What is the nature of the social sciences? What kinds of knowledge can they-and should they-hope to create? Are objective viewpoints possible and can universal laws be discovered? Questions like these have been asked with increasing urgency in recent years, as some philosophers and researchers have perceived a "crisis" in the social sciences. "Metatheory in Social Science" offers many provocative arguments and analyses of basic conceptual frameworks for the study of human behavior. These are offered primarily by practicing researchers and are related to problems in disciplines as diverse as...
What is the nature of the social sciences? What kinds of knowledge can they-and should they-hope to create? Are objective viewpoints possible and can ...
Studies of human development have taken an ethnographic turn in the 1990s. In this volume, leading anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists discuss how qualitative methodologies have strengthened our understanding of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral development, and of the difficulties of growing up in contemporary society. Part 1, informed by a post-positivist philosophy of science, argues for the validity of ethnographic knowledge. Part 2 examines a range of qualitative methods, from participant observation to the hermeneutic elaboration of texts. In Part 3, ethnographic...
Studies of human development have taken an ethnographic turn in the 1990s. In this volume, leading anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists di...
Many of us believe we recognize the symptoms of middle age: lower back pain, mortgages, and an aversion to loud late-night activities. This particular construction of midlife, most often rendered in chronological, biological, and medical terms, has become an accepted reality to European-Americans and has recently spread to such non-Western capitals as Tokyo and New Delhi. "Welcome to Middle Age (And Other Cultural Fictions)" explores the significance of this pervasive cultural representation alongside the alternative "fictions" that represent the life course in other regions of the world...
Many of us believe we recognize the symptoms of middle age: lower back pain, mortgages, and an aversion to loud late-night activities. This particular...
Clifford Geertz is the most influential American anthropologist of the past four decades. His writings have defined and given character to the intellectual agenda of a meaning-centered, nonreductive interpretive social science and have provoked much excitement and debate about the nature of human understanding. As part of the American Anthropological Association's centennial celebration, the executive board sponsored a presidential session honoring Geertz. "Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues" compiles the twelve speeches given then by a distinguished panel of social scientists along with a...
Clifford Geertz is the most influential American anthropologist of the past four decades. His writings have defined and given character to the intelle...
The relationship between everyday experience and culture - seen as a set of ideas, values, or symbolic codes - has challenged social scientists and especially anthropologists, for more than a century. As a comprehensive and critical account of knowledge and research in the field of culture theory, leading social scientists explore the implications for understanding different aspects of subjective experience, social practice, and individual behavior. The focus of the volume is on the role of symbols and meaning in the development of mind, self, and emotion. They examine the content of culture...
The relationship between everyday experience and culture - seen as a set of ideas, values, or symbolic codes - has challenged social scientists and es...
This collection of essays from leading scholars in anthropology, psychology, and linguistics is an outgrowth of the internationally known "Chicago Symposia on Culture and Human Development." It raises the idea of a new discipline of cultural psychology through the study of the relationship between psyche and culture, subject and object, person and world, with special reference to core areas of human development: cognition, learning, self, personality dynamics, and gender. The essays critically examine such questions as: Is there an intrinsic psychic unity to humankind? Can cultural traditions...
This collection of essays from leading scholars in anthropology, psychology, and linguistics is an outgrowth of the internationally known "Chicago Sym...
Why do American children sleep alone instead of with their parents? Why do middle-aged Western women yearn for their youth, while young wives in India look forward to being middle-aged? In these provocative essays, one of the most brilliant advocates of cultural psychology reminds us that cultural differences in mental life lie at the heart of any understanding of the human condition.
Drawing on ethnographic studies of the distinctive modes of psychological functioning in communities around the world, Richard Shweder explores ethnic and cultural differences in ideals of gender, in...
Why do American children sleep alone instead of with their parents? Why do middle-aged Western women yearn for their youth, while young wives in In...
A discipline is emerging called cultural psychology; it will serve as a force of renewal for both anthropology and psychology. In this book Richard Shweder presents its manifesto. Its central theme is that we have to understand the way persons, cultures, and natures make each other up. Its goal is to seek the mind indissociably embedded in the meanings and resonances that are both its product and its components.
Over the past thirty years the person as a category has disappeared from ethnography. Shweder aims to reverse this trend, focusing on the search for meaning and the creation...
A discipline is emerging called cultural psychology; it will serve as a force of renewal for both anthropology and psychology. In this book Richard...
The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion offers both parents and professionals access to the best scholarship from all areas of child studies in a remarkable one-volume reference.
Bringing together contemporary research on children and childhood from pediatrics, child psychology, childhood studies, education, sociology, history, law, anthropology, and other related areas, The Child contains more than 500 articles--all written by experts in their fields and overseen by a panel of distinguished editors led by anthropologist Richard A. Shweder. Each entry provides a concise...
The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion offers both parents and professionals access to the best scholarship from all areas of child studies in...
