Cultural Connections


Book Description

Illustrates the history, civilization, and social conditions of the United States via artifacts, paintings, and other objects from the collections of cultural institutions in Philadelphia and environs.




Human Universals


Book Description

This book explores physical and behavioral characteristics that can be considered universal among all cultures, all people. It presents cases demonstrating universals, looks at the history of the study of universals, and presents an interesting study of a hypothetical tribe, The Universal People.




Particulars and Universals in Clinical and Developmental Psychology


Book Description

What sparks a psychologist’s interest in a certain phenomenon? Is it a symptom, a syndrome, a treatment, the usual, the exceptional, the group, the individual? An epistemologist, for example, focuses on the group and delivers group results. The clinician has to focus on the patient, although the patient may be perceived as one of a group (e.g., all patients with the same disease). The patient usually focuses on the clinician, but can take other opinions into account; especially, when the clinician is not considered to be the only authority. These dynamics – observable in therapy as well as in research – are critically reflected in this book, not only highlighting differences, but also commonalities individuals share: They all filter information and concentrate on certain aspects according to their socialization. They all have different expectations and can, yet, all deal with the same objective. Communication and building relationships seem to be vital – this book aims to support this quest by moving from the universal to the particular.




Cultural Universals and Particulars


Book Description

"Wiredu's discussion of culturally defined values and concepts, as well as his attention to such timely issues as human rights, makes this book invaluable interdisciplinary reading." —D. A. Masolo Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu confronts the paradox that while Western cultures recoil from claims of universality, previously colonized peoples, seeking to redefine their identities, insist on cultural particularities. Wiredu asserts that universals, rightly conceived on the basis of our common biological identity, are not incompatible with cultural particularities and, in fact, are what make intercultural communication possible. Drawing on aspects of Akan thought that appear to diverge from Western conceptions in the areas of ethics and metaphysics, Wiredu calls for a just reappraisal of these disparities, free of thought patterns corrupted by a colonial mentality. Wiredu's exposition of the principles of African traditional philosophy is not purely theoretical; he shows how certain aspects of African political thought may be applied to the practical resolution of some of Africa's most pressing problems.




Translating Cultures in Search of Human Universals


Book Description

Informed by the anthropological research of Professor Donald E. Brown on human universals, this book compiles 10 articles exploring the representation of common human cultural practices and concerns in literature, cinema and language. The book as a whole demonstrates not only that Brown’s human universals are shared by different cultures, but most importantly that they have the potential to form a basis for inter- and intra-cultural communication and consolidation, bridging gaps of misinformation and miscommunication, both spatial and temporal. The contributors are Egyptian scholars who cross temporal and spatial boundaries and borders from Africa and the Middle East to Asia, Europe and the Americas, and dive deep into the heart of the shared human universals of myth, folklore and rituals, dreams, trauma, cultural beliefs, search for identity, language, translation and communication. They bring their own unique perspectives to the investigation of how shared human practices and concerns seep through the porous boundaries of different cultures and into a variety of creative and practical genres of fiction, drama, autobiography, cinema and media translation. Their research is interdisciplinary, informed by anthropological, social, psychological, linguistic and cultural theory, and thus offers a multi-faceted and multi-layered view of the human experience.




Children's Thinking About Cultural Universals


Book Description

This book summarizes findings from interview studies probing K-3 students' knowledge and thinking about topics commonly addressed in the primary grades social studies curriculum.




Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History


Book Description

In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates. Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a "new humanism," one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity.




Language Universals


Book Description

Languages differ from one another in bewildering and seemingly arbitrary ways. For example, in English, the verb precedes the direct object ('understand the proof'), but in Japanese, the direct object comes first. In some languages, such as Mohawk, it is not even possible to establish a basic word order. Nonetheless, languages do share certain regularities in how they are structured and used. The exact nature and extent of these "language universals" has been the focus of much research and is one of the central explanatory goals in the language sciences. During the past 50 years, there has been tremendous progress, a few major conceptual revolutions, and even the emergence of entirely new fields. The wealth of findings and theories offered by the various language-science disciplines has made it more important than ever to work toward an integrated understanding of the nature of human language universals. This book is the first to examine language universals from a cross-disciplinary perspective. It provides new insights into long standing questions such as: What exactly defines the human capacity for language? Are there universal properties of human languages and, if so, what are they? Can all language universals be explained in the same way, or do some universals require different kinds of explanations from others? Language Universals is unique in starting with the assumption that the best way to approach these and related questions is through a dialogue between a wide range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, computer science and biology.




Statistical Universals of Language


Book Description

This volume explores the universal mathematical properties underlying big language data and possible reasons why such properties exist, revealing how we may be unconsciously mathematical in our language use. These properties are statistical and thus different from linguistic universals that contribute to describing the variation of human languages, and they can only be identified over a large accumulation of usages. The book provides an overview of state-of-the art findings on these statistical universals and reconsiders the nature of language accordingly, with Zipf's law as a well-known example. The main focus of the book further lies in explaining the property of long memory, which was discovered and studied more recently by borrowing concepts from complex systems theory. The statistical universals not only possibly lie as the precursor of language system formation, but they also highlight the qualities of language that remain weak points in today's machine learning. In summary, this book provides an overview of language's global properties. It will be of interest to anyone engaged in fields related to language and computing or statistical analysis methods, with an emphasis on researchers and students in computational linguistics and natural language processing. While the book does apply mathematical concepts, all possible effort has been made to speak to a non-mathematical audience as well by communicating mathematical content intuitively, with concise examples taken from real texts.




Human Rights in Global Politics


Book Description

There is a stark contradiction between the theory of universal human rights and the everyday practice of human wrongs. This timely volume investigates whether human rights abuses are a result of the failure of governments to live up to a universal human rights standard, or whether the search for moral universals is a fundamentally flawed enterprise which distracts us from the task of developing rights in the context of particular ethical communities. In the first part of the book chapters by Ken Booth, Jack Donnelly, Chris Brown, Bhikhu Parekh and Mary Midgley explore the philosophical basis of claims to universal human rights. In the second part, Richard Falk, Mary Kaldor, Martin Shaw, Gil Loescher, Georgina Ashworth and Andrew Hurrell reflect on the role of the media, global civil society, states, migration, non-governmental organisations, capitalism, and schools and universities in developing a global human rights culture.