TY  - UNPB
ID  - cogprints404
UR  - http://cogprints.org/404/
A1  - Sperber, Dan
TI  - CONCEPTUAL TOOLS FOR A NATURAL SCIENCE OF SOCIETY AND CULTURE
Y1  - 1999///
N2  - This is the text of the Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthopology 1999 (To appear in the Proceedings of the British Academy). In it, I argue that to approach society and culture in a naturalistic way, the domain of the social sciences must be reconceptualised by recognising only entities and processes of which we have a naturalistic understanding. These are mental representations and public productions, the processes that causally link them, the causal chains that bond these links, and the complex webs of such causal chains that criss-cross human populations over time and space. Such causal chains may distribute and stabilise representations and productions throughout a human population, thereby generating culture. The lecture introduces several conceptual tools useful for such a naturalistic approach, and illustrates their use with the case study of ritual activity in a Southern Ethiopian household.
AV  - public
KW  - anthropology
KW  -  culture
KW  -  society
KW  -  naturalism
KW  -  divination
KW  -  phisolophy of the social sciences
KW  -  philosophy of the cognitive sciences
KW  -  cultural evolution
KW  -  cognition
KW  -  communication
KW  -  Ethiopia
KW  -  anthropological theory
KW  -  epidemiology of representations
KW  -  Radcliffe-Brown
ER  -

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