Abstract

"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 Culture as a system, 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 collectively held pragmatic cognitive system. The cognitive system is shown to be behavioral as well as linguistic, and, in addition to intellectual knowledge, involves expectations 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 students of cognitive anthropology, linguistic anthropology, sociology of culture, philosophy, and computational cognitive science"--.