As mentioned in my previous post, this term I’m running a special course on the topic of culture and cognition, for six of the students in my Culture, Language and Cognition course from last term, all of whom were highly successful and, because I’m advising them in one way or another, are highly motivated to do some more work in this field. I’m running this as a joint directed study – it looks like a seminar, and acts like a seminar, but keeping it ‘directed’ allows me to schedule it and manage enrollment more effectively. I’m calling it ‘Anthro X’ as a conscious homage to the late physicist Richard Feynman, and his ‘Physics X’ informal seminars at Caltech. Last term’s course was skewed a little towards ‘cognitive anthropology’ construed narrowly, within the American tradition outlined by Roy D’Andrade in his The development of cognitive anthropology (1995). This sort of work is obviously important, but hardly scratches the surface of the broader subject of ‘culture and cognition’ (across anthropological subfields and related disciplines). It’s that broader field where I position my own work on number and numeracy, and thus, where I decided to go in this new course. I chose recent book-length works, all from the past ten years, and a heavy skew towards the past two years. Partly that’s because these particular students already have a broad reading background in the older material, so are more than ready for contemporary stuff. Partly it’s because they’ll be writing book reviews, which they’ll be posting here in the weeks to come. Partly it’s because I haven’t read half this stuff myself, and assigning it to students provides me a good incentive to do so. Anyway, here’s the planned reading list – comments and questions are welcome!Bloch, Maurice. 2012. Anthropology and the cognitive challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.C
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 05:31:09 +0000
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