Culture as a System : How We Know the Meaning and Significance of What We Do and Say PDF
Preview Culture as a System : How We Know the Meaning and Significance of What We Do and Say
Culture as a System A particular culture is associated with a particular community, and thus has a social dimension. But how does culture operate and how is it to be defined? Is it to be taken as the behavioral repertoire of members of that community, as the products of their behavior, or as the shared mental content that pro- duces the behavior? Is it to be viewed as a coherent whole or only a collec- tion of disparate parts? Culture is shared, but how totally? How is culture learned and maintained over time, and how does it change? In C ulture as a System, Kronenfeld adopts a cognitive approach to culture to offer answers to these questions. Combining insights from cognitive psy- chology and linguistic anthropology with research on collective knowledge systems, he offers an understanding of culture as a collectively held prag- matic cognitive system. The cognitive system is shown to be behavioral as well as linguistic, and, in addition to intellectual knowledge, involves expec- tations about peoples’ feelings, attitudes, and behaviors. He argues that the need for effectiveness in communication and joint action in novel situations requires the system to be productive: that society’s division of labor requires knowledge to be distributed differentially across the population, but still systematically integrated. Engagingly written, it is essential reading for scholars and graduate stu- dents of cognitive anthropology, linguistic anthropology, sociology of cul- ture, philosophy, and computational cognitive science. David B. Kronenfeld is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Anthropol- ogy at University of California, Riverside, USA. Routledge Studies in Anthropology For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Anthropology/book-series/SE0724 36 Truth, Intentionality and Evidence Anthropological Approaches to Crime Edited by Yazid Ben Hounet and Deborah Puccio-Den 37 Meeting Ethnography Meetings as Key Technologies of Contemporary Governance, Development, and Resistance Edited by Jen Sandler and Renita Thedvall 38 Toward an Anthropology of Ambient Sound Edited by Christine Guillebaud 39 On Knowing Humanity Insights from Theology for Anthropology Edited by Eloise Meneses and David Bronkema 40 Everyday Faith in Sufi Senegal Laura L. Cochrane 41 Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South The Human Consequences of Piracy in China and Brazil Rosana Pinheiro-Machado 42 Culture as a System How We Know the Meaning and Significance of What We Do and Say David B. Kronenfeld 43 Distortion Social Processes beyond the Structured and Systemic Edited by Nigel Rapport 44 The Greek Crisis Critical Anthropological Explorations and Ethnographic Approaches Edited by Dimitris Dalakoglou and Georgos Agelopoulos Culture as a System How We Know the Meaning and Significance of What We Do and Say David B. Kronenfeld First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 David B. Kronenfeld The right of David B. Kronenfeld to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-28918-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-26732-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC To Anya, Nadia, Zaid, and Owen who, even from afar, continually bring joy and light into my life! And to Mara, Karim, Lisa, and Dan who have created and nurtured such wonders! Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Linguistic background; semantics and pragmatics 13 3 Linguistic relativity: Sapir, Whorf, and kinship 22 4 Culture as shared differentially distributed pragmatic knowledge 33 5 Cognitive structures and social units 41 6 Prototype-extension view of concepts 45 7 Kinds of collective cognitive structures I 53 8 Kinds of collective cognitive structures II – cultural models of action 63 9 Individual knowledge and individual use of cultural knowledge 77 10 Cultural models, methods and empirical data 83 11 Conclusion 101 Appendix 1: Saussure’s view of language 116 Appendix 2: Kronenfeld semantic theory 118 Bibliography 119 Index 129 1 Introduction A cognitive approach to culture Certainly since the time of Boas in the US and of Tyler and Frazer in the UK, the central part of anthropology has been cultural – or, with a differ- ent emphasis, social – anthropology. Central to cultural anthropology has been the idea of culture: its content, its relationship to the community of people, and its relationship to the material objects produced by members of a cultural community. My book is not about the history of anthropological understandings of culture, but it does offer a coherent view of culture that speaks directly to complexities of the culture concept. A particular culture is associated with a particular community, and thus has a social dimension. There has been a continuing debate concerning whether culture is to be taken as the behavioral repertoire of members of that community, as the products of their behavior, or as the shared mental content that produces the behavior. Questions have been raised concern- ing the coherence of any specific culture – the relationship of parts to one another; is that culture a single coherent whole or only a collection of dispa- rate parts? Culture is shared, but how totally? How is culture learned? How is it maintained over time, and how does it change? My book’s approach to culture offers an integrated approach that responds to these questions. I offer a cognitive and social understanding of culture that comes most directly out of cognitive anthropology, but that includes important insights from linguistics, sociology, and cognitive science – and draws significantly on my kinship research. Cognition refers to knowledge – but not just verbal or conscious knowledge. Cultural cognition is the shared pragmatic knowledge that includes our behavioral as well as conceptual knowledge – our knowl- edge of how to engage each other (whether via cooperation or competition) or avoid engagement, of how to make sense of what those around us say and do, of how to make things – either alone or via organized cooperation – of how to think about novel problems, and so forth. Cognitive anthropology, as I see it, joins insights from cognitive psychol- ogy regarding individual cognition with insights about collective knowledge systems (including how to study them) that come out of linguistics (includ- ing recent work in cognitive linguistics) and linguistic anthropology. Work
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