Professor M Bloch, A608, Dr R Astuti, A614, Professor C Stafford, A601

This course is compulsory for MSc Anthropology of Learning and Cognition, and is optional for MSc Anthropology and Development, MSc Social Anthropology and MSc Biomedicine, Bioscience and Society.

The course will focus on the relationship between mechanisms of cultural transmission, both informal and institutional, and what anthropologists have called ‘culture’ and ‘society’. We shall look at the way universal human capabilities develop and are used during different stages of life to create unique cultural understandings. We shall then examine how these understandings enable us to interact in specific ways with others.

Topics covered include schemas, memory, ‘theory of mind’, informal and formal education, emotions, expertise, and the nature of different types of beliefs. We shall consider how themes of this kind – elaborated in cognitive anthropology and in cognitive science more generally – lead to a reconsideration of classic anthropological concerns, including kinship, religion, politics and economics.

Lectures (20 in all) weekly MT, LT, Seminars (20 in all) weekly MT, LT.

B Shore, Culture in Mind; M Cole, Cultural Psychology; R D’Andrade, The Development of Cognitive Anthropology; D Holland & N Quinn, Cultural Models in Language and Thought; E Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild; J Lave, Cognition in Practice; M Bloch, How We Think They Think; D Sperber, Explaining Culture; P Boyer, Religion explained; R Astuti, G Solomon & S Carey, Constraints on Conceptual Development; M Tomasello The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition.

There is a three-hour examination in the ST.