The Split Brain and the Culture-and-Cognition Paradox

Paredes, J. Anthony; Hepburn, Marcus J.

doi:10.1086/201676

Cited by 62 publications

(19 citation statements)

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“…On the surface, the present Aboriginal‐Australian/Euro‐Australian, patterned‐cyclical‐time/linear‐time model appears to exhibit what Paredes and Hepburn (1976) have referred to as “the culture‐and‐cognition paradox.” This putative paradox refers to two theoretical presuppositions that appear to anthropologists to be contradictory. On the one hand, they have been able to find radical differences in thought processes between members of modern and pre‐literate societies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Text and Temporality: Patterned‐Cyclical and Ordinary‐Linear Forms of Time‐Consciousness, Inferred from a Corpus of Australian Aboriginal and Euro‐Australian Life‐Historical Interviews

TenHouten

1999

Symbolic Interaction

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It is argued that autobiographical texts, such as life‐historical interviews, provide the richest possible source of information about a person's temporality and a culture's historical past. It is proposed that time‐consciousness can be inferred from such texts. To this end, ethnographic and other studies of Australian Aboriginal time‐consciousness were used to construct a seven‐part model of patterned‐cyclical time‐consciousness. Turning these seven attributes of patterned‐cyclical time‐consciousness into their opposites yields seven features of one‐dimensional, ordinary‐linear time‐consciousness, thereby establishing a structured temporal polarity. A lexical‐level, content‐analytic methodology, Neurocognitive Hierarchical Categorization Analysis (NHCA), is introduced, in which folk‐concepts of time from Roget's International Thesaurus were used to construct wordlist indicators for 9 of the 14 definitional components. Then, using NHCA for a comparative analysis of texts consisting of life‐historical interviews, earlier results of an empirical study were briefly re‐presented. Australian Aborigines, compared to Euro‐Australian controls, used a significantly smaller proportion of words for an index of ordinary‐linear time but a higher proportion of words for an index of patterned‐cyclical time, indicating a time‐consciousness that is primarily patterned‐cyclical rather than linear. Females were less linear and more patterned‐cyclical than males in both cultures. These cross‐cultural results contribute predictive validity to the proposed polarity of time‐consciousness. Implications for the culture‐and‐cognition paradox and its resolution in dual‐brain theory are addressed.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Text and Temporality: Patterned‐Cyclical and Ordinary‐Linear Forms of Time‐Consciousness, Inferred from a Corpus of Australian Aboriginal and Euro‐Australian Life‐Historical Interviews

TenHouten

1999

Symbolic Interaction

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“…Neurosociologic theory has been discussed and extended in a number of publications (Hepburn, 1977;Kaplan, 1977;Paredes, 1977;Paredes & Hepburn, 1976;TenHouten, 1976TenHouten, , 1977Thompson & Bogen, 1976). These have almost exclusively centred around discussions of anthropological data and cultural variations in behaviour patterns.…”

Section: The Concept Of Hemisphericitymentioning

confidence: 99%

How Many Brains for How Many Minds? Hemisphericity and education

Beaumont

1983

Educational Psychology

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“…Clinicians, social planners, and psychologists themselves find very little of value in the research that psychologists do (41, p. 191; 55, p. 408; 106, p. 141). Even the elegant and convincing work of Piaget has been very hard to evaluate, largely because of the problematic nature of the relationship between language and thought (see 46,83,85). One result of this has been an increasing distance between what William James used to call "tough-minded" and "tender-minded" approaches to psychology.…”

Section: The Climate Of Psychological Thoughtmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another set of revealing findings comes from neurophysiology. There is now a large body of literature (see 83,85,97) demonstrating that the cognitive functions of the two cerebral hemi spheres tend to differ, especially in right-handed people. Thinking in the right hemisphere tends to be well suited for the solution of spatial, kinesthetic, and musical tasks, whereas verbal analytic tasks tend to be the specialty of the left hemisphere.…”

Section: Symbols Thought and Social Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychological Anthropology

Kiefer¹

1977

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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Applying the term "psychological anthropology" to a special subfi eld of ethnology used to make more sense than it does now. To be sure, there has always been a liberal amount of psychological thinking-either implicit or explicit-throughout the theo retical literature on the evolution and nature of man, but most ethnologists used to hope they could identify biological, ecological, and cultural laws that operated-or that could be studied-independently of the workings of the human mind. This hope has faded for most of us in the last decade or two, due especially in the United States to large-scale government support of our science.One reason for this trend has been the necessity-imposed by granting agency standards-of a clearer sense of problem. Whether we are interested in technology or in religion, we are required to anticipate the questions of interdisciplinary review committees about "overlooked variables." Since psychologists greatly outnumber anthropologists on most committees (as in the universe), there are almost certain to be some questions about psychology. Another reason has been our very obvious failure to develop a predictive science of man of the sort that public sponsors would like ideally to see. Rather than reject the possibility of a predictive science, and rather than scrap our theories altogether, we are tempted to look for complications at the level of psychology that might indicate where we have missed the mark. If, for example, we fi nd that some individuals and communities are greatly upset and disorganized by rapid social change, and others of the same cultural type are not, we become more curious about cognitive, situational, and personality variables (cf 20, 62, 93). Whether or not this is the most productive direction for anthropology to take, it has the happy result of generating a great many researchable questions.At any rate, we have been thrown into competition with psychologists and sociol ogists for research funds, and have had to become much more self conscious about our methods. We have seen how difficult it is to get two or more subjects, or two or more observers, to agree on a description of anything, much less an interpretation of it (cf 13,69). We have become more aware that observing and participating are themselves very complex and poorly understood processes of perception, thinking 103 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1977.6:103-119. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by Michigan State University Library on 02/04/15. For personal use only.Quick links to online content Further ANNUAL REVIEWS

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The Split Brain and the Culture-and-Cognition Paradox

Cited by 62 publications

References 0 publications

Text and Temporality: Patterned‐Cyclical and Ordinary‐Linear Forms of Time‐Consciousness, Inferred from a Corpus of Australian Aboriginal and Euro‐Australian Life‐Historical Interviews

Text and Temporality: Patterned‐Cyclical and Ordinary‐Linear Forms of Time‐Consciousness, Inferred from a Corpus of Australian Aboriginal and Euro‐Australian Life‐Historical Interviews

How Many Brains for How Many Minds? Hemisphericity and education

Psychological Anthropology

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