New topic Cognition and Ideology

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New topicCognition and Ideology

• Good News no annotative references!
• Bad News An exercise on the Panels in Zimmerman
  West Wing ( we need to take a field trip and look
  at them)
• Exercise (2) is on the WEB. In that exercise you
  will discuss the panels as ideology and compare
  them to McGuires article Dialogues with the
  Dead.
• DUE DATE 4/14

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Cognitive Studies In Archaeology Science or
Post-Processual?

• No simple answer to this question. Cognitive
  studies can be within either science or
  post-processualism depending on the question
  being asked
• Johnson (textbook) recognizes this problem, using
  the phrase
• cognitive processualism.
• Post processualists raised the topic within
  archaeology. Humans have big brains, create
  culture cognitive aspects of cultural
  construction in past societies should be a topic
  of investigation
• Cognitive science and evolutionary psychology
  become part of cutting edge research in the later
  1980s and 1990s.

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Science and Cognition

• HEE remember the assumption selection has
  shaped our brains to maximize reproductive
  success to make optimal decision according to
  historical setting
• Humans are big brained animals, and the
  development of that brain has implications for
  the development of diversified and endless
  variable cultural patterns, including ( of
  course) language, music and art.
• Donalds example in Cognition and Material
  Culture about the difference between Chimpanzees
  and human

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Cognition and Post Processualism

• Mind gives meaning to experience
• Expression of cognition through collective
  action, symbolic action
• Cosmology, ideology, agency/action
• McGuires Dialogues with the Dead

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Crucial definitions

• Thought Mental activity intellectual activity,
  forming ideas in the mind---in science, pure
  concepts
• Brain biological structure that accepts sensory
  information and processes that information----
  makes sense out of light, sound, touch, smell.
  The brain makes sense out of sensory experience.
• Animal brain composed of seris of more or less
  autonomous structures. Driving and talking on
  cell phones
• Mind integrates all the sensory experience into
  something coherent. Integrates across all
  modules of the brain through the CEO--- the
  frontal lobes
• In Donalds article, consciousness and mind are
  synonyms.
• Not accepted by all cognitive scientists.
  Consciousness may have the additional dimension
  of awareness.

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Donalds article Cognition and Material Culture

• Key Question
• What is the truly modern mind? Can we build a
  model that suggests when that transformation
  occurred, and what criteria can we use to specify
  this transformation?
• Modern Human Mind combination of genetics and
  enculturation.
• Whats enculturation?
• Humans transmit knowledge all the time as
  representation----speech, art, gesture, writing,
  speaking
• Collective cognition memory of generations of
  representation, and we call that collective
  representation CULTURE.

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Culture Stored Representation
Relationship between individual cognition and
Cultural representation
C C C C
I I I I I
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Stages of Cognitive Evolution

• Episodic
• Memetic
• Mythic
• theoretic

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Conflict, Power and Ideology
Peter Bourdieu
Anthony Giddens
Karl Marx
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conflict
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StructurationTheory Action and reaction occur in
all social situations. It is this interaction
that Giddens perceives when he describes people
as agents. People have a practical
consciousness and they read, interpret, and act
according the structures in which they live and
which they create. The concept of power is
closely related to that of action. Definition of
Power Asymmetry in relations Post-modernism
has a different conception of power. Power is
aspect of all interactions. Individuals have and
exercise power (dominance and resistance are
examples of power). Thus there is not just
power over . There is power to.
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Ideology How does ideology relate to conflict
and power?

• Definition Ideology
• Marxs definition false consciousness
• McGuire Instrumental