Culture, Cognition, and the Environment

In this lecture on culture, cognition and the environment, Dr. Michael Paolisso presents an overview of the cognitive approach to understanding culture, and its application to environmental challenges. He starts by noting that there are many definitions of culture, and that the cognitive approach to understanding culture uses concepts like taxonomy, cultural domains, prototypes, cultural models and cultural consensus to explain shared human decision-making and understanding. He uses the example of the Pfiesteria outbreak in the Chesapeake Bay as a research project to which these approaches have been applied, and overviews the analytical tool used. He then uses a second example of farmer perceptions of land conservation to explain the cultural model methodology, which uses empirical data to build a schema that highlights shared understanding and motivations of farmers to conserve land. He also uses the example of oyster restoration to elaborate on the culture as distributed knowledge approach, which seeks to characterize within-group variation in cultural consensus and to identify the linkages among different cultural concepts. Finally, he discusses the opportunities and motivations in anthropology for linking culture, cognition and the environment.

This video is a recording of a presentation given as part of SESYNC’s Socio-Environmental Immersion program.