SEMINAR COURSE 1 | Exploring diversity in language, culture and cognition

CEFH - SUMMER SCHOOL 2023 PAGINAS

 

Chris SinhaUniversity of East Anglia

CEFH - Chris Sinha foto

Vera SinhaUniversity of Oxford

CEFH - Vera-Da-Silva-Sinha foto

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of variation between cultures in language and cognition, drawing upon anthropology, biology, philosophy and psychology as well as linguistics. The theoretical background is the biocultural approach to language as a human-specific symbolic niche, interlocking with other dimensions of the human niche complex. This gives us a context within which to understand cultural variation and cultural evolutionary processes in relation to the cognitive domains of space, time and number. We also provide a critical evaluation of the (meta-)methodological issues involved in the study of endangered languages and cultures, in both a scientific and a historical and socio-political context. The course consists of four 1.5 hour sessions, each comprising a lecture of about one hour followed by a seminar discussion of about 30 minutes.

Session 1: Artefacts, symbols, and the dynamics of human biocultural niche construction

Session 2: Time and events—in language, mind and world

Session 3: Fingers, hands, feet and toes: Embodied number in an Amazonian society

Session 4: Learning about, learning from, learning with—towards a practice and theory of situated language sciences

Further reading

Silva Sinha, Vera da. (2019) Event-based time in three indigenous Amazonian and Xinguan cultures of Brazil. Frontiers in Psychology (Section Cultural Psychology) 10, 454 1-21. 

 

Silva Sinha, Vera da. (2022) Time: Sociocultural structuring beyond the spatialization paradigm.  In Völkel, Svenja and Nassenstein, Nico. Approaches to Language and Culture (Series Anthropological Linguistics Vol. 1). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2022. 

 

Sinha Chris. (2017) Ten Lectures on Language, Culture and Mind. Cultural, developmental and evolutionary perspectives in cognitive linguistics. Boston and Leiden, Brill. x + 180 pp.

 

Sinha, Chris. (2021) Artefacts, symbols, and the socio-cultural dynamics of niche construction. In Nathalie Gontier, Andy Lock, and Chris Sinha (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.