Why are Romanian cars and real estate priced in euros? A particular case of Thiers’ Law
In contemporary Romania, the prices of real estate (sale or rent) and cars are expressed in euros, even though most transactions involve lei (singular leu, the national currency). Sometimes wages and contracts are also settled in euros, and people often think of how much they are earning in euros despite the fact that actual payments are in the national currency. Why is that?
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Notes on relevance theory
Edited by by Kate Scott, Billy Clark, and Robyn Carston, Relevance, Pragmatics and Interpretation (Cambridge UP 2019), is both a collection of outstanding essays* exemplifying current directions of research inspired by relevance theory and a tribute to Deirdre Wilson. Asked to contribute a chapter, I wrote a short and rather personal piece, which, I thought, would make for a appropriate blog post. Here it is.
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‘It’s like you disappear’ – Fleabag’s Attentional Conflicts
In his book Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age that has been extensively discussed on these pages, Alberto Acerbi asks how the diffusion of digital media might influence the dissemination and success of cultural traits, and how this in turn affects cultural transmission. The quality and modes of human attention might be considered a case in point. How we allocate attention, and what modes of attention we have at our disposal, are under transformation under the influence of changes in the media we use, and this in turn is reflected by cultural objects. In this blog, distraction-conflict theory helps explain how an acclaimed television series dramatizes attentional conflict and probes the implications of a contemporary phenomenon that many of us are afflicted by: being constantly suspended between two places.
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Public Relations Failures by Russian State Officials: A Botched Cultural Transmission?
“Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age” Book Club General Discussion
Join the discussion of our Book Club here!
You will find on the Book Club page: the précis of the book by Alberto Acerbi, commentaries by Alex Mesoudi, Hugo Mercier, Mathieu Charbonneau, Olivier Morin, Pascal Boyer, Sacha Altay and Tiffany Morisseau, and finally Alberto's response to the commentaries. The general discussion starts today and will continue until July 12th. Everyone is welcome to join.
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Comments are moderated and may only appear after a short delay. For any practical question, send an email to: tiffany@cognitionandculture.net.
...Alberto Acerbi’s response: There is much work to do
It was a great pleasure having a book club dedicated to Cultural evolution in the digital age. Writing a book feels like a long and solitary experience and it is comforting that, when done, it may result in such productive exchanges. Thus, first of all, I want to thank the organisers, Tiffany Morisseau and Dan Sperber, and all the participants for their commentaries: kind, sometimes even flattering, but always perceptive and stimulating. I organised my reply around three macro-themes that emerged in the book club: the role of producers of cultural traits, the features of specifically digital cultural transmission, and a discussion on some more foundational issues in cultural evolution, namely the importance of faithful transmission for cumulative culture and our reliance on social information.
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