Letters Remain

Tag: anthropology

  • Language’s Influence on Culture

    I’ve written before about Lera Boroditsky’s fascinating research into how language affects thinking, and a recent article by Boroditsky in The Wall Street Journal covers similar ground, asking Does language influence culture? The answer, it seems, is yes: Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate…

  • The World as the Extended Mind

    That the tools and technologies we use act as extensions to our brains is nothing new: this is the extended mind theory. Indeed, last year I pointed to Carl Zimmer arguing that Google–and thus the Internet as a whole–was an extended mind. However, Scott Adams’ take on the ‘exobrain’ is simultaneously the most concise and…

  • Why Preserve Endangered Languages?

    With his book on “the politics of language” due to be published next year, international correspondent for The Economist, Robert Lane Green, is interviewed in More Intelligent Life. The discussion I find most intriguing is this on the saving of threatened world languages: Half of today’s languages may be gone in a century. Is there a book that explains…

  • How Different Cultures Define Choice

    In her book The Art of Choosing, psychologist Sheena Iyengar—the experimenter who conducted the original studies leading to the paradox of choice theory—looks at the cultural differences in the definition and acceptance of choice. Take a mundane question: Do you choose to brush your teeth in the morning? Or do you just do it? Can a habit…

  • Religion and Societal Dysfunction

    Dysfunctional societies and those under extreme stress rely on religion as a coping mechanism; it is “a natural invention of human minds in response to a defective habitat”. This is one conclusion from Gregory Paul who has released the findings from his research on the incidence of religious belief and how it affects the overall…

  • Cultural Differences in Career Change Perceptions

    We all have career transitions throughout our lives—some by choice, some not. By interviewing workers from Austria, Serbia, Spain, China and the U.S., researchers have determined some cultural differences in how people perceive career transitions, and why they occur. Workers in the United States didn’t ever attribute a career transition to an external cause, such as…

  • Why We Make Lists

    One of the current exhibitions being held in the Musée du Louvre, Paris has been curated by author and consistent top intellectual, Umberto Eco. The Infinity of Lists, as the exhibition is called, looks at the human fascination with lists and how they have progressed cultures. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It…

  • In Defence of Fixed Service Charges (or: Why Only Tip for Service?)

    Tipping: that most contentious of issues that–depending on your location–can be illegal, required, or the most heinous of etiquette crimes. It’s a complicated business (as the Wikipedia entry indicates by the size of the Tipping by region section), and an odd and occasionally uncomfortable tradition. As a self-proclaimed ‘socially awkward Briton’ David Mitchell laments the…

  • Marriage, Children, and Surnames

    In most countries around the world it is convention that the wife take the husband’s surname at marriage. It is equally conventional for a child to then also take this same name. Evolutionary psychology is the reason behind this phenomenon, as discussed briefly in the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. One of the…

  • The Universality of Facial Expressions

    Or not. It’s not just happiness that’s perceived differently across cultures: facial expressions are too. Recent research questioning the assumption that face processing and facial expression recognition is invariant has found that Western Caucasians and East Asians differ in how they process facial expressions. It is a widely held belief that many basic visual processes…