Culture, Society, and Cognition: Collective Goals, Values, Action, and Knowledge

by David B. Kronenfeld

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783110206074
Publisher:	De Gruyter
Publication date:	10/20/2008
Series:	Mouton Series in Pragmatics [MSP] , #3
Pages:	291
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.06(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David B. Kronenfeld, University of California at Riverside, USA.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction 1

1 Culture as a system of distributed cognition 3

2 Contemporary anthropological concerns 3

3 Framing notions 4

3.1 The language-culture interface 4

3.2 The social nature of language and culture 5

3.3 Pragmatics 7

3.3.1 Meaning: semantics and pragmatics 7

3.3.2 Pragmatics proper 9

3.4 Academic context 10

3.4.1 Putnam 10

3.4.2 Wittgenstein 17

3.4.3 Berger and Luckman 17

3.4.4 Sperber 18

4 Cognitive anthropology 27

4.1 Systems of cultural knowledge including cultural models, cultural conceptual systems, and others 27

4.2 Historical frame 28

4.3 Cultural models 30

4.4 Strauss and Quinn 31

4.5 Other context and background 35

4.6 A note on individual structures 37

Chapter 2 Background and history 40

1 Durkheimian collective representations: A distributed cognition perspective 40

1.1 Appendix: selected quotations from Durkheim's The Rules of Sociological Method (1938) 45

1.1.1 A system of mental entities - as in Saussure 45

1.1.2 System of generative patterns 45

1.1.3 The crowd as a minimal simple example, a microcosm, of a society 45

1.1.4 A collective emotion 46

1.1.5 Universality 46

1.1.6 Regarding the possibility of a "Social Psychology" 46

2 Anthropological studies of routine decision making 47

2.1 Christina and Hugh Gladwin 47

2.2 James Young 49

2.3 Carol Mukhopadhyay 50

2.4 Robert Randall 51

2.5 Stuart Plattner 53

3 Comparison: Decision theory with simulation approaches 54

4 General cognitive background 56

4.1 Mode of intellectual functioning 56

4.2 Cognitive schemas 57

4.3 Piagetian stages 57

4.4 Gombrichian conventions 58

5 Piaget's paradigm 60

5.1 Basicframework 60

5.2 The stages 62

6 Piaget vs. other cognitive psychology 64

7 Gombrich's approach: Art and Illusion 65

8 Schank & Abelson 1977: Scripts, plans, goals, and understanding 68

9 Hutchins: Culture and Inference 72

Chapter 3 Language to culture-building from Kronenfeld's semantic theory 74

1 Culture and society 76

Chapter 4 Culture as Distributed Cognition 83

1 Representations - collective and individual 83

2 Culture 85

3 The issue is not "internalization" 88

4 Culture and language 90

5 Parallel distributed processing and decentralization 93

6 The role of culture 97

7 Biological bases, mammalian sociability, and the social origins of human intelligence 100

8 What culture gives us 101

9 What makes culture socially systematic 102

Chapter 5 An agent-based approach to cultural (and linguistic) change: Examples 106

1 "Pen" 108

2 "Cousin" 110

3 "Sibling" 112

4 "Jew" 114

Chapter 6 Society (with a note on the self) 120

1 Society: issues 120

2 Society: Kronenfeld view 130

3 Identity and self, loyalty 133

3.1 A general overview 133

3.2 Self 134

3.3 Loyalty 136

Chapter 7 Ethnicity 138

1 Summary 145

Chapter 8 The social construction of ethnicity: Intuition, authenticity, authenticators-the Sami example 149

1 The Sami example 149

2 Other Sami thoughts 155

3 Problems and issues 158

4 Distributed cognition 159

Chapter 9 Some kinds of cultural knowledge-a non-exhaustive list 162

1 The current state of the art 163

2 Cultural models 164

2.1 Empirical validation 165

2.2 Form 166

2.3 Structure and content 167

2.4 Function 167

2.5 Existence status 169

2.6 How constructed 169

2.7 Prediction 170

2.8 How used 171

2.9 Cultural models vs. systems of classification 172

2.10 Cultural models, language, and communication 173

2.11 More on the content of cultural models 175

3 Cultural models and culture 176

3.1 Collective knowledge 176

3.2 Collective representations and social "others" 176

3.3 Learned without being taught 177

3.4 Cognitive hierarchy 178

3.5 Social complexity 178

3.6 Presupposition of sharing 182

3.7 Productivity, form, and application 182

3.8 Function and use 184

3.9 "Application" or "invocation" 188

Chapter 10 Illustrative examples 189

1 Calculating and applying kinterms in Fanti 189

1.1 The example 189

1.2 Implications of the example 190

2 The stages of instantiation and English kin 194

3 Cultural models and romantic love 195

Chapter 11 Problems - messages vs. codes 198

1 Shared "codes" and individual "messages" 198

2 Nature of cultural models, and their relationship to psychological schemas 200

2.1 Cultural models are social 202

2.2 Cultural models are shared and distributed 203

2.3 Role, nature, and functioning of cultural values 204

3 Aspects and attributes of cultural models 205

3.1 Prototypes and prototypicality 205

3.2 Alternative or conflicting cultural models 208

3.3 Degrees and aspects of specificity of cultural models 209

3.4 Where we have good vs. weak vs. no cultural models 210

3.5 Rules for breaking rules 210

3.6 Variability in cultural models 211

3.7 Instantiation issues in apparent variability or vagueness of cultural models 211

3.8 Variability in cultural models vs. in individuals' knowledge of them 212

3.9 Conformity 214

4 Collective representations reprise 214

5 Looking back 215

6 Whither now 217

Chapter 12 Other theoretical issues and relationships 219

1 Cultural models - truth status 219

2 Theoretical models and empirical tests 221

2.1 Culture as a mixed structure: empirical implications 221

2.2 Behavioral models and analytic regularities 222

2.3 Empirical tests 223

3 Some further methodological thoughts 224

4 What seem pressing empirical issues 225

5 Neural networks 225

Chapter 13 Illustrative examples: cultural models 227

1 Cultural models: empirical examples 227

2 Image studies 228

3 An extended example: Ranches, rangeland, and environmental cultural models 237

3.1 Introduction 237

3.2 Empirical testing of cultural models 238

3.3 What is a ranch? 239

3.4 Environmental categories 241

3.5 A use category 244

3.6 Environmental health and conflict 245

3.7 Forms of cultural models and action 247

Chapter 14 Gregory Bateson: Pulling it all together 250

1 Bateson's Naven 250

2 Bateson's system 251

3 Cultural models 256

4 Some lessons from Bateson 257

4.1 How it all goes together 257

4.2 Eidos and cultural models 258

5 Some concluding reactions to Naven 259

5.1 Sociology and culture 259

5.2 Levels of analysis - a demurrer 260

References 263

Index 275