The results of a collaborative research project by the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine, this collection explores the role that scholars and universities play in shaping and defining culture, and how teaching and research institutions are changing in response to international movements and social forces. 7 photos.

We tend to assume that our map of the intellectual disciplines is valid cross-culturally. G. E. R. Lloyd challenges this in relation to eight main areas of human endeavour, namely philosophy, mathematics, history, medicine, art, law, religion, and science, by examining how the disciplines were conceived and developed in different times and places.

The importance of science and technology and future of education and research are just some of the subjects discussed here.

Argues that culture is perhaps the most important thing to know about people if one wants to make predictions about their behavior. The goal of this volume is to present a theoretically exhaustive integration of multidisciplinary approaches.

In this book J. M. Balkin offers a strikingly original theory of cultural evolution, a theory that explains shared understandings, disagreement, and diversity within cultures. Drawing on many fields of study--including anthropology, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, linguistics, sociology, political theory, philosophy, social psychology, and law--the author explores how cultures grow and spread, how shared understandings arise, and how people of different cultures can understand and evaluate each other's views. Cultural evolution occurs through the transmission of cultural information and know-how--cultural software--in human minds, Balkin says. Individuals embody cultural software and spread it to others through communication and social learning. Ideology, the author contends, is neither a special nor a pathological form of thought but an ordinary product of the evolution of cultural software. Because cultural understanding is a patchwork of older imperfect tools that are continually adapted to solve new problems, human understanding is partly adequate and partly inadequate to the pursuit of justice. Balkin presents numerous examples that illuminate the sources of ideological effects and their contributions to injustice. He also enters the current debate over multiculturalism, applying his theory to problems of mutual understanding between people who hold different worldviews. He argues that cultural understanding presupposes transcendent ideals and shows how both ideological analysis of others and ideological self-criticism are possible.

Die Reihe widmet sich zentralen neueren Konzepten und Methoden im Feld der kulturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagenforschung und inhaltlichen Fragestellungen. Sie zielt darauf, die gegenwärtige Diskussion in den Kulturwissenschaften weiter zu profilieren und sie zugleich für die Arbeit in den Disziplinen fruchtbar zu machen: durch die Ausarbeitung interdisziplinärer Schlüsselkonzepte und die Entwicklung einer transkulturellen study of culture. Die Bände gehen überwiegend aus den Literatur-, Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften hervor, aber auch aus der Politikwissenschaft, der Soziologie und den Medienwissenschaften.

Cultural anthropologists can be an intellectually adventurous crowd: open—even eager—to building bridges across disciplines in the name of understanding human behavior and the human experience more broadly. In this first-of-its-kind book, Caroline Brettell explores the cross-disciplinary conversations that have engaged cultural anthropologists both past and present. Brettell highlights a handful of conversations between the discipline of anthropology on the one hand and history, geography, literature, biology, psychology and demography on the other. She also pinpoints how these exchanges address three enduring issues of anthropological concern: the temporal and the spatial dimensions of human experience; the scientific and the humanistic dimensions of the anthropological enterprise; and the individual and the group/population as units of analysis in research. Anthropological Conversations offers detailed accounts of particular ethnographic methodologies and findings (and the theoretical trends informing them) as a means of grasping the big-picture issues. Brettell clearly shows that, by engaging with other fields, cultural anthropologists have been able to think more deeply about what they mean by culture; through this book, she invites readers to continue the conversation.