Implicit Culture and the Insane Clown Posse Stance

In a recent article published online first in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, I attempt to sort out the (various) distinction(s) cultural analysts aim to track when they use the term implicit culture (and, by implication, explicit culture). The article is partly based on reflections developed previously in …

Schematic Narrative Templates in Collective Remembering: The Case of Russia

James V. Wertsch introduced the concept of schematic narrative template in his book Voices of Collective Remembering published twenty years ago. The book provides a thorough theoretical discussion on collective remembering and an account of the continuities and discontinuities between the Soviet and post-Soviet collective memory in Russia. In this …

Cognitive Artifacts, Affordances, and External Representations: Implications for Cognitive Sociology

We use all kinds of artifacts in our everyday life to accomplish different types of cognitive tasks. We write scientific articles and blog posts by using word-processing programs. We prepare to-do lists to organize work tasks, and those of us who engage in statistical or computational analysis of data use …

A Finer Grained Taxonomy of Artifactual (Cultural) Kinds

In a previous post, I reviewed a taxonomy of cultural kinds proposed by Richard Heersmink. Under this classification, there are four families of artifacts: Embodied, perceptual, cognitive, and affective. Perceptual artifacts in their turn could be classified into three distinct “genera”: Corrective, enhancing, or substitutive, depending on the way they …

A Taxonomy of Artifactual (Cultural) Kinds

In previous posts, I made a broad distinction between the two “families” of cultural kinds. This distinction was based on the way they fundamentally interact with people. Some cultural kinds do their work because they can be learned or internalized by people. Other cultural kinds do their work not because …

Back to Top