FALL 2000 SYLLABUS

Culture and Cognition First Year Seminar

Fall 2000

Fridays 8:45-10:30, 3048 East Hall

Faculty presenters:

Ram Mahalingam, Psychology

Justin Barrett, Psychology

Joe Henrich, Anthropology/Organizational Behavior

The following syllabus has been developed to provide: a) a structured, comprehensive (if brief) introduction to fundamental issues in the study of culture and cognition; b) informative lectures by faculty as well as sufficient time for student response and unstructured open discussion; and c) bibliographic guidance for further study on individual topics.

Class time will be managed as follows: class will begin promptly at 9:00. Please arrive at 8:45 to have coffee and refreshments, and be prepared to start at 9:00. A faculty member will speak until approximately 9:45 on the topic of the day. Students should send reflection questions and comments by email to the faculty no later than Thursday morning so that the faculty could respond to them as part of the opening lecture. Between 9:45 and 10:30 the floor will be open for discussion of the topics proposed.

9/08/00 Introduction: Goals and structure of program, course

9/15/00 Sociocultural Approaches to Culture and Cognition (Ram)

READING: Cole, M. (1996) Cultural psychology: A once and a future discipline (chapter 1) Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

FURTHER READINGS: Ogbu, J. U. (1982). Origins of human competence: A cultural- ecological perspective. Child Development, 52, 413-429.

Miller, P., & Goodnow, J. (1995). Cultural practices: Toward an integration of culture and development. New Directions for Child Development, 67, 5-16.

Rogoff, B., Baker-Sennett, Lacasa, P., & Goldsmith, D. (1995). Development through participation in sociocultural activity. New Directions for Child Development, 67, 45-66.

Shweder, R., Jensen, A., & Goldstein, W. (1995). Who sleeps by whom revisited: A method for extracting the moral goods implicit in practice. New Directions for Child Development, 67

9/22/00 Evolutionary Approaches to Culture and Cognition (Joe)

READING: Cosmides, Leda and Tooby, John (1997). ³Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer² (www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/). Students should take a look at the website.

FURTHER READINGS: Barkow, J., Tooby J. and Cosmides, L. (editors). (1992). The Adapted Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

Pinker, S. (1998). How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton & Company

Smith E. A. (2000) ³Three Styles in the Evolutionary Analysis of Human Behavior² in L. Cronk, N. Chagnon, and W. Irons (editors). Human Behavior and Adaptation: An Anthropological Perspective, Aldine de Gruyter.

9/29/00 Culture and Cognition (Justin)

READING: McCauley, R. N. and Lawson, E. T. (1996). "Who Owns 'Culture'?" Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8, 171-190.

FURTHER READINGS: Sperber, D. & Hirschfeld, L. ³Culture, Cognition, and Evolution² http://www.dan.sperber.com/mitecs.htm

Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining Culture (chapter 4 or 5). New York: Blackwell

10/6/00 Cultural Psychology: Research Methods (Ram)

READING: Berry, J.W., Poortinga, Y. H., Pandey, J. (Eds.) Handbook of cross-cultural psychology, Vol. 1: Theory and method (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn Bacon

FURTHER READINGS: Gustav, J. (1995). In pursuit of the Emic-Etic distinction: Can we ever capture it? In N.R. Goldberger & J. B. Veroff (Eds.). Culture and psychology. New York: New York University Press.

Lonner, W. J. & Berry, J. W. (1986) Field methods in cross-cultural research. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

10/13/00 Anthropological Field Methods (Joe)

READINGS: Aunger, R. Sources of Variation in Ethnographic Interview Data: Food Avoidances in the Ituri Forest, Zaire (1994). Ethnology, vol. 23, pp.65-99.

FURTHER READING: Bernard H.R. (1994). Research Methods in Anthropology. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage Publications.

Johnson, Allen (1978) Quantification in Cultural Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Pelto, P. & Pelto, G. (1970). Anthropological Research: The Structure of Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10/20/00 Cross-Cultural psychological research (Justin)

READING: Avis, M., & Harris, P. (1991). Belief-desire reasoning among Baka children: Evidence for a universal conception of mind. Child Development, 62, 460-467.

FURTHER READING: Walker [Jeyifous}, S. (1992). Developmental changes in the representation of word-meaning: cross-cultural findings. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 10, 285-299.

10/27/00 Culture and Learning (Ram)

READING: Vosniadou, S. (1994). Universal and culture-specific properties of children¹s mental models. In L. Hirschfeld & S. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (pp. 412-430). New York: Cambridge University Press.

FURTHER READINGS: Saxe, G. B. (1988). Candy selling and math learning. Educational Researcher, 17(6), 14-21.

Scribner, S. (1984). Studying working intelligence. In B. Rogoff & J. Lave (Eds.), Everyday cognition: Its development in social context(pp. 9-40). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Morris, M W.; Nisbett, R. & Peng, K. (1995) Causal attribution across domains and cultures. In Sperber, D (Ed) Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate (pp. 577-614). New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press.

11/3/00 Nativism (Justin)

READING: Boyer, P. (1994). "Cognitive Constraints on Cultural Representations: Natural Ontologies and Religious Ideas," in L. Hirschfeld and S. Gelman (eds.). Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 391-411.

FURTHER READINGS: Evans, E. M. (2000). The emergence of beliefs about the origins of species in school-age children. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly: A Journal of Developmental Psychology, 46, 221-254.

Boyer, P. & Ramble, C. (in press). Cognitive Templates for Religious Concepts: Cross-cultural Evidence For Recall of Counter-Intuitive Representations, Cognitive Science.

11/10/00 Cultural evolution, mimetics, and the epidemiology of representation

READING: Boyd, Robert and Richerson, Peter. ³Culture is real and important² (manuscript)

FURTHER READINGS: Sperber, D. (1996) Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Boyd, R. & Richerson P. (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Durham, William (1991) Coevolution: Genes, Culture and Human Diversity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

11/17/00 Culture and Cognition in non-human primates, and other animals (Joe)

READINGS: Boesch, C. & Tomasello, M. (1998). ³Chimpanzee and human culture.² Current Anthropology, 39, 591-604.

FURTHER READINGS Galef J. & C. Heyes (Eds.), Social Learning in Animals: The Roots of Culture. New York: Academic Press.

Tomasello, M. & Call, J. (1997). Primate Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dukas, Reuven (1998) Cognitive Ecology: The Evolutionary Ecology of Information Processing and Decision Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

12/1/00 Levels of representation (Justin)

READING: Barrett, J.L. (1999). Theological Correctness: cognitive constraint and the study of religion. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 11, 325-339.

FURTHER READINGS: Barrett, J.L. and Keil, F.C. (1996) Anthropomorphism and God Concepts: conceptualizing a non-natural entity. Cognitive Psychology, 3, 219-247

Barrett, J.L. (1998) Cognitive constraints on Hindu concepts of the divine. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37, 608-619.

12/08/00 Culture and Self (Ram)

READING: . Roland, A.(1996) The influence of culture on the self and self-object relationships: An Asian-North American comparison. Psychoanalytic Dialogues; Vol 6(4), 461-475.

FURTHER READINGS: Fredrickson, B. L., Roberts, T. A. (1997) Objectification theory: Toward understanding women's lived experiences and mental health risks. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21(2), 173-206.

Holland, D. & Skinner, D. (1997). The co-development of identity, agency, and lived worlds. In Tudge, J., Valsiner, J. (Eds) Comparisons in human development: Understanding time and context (pp. 193-221). New York, NY:Cambridge University Press.

Landrine, H. (1992). Clinical implications of cultural differences: The referential vs. indexical self. Clinical Psychology Review, 12(4), 401-415.

Markus, H. R., Mullally, P. R. & Kitayama, S. (1997) Selfways: Diversity in modes of cultural participation. In Neisser, U. (Ed) The conceptual self in context: Culture, experience, self-understanding (pp. 13-61). New York: Cambridge University Press.