Culture and Cognition

Recommended Prerequisites

History and theory in anthropology, epistemology, working knowledge of the English language (reading skills).

Teaching Methods

NA

Learning Outcomes

The student must be able to:

(1) To acquire critical skills that could allow an understanding of concepts and thematic circumscriptions of anthropology concerning the cognition issue. The debate between Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere will be considered, as well as the importance that the relation between culture and cognition had and still has in the constitution of the discipline, and in what way does a set of representations and pratical dispositions shape and is shaped by what is part of an innate mental-neuronal-bodily architecture.

(2) To acquire critical skills that could allow an understanding of why there isn’t culture without cognition, nor cognition without culture, and being able to question this same procedural circularity having in mind, not only a set of exhaustive reflections on the part of several anthropologists (from the evolutionists until Clifford Geertz), but also the contemporary connections between anthropology and cognitive science.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

This course has as aim the study of some conceptual acquisitions and thematic circumscriptions of the discipline concerning cognition. Through the semester it will approach this issue/problem having in mind three main points: 1. To show how the problem was object of exhaustive reflection on the part of several anthropologists since, at least, the evolutionists until C. Geertz; 2. To show how the incorporation of anthropology in the field of what would be named as “the new science of the mind” (Gardner, 2002), the cognitive science, produced answers which must be assessed differentially; 3. To show how, contemporaneously, we think the problem, locating it in much of what cognitive science has been teaching, but including elements that are the result of critics (some of them particularly harsh and radical) to this interdisciplinary field, in which anthropology didn’t always has a particularly easy or produtive relationship for historical reasons that would be pointed out.

Assessment Methods

Continuous assessment
Frequency: 50.0%
Three short essays: 50.0%

Evaluation through exam
Exam: 100.0%

Bibliography

Quintais, Luís (2010), Cultura e cognição. Coimbra: Angelus Novus (Biblioteca Mínima).

Sperber, Dan (1996 [1984]), “Anthropology and psychology: towards an epidemiology of representations”, in Explaining culture: a naturalistic approach. Oxford: Blackwell [capítulo 3; pp. 56-76].

Whitehouse, Harvey (2001), The debated mind: evolutionary psychology versus ethnography. Oxford: Berg.