Disciplining Culture: A Sociocognitive Approach

Abstract

Anthropology has an ambivalent relationship with its core disciplinary concept: culture. Beyond the rather vague but important notion that culture is shared and learned, there is little agreement about how to define and identify something as culture(al). In order to move beyond the “mush stage” of defining culture, we offer a disciplinary framework for considering how culture can be a collective that is individually held and used. Our emphasis is predominantly on the shared aspect of culture and the sociocognitive mechanisms that allow us to know something is shared and how this second- order knowing frames our actions. We posit that while culture does not actually exist, humans nonetheless take it to exist. We rely on researchers from anthropology, cognitive sciences, and sociology to show how culture can possess a causal force even though as a collective symbol system it has no agency in itself. We furthermore propose that cultural models are potentially the basic units of culture.