks into the embodied nature of human language and cognition as arising from and situated in the cultural environment. The papers in this collection all attempt to demonstrate, from different angles, the language-body connections that may reflect, to some extent, the mind-body connections as manifested in the interaction between the body and the physical and cultural world. They study language in a systematic way as a window into the human mind. As a collection of papers that focuses on the study of Chinese with a comparative viewpoint on English, it sheds light on the bodily basis of human meaning and understanding in particular cultural contexts.
Download or read book Language Culture and Society written by Christine Jourdan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-11 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language, our primary tool of thought and perception, is at the heart of who we are as individuals. Languages are constantly changing, sometimes into entirely new varieties of speech, leading to subtle differences in how we present ourselves to others. This revealing account brings together eleven leading specialists from the fields of linguistics, anthropology, philosophy and psychology, to explore the fascinating relationship between language, culture, and social interaction. A range of major questions are discussed: How does language influence our perception of the world? How do new languages emerge? How do children learn to use language appropriately? What factors determine language choice in bi- and multilingual communities? How far does language contribute to the formation of our personalities? And finally, in what ways does language make us human? Language, Culture and Society will be essential reading for all those interested in language and its crucial role in our social lives.
Download or read book Human Motives and Cultural Models written by Roy G. D'Andrade and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-05-21 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do people do what they do? The authors attempt to show how shared cultural knowledge comes to motivate, or fail to motivate, individuals.
Download or read book Mental Culture written by Dimitris Xygalatas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is the set of human beliefs and behaviours that we call "religion" such a widespread feature of all known human societies, past and present, and why are there so many forms of religiosity found throughout history and culture? "Mental Culture" brings together an international range of scholars - from Anthropology, History, Psychology, Philosophy, and Religious Studies - to answer these questions. Connecting classical theories and approaches with the newly established field of the Cognitive Science of Religion, the aim of "Mental Culture" is to provide scholars and students of religion with an overview of contemporary scientific approaches to religion while tracing their intellectual development to some of the great thinkers of the past.
