Culture, Society, and Cognition : : Collective Goals, Values, Action, and Knowledge / / David B. Kronenfeld.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DGBA Backlist Complete English Language 2000-2014 PART1
• VerfasserIn: Kronenfeld, David B. ,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter Mouton, , [2008]; ©2008
• Year of Publication: 2008
• Language: English
• Series: Mouton Series in Pragmatics [MSP] , 3
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (277 p.)

This 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Background and history -- Chapter 3. Language to culture – building from Kronenfeld’s semantic theory -- Chapter 4. Culture as distributed cognition -- Chapter 5. An agent-based approach to cultural (and linguistic) change: Examples -- Chapter 6. Society (with a note on the self) -- Chapter 7. Ethnicity -- Chapter 8. The social construction of ethnicity: Intuition, authenticity, authenticators – the Sami example -- Chapter 9. Some kinds of cultural knowledge – a non-exhaustive list -- Chapter 10. Illustrative Examples -- Chapter 11. Problems – messages vs. codes -- Chapter 12. Other theoretical issues and relationships -- Chapter 13. Illustrative examples: cultural models -- Chapter 14. Gregory Bateson: pulling it all together -- Backmatter