Success or Prestige? Hunters’ cultural biases
Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson have identified two biases, one based on success, the other on prestige, that might influence which individual is most imitated. If you were living in a foraging society, would you rather imitate prestigious hunters or successful ones? Successful ones, you say? It may ...
Interviews with some Great Ancestors
via Savage Minds (savageminds.org): Alan MacFarlance has put online an impressive collection [1] of video-recorded interviews with famous anthropologists (Fredrick Barth, Mary Douglas, Meyer Fortes, Ernest Gellner, Jack Goody, Edmund Leach, Sydney Mintz, and many others). Enjoy !
[1] http://ww...
Book review : The Art Instinct, by Denis Dutton.
(Editor's note) It would be difficult not to notice the buzz around Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct [1], (see Nigel Warburton's review, Michael O'Donnell's, and Brian Morton's - and even the Colbert Report [2]). It's always a pleasure to see an accessible and much advertised book written in a ...
Incest in France
The French used to be astoundingly tolerant of incest, but times are changing.
Cover of the 1984 single Lemon Incest, a song featuring Serge Gainsbourg with his daughter Charlotte.
Mutually consensual incest is a classic puzzle for moral psychologists : on the one hand, it harms neither the lovers ...
Institutions again – What is a primitive society?
That is the rather provocative question that Richard Posner asked in a 1980 article [1] that I only recently discovered - and I think should be on the reading list of a decent cognitive anthropology course, as the issues are certainly relevant to understanding the cognitive underpinnings of ...
Nick Enfield’s “The Anatomy of meaning”
A new book by N. J. Enfield of the Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands.
The Anatomy of Meaning: Speech, Gesture, and Composite Utterances (Language Culture and Cognition) (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
"How do we understand what others are trying to say? The answer ...
Natural Pedagogy and Flossing Monkeys
(via Concrete Tower)
Gyorgy Gergely and Gergely Csibra have issued a new version of their theory of Natural Pedagogy in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (here). As luck would have it, the paper coincides with a BBC report of macaques teaching flossing to their youngs (well, more accurately, taking ...
Noga Arikha at Google
Invited at Google, Noga Arikha gave a talk that dwelt on the history of Humors Theory, and more generally on the way mind and body may or may not fit together in today's medicalized world [1]. Enjoy ! (see also Noga's posts on our blog)
[1] "Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours | Noga ...
The interpretand
This is the second installment of a series of posts on a cognitive approach to interpretive traditions. The aim of this series is a general framework for the analysis of interpretive traditions.
When I began to study the use of the Bible at Creekside Baptist Church, I tried to proceed systematic...
How I found glaring errors in Einstein’s calculations
Call me radical, call me a maverick. Rather than slavishly swallowing the scientific orthodoxy from establishment textbooks, I decided to go back to the original papers. I have identified several embarassing errors of mathematics and physical reasoning in Einstein’s original 1905 paper on the ...