Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Preface
- What Science Offers the Humanities
- Introduction
- PART I EXORCISING THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE
- PART II EMBODYING CULTURE
- 4 Embodying Culture: Grounding Cultural Variation in the Body
- PART III DEFENDING VERTICAL INTEGRATION
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Embodying Culture: Selected Bibliography and Other Resources
- References
- Index
4 - Embodying Culture: Grounding Cultural Variation in the Body
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Preface
- What Science Offers the Humanities
- Introduction
- PART I EXORCISING THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE
- PART II EMBODYING CULTURE
- 4 Embodying Culture: Grounding Cultural Variation in the Body
- PART III DEFENDING VERTICAL INTEGRATION
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Embodying Culture: Selected Bibliography and Other Resources
- References
- Index
Summary
Part of the continuing appeal of postmodernism is the undeniable reality of human cultural variation, both across the world and over the course of history. People value as delicacies such foodstuffs as the durian fruit, which smells and tastes unmistakably like human vomit, or the Chinese specialty of – literally translated – “stinky tofu,” which is marinated for months in a brined mixture of rotten vegetables and putrid shrimp. I argued in the previous chapters that human beings universally value “strength” and have an aversion to “sickness,” but how are we to reconcile this with the Daoist Daodejing, which advocates the path of weakness, or Kierkegaard's celebration of the spiritual “sickness unto death” that leads to salvation? The claim that human beings share a set of cognitive and normative universals needs to be reconciled with the blooming, buzzing cultural variety that is the single most salient phenomenon to humanists.
This is particularly important because, as I will discuss, there is considerable evidence from cross-cultural psychology that these various practices, and the environments that these practices create, can result in distinct schemas at fairly early stages of perception. There is, after all, something to the claim of Thomas Kuhn that advocates of different conceptual paradigms inhabit different thought-worlds.
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- Chapter
- Information
- What Science Offers the HumanitiesIntegrating Body and Culture, pp. 151 - 218Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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