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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.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Part I The Problem of Culture in Mind
• 1 The Psychic Unity Muddle
• 2 Rethinking Culture as Models
• Part II The Cognitive Landscape of Modernity
• 3 Mind Games: Cognitive Baseball
• 4 Playing With Rules: Sport at the Borderlands of Time and Space
• 5 Interior Furnishings: Scenes from an American Foundational Schema
• 6 Technologic Trends: The Neuromatic Frame of Mind
• Part III Rethinking "Primitive Classification"
• 7 Totem as Practically Reason: Rationality Reconsidered
• 8 Kwakiutl Animal Symbolism: Food for Thought
• Part IV Dreamtime Learning
• 9 Dreamtime Learning, Inside-Out: The Narrative of the Wawilak Sisters
• 10 Dreamtime Learning, Outside-In: Murngin Age-Grading Rituals
• Part V The Problem of Multiple Models
• 11 Tropic Landscapes: Alternative Spatial Models in Samoan Culture
• 12 When Models Collide: Cultural Origins of Ambivalence
• Part VI Culture in Mind
• 13 Culture and the Problem of Meaning
• 14 Analogical Transfer and the Work of Culture

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Library Journal Review

For most of the 20th century, social scientists have assumed that all human beings essentially "think alike"-that seeming differences in the ways people conceive of the world are due to "superficial" cultural differences rather than to "actual" physical differences. This unquestioned tenet of anthropology arose in reaction to the Darwinian concepts of the previous century, where "different" was assumed to mean inferior to Western cognition. In this important book, Shore argues that the dichotomy between the cultural and the physical is false, since humans are necessarily culture-bearing creatures. In making this argument, he discusses diverse cultural models such as American baseball, Australian aborigine initiation, and the spatial arrangement of Samoan villages. While the ideas discussed here are important, the book is not easy reading and will be of interest mainly to anthropologists (psychologists, alas, should pay greater attention to cross-cultural differences, but do not). Academic and research libraries with anthropology collections will consider this a necessary purchase.-Mary Ann Hughes, Neill P.L., Pullman, Wash. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Shore has written an important book for the human sciences. He reminds readers that anthropology and psychology both sought to understand human cognition, but took separate paths. He argues for the need to take culture seriously as cognition, and cognition as the central problem of cultural studies. The book offers useful accounts of classic issues, reopening the problem of the psychic unity of humankind. It relates ethnographic problems of meaning with contemporary accounts of cognition, notably to connectionist models of cognitive processing. By covering a wide range of material, both theoretical and ethnographic (with examples drawn from American life, Samoa, Australia, and elsewhere), Shore brings a new angle and new passion to major topics. The result will be suggestive to advanced researchers, and both clear and exciting to upper-division undergraduates. J. Kirkpatrick SMS Research

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Bradd Shore is at Emory University.