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Transmitting symbolic concepts from the perspective of cultural cognition - the acquisition and transfer of folk-biological knowledge

Ellen, Roy (2018) Transmitting symbolic concepts from the perspective of cultural cognition - the acquisition and transfer of folk-biological knowledge. In: Althoff, Jochen and Berrens, Dominik and Pommerening, Tanja, eds. Finding, inheriting or borrowing? The construction and transfer of knowledge in antiquity and the middle ages. Mainz Historical Cultural Sciences, 39 . Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, Germany, pp. 41-70. ISBN 978-3-8376-4236-0. E-ISBN 978-3-8394-4236-4. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:73081)

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Abstract

The papers prepared for this meeting concern the transmission of sets of concepts so complex and diverse that it might be thought an unlikely assemblage from which to draw productive comparative generalizations about how knowledge is acquired and transferred. However, issues relating to how knowledge moves around the anthroposphere are in theory much the same regardless of whether we are dealing with movement across the generations (temporal change) or between different groups separated geographically (spatial change), or whether it is technical or symbolic. In this presentation I use my own ethnographic data on ethnobiological knowledge to illustrate how an examination of one domain that permits ‘radical simplification’ through the identification of elemental units can highlight some problems in current models of cultural knowledge transmission, and the extent to which it might also help us make sense of systems of complex symbolic knowledge.

Item Type: Book section
Uncontrolled keywords: cultural cognition, knowledge transmission, folk-biology
Subjects: G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Human and Social Sciences > School of Anthropology and Conservation
Depositing User: Roy Ellen
Date Deposited: 19 Mar 2019 16:30 UTC
Last Modified: 08 Mar 2021 13:09 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/73081 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Ellen, Roy.

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