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A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning

SPA Publication No. 9
by Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
ISBN: 052159541X

Anthropologists must draw on modern psychological theories of cognition in order to understand how the shared schemas of a culture are learnt, and come to shape everyday actions and decisions. Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn review a range of current psychologic al theories of cultural meaning, many unfamiliar to anthropologists, and formulate a new approach which draws particularly on ‘connectionist’, or ‘neural network’, modelling This is illustrated by original research on understandings of marriage, and ideas of success, in the United States.

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