Mapping Minds across Cultures
نویسنده
چکیده
Anthropology is the study of the physical, social, and cultural development of humans. It has been considered part of cognitive science since that enterprise was organized in the 1970s (Gardner, 1985; D’Andrade, 1995), but anthropology is also classed as a social science because of its concern with groups and cultural interactions. Ironically, cognitive anthropology has waned as a practice within the community of anthropologists under the influence of postmodernism, at the same time that there has been an explosion of research by cognitive and social psychologists concerned with culture (e.g., Kitayama & Cohen, 2007). These divergences make anthropology an excellent field in which to examine the relevance of cognition in individuals to the operation of societies. In contemporary social science, the two most prominent accounts of the relation between the social and the psychological are methodological individualism, the reductionist view that everything social is caused by the actions of individual people; and postmodernism, the holistic view that reality is a matter of social construction. Methodological individualism remains dominant in economics and political science, where social events are viewed as arising from individual actions determined by rational selfinterest, as in game theory. In contrast, many researchers in anthropology, sociology, and history have adopted the postmodernist view that the individual can be largely ignored in favor of attention to social processes such as discourse and power. Neither of these approaches is adequate to explain complex social phenomena such as culture. Cultural psychologists have adopted a richer view of the dynamic interdependence of self systems and social systems, arguing that the psychological and the cultural mutually constitute one another and must be analyzed and understood together (Markus & Hamedani, 2007, p. 3). From the
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