Culture as a System : How We Know the Meaning and Significance of What We Do and Say

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 produces the behavior? Is it to be viewed as a coherent whole or only a collection of disparate parts? Culture is shared, but how totally? How is culture learned and maintained over time, and how does it change? In Meaning and Significance in Human Engagement, Kronenfeld adopts a cognitive approach to culture to offer answers to these questions. Combining insights from cognitive psychology and linguistic anthropology with research on collective knowledge systems, he offers an understanding of culture as a phenomenon produced and shaped by a combination of conditions, constraints and logic. Engagingly written, it is essential reading for scholars and graduate students of cognitive anthropology, linguistic anthropology, sociology of culture, philosophy, and computational cognitive science. Cover 1 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 1 Introduction 10 2 Linguistic background; semantics and pragmatics 22 3 Linguistic relativity: Sapir, Whorf, and kinship 31 4 Culture as shared differentially distributed pragmatic knowledge 42 5 Cognitive structures and social units 50 6 Prototype-extension view of concepts 54 7 Kinds of collective cognitive structures I 62 8 Kinds of collective cognitive structures II – cultural models of action 72 9 Individual knowledge and individual use of cultural knowledge 86 10 Cultural models, methods and empirical data 92 11 Conclusion 110 Appendix 1: Saussure’s view of language 125 Appendix 2: Kronenfeld semantic theory 127 Bibliography 128 Index 138