Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge

Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge PDF Author: Maurice Bloch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521006155
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the world's most distinguished anthropologists proposes that cognitive science enriches, rather than threatens, the work of social scientists.

Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge

Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge PDF Author: Maurice Bloch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521006155
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the world's most distinguished anthropologists proposes that cognitive science enriches, rather than threatens, the work of social scientists.

Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge

Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge PDF Author: Maurice Bloch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139510371
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Get Book Here

Book Description
This provocative new study one of the world's most distinguished anthropologists proposes that an understanding of cognitive science enriches, rather than threatens, the work of social scientists. Maurice Bloch argues for a naturalist approach to social and cultural anthropology, introducing developments in cognitive sciences such as psychology and neurology and exploring the relevance of these developments for central anthropological concerns: the person or the self, cosmology, kinship, memory and globalisation. Opening with an exploration of the history of anthropology, Bloch shows why and how naturalist approaches were abandoned and argues that these once valid reasons are no longer relevant. Bloch then shows how such subjects as the self, memory and the conceptualisation of time benefit from being simultaneously approached with the tools of social and cognitive science. Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge will stimulate fresh debate among scholars and students across a wide range of disciplines.

Cognition in the Wild

Cognition in the Wild PDF Author: Edwin Hutchins
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262581469
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 403

Get Book Here

Book Description
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

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things PDF Author: George Lakoff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226471012
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 633

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science. . . . Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories reveal a great deal."—David E. Leary, American Scientist

Puzzling Stories

Puzzling Stories PDF Author: Steven Willemsen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800735928
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Get Book Here

Book Description
Many films and novels defy our ability to make sense of the plot. While puzzling storytelling, strange incongruities, inviting enigmas and persistent ambiguities have been central to the effects of many literary and cinematic traditions, a great deal of contemporary films and television series bring such qualities to the mainstream—but wherein lies the attractiveness of perplexing works of fiction? This collected volume offers the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and trans-medial approach to the question of cognitive challenge in narrative art, bringing together psychological, philosophical, formal-historical, and empirical perspectives from leading scholars across these fields.

Mind and Religion

Mind and Religion PDF Author: Harvey Whitehouse
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 9780759106192
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection examines new psychological evidence for the modal theory and attempts to synthesize this theory with other theories of cognition and religion.

How Things Shape the Mind

How Things Shape the Mind PDF Author: Lambros Malafouris
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262528924
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
An account of the different ways in which things have become cognitive extensions of the human body, from prehistory to the present. An increasingly influential school of thought in cognitive science views the mind as embodied, extended, and distributed rather than brain-bound or “all in the head.” This shift in perspective raises important questions about the relationship between cognition and material culture, posing major challenges for philosophy, cognitive science, archaeology, and anthropology. In How Things Shape the Mind, Lambros Malafouris proposes a cross-disciplinary analytical framework for investigating the ways in which things have become cognitive extensions of the human body. Using a variety of examples and case studies, he considers how those ways might have changed from earliest prehistory to the present. Malafouris's Material Engagement Theory definitively adds materiality—the world of things, artifacts, and material signs—into the cognitive equation. His account not only questions conventional intuitions about the boundaries and location of the human mind but also suggests that we rethink classical archaeological assumptions about human cognitive evolution.

The Challenge of Epistemology

The Challenge of Epistemology PDF Author: Christina Toren
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857455168
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
Epistemology poses particular problems for anthropologists whose task it is to understand manifold ways of being human. Through their work, anthropologists often encounter people whose ideas concerning the nature and foundations of knowledge are at odds with their own. Going right to the heart of anthropological theory and method, this volume discusses issues that have vexed practicing anthropologists for a long time. The authors are by no means in agreement with one another as to where the answers might lie. Some are primarily concerned with the clarity and theoretical utility of analytical categories across disciplines; others are more inclined to push ethnographic analysis to its limits in an effort to demonstrate what kind of sense it can make. All are aware of the much-wanted differences that good ethnography can make in explaining the human sciences and philosophy. The contributors show a continued commitment to ethnography as a profoundly radical intellectual endeavor that goes to the very roots of inquiry into what it is to be human, and, to anthropology as a comparative project that should be central to any attempt to understand who we are.

How We Think They Think

How We Think They Think PDF Author: Maurice E F Bloch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429968531
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Maurice Bloch is so ferociously smart that one can always enjoy tangling with his ideas, even when—perhaps especially when—one doesn’t agree with him. This is an important and provocative book.” —Sherry Ortner Columbia University These essays by one of anthropology’s most original theorists consider such fundamental questions as: Is cognition language-based? How reliable a guide to memory are people’s narratives about themselves? What connects the “social recalling” studied by anthropologists to the “autobiographical memory” studied by psychologists? Now gathered in accessible form for the first time and drawing frequently upon the author’s fieldwork among the Zafimaniry of Madagascar for ethnographic examples, the twelve closely linked essays of How We Think They Think pose provocative challenges not only to conventional cognitive models but to the basic assumptions that underlie much of ethnography. This book will be read with interest by those who study culture and cognition, ethnographic theory and practice, and the peoples and cultures of Africa.

Cultural Evolution

Cultural Evolution PDF Author: Tim Lewens
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199674183
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
Tim Lewens explores what it means to take an evolutionary approach to cultural change, and why this approach is often treated with suspicion. He makes an original case for the value of evolutionary thinking for students of culture, and shows why the concerns of sceptics should not dismissed as mere prejudice, confusion, or ignorance.