Distributed Cognition--Cognitive Anthropology
What is it about?
“Culture” is a system of collective — differentially distributed — cognitive structures. It is flexibly and variably applied, differentially shared distributed pragmatic knowledge. Culture is constitutive of society and vice versa. Culture includes multple sub-cultures (based on default hierarchies of content), each tied to matching social entities. Prototype-extension provides the basis of the application of shared concepts to the experienced and imagined world. Types of cultural knowledge systems (including cultural modes of thought, cultural conceptual systems, and cultural models of action) are described. Two concrete examples are offered: Old and Middle English watercourses, and alternative Fanti kinship terminological systems.
Why is it important?
It is a systemic view that explain our flexible use of culture in our everyday lives--including what makes our speech and actions comprehensible and interpretable to those around us. Culture's tools can be used to enable cooperation and coordination or to misrepresent and lie--and to avoid interaction. It addresses our learning of culture and how the system of defaults enables us to keep its content in our heads.