Explaining Culture by Dan Sperber
A Naturalistic Approach
This work advances a naturalistic account of culture as the distribution and transformation of mental and public representations shaped by human cognitive capacities and environmental contexts. It rejects holistic or purely symbolic explanations, proposing an “epidemiology of representations” to explain how ideas spread, stabilize, and change through recurrent cognitive biases and cultural attractors. By integrating insights from cognitive science and anthropology, it reframes traditions, norms, and symbols as outcomes of many small inferential processes rather than autonomous collective entities.
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- Published
- 1996
- Nationality
- British
- Length
- Short
- Pages
- 176-192
- Original Language
- French
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- Alternate Titles
- - La contagion des idées
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