: David B. Kronenfeld
: Culture, Society, and Cognition Collective Goals, Values, Action, and Knowledge
: De Gruyter Mouton
: 9783110211481
: Mouton Series in Pragmatics [MSP]ISSN
: 1
: CHF 159.70
:
: Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft
: English
: 291
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: PDF
Thi theoretically motivated approach to pragmatics (vs. semantics) produces a radically new view of culture and its role vis-a-vis society. Understanding what words mean in use requires an open-ended recourse to pragmatic cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge makes up a productive conceptual system. Members of a cultural community share the system but not all of the system's content, making culture a system of parallel distributed cognition. This book presents such a system, and then elaborates a version of 'cultural models' that relates actions to goals, values, emotional content, and context, and that allows both systematic generative capacity and systematic variation across cultural and subcultural groups. Such models are offered as the basic units of cultural action. Culture thus conceived is shown as a tool that people use rather than as something deeply internalized in their psyches.

David B. Kronenfeld, University of California at Riverside, USA.

Frontmatter1
Contents9
Chapter 1. Introduction15
Chapter 2. Background and history54
Chapter 3. Language to culture – building from Kronenfeld’s semantic theory88
Chapter 4. Culture as distributed cognition97
Chapter 5. An agent-based approach to cultural (and linguistic) change: Examples121
Chapter 6. Society (with a note on the self)134
Chapter 7. Ethnicity152
Chapter 8. The social construction of ethnicity: Intuition, authenticity, authenticators – the Sami example163
Chapter 9. Some kinds of cultural knowledge – a non-exhaustive list176
Chapter 10. Illustrative Examples203
Chapter 11. Problems – messages vs. codes212
Chapter 12. Other theoretical issues and relationships233
Chapter 13. Illustrative examples: cultural models241
Chapter 14. Gregory Bateson: pulling it all together264
Backmatter277