Download or read book Culture and Human Nature written by Horace Kallen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume illustrates Melford Spiro's explorations of key relationships among culture, society, and human nature. He addresses such fundamental issues as the limitations of cultural relativism, the problem of explanation in the social sciences, and the importance of a comparative approach to the study of social and cultural system.
Download or read book Cultural Connections written by Morris J. Vogel and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illustrates the history, civilization, and social conditions of the United States via artifacts, paintings, and other objects from the collections of cultural institutions in Philadelphia and environs.
Download or read book Beyond Human Nature written by Jesse J Prinz and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative, revelatory tour de force, Jesse Prinz reveals how the cultures we live in - not biology - determine how we think and feel. He examines all aspects of our behaviour, looking at everything from our intellects and emotions, to love and sex, morality and even madness. This book seeks to go beyond traditional debates of nature and nurture. He is not interested in finding universal laws but, rather, in understanding, explaining and celebrating our differences. Why do people raised in Western countries tend to see the trees before the forest, while people from East Asia see the forest before the trees? Why, in South East Asia, is there a common form of mental illness, unheard of in the West, in which people go into a trancelike state after being startled? Compared to Northerners, why are people in the American South more than twice as likely to kill someone over an argument? And, above all, just how malleable are we? Prinz shows that the vast diversity of our behaviour is not engrained. He picks up where biological explanations leave off. He tells us the human story.
Download or read book Genetic Nature Culture written by Prof. Alan H. Goodman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-11-06 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The so-called science wars pit science against culture, and nowhere is the struggle more contentious—or more fraught with paradox—than in the burgeoning realm of genetics. A constructive response, and a welcome intervention, this volume brings together biological and cultural anthropologists to conduct an interdisciplinary dialogue that provokes and instructs even as it bridges the science/culture divide. Individual essays address issues raised by the science, politics, and history of race, evolution, and identity; genetically modified organisms and genetic diseases; gene work and ethics; and the boundary between humans and animals. The result is an entree to the complicated nexus of questions prompted by the power and importance of genetics and genetic thinking, and the dynamic connections linking culture, biology, nature, and technoscience. The volume offers critical perspectives on science and culture, with contributions that span disciplinary divisions and arguments grounded in both biological perspectives and cultural analysis. An invaluable resource and a provocative introduction to new research and thinking on the uses and study of genetics, Genetic Nature/Culture is a model of fruitful dialogue, presenting the quandaries faced by scholars on both sides of the two-cultures debate.
Download or read book Human nature written by John P. Herron and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provocative essays explore how ideas about human nature inform or shape human understanding of nature and the environment.
Download or read book The Cultural Animal written by Roy F. Baumeister and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-10 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a coherent explanation of human nature, which is to say how people think, act, and feel, what they want, and how they interact with each other. The central idea is that the human psyche was designed by evolution to `nable people to create and sustain culture.
Download or read book Human Universals written by Donald Brown and published by McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores physical and behavioral characteristics that can be considered universal among all cultures, all people. It presents cases demonstrating universals, looks at the history of the study of universals, and presents an interesting study of a hypothetical tribe, The Universal People.
Download or read book Beyond Nature and Culture written by Philippe Descola and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Gives to anthropological reflection a new starting point and will become the compulsory reference for all our debates in the years to come.” —Claude Lévi-Strauss, on the French edition Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Culture—as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth—is often seen as essentially different from nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Philippe Descola shows this essential difference to be not only a Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the “four ontologies” —animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism—to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh. “A compelling and original account of where the nature-culture binary has come from, where it might go—and what we might imagine in its place.” —Somatosphere “The most important book coming from French anthropology since Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Anthropologie Structurale.” —Bruno Latour, author of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence “Descola’s challenging new worldview should be of special interest to a wide range of scientific and academic disciplines from anthropology to zoology . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice
Download or read book The Human Relationship with Nature written by Peter H. Kahn and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of Outstanding Book Award, 2000, Moral Development and Education, American Educational Research Association. Winner of the 2000 Book Award from the Moral Development & Education Group of the American Educational Research Association Urgent environmental problems call for vigorous research and theory on how humans develop a relationship with nature. In a series of original research projects, Peter Kahn answers this call. For the past eight years, Kahn has studied children, young adults, and parents in diverse geographical locations, ranging from an economically impoverished black community in Houston to a remote village in the Brazilian Amazon. In these studies Kahn seeks answers to the following questions: How do people value nature, and how do they reason morally about environmental degradation? Do children have a deep connection to the natural world that gets severed by modern society? Or do such connections emerge, if at all, later in life, with increased cognitive and moral maturity? How does culture affect environmental commitments and sensibilities? Are there universal features in the human relationship with nature? Kahn's empirical and theoretical findings draw on current work in psychology, biology, environmental behavior, education, policy, and moral development. This scholarly yet accessible book will be of value to practitioners in the social science and environmental fields, as well as to informed generalists interested in environmental issues and children.
Download or read book Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens written by Pascal Boyer and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2021-07-09 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a collection of seven articles previously published by the author, with a new introduction reframing the articles in the context of past and present questions in anthropology, psychology and human evolution. It promotes the perspective of ‘integrated’ social science, in which social science questions are addressed in a deliberately eclectic manner, combining results and models from evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, economics, anthropology and history. It thus constitutes a welcome contribution to a gradually emerging approach to social science based on E. O. Wilson’s concept of ‘consilience’. Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens spans a wide range of topics, from an examination of ritual behaviour, integrating neuro-science, ethology and anthropology to explain why humans engage in ritual actions (both cultural and individual), to the motivation of conflicts between groups. As such, the collection gives readers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the applications of an evolutionary paradigm in the social sciences. This volume will be a useful resource for scholars and students in the social sciences (particularly psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology and the political sciences), as well as a general readership interested in the social sciences.
Download or read book The Nature of Culture written by Miriam N. Haidle and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume introduces a model of the expansion of cultural capacity as a systemic approach with biological, historical and individual dimensions. It is contrasted with existing approaches from primatology and behavioural ecology; influential factors like differences in life history and demography are discussed; and the different stages of the development of cultural capacity in human evolution are traced in the archaeological record. The volume provides a synthetic view on a) the different factors and mechanisms of cultural development, and b) expansions of cultural capacities in human evolution beyond the capacities observed in animal culture so far. It is an important topic because only a volume of contributions from different disciplines can yield the necessary breadth to discuss the complex subject. The model introduced and discussed originates in the naturalist context and tries to open the discussion to some culturalist aspects, thus the publication in a series with archaeological and biological emphasis is apt. As a new development the synthetic model of expansion of cultural capacity is introduced and discussed in a broad perspective.
Download or read book Human Nature and Social Life written by Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores how humans are distinct social beings whose relations nevertheless extend into nonhuman spheres in various ways.
Download or read book Not By Genes Alone written by Peter J. Richerson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-06-20 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. While we are similar to other mammals in many ways, our behavior sets us apart. Our unparalleled ability to adapt has allowed us to occupy virtually every habitat on earth using an incredible variety of tools and subsistence techniques. Our societies are larger, more complex, and more cooperative than any other mammal's. In this stunning exploration of human adaptation, Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd argue that only a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution can explain these unique characteristics. Not by Genes Alone offers a radical interpretation of human evolution, arguing that our ecological dominance and our singular social systems stem from a psychology uniquely adapted to create complex culture. Richerson and Boyd illustrate here that culture is neither superorganic nor the handmaiden of the genes. Rather, it is essential to human adaptation, as much a part of human biology as bipedal locomotion. Drawing on work in the fields of anthropology, political science, sociology, and economics—and building their case with such fascinating examples as kayaks, corporations, clever knots, and yams that require twelve men to carry them—Richerson and Boyd convincingly demonstrate that culture and biology are inextricably linked, and they show us how to think about their interaction in a way that yields a richer understanding of human nature. In abandoning the nature-versus-nurture debate as fundamentally misconceived, Not by Genes Alone is a truly original and groundbreaking theory of the role of culture in evolution and a book to be reckoned with for generations to come. “I continue to be surprised by the number of educated people (many of them biologists) who think that offering explanations for human behavior in terms of culture somehow disproves the suggestion that human behavior can be explained in Darwinian evolutionary terms. Fortunately, we now have a book to which they may be directed for enlightenment . . . . It is a book full of good sense and the kinds of intellectual rigor and clarity of writing that we have come to expect from the Boyd/Richerson stable.”—Robin Dunbar, Nature “Not by Genes Alone is a valuable and very readable synthesis of a still embryonic but very important subject straddling the sciences and humanities.”—E. O. Wilson, Harvard University
Download or read book The Five Factor Model of Personality Across Cultures written by Robert R. McCrae and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Five-Factor Model Across Cultures was designed to further an understanding of the interrelations between personality and culture by examining the dominant paradigm for personality assessment - the Five-Factor Model or FFM - in a wide variety of cultural contexts. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary research and theory about personality traits and culture that is extremely relevant to personality psychologists, cross-cultural psychologists, and psychological anthropologists.
Download or read book On Human Nature written by Jonathan H. Turner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Jonathan H. Turner combines sociology, evolutionary biology, cladistic analysis from biology, and comparative neuroanatomy to examine human nature as inherited from common ancestors shared by humans and present-day great apes. Selection pressures altered this inherited legacy for the ancestors of humans—termed hominins for being bipedal—and forced greater organization than extant great apes when the hominins moved into open-country terrestrial habitats. The effects of these selection pressures increased hominin ancestors’ emotional capacities through greater social and group orientation. This shift, in turn, enabled further selection for a larger brain, articulated speech, and culture along the human line. Turner elaborates human nature as a series of overlapping complexes that are the outcome of the inherited legacy of great apes being fed through the transforming effects of a larger brain, speech, and culture. These complexes, he shows, can be understood as the cognitive complex, the psychological complex, the emotions complex, the interaction complex, and the community complex.
Download or read book War Peace and Human Nature written by Douglas P. Fry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-02 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The chapters in this book [posit] that humans clearly have the capacity to make war, but since war is absent in some cultures, it cannot be viewed as a human universal. And counter to frequent presumption, the actual archaeological record reveals the recent emergence of war. It does not typify the ancestral type of human society, the nomadic forager band, and contrary to widespread assumptions, there is little support for the idea that war is ancient or an evolved adaptation. Views of human nature as inherently warlike stem not from the facts but from cultural views embedded in Western thinking"--Amazon.com.
Download or read book The Western Illusion of Human Nature written by Marshall Sahlins and published by Paradigm. This book was released on 2008 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting the decline in college courses on Western Civilization, Marshall Sahlins aims to accelerate the trend by reducing "Western Civ" to about two hours. He cites Nietzsche to the effect that deep issues are like cold baths; one should get into and out of them as quickly as possible. The deep issue here is the ancient Western specter of a presocial and antisocial human nature: a supposedly innate self-interest that is represented in our native folklore as the basis or nemesis of cultural order. Yet these Western notions of nature and culture ignore the one truly universal character of human sociality: namely, symbolically constructed kinship relations. Kinsmen are members of one another: they live each other's lives and die each other's deaths. But where the existence of the other is thus incorporated in the being of the self, neither interest, nor agency or even experience is an individual fact, let alone an egoistic disposition. "Sorry, beg your pardon," Sahlins concludes, Western society has been built on a perverse and mistaken idea of human nature.
