Cultural Models Theory Research Articles

The Nolan Index: An R Program for Calculating List Resemblances

The Nolan Index (NI) is a normed, quantitative measure for comparing the degree of resemblance (similarity or dissimilarity) between free listings with an Excel program for calculating it. This article enhances that effort with the addition of an R program and additional applications. Free-list resemblance measures have been used to investigate and compare historical and cultural connections, ecological relationships, cultural item utilities, practices, knowledge, and values both within and between various groups. Their utility for cultural domain analysis and the theory of cognitive cultural models is also considered.

МОДЕЛІ КУЛЬТУРИ В КОНТЕКСТІ РОМАНУ Г. ГЕССЕ «ГРА В БІСЕР»

The article examines the models of culture in the context of Hermann Hesse’s novel «The Glass Bead Game», analyzes various aspects of the author’s system of values, which combines the created models of culture in this work. The purpose of this study is to show the structure and features of the models of culture created by H. Hesse on the basis of European culture with its history and philosophy, which served as the foundation for the formation of postmodernism in culture, art and literature. The subject of this study is the consideration of models of culture in the context of Hermann Hesse’s novel «The Glass Bead Game». In accordance with the purpose of the study, the following tasks were identified: to identify the structure and content of the concept of «culture model» as a cultural category, to determine the categorical apparatus of culture models and show the hierarchy of different types of culture models; define the concept of «model of culture»; characterize the common components and some individual features of the author’s culture models on the example of Hermann Hesse’s novel «The Glass Bead Game»; highlight the technique of modeling the author’s models of culture. The study of literature in the culturological aspect is especially productive in connection with the modern application of the synthesis of sciences, which has become widespread in scientific research. The study of literary subjects in the cultural aspect allows the most complete disclosure of the research subject and the development of new theoretical and methodological prerequisites for further scientific research in this direction. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the use of the culturological-categorical apparatus in the analysis of the work and the application of the theory of cultural models to the work of Н. Hesse, in particular, his novel «The Glass Bead Game». In the study, the work is an integral component of a single artistic space that unites literary creativity, science, and art. The methodological basis of this work was a complex schemethat combines the system-structural and comparative-analytical methods of research. As a result of scientific research, it was found that the pan-European history of culture and literature consists of many artistic trends such as the so-called «core models of culture», which includs national cultural models with their history and stages of development. The models of culture created by the author in the novel «The Glass Bead Game» are close to the cultural categories of the picture and the model of the world. The writer Н. Hessе in his work «The Glass Bead Game» created individual author’s artistic models of culture in the traditions of the postmodern trend in literature. Key words: culture, model of culture, context, novel «The Glass Bead Game», Hermann Hesse.

Perhaps an Other Time

In this article it is argued that conceptions of time have important cognitive and behavioural effects on historical agents, and that in ancient China at least one such conception tied fundamentally with the traditional Chinese calendar, the Stems and Branches system, is significantly different than the worldwide dominant modern conception of time in ways that deserve wider acknowledgement and exploration. The article relies on cognitive science literature, Takayama’s method of uncovering ancient cognition, and Bradd Shore’s Cultural Models Theory, to make its case. By examining the underlying qualitative and calculative structures of the calendar(s) in use by the humans we study, we can begin to see just how potentially different these views of time were and are in ways so fundamental to being in the world as to warrant new (re)considerations of historical actors cognizing about in and about their respective conceptual frameworks of time and the behaviours they engage in as a consequence.

Social justice in education from the perspective of the Roma in the Czech Republic – A case study

Abstract This paper addresses the current educational rights of the Roma community (in the Czech Republic). The aim of the paper is to present the educational system, its advantages and disadvantages and the ways in which the legal system supports educational rights. The second part of the paper focuses on the exercising and negotiation of rights in the contemporary social context. The work is based on ethnographic research conducted since 2005 by the Levínská, Bittnerová, & Doubek team in socially excluded localities. The data analysis is based on the theoretical concept of cognitive anthropology and the cultural models theory (D’Andrare, & Strauss, 1992). Cultural models and the ways in which parents, students and teachers negotiate rights are presented. The tension between rationality and morality (Bateson, 1958) is demonstrated by the models’ endurance; communication, cognitive and material support; and independence. Although the system itself provides equal opportunities, the prospects that education affords are a fundamental problem. One obstacle is racial bias, which influences members of the dominant group. Another significant obstacle is poverty and the costs of higher education, which are beyond the financial capacity of poor families. A third obstacle is knowledge, which is insufficient in excluded localities and poor families, and that families are unable to give students adequate support in navigating the full scope of student responsibilities.

Students’ Self-Organization of the Learning Environment during a Blended Knowledge Creation Course

Learner-centered blended learning approaches, such as Knowledge Creation, emphasize the self-organizing characteristic of thought and action, and value the students’ autonomy and self-regulation during the engagement in collaborative learning tasks. In blended contexts, the students need to organize their learning paths within a complex environment, including multiple online and offline learning spaces. This process of self-organization during courses based on the Knowledge Creation approach is currently an overlooked topic of research. The present case study is aimed at addressing this research gap by providing an in-depth understanding of the collaborative self-organization of a group of five undergraduate students participating in an interdisciplinary media design course. The course was designed according to the Knowledge Creation approach and was carried out before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The dialogical theory of the chronotope and the theory of cultural models constitute the main theoretical tools for the research. We used qualitative methods inspired by ethnography, including participant observation, in addition to the collection and analysis of audio-visual records, stimulated recall interviews, and learning diaries completed by the students. The findings show that the group self-organization changed across different phases of the collaborative task and involved the development of specific practices of self-organization. Cultural models associated with the task contributed to determine the students’ choices related to self-organization.

Co-constructed leadership in early childhood education

ABSTRACT Early childhood education contexts are complex and diverse and thus require leadership approaches that connect with the values and beliefs of that field. Currently the research on leadership in early childhood education is limited and it would benefit from research into innovative approaches employed in very different but comparable locations. This article presents findings from a cross-case analysis exploring the role of leadership in two early childhood education settings: a university laboratory school in the United States of America and a public school in Australia. Drawing on cultural models theory, we argue that co-constructing leadership in context is a useful alternative to traditional hierarchical approaches to leadership. Each site’s co-construction of leadership provided an opportunity for leadership to be developed organically and to be shared amongst the community of learners. The findings demonstrate how co-constructed leadership promotes a democratic environment for all members of a learning community.

Re-imagining family engagement as a two-way street

The calls for family-school partnerships have been strong within the literature and educational policy within Australia, however, there is little research that demonstrates what such partnerships might look like. Much of the research demonstrates a one-way street approach where schools focus on educating families, particularly parents, to build their alignment with the already defined direction of the school. This paper draws from cultural models theory to explore the artefacts and practices within the figured worlds of two South Australian primary schools. It focuses on the sites’ re-imagining of family engagement as part of their participation in the South Australian Collaborative Childhood Project, inspired by the educational principles of the Reggio Emilia Project in Italy. This paper argues that an early childhood perspective on family engagement provides valuable insights in re-imagining practices and artefacts to support authentic family-school partnerships in primary schools.

Islamophobia and Antisemitism are Different in Their Potential for Globalization

A widespread assumption in research on prejudice and hate crime is that Islamophobia and antisemitism are analogous phenomena: both travel easily across national and cultural boundaries and adapt to new contexts. This article argues that this assumption is incorrect. Islamophobia works well in very different cultural contexts and shows highly diverse localized expressions. Antisemitism is linked to Christian theology even when expressed in Muslim societies and is not global to nearly the same extent as Islamophobia. The key question is this: how can we understand the cultural conditions for the globalization of antisemitism and Islamophobia? To answer this the article looks briefly at Islamophobia and antisemitism in Chinese and Hindu civilizations and then moves on to introduce the theory of cultural models. Islamophobia is a family of more or less similar cultural models belonging to a range of different cultures across time and space. This is the general answer to the question of why Islamophobia is an intensely globalizing prejudice. Islamophobia should be conceptualized as a number of overlapping cultural models found in various societies. Today, local varieties of Islamophobia seem to come into closer contact, to converge and sometimes to exchange elements as a result of intensifying transnational and global communication.

Communing to re-imagine figured worlds

The importance of community has been widely recognised in the field of early childhood education. However, the various ways it has been conceived, together with taken-for-granted notions of education, have made it difficult to actualise the processes involved in contextually meaningful ways. This article draws on cultural models theory to explore educational leaders’ re-imagining and redesigning of early childhood educational learning communities in a range of diverse settings. The examination of the processes and artefacts used to promote democratic identities and agency highlights the significance of establishing shared principles, sociality and challenging power relations to engage in processes of communing that are contextually meaningful, sustainable and democratic.

“Teaching Culture Through Culture”: A Case Study of Culturally Responsive Pedagogies in an Australian Early Childhood/Primary Context

ABSTRACTThis article presents the findings from a case study focused on understanding how cultural models of education are brought together in dialogue to re-imagine education. The use of cultural models theory provided a useful framework for exploring how teachers, leaders, children, and families at Westside Primary School orchestrated multiple perspectives to re-imagine their figured world as culturally responsive. Findings suggest the principles from two cultural models of education – Reggio Emilia and a pedagogical framework called the Nunga Way, informed by local Australian Aboriginal First Nations peoples – were significant for local culturally responsive pedagogy.

An Application of Cultural Models Theory to Cross-cultural Awareness Cultivation in Primary School English Teaching

Cultural models theory is one of the most important theories in cognitive linguistics. This paper briefly introduces the theory of cultural models in cognitive linguistics, analyses the current situation of cross-cultural awareness teaching in primary school, and further discusses the significance of cultural models theory in the cultivation of cross-cultural awareness in primary school English teaching. This theory provides a tool for teachers to cultivate pupils' cross-cultural awareness, so teachers can effectively introduce cultural factors into primary school English teaching.

Are shared models always cultural models? A study of the cultural model of affect and emotion in Chuuk

This article investigates a theoretical tension in cultural models theory between their sharedness and their origin in social and culturally mediated experiences. To address this tension empirically, this article presents a mixed-methods analysis of the shared understanding of a typology of emotion in Chuuk Lagoon. Based on a review of contemporary theory, one would expect that while people in Chuuk would have distinct cultural models for specific culturally meaningful paradigmatic emotions, the shared model for the entire typology of emotion would be structured by two universal dimensions of core affect (arousal and hedonic quality). But this theoretical literature ignores the importance of an intersubjective dimension of prereflective experience. This dimension may be culturally muted in industrial, educated, and rich contexts where most prior research has been conducted but culturally emphasized in places like Chuuk. The mixed-methods analysis finds that an intersubjective dimension along with a hedonic quality dimension structures the shared model of a typology for affect and emotion in Chuuk, while the arousal dimension found elsewhere is muted. Thus, shared models of affect and emotion are cultural models both in terms of specific, culturally elaborated emotions and in terms of the cultural emphasis given to underlying affective and intersubjective dimensions.

Cultural models of male body image, fat, and acceptable personhood among Euro-Americans and South Koreans

Based on a comparative study of Euro-American and South Korean college students’ cultural models of the ideal male body, I show that Euro-Americans and Koreans conceptualize fat in distinct ways related to each group’s cultural model of acceptable personhood. Drawing on cultural models theory and using cultural domain analysis and residual agreement analysis, I demonstrate that while Euro-Americans tend to view fat as a black-and-white moral issue through the perspective of “healthism,” Koreans understand fat to be a negative appearance trait within the more flexible, if discriminatory, lens of “lookism.” Because healthism invites mutually reinforcing moral and medical judgments of fat individuals, fatness becomes an index of aesthetic undesirability, compromised character, and danger, leading to fat stigma. On the other hand, the lens of “lookism” deems fatness as one of many potential physical flaws that can be corrected by dietary or surgical intervention and mitigated through self-maintenance practices. Therefore, under “lookism,” fatness invites negativity, but it does not index poor character except in the context of other undesirable traits. As a result, the concept of fat stigma may not adequately explain the treatment of fat in the Korean context.

Cultural models of society in Western Ukraine

Ukraine’s democratization that started after the disintegration of the Soviet Union is an ongoing effort, accompanied by incremental political, social, and ideological transformations as well as tumultuous events—the Orange Revolution (2004–2005), growing authoritarianism during the presidency of Yanukovych (2010–2014), the Revolution of Dignity (2013–2014), Russian annexation of Crimea (2014), and Russia’s ongoing military aggression in Eastern Ukraine (2014-present). This study is concerned not with the actual political and social transformations in the country, but with mental representations of society that these transformations generated. The cultural models theory and method offered a toolkit for examining people’s implicit ideas and taken-for-granted assumptions through the analysis of spoken discourse. I conducted 32 semi-structured interviews with people in Western Ukraine, identified recurrent ideas and conceptual metaphors in the interviewees’ discourses, and propose three cultural models of society underlying them.

Western and East Asian sociocultural learning models: Evidence from cross‐cultural and immigrant research

We review Li's research and theory of cultural learning models in light of Chirkov's (2019) theory of sociocultural models that draw on previous theories and research across social sciences. We recast Li's models as sociocultural learning models (SCLMs) by incorporating Chirkov's three emphases: (a) the inseparability between the social and the cultural, (b) the public versus individuals’ internalization ofSCLMs and their mutual enforcement, and (c) collective intentionality and intersubjectivity as embedded in the enactment ofSCLMs. As an initial attempt to document how publicSCLMs become internalized, we further examine the role of joint intentionality and intersubjectivity at the person‐to‐person level. We use discourse analysis to look at two mother–child conversations about learning from our current European American and Chinese immigrant research data. We show evidence that both joint intentionality and intersubjectivity are prevalently and deeply present in the process of parental socialization (transmittingSCLMs to their young). We conclude that intentionality and intersubjectivity are indispensable to enableSCLMs to exist and to continue by enabling the public to become internalized. The internalization is then enacted and repeated by members across the culture, who in turn function to uphold and renewSCLMs.

“Struggle” for Trust – Unintended Consequences of an “Integration Project”

This article has resulted from multiple years of cooperation of the research team Bittnerová, Doubek, and Levínská that examines issues related to Roma education in the context of social exclusion. Its main topic is to search for an understanding and interpretation of the failure of the project aiming to develop a social centre intended to serve as a basis for providing social services to needy residents of the researched site. The failure of “integration” is not just the refusal of embracing intercultural differences but the symbolic refusal of the impoverished status of the whole town, with the local Roma being the most glaring symbol of that impoverishment. This theoretical point is the theory of cultural models of Strauss and Quinn. “Romahood” is seen as a radial family resemblance category driven by a prototype in the context of distributed culture.

Preschool teachers as undercover agents within the figured world of public school

This article explores the lived and sometimes clandestine professional experiences of early childhood teachers who exist within contexts where dominant discourses of professional are competing with teacher’s own understandings of their professional identities. Cultural models theory is used to shed light on the secrete and undercover work of public preschool teachers as they resist the prevailing managerial discourse and assert their understandings of their professional identities behind the closed doors of their classrooms.

Gauging aging: Expert and public understandings of aging in America

Understanding how people make sense of social issues is a fundamental aspect of communications research. In this piece, we apply theory from psychological anthropology to provide a new perspective on this core feature of communication and argue for the importance of considering culture in applied communications research. Drawing on a study of the implicit understandings and patterns of reasoning that Americans use to think about the process of aging and older adults, we show how the theory of cultural models can be applied to arrive at a deeper view of the ways in which members of the public make meaning of aging issues. We discuss the implications of this research for those communicating about aging and other social and scientific issues. The article provides information on public understanding that is directly pertinent to those communicating about aging and demographic change in the United States.

The significance of critical incidents and voice to identity and agency

Human agency is significant to the understanding of professional identities and actions. It is through human agency that individuals can become powerful in changing or authoring their own identities. Stemming from a larger narrative inquiry focused on understanding the professional identities of public preschool teachers, this paper draws on cultural models theory to explore identity, agency and professional practice through the lived stories of CeCe, an African-American public preschool teacher from the United States. Findings demonstrate the influence of CeCe’s lived experiences to her developing sense of human agency and highlight the importance of critical incidents and voice to identity and human agency.

Prosocial Morality in Individual and Collective Cognition

There has been much interest in understanding the operation of shared collective constructs. Cultural models theory is one of the frameworks in cognitive anthropology engaging the interaction between the individual and collective levels of culture in the process of cultural transmission. The present study attempts to produce the cognitive ethnography focusing on shared understanding of prosocial morality in Sweden. It draws on cognitive data associated with the organization of prosocial ideas (formulated as values) in Swedish society, and uses multi-item scales to explore the distribution of this cultural model across the individual minds and on the group level. The study tests a hypothesis that cultural and individual values priorities have distinct demographic predictors when examined separately, and that these predictors reflect their respective differences in the transmission channels. I stress the importance of the interdisciplinary research to account for the process of consolidation of shared collective knowledge into cultural models.