Cultural Processes

Cultural Processes PDF Author: Angela K.-y. Leung
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139494775
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
With the rapid growth of knowledge concerning ethnic and national group differences in human behaviors in the last two decades, researchers are increasingly curious as to why, how, and when such differences surface. The field is ready to leapfrog from a descriptive science of group differences to a science of cultural processes. The goal of this book is to lay the theoretical foundation for this exciting development by proposing an original process model of culture. This new perspective discusses and extends contemporary social psychological theories of social cognition and social motivation to explain why culture matters in human psychology. We view culture as a loose network of imperfectly shared knowledge representations for coordinating social transactions. As such, culture serves different adaptive functions important for individuals' goal pursuits. Furthermore, with the increasingly globalized and hyper-connected multicultural space, much can be revealed about how different cultural traditions come into contact.

Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution

Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution PDF Author: Stephen Shennan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520255999
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
This volume offers an integrative approach to the application of evolutionary theory in studies of cultural transmission and social evolution and reveals the enormous range of ways in which Darwinian ideas can lead to productive empirical research, the touchstone of any worthwhile theoretical perspective. While many recent works on cultural evolution adopt a specific theoretical framework, such as dual inheritance theory or human behavioral ecology, Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution emphasizes empirical analysis and includes authors who employ a range of backgrounds and methods to address aspects of culture from an evolutionary perspective. Editor Stephen Shennan has assembled archaeologists, evolutionary theorists, and ethnographers, whose essays cover a broad range of time periods, localities, cultural groups, and artifacts.

Culture and the Evolutionary Process

Culture and the Evolutionary Process PDF Author: Robert Boyd
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226069338
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
How do biological, psychological, sociological, and cultural factors combine to change societies over the long run? Boyd and Richerson explore how genetic and cultural factors interact, under the influence of evolutionary forces, to produce the diversity we see in human cultures. Using methods developed by population biologists, they propose a theory of cultural evolution that is an original and fair-minded alternative to the sociobiology debate.

Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process

Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process PDF Author: Dean E. Arnold
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521272599
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
A theory of ceramics that elucidates the complex relationship between culture, pottery and society.

Cultural Identity and Global Process

Cultural Identity and Global Process PDF Author: Jonathan Friedman
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780803986381
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This fascinating book explores the interface between global processes, identity formation and the production of culture. Examining ideas ranging from world systems theory to postmodernism, Jonathan Friedman investigates the relations between the global and the local, to show how cultural fragmentation and modernist homogenization are equally constitutive trends of global reality. With examples taken from a rich variety of theoretical sources, ethnographic accounts of historical eras, the analysis ranges across the cultural formations of ancient Greece, contemporary processes of Hawaiian cultural identification and Congolese beauty cults. Throughout, the author examines the interdependency of world market and local cultural

Understanding Culture

Understanding Culture PDF Author: Robert S. Wyer
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1136642919
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
This volume contains contributions from 24 internationally known scholars covering a broad spectrum of interests in cross-cultural theory and research. This breadth is reflected in the diversity of the topics covered in the volume, which include theoretical approaches to cross-cultural research, the dimensions of national cultures and their measurement, ecological and economic foundations of culture, cognitive, perceptual and emotional manifestations of culture, and bicultural and intercultural processes. In addition to the individual chapters, the volume contains a dialog among 14 experts in the field on a number of issues of concern in cross-cultural research, including the relation of psychological studies of culture to national development and national policies, the relationship between macro structures of a society and shared cognitions, the integration of structural and process models into a coherent theory of culture, how personal experiences and cultural traditions give rise to intra-cultural variation, whether culture can be validly measured by self-reports, the new challenges that confront cultural psychology, and whether psychology should strive to eliminate culture as an explanatory variable.

Cultural Processes in Child Development

Cultural Processes in Child Development PDF Author: Ann S. Masten
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1135691266
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
The chapters of this volume were originally presented at the 29th Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology. The focus of this symposium on cultural processes in child development emerged from the growing recognition among those at the Institute of Child Development and many others in the field that more needs to be known about the processes linking individual development and the contexts in which it occurs, and that this is no longer a luxury but essential for good science and good policy in an increasingly interconnected and pluralistic world. The chapter authors in this volume chronicle the challenges as well as the benefits of venturing out to the growing edge of theory and research concerned with how cultures and individuals interact to shape development. These investigators have wrested with the complexities of figuring out the assumptions, beliefs, values, and rules by which people conceptualize their lives and rear their children, organize their societies, and educate the next generation. As a whole, this volume reflects the beginnings of a "cultural renaissance" in developmental science.

Anthropology: Culture Patterns & Processes

Anthropology: Culture Patterns & Processes PDF Author: Alfred Louis Kroeber
Publisher: Harvest Books
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
A selection of those chapters of ... [the author's Anthropology [rev. ed., 1948] that deal specifically with matters of culture patterns and processes.

Cultural Analytics

Cultural Analytics PDF Author: Lev Manovich
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262360632
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
A book at the intersection of data science and media studies, presenting concepts and methods for computational analysis of cultural data. How can we see a billion images? What analytical methods can we bring to bear on the astonishing scale of digital culture--the billions of photographs shared on social media every day, the hundreds of millions of songs created by twenty million musicians on Soundcloud, the content of four billion Pinterest boards? In Cultural Analytics, Lev Manovich presents concepts and methods for computational analysis of cultural data. Drawing on more than a decade of research and projects from his own lab, Manovich offers a gentle, nontechnical introduction to the core ideas of data analytics and discusses the ways that our society uses data and algorithms.

Girl Making

Girl Making PDF Author: Gerry Bloustien
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571814265
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Through the innovative methodology of asking them to record their experiences on videotape, this book offers an evocative and fascinating cross-cultural exploration into the everyday lives of a number of teenage girls from their own broad social, cultural and ethnic perspectives. The use of the video camera by the girls themselves reveals their exploration and experimentation with possible identities, highlighting their awareness that the self is not ready made but rather constituted in the process of continuous performance. The result is an active self-conscious exploration of the continuous "art" of self-making. Through their play, the teenagers are shown to strategically test out various possibilities, while keeping such explorations within the bounds of what is acceptable and permissible in their own micro-cultural worlds. The resulting material challenges previous findings in those feminist and youth anthropological studies based on too narrow a concept of class, ethnicity or populist approaches to culture.