Social Anthropology Lectures

Sociocultural Psychology Presentation - Dave Neale

Teaching - Lectures

This is the presentation that accompanied Dave's excellent presentation, which followed the last of the belief lectures this morning. Dave traced the development of psychological thought about the effect of culture on cognition from Vygotsky on, before considering what the relation of sociocultural psychology and cognitive anthropology ought to be.

Attachments:

File	Description	File size
Sociocultural Psychology	Presentation by Dave Neale	105 Kb

Anthropology of Belief 2: Ethnography of Belief

Teaching - Lectures

In this final lecture, we looked at exceptionalist and ethnographic approaches to belief.

Exceptionalist Approaches: After considering Needham's arguments in more detail, we looked at Malcolm Ruel's arguments in 'Christians as Believers'. Ruel argued that the meaning of 'belief' has changed radically through the history of Christianity, identifying 4 distinct stages. If we acknowledge the historicity of the Christian roots of the English term 'belief', he concluded, we must avoid trying to apply it to other contexts as if it were a universal.

Ethnographic approaches: Beginning with Asad's call to pay attention to the role of power in creating the conditions of possibility of historical forms of belief, we looked in detail at Veyne's description of different modalities of belief, corresponding as he saw it to different regimes or programmes of truth, in the context of classical myth.

Finally, I thought out the consequences of the ethnographic approach to belief by applying it to the context of Buddhism in Inner Mongolia, northern China.

Attachments:

File	Description	File size
Anthropology of Belief - Lecture 2 - Presentation	Anthropology of Belief 2: Ethnographic Approaches to Beliefs	658 Kb
Anthropology of Belief - Lecture 2 - Handout	Anthropology of Belief 2: Ethnographic Approaches to Beliefs	83 Kb

Anthropology of Belief 1: The Problem of Belief

Teaching - Lectures

In this, the first of two lectures on belief in anthropology, we looked at the standard model of belief in anthropology, considered empirical problems that ethnographic work has raised, and considered three categories of solution to the failure of the standard model. These categories were:

1. Universalist solutions - which seek to preserve the idea that belief is a universal capacity by refining the standard model in the light of evidence that contradicts it.
2. Particularist solutions - which claim that the concept of belief is too rooted in a particular culture (Western, or English-Language, or Euro-American, or Christian, etc.) to be useful in broader comparisons, or in describing other contexts.
3. Ethnographic solutions - which see belief as an always-situated practice, which therefore needs to be studied historically and ethnographically.

These categories need not be exclusive.

We finished the lecture by looking in more detail at universalist approaches to belief.

Attachments:

File	Description	File size
Anthropology of Belief - Lecture 1 - Presentation	Anthropology of Belief 1: The Problem of Belief	211 Kb
Anthropology of Belief - Lecture 1 - Handout	Anthropology of Belief 1: The Problem of Belief	78 Kb

Cognitive Anthropology 3: Cognitive Anthropology of Religion

Teaching - Lectures

This week's lecture looked at the ways in which cognitive anthropologists have tried to explain the distribution and content of religious ideas in terms of human cognition. I ran briefly through the main theories, and focused on two: MCIs (minimally counterintuitive ideas) as proposed by Pascal Boyer, and the combination of Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device and the Theory of Mind Module proposed by cognitive anthropologists such as Stuart Guthrie and Justin Barrett.

After looking at some of the main criticisms of cognitive anthropology, especially Laidlaw's point that cognitive explanations are simply not relevant, I introduced 'adis' a spiritual fluid from Inner Mongolia, and considered the ways in which seeing it as an intuitive concept might affect ethnographic questions and descriptions.

Next week Anthropology of Belief...

Attachments:

File	Description	File size
Lecture 3 - Handout	Cognitive Anthropology 3: Cognitive Anthropology of Religion	82 Kb
Lecture 3 - Presentation	Cognitive Anthropology 3: Cognitive Anthropology of Religion	4152 Kb