Culture, society, and cognition : collective goals, values, action, and knowledge / by David B. Kronenfeld.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kronenfeld, David B., 1941-

Series:

Mouton series in pragmatics ; 3.

Mouton series in pragmatics, 1864-6409 ; 3

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cognition and culture.

Culture.

Distributed cognition.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (292 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, c2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. Background and history

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

Chapter 4. Culture as distributed cognition

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

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

Chapter 7. Ethnicity

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

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

Chapter 10. Illustrative Examples

Chapter 11. Problems - messages vs. codes

Chapter 12. Other theoretical issues and relationships

Chapter 13. Illustrative examples: cultural models

Chapter 14. Gregory Bateson: pulling it all together

Backmatter

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [263]-273) and index.

ISBN:

9786611999551

9781281999559

1281999555

9783110211481

3110211483

OCLC:

503441356