A Cognitivist’s View of the Units Debate in Cultural Anthropology

Abstract

This article explores some of the implications of the current ideational definition of culture. If culture consists of shared ideas, then the findings of cognitive psychology concerning the limits of shortterm memory necessarily constrain the size and complexity of cultural units. Wierzbicka’s universal linguistic primes or primitives would then be the atomic units of culture. Although this approach has much to recommend it, problems remain concerning the relation of cultural ideas to their physical manifestations in artifacts and actions, and a classification of the kinds of relations cultural ideas have to their physical manifestations is presented. Finally, the notion that the collection of cultural items held by the members of a society form any kind of entity is critiqued, and the argument is made that there is just one common culture for all humans.