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Cultural Repertoire (cultural + repertoire)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences83%

Selected Abstracts

Finding Meaning in First Episode Psychosis: Experience, Agency, and the Cultural Repertoire

MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2004
JOHN AGGERGAARD LARSEN
The article examines individuals' attempts to generate meaning following their experiences with psychosis. The inquiry is based on a person-centered ethnographic study of a Danish mental health community program for early intervention in schizophrenia and involves longitudinal interviews with 15 of its participants. The article takes an existential anthropological perspective emphasizing agency and cultural phenomenology to investigate how individuals draw on resources from the cultural repertoire to make sense of personally disturbing experiences during their psychosis. It is suggested that the concept of "system of explanation" has advantages over, for example, "illness narrative" and "explanatory model" when demonstrating how some individuals engage in the creative analytic and theory-building work of bricolage, selecting, adding, and combining various systems of explanation. Delusions are equally derived from the cultural repertoire but are constructed as dogmatic explanations that are idiosyncratic to the individual who holds them. [source]

Is culture a golden barrier between human and chimpanzee?

EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2003
Christophe Boesch
Abstract Culture pervades much of human existence. Its significance to human social interaction and cognitive development has convinced some researchers that the phenomenon and its underlying mechanisms represent a defining criterion for humankind. However, care should be taken not to make hasty conclusions in light of the growing number of observations on the cultural abilities of different species, ranging from chimpanzees and orangutans to whales and dolphins. The present review concentrates on wild chimpanzees and shows that they all possess an extensive cultural repertoire. In the light of what we know from humans, I evaluate the importance of social learning leading to acquisition of cultural traits, as well as of collective meaning of communicative traits. Taking into account cross-cultural variations in humans, I argue that the cultural abilities we observe in wild chimpanzees present a broad level of similarity between the two species. [source]

Finding Meaning in First Episode Psychosis: Experience, Agency, and the Cultural Repertoire

MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2004
JOHN AGGERGAARD LARSEN
The article examines individuals' attempts to generate meaning following their experiences with psychosis. The inquiry is based on a person-centered ethnographic study of a Danish mental health community program for early intervention in schizophrenia and involves longitudinal interviews with 15 of its participants. The article takes an existential anthropological perspective emphasizing agency and cultural phenomenology to investigate how individuals draw on resources from the cultural repertoire to make sense of personally disturbing experiences during their psychosis. It is suggested that the concept of "system of explanation" has advantages over, for example, "illness narrative" and "explanatory model" when demonstrating how some individuals engage in the creative analytic and theory-building work of bricolage, selecting, adding, and combining various systems of explanation. Delusions are equally derived from the cultural repertoire but are constructed as dogmatic explanations that are idiosyncratic to the individual who holds them. [source]

Producing Absolute Truth: CSI Science as Wishful Thinking

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 1 2010
Corinna Kruse
ABSTRACT, Forensic science has come to be assigned an important role in contemporary crime fiction. In this article, I analyze the cultural repertoire of forensic science conveyed by the popular television show Crime Scene Investigation (CSI). I argue that CSI science, in delivering an absolute "truth" about how and by whom crimes have been committed, is equated with justice, effectively superseding nonfictional forensic science as well as nonfictional judicature as a whole. Thus, CSI as a cultural performance adds to the mediascape a repertoire of wishful-thinking science with which to think about perceptions of and desires for crime and justice in nonfictional society. This repertoire seems to be considered relevant enough to nonfictional society to cause concern about the judicial system, as expressed in discussions of the so-called "CSI effect." [source]

Local attachments and transnational everyday lives: second-generation Italians in Switzerland

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 3 2010
SUSANNE WESSENDORF
Abstract Many descendants of migrants grow up in the context of lively transnational social relations to their parents' homeland. Among southern Italian migrants in Switzerland, these relations are imbued with the wish to return among the first generation, a dream fostered since the beginning of their migration after the Second World War. Second-generation Italians have developed different ways of negotiating the transnational livelihoods fostered by their parents on the one hand, and the wish for local attachments on the other. In this article I discuss how the children of Italian migrants have created their own cultural repertoires of Italianità and belonging within Switzerland and with co-ethnic peers, and how, for some, this sense of belonging evokes the wish for ,roots migration', the relocation to the parents' homeland. With the example of two trajectories of local attachment and transnationalism among members of the second generation of the same origin, I question existing work on the second generation that assumes commonalities among them on the grounds of ethnicity and region of origin. [source]

Tribal synthesis: Piros, Mansos, and Tiwas through history

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 2 2006
Howard Campbell
This article critically examines recent anthropological theorizing about indigenous tribalism using ethnographic and historical data on the Piro-Manso-Tiwa Indian tribe of New Mexico. Debates about constructionism, neo-tribal capitalism, and proprietary approaches to culture provide valuable insights into recent indigenous cultural claims and political struggles, but also have serious limitations. The approach taken in the article, ,tribal synthesis', emphasizes process, agency, interdependence, and changing political and cultural repertoires of native peoples who seek survival amidst political domination and internal conflict. Such an approach can apply the best of recent critical theory in an advocacy anthropology that supports indigenous struggles. [source]