A particular culture is associated with a particular community, and thus has a social dimension. But how does culture operate and how is it to be defined? Is it to be taken as the behavioral repertoire of members of that community, as the products of their behavior, or as the shared mental content that produces the behavior? Is it to be viewed as a coherent whole or only a collection of disparate parts? Culture is shared, but how totally? How is culture learned and maintained over time, and how does it change?
In Meaning and Significance in Human Engagement, Kronenfeld adopts...

At the end of the 1970s, Chinese merchandise moved to Brazil via Paraguay, forming an on-the-margins-of-the-law trade chain involving the production, distribution, and consumption of cheap goods. Economic changes in the 21^st century, including the enforcement of intellectual property rights and the growing importance of emerging economies, have had a dramatic effect on how this chain works, criminalizing and dismantling a trade system that had previously functioned in an organized form and stimulated the circulation of goods, money, and people at transnational...

The dominance of 'illness narratives' in narrative healing studies has tended to mean that the focus centres around the healing of the individual. Meza proposes that this emphasis is misplaced and the true focus of cultural healing should lie in managing the disruption of disease and death (cultural or biological) to the individual's relationship with society. By explicating narrative theory through the lens of cognitive anthropology, Meza re-frames the epistemology of narrative & healing, moving it from relativism to a philosophical perspective of pragmatic realism.

Using a novel...

In much of the discourse on stress, distress and resilience (SDR) in the US Marine Corps there is the recognition that the social somehow plays a role in the development of stress and distress. However, these arguments are most often grounded in the same fundamental and largely unchallenged assumption that stress and distress are essentially the result of brain functions. Even in the literature that focuses on the social implications of combat, stress and distress are most often conceived as traumatic damage to the psychology and mind of soldiers, and not as personal and socio-cultural...