Naturalistic Study of Culture

Abstract

In Explaining Culture (1996), Dan Sperber argues for the naturalization of anthropology through conjunction with cognitive psychology. Culture is to be explained in terms of the production and spread of representations. I charge Sperber with two errors. First, his view of culture, given in terms of thoughts natives have about their social settings, is too inert. By contrast, to participate in a culture is to do things as much as it is to have thoughts. Second, Sperber focuses on the wrong sort of mental representations for his naturalization project. Instead of propositional knowledge, I argue we should be much more concerned with know-how, which is easily linked to the culturally specific skills deployed in participation in a culture. Through development of these charges, an alternative way of studying culture naturalistically is developed. This conception, unlike Sperber's, does not amount to the psychologization of anthropology.