Culture in mind : cognition, culture, and the problem of meaning /

Shore has written an important book for the human sciences. He reminds readers that anthropology and psychology both sought to understand human cognition, but took separate paths. He argues for the need to take culture seriously as cognition, and cognition as the central problem of cultural studies. The book offers useful accounts of classic issues, reopening the problem of the psychic unity of humankind. It relates ethnographic problems of meaning with contemporary accounts of cognition, notably to connectionist models of cognitive processing. By covering a wide range of material, both theoretical and ethnographic (with examples drawn from American life, Samoa, Australia, and elsewhere), Shore brings a new angle and new passion to major topics. The result will be suggestive to advanced researchers, and both clear and exciting to upper-division undergraduates. J. Kirkpatrick SMS Research

For most of the 20th century, social scientists have assumed that all human beings essentially "think alike"-that seeming differences in the ways people conceive of the world are due to "superficial" cultural differences rather than to "actual" physical differences. This unquestioned tenet of anthropology arose in reaction to the Darwinian concepts of the previous century, where "different" was assumed to mean inferior to Western cognition. In this important book, Shore argues that the dichotomy between the cultural and the physical is false, since humans are necessarily culture-bearing creatures. In making this argument, he discusses diverse cultural models such as American baseball, Australian aborigine initiation, and the spatial arrangement of Samoan villages. While the ideas discussed here are important, the book is not easy reading and will be of interest mainly to anthropologists (psychologists, alas, should pay greater attention to cross-cultural differences, but do not). Academic and research libraries with anthropology collections will consider this a necessary purchase.-Mary Ann Hughes, Neill P.L., Pullman, Wash. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.