Cognitive science and the cultural challenge

Interdisciplinarity is highly valued these days in academia, and with good reason. Many problems require the concepts, tools and insights of multiple disciplines for their solutions. Furthermore, interdisciplinarity – done well – can help scholars break free of old paradigms and make true innovations. It is thus both unfortunate and perplexing that collaborations between psychology and anthropology are vanishingly rare. The goal of Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge (Bloch 2012; hereafter, ‘ACC’) is to change this state of affairs: to get anthropologists and psychologists talking to one another; ‘to change the ground ... where the different disciplines can meet and engage in a joint, yet difficult enterprise’ (p. 192). Maurice Bloch is just the person to write this important book, given his own seminal research in cognitive anthropology and his interdisciplinary successes (e.g. Bloch et al. 2001). The result is a brilliant tour-de-force that should be required reading for both anthropologists and psychologists. One important contribution of ACC is the historical analysis explaining how we have come to this impasse. Bloch argues that anthropologists have resisted cognitive sciences in order to avoid (among other things) reductionism and genetic determinism. This backdrop is crucial for reminding us of the potential pitfalls of an overly enthusiastic embracing of biological bases to social difference (Dar-Nimrod and Heine 2011), and for underlining the implicit and unexamined assumptions that underlie distinct research traditions. Most notable among them is the idea, casually embraced by psychologists as well as anthropologists, that nature and culture are deeply opposed. Yet as Bloch reminds us: ‘There are no non-cultural bits of us as there are no nonnatural bits. ... [W]e are simultaneously created by our biology, which includes our psychology, and by history and culture’ (pp. 76, 119). The implications of this point are far-reaching. If history/psychology and biology/culture are inextricably intertwined, then neither psychologists nor anthropologists can afford to simply ignore the other. With the problem diagnosed, then, what is to be done? Bloch documents that understanding any complex concept (such as time, or social relationships, or ‘the self’, or memory) requires different levels of analyses, and correspondingly, different approaches depending on one’s question. He further makes a powerful case for the value of psychological concepts and methods in anthropological research; readers who are cognitive psychologists will find themselves nodding along in enthusiastic agreement. An example par excellence is the monograph by Astuti et al. (2004), who disentangled, with surgical precision, the metacognitive beliefs of the Vezo regarding property transfer in human groups from their unarticulated but foundational essentialist beliefs. Another compelling example (from Regnier 2012; see also this volume) illustrates how cognitive science models of essentialism shed light on marriage