Cognition in and Out of the Mind

This edited collection seeks to present a new, well-defined agenda for the role of anthropology in cognitive science and the role of cognitive science in anthropology.Since much of culture is knowledge situated in human minds, an understanding of the working of the mind is necessary to understand culture and symmetrically, an understanding of the work of culture is necessary to understand how the mind works. Anthropology is one of the six founding constituent disciplines of cognitive science. However, its role in cognitive science is presently marginal. A goal of this edited volume is to re-establish our position as important players in the world of cognitive science since, ultimately, without the mental production of shared knowledge, goals and desires human social life and our species would cease to exist. The anthropological connection to culture and cognition should be of central importance to developments in cognitive science.  This edited volume shows how anthropology can find a niche and play a vital role in the cognitive sciences. We propose that the base of the nice depends on cultural model theory and methods that accompany it.The contributors include both distinguished senior scholars and new voices, across anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, philosophy, and cognitive science. Despite this breadth, contributors do share a common core of beliefs and goals: that of biological and human (cultural and linguistic) evolution/s; the importance of local histories and their ontological particulars, that processes of socio-cultural and technological change and the cognitive processes for encoding and storing the effects of those changes are interactive processes that we can study; and that cultural models are the key mental constructs by which we understand and interact with the world. Advancing the momentum established by foundational work in this area, this volume contributes both to anthropology, which needs a robust theory of social sharing and transmission (Bender et al. 2010), and to cognitive science, which needs to pay greater attention to cultural and linguistic variation (Levinson, 2012).  Linguists, cognitive scientists, anthropologists and other social scientists, as well as interested laypersons and students will come away with a deeper understanding of the importance of culture and an appreciation of how the sharedness of culture can bond us all together across relative cultural differences and (mis)perceived divisions.