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Cultural Models (cultural + models)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	84%
3 Other Domains	16%

Selected Abstracts

Cultural Models and Metaphors for Marriage: An Analysis of Discourse at Japanese Wedding Receptions

ETHOS, Issue 3 2004
CYNTHIA DICKEL DUNN
This article uses metaphor analysis to delineate the cultural model of marriage expressed in speeches at Japanese wedding receptions. Wedding speakers used three main metaphors for talking about marriage: marriage as a joint creation, marriage as a physical union, and marriage as a journey. These metaphors were used to express a number of themes including the concepts that marriage is a new beginning, requires joint effort and cooperation, is ideally a lasting union, and involves love, trust, and emotional unity. A comparison with earlier studies of U.S. discourse reveals that people in Japan and the United States share many of the same metaphors and ideas about marriage, but differ in their understanding of the "work" required in marriage. Whereas people in the United States talk of the need to "work on" the relationship, particularly through open communication of needs and emotions, speakers at Japanese weddings emphasized the couple "working together" and emotional unity was presented as a part of that cooperation rather than an end in itself. [source]

Cultural Models and Fertility Timing among Cherokee and White Youth in Appalachia: Beyond the Mode

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 4 2009
Ryan A. Brown
ABSTRACT Much anthropological research and theory concerns how group differences in behavior, subjective experience, and ways of seeing the world (i.e., cultural differences) are created and maintained. Both within and outside the United States, there are dramatic group differences in fertility. In the United States, American Indian groups exhibit some of the highest and earliest fertility. We used ethnographic data as well as structured card-sort and questionnaire data to compare cultural models of childbearing among Cherokee and white youth in Appalachia. The critical difference between Cherokee and white youth was not a modal difference in ideal ages for first childbirth but, rather, the degree of latitude for the timing of having children vis-à-vis other major life events. Group differences in modal norms are often posited as the critical axis of group distinction. In many cases, group differences in the intrapopulation variability among multiple norms may play a more critical role. [source]

Cultural Models and Cultural Consensus of Chesapeake Bay Blue Crab and Oyster Fisheries

ANNALS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL PRACTICE, Issue 1 2007
Michael Paolisso
This article describes ongoing anthropological study of Chesapeake Bay fisheries. In particular, this article focuses on the blue crab and oyster fisheries. Two approaches to cultural analysis,cultural models and cultural consensus#8212;are described in terms of their application to these fisheries. The discussion summarizes each approach and provides brief examples of results each approach can produce. The article concludes with a few thoughts on the utility of this combined approach to cultural analysis for research on and management of Chesapeake Bay fisheries. [source]

Bridging Psychiatric and Anthropological Approaches: The Case of "Nerves" in the United States

ETHOS, Issue 3 2009
Britt Dahlberg
Psychiatrists and anthropologists have taken distinct analytic approaches when confronted with differences between emic and etic models for distress: psychiatrists have translated folk models into diagnostic categories whereas anthropologists have emphasized culture-specific meanings of illness. The rift between psychiatric and anthropological research keeps "individual disease" and "culture" disconnected and thus hinders the study of interrelationships between mental health and culture. In this article we bridge psychiatric and anthropological approaches by using cultural models to explore the experience of nerves among 27 older primary care patients from Baltimore, Maryland. We suggest that cultural models of distress arise in response to personal experiences, and in turn, shape those experiences. Shifting research from a focus on comparing content of emic and etic concepts, to examining how these social realities and concepts are coconstructed, may resolve epistemological and ontological debates surrounding differences between emic and etic concepts, and improve understanding of the interrelationships between culture and health. ["nerves," cultural models, metaphor, psychiatry, embodiment] [source]

Past Times: Temporal Structuring of History and Memory

ETHOS, Issue 2 2006
Kevin Birth
In On Collective Memory, Maurice Halbwachs asks, "Why does society establish landmarks in time that are placed close together,and usually in a very irregular manner, since for certain periods they are almost entirely lacking,whereas around such salient events sometimes many other equally salient events seem to gather, just as street signs and other signposts multiply as a tourist attraction approaches?" (1992:175). The recognition of the "irregular manner" of history and memory only emerges in contrast to a concept of the regularity of time implied by objectifying chronologies. Furthermore, such irregularity suggests that concepts of time other than chronology are crucial for understanding representations of the past, and experiences of the past in the present. This article draws on nondirected interviews conducted in rural Trinidad in which subjects discussed significant events in their lives. In examining this material, I address Halbwachs's question by emphasizing nonchronological, cultural models of time that organize autobiographical narratives. These cultural models position autobiographical narratives in space and connect them to events of historical significance. [time, memory, intersubjectivity, labor, Trinidad] [source]

What's Cultural about Biocultural Research?

ETHOS, Issue 1 2005
WILLIAM W. DRESSLER
Advances in biocultural research have been hampered by the lack of an explicit theory of culture. Culture can be viewed as a collection of cultural models of specific domains with empirically verifiable distributions within a social group. Individuals are variably able to approximate these models in their own beliefs and behavior, a concept referred to as "cultural consonance." Cultural consonance is hypothesized to be associated with psychophysiologic outcomes, including blood pressure and depressive symptoms. In this article, the cultural domain of family life in Brazil is used to illustrate both the concept and measurement of cultural consonance. It is associated with arterial blood pressure and depressive symptoms, controlling for covariates and other explanatory variables. This theoretical orientation can define more precisely the cultural in the biocultural. [source]

Towards a Socio-Cognitive Approach to Knowledge Transfer

JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT STUDIES, Issue 5 2008
Torsten Ringberg
abstract Dominant research streams in the knowledge transfer field, such as the positivist and social constructionist approaches, largely assume that knowledge transfer is accomplished through instructions and/or socially constructed practices. Underlying these views is the belief that texts and practices carry with them the codes necessary for their own decoding and therefore enable an unproblematic knowledge transfer. In contrast, we argue that the decoding of information into meaningful knowledge is always mediated by people's private and cultural models, which are created from the unique combination of their cognitive dispositions (i.e. acumen, memory, creativity, volitions, emotions) and socio-cultural interaction. The degree to which people apply these models reflectively and/or categorically (i.e. automatically) depends on the need for cognition as well as environmental demands and feedback. Therefore, knowledge transfer is always tentative, because it depends on the application of private and cultural models along the continuum that goes from reflective to categorical processing. We present first a critique of the positivist and social constructionist positions; then we introduce a socio-cognitive model that captures and explicates socio-cognitive processes involved in sense making during knowledge transfer. Finally, we explore future research streams and managerial implications. [source]

Cultural Models and Fertility Timing among Cherokee and White Youth in Appalachia: Beyond the Mode

Parenting and Cultures of Risk: A Comparative Analysis of Infidelity, Aggression, and Witchcraft

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 1 2007
ROBERT J. QUINLAN
Parenting behavior may respond flexibly to environmental risk to help prepare children for the environment they can expect to face as adults. In hazardous environments where child outcomes are unpredictable, unresponsive parenting could be adaptive. Child development associated with parenting practices, in turn, may influence cultural patterns related to insecurity and aggression (which we call the "risk-response model"). We test these propositions in a cross-cultural analysis. The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS) includes indicators of parental responsiveness: father,infant sleeping proximity, father involvement, parental response to infant crying, and breastfeeding duration (age at weaning). Unresponsive parenting was associated with cultural models including greater acceptance of extramarital sex, aggression, theft, and witchcraft. Socialization practices in later childhood were not better predictors of the outcomes than was earlier parenting. We conclude that some cultural adaptations appear rooted in parenting practices that affect child development. [source]

The Health Consequences of Cultural Consonance: Cultural Dimensions of Lifestyle, Social Support, and Arterial Blood Pressure in an African American Community

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 2 2000
William W. Dressler
Cultural dimensions of health and behavior have been difficult to study because of limited theoretical and methodological models linking the cultural, the individual, and the biological. We employ a cognitive theory of culture to understand culture and health in an African American community in the southern United States. First, cultural consensus analysis is used to test for shared cultural models of lifestyles and social supports within the community. Then, the theoretical and operational construct of "cultural consonance" is used to assess the degree to which individuals behave in a way consistent with cultural models. Findings indicate that cultural consonance in lifestyle and social support combine synergistically in association with blood pressure. These associations of cultural consonance and health are not altered by taking into account a variety of other variables, indicating an independent association of cultural dimensions of behavior with health status. Implications of these results for culture theory are discussed, [culture theory, culture consensus analysis, cultural consonance, African American community, arterial blood pressure] [source]

Suffering in a productive world: Chronic illness, visibility, and the space beyond agency

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 2 2010
M. CAMERON HAY
ABSTRACT Is coping with illness really a matter of agency? Drawing on ethnographic research among people with rheumatological and neurological chronic diseases in the United States, I argue that patients' coping strategies were informed by a cultural expectation of productivity that I call the "John Wayne Model," indexing disease as something to be worked through and controlled. People able to adopt a John Wayne,like approach experienced social approval. Yet some people found this cultural model impossible to utilize and experienced their lack of agency in the face of illness as increasing their suffering, which was made all the worse if their sickness was invisible to others. Unable to follow the culturally legitimated John Wayne model, people fell into what I call the "Cultured Response",the realm beyond the agency embedded in cultural models, in which people do not resist but embrace as ideal the cultural expectations they cannot meet and that oppress their sense of value in the world. [suffering, cultural models, agency, chronic illness, United States, cultural anthropology, medical anthropology] [source]

Learning models in different cultures

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR CHILD & ADOLESCENT DEVELOPMENT, Issue 96 2002
Jin Li
The beliefs about learning that different cultures have,that is, cultural models of learning,may influence the meanings children construct for learning and achievement. [source]

Antigone and Cassandra: Gender and Nationalism in German Literature

ORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 2 2000
Isabel Capeloa Gil
Stemming from an understanding of literature as a sub-text of culture, created through the circulation of social energies, this paper will discuss how the reception of the Antigone and Cassandra stories in German literature may help understand the nation-building process, particularly from Bismarck's "Grunderjahre" until 1990. Seen as female models in the Western tradition, Antigone and Cassandra derive their particular role in German literature, especially in the 20th century from the coming together of three factors: a sense of decay in the present which leads to the search for cultural models in the past, more specifically in Greek and Roman Antiquity; the "verspätete Nation" complex leading both to a cosmopolitan outlook on the nationality issue, as well as to an identity-reductive conception further represented by the "völkisch" ideology; and thirdly the ideological and utopian projection of the feminine as the "natural" representative of an alternative and purified existence. Since all identity is constructed across difference, this paper argues that Antigone and Cassandra function as gendered nation-building constructions and will show how in literary terms they were used to support and/or reject nationalist cohesion. [source]

Cultural consonance and adult body composition in urban Brazil

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY, Issue 1 2008
William W. Dressler
In previous research in Brazil, we found socioeconomic and gender differences in body mass and percent body fat, consistent with a model in which individuals in higher socioeconomic strata, especially women, could achieve a cultural ideal of body size and shape. In this article, using new data, we examine these processes more precisely using measures of cultural consonance. Cultural consonance refers to the degree to which individuals approximate, in their own beliefs and behaviors, the shared prototypes for belief and behavior encoded in cultural models. We have found higher cultural consonance in several domains to be associated with health outcomes. Furthermore, there tends to be a general consistency in cultural consonance across domains. Here we suggest that measures of body composition can be considered indicators of individuals' success in achieving cultural ideals of the body, and that cultural consonance in several domains will be associated with body composition. Using waist circumference as an outcome, smaller waist size was associated with higher cultural consonance in lifestyle (, = ,0.311, P < 0.01) and higher cultural consonance in the consumption of high prestige foods (, = ,0.260, P < 0.01) for women (n = 161), but not for men (n = 106), controlling for age, family income, tobacco use, and dietary intake of protein and carbohydrates. Similar results were obtained using the body mass index and weight as outcomes, while there were no associations with height. These results help to illuminate the cultural mediation of body composition. Am. J. Hum. Biol., 2008. © 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]

Local and Foreign Models of Reproduction in Nyanza Province, Kenya

POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, Issue 4 2000
Susan Cotts Watkins
This article uses colonial archival records, surveys conducted in the 1960s, and surveys and focus group discussions in the 1990s to describe three distinct but temporally overlapping cultural models of reproduction in a rural community in Kenya between the 1930s and the present. The first model, "large families are rich," was slowly undermined by developments brought about by the integration of Kenya into the British empire. This provoked the collective formulation of a second local model, "small families are progressive," which retained the same goal of wealth but viewed a smaller family as a better strategy for achieving it. The third model, introduced by the global networks of the international population movement in the 1960s, augmented the second model with the deliberate control of fertility using clinic provided methods of family planning. By the 1990s this global model had begun to be domesticated as local clinics routinely promoted family planning and as men and women in Nyanza began to use family planning and to tell others of their motivations and experiences. [source]

Worldwide access to evidence-based mental health literature: How useful is PubMed in Anglo-Saxon and non-Anglo-Saxon countries?

PSYCHIATRY AND CLINICAL NEUROSCIENCES, Issue 5 2005
MASSIMO MORLINO md
Abstract The aim of this study was to verify the presence of cultural variety among the psychiatric journals available on PubMed, the major online tool for accessing literature. Data for analysis were taken from a survey of the world psychiatric journals indexed in Index Medicus 1999 (IM), the alphabetical list used by PubMed, and from the mean impact factor (IF) values of the journals. Approximately 80% of international psychiatric literature available on PubMed is published in Anglo-Saxon countries, especially in the USA (59.8% of the total). The widespread use of the English language (94.9% of all the journals) further stresses the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon cultural model, as do the mean IF values of Anglo-Saxon journals compared to non-Anglo-Saxon publications (3.252 vs. 1.693; P = 0.0079). The under-representation of non-Anglo-Saxon cultural models on PubMed plays a negative role for bringing about a truly multicultural literature in psychiatry. [source]

The cosmopolitan imagination: critical cosmopolitanism and social theory

THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2006
Gerard Delanty
Abstract Critical cosmopolitanism is an emerging direction in social theory and reflects both an object of study and a distinctive methodological approach to the social world. It differs from normative political and moral accounts of cosmopolitanism as world polity or universalistic culture in its conception of cosmopolitanism as socially situated and as part of the self-constituting nature of the social world itself. It is an approach that shifts the emphasis to internal developmental processes within the social world rather than seeing globalization as the primary mechanism. This signals a post-universalistic kind of cosmopolitanism, which is not merely a condition of diversity but is articulated in cultural models of world openness through which societies undergo transformation. The cosmopolitan imagination is articulated in framing processes and cultural models by which the social world is constituted; it is therefore not reducible to concrete identities, but should be understood as a form of cultural contestation in which the logic of translation plays a central role. The cosmopolitan imagination can arise in any kind of society and at any time but it is integral to modernity, in so far as this is a condition of self-problematization, incompleteness and the awareness that certainty can never be established once and for all. As a methodologically grounded approach, critical cosmopolitan sociology has a very specific task: to discern or make sense of social transformation by identifying new or emergent social realities. [source]

Changing Places: Relatives and Relativism in Java

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 3 2002
Andrew Beatty
This article examines the social context of conceptual and moral relativism; more specifically, it explores links between religious orientation and experience in an ideologically plural setting. I argue that cultural models of ,changing places' serve to guide a number of Javanese practices: child,borrowing, gender,switching, language use, and even religious conversion. These models, formed in childhood experience, engender and express a relativism which is highly valued in rural Java. [source]