Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review 2009, 45(2): 345-368
Esencializmus a etnicita: sociálno-kognitívne vysvetlenie reprezentovania sociálnych skupín
- Univerzita Komenského v Bratislave, Bratislava
- Masarykova univerzita, Brno
The aim of this article is to explore the various ways in which people represent social groups. The author shows that a prominent role in such processes is played by psychological essentialism. People represent some of their social identities as inherent qualities that are based on the sharing of a presumed 'essence': something unobservable, diffi cult to remove, irreversible, and causally responsible for overt behaviours. Empirical evidence suggests that no particular causal process of essence acquisition is constitutive for essentialism in folk models of society. Some authors believe that folk essentialism is necessarily connected with the presumed innateness of an essence (its biological transmission across generations). Innate potential and biological inheritance, however powerful they may be for the human cognitive mind in the domain of folk models for biology, are far from necessary in essentialist folksociological classifications. Essentialism in folk sociology is not defined by any particular causal process of essence acquisition. Even when it is possible to detect that a given group of people claim the innate essence of a particular folk sociology, it is always necessary to look for other features of essentialism (inherence, sharp boundaries, the immutability of identity, etc.). The article reviews some infl uential cognitive proposals concerning folk models of society (Astuti, Gil-White, Hirschfeld) and ethnicity, and provides arguments and empirical evidence collected in Western Ukraine in support of the claim that presumed innateness is not the constitutive part of folk models of society, let alone of psychological essentialism.
Klíčová slova: essentialism, folk models of society, ethnicity, Ukraine, social identity.
Zveřejněno: 1. duben 2009 Zobrazit citaci
Reference
- Ahn, Woo-kyoung et al. 2001. "Why essences are essential in the psychology of concepts." Cognition 82 (1): 59-69.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Astuti, Rita. 1995. "'The Vezo are not a kind of people': identity, difference and 'ethnicity' among a fishing people of western Madagascar." American Ethnologist 22 (3): 464-482.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Astuti, Rita. 2000. "Kindreds, cognatic and unilineal descent groups: New perspectives from Madagascar." Pp. 90-103 in Janet Carsten (ed.). Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Astuti, Rita. 2001. "Are we all natural dualists? A cognitive developmental approach." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7 (3): 429-447.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Atran, Scott. 1990. Cognitive Foundations of Natural History. Towards an Anthropology of Science. New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Atran, Scott. 2001. "Comment." Current Anthropology 42 (4): 537-538.
- Augoustinos, Martha, Iain Walker, Ngaire Donaghue. 2006. Social Cognition: An Integrated Introduction. London: Sage.
- Barrett, Clark H. 2001. "On the functional origins of essentialism." Mind and Society 2 (3): 1-30.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Bloch, Maurice. 2005. Essays on Cultural Transmission. London: Berg Publishers.
- Bloom, Paul. 1996. "Intention, history, and artifact concepts." Cognition 60 (1): 1-29.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Bloom, Paul, Csaba Veres. 1999. "The perceived intentionality of groups." Cognition 71 (1): B1-B9.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Botterill, George, Peter Carruthers. 1999. The Philosophy of Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Boyer, Pascal. 1990. Tradition as Truth and Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Brubaker, Rogers, Mara Loveman, Peter Stamatov. 2003. "Ethnicity as cognition." Theory and Society 33 (1): 31-64.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Brubaker, Rogers. 2004. Ethnicity Without Groups. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Bruner, Jerome S., Bertram F. Malle, Louis J. Moses, Dare A. Baldwin (eds.). 2003. Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
- Carey, Susan, Gregg Solomon, Rita Astuti. 2004. Constraints on Conceptual Development: A Case Study of the Acquisition of Folk Biological and Folk Sociological Beliefs. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Cerulo, Karen A. (ed.). 2001. Culture in Mind: Toward a Sociology of Culture and Cognition. London: Routledge.
- D'Andrade, Roy G. 2005. The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- DiMaggio, Paul. 2001. "Why Cognitive (and Cultural) Sociology Needs Cognitive Psychology." Pp. 274-282 in Karen A. Cerulo (ed.). Culture in Mind: Toward a Sociology of Culture and Cognition. London: Routledge.
- Ellis, Brian. 2001. Scientific Essentialism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Fenton, Steve. 2003. Ethnicity. Key Concepts. New York: Polity Press.
- Fuchs, Stephan. 2005. Against Essentialism: A Theory of Culture and Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
- Geertz, Clifford. 1973. Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
- Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books.
- Gil-White, Francisco. 1999. "How thick is blood? The plot thickens: If ethnic actors are primordialists, what remains of the circumstantialist/primordialist controversy?" Ethnic and Racial Studies 22: 789-820.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Gil-White, Francisco. 2001. "Are ethnic groups biological species to the human brain? Essentialism in our cognition of some social categories." Current Anthropology 424: 515-536.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Gil-White, Francisco. 2005. "The study of ethnicity needs better categories: Clearing up the confusions that result from blurring analytic and lay concepts." Journal of Bioeconomics 7: 239-270.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Gelman, Susan. 2003. The Essential Child. Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought. New York: Oxford University Press.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Gelman, Susan A. 2004. "Psychological essentialism in children." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (9): 404-409.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Gelman, Susan, Paul Bloom. 2000. "Young children are sensitive to how an object was created when deciding what to name it." Cognition 76 (2): 91-103.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Gelman, Susan, Lawrence Hirschfeld. 1999. "How biological is essentialism?" Pp. 403-446 in Scott Atran, Douglas L. Medin (eds.). Folkbiology. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Gelman, Susan, Charles Kalish. 1993. "Categories and causality." Pp. 3-32 in Mark L. Howe (ed.). Emerging Themes in Cognitive Development, Vol. II: Competencies. New York: Springer Verlag.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Hirschfeld, Lawrence A. 1996. Race in the Making. Cambridge, Mass., London: The MIT Press.
- Hirschfeld, Lawrence A. 1998. "Natural assumption: Race, essence, and taxonomies of human kinds." Social Research 65 (2): 331-349.
- Hirschfeld, Lawrence A. 2001. "On a folk theory of society: Children, evolution, and mental representations of social groups." Personality & Social Psychology Review 5 (2): 107-117.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Kanovský, Martin. 2004. "Two kinds of explanation in social anthropology: An illustration from Storoznycja, Ukraine." Anthropological Journal of European Cultures (12): 73-86.
- Kanovský, Martin. 2007. "Essentialism and Folksociology: Ethnicity Again." Journal of Cognition and Culture 7 (3-4): 241-281.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Keil, Frank. 1989. Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Medin, Douglas, Andrew Ortony. 1989. "Psychological Essentialism." Pp. 179-195 in Stella Vosniadou, Andrew Ortony (eds.). Similarity and Analogical Reasoning. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Rothbart, Myron, Marjorie Taylor. 1990. "Category labels and social reality: Do we view social categories as natural kinds?" Pp. 11-36 in Gun Semin, Klaus Fiedler (eds.). Language, Interaction and Social Cognition. London: Sage.
- Shore, Bradd. 2003. Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Sousa, Paolo, Scott Atran, Douglas Medin. 2002. "Essentialism and Folkbiology: Evidence from Brazil." Journal of Cognition and Culture 2 (3): 195-223.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining Culture. A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Strevens, Michael. 2000. "The essentialist aspect of naive theories." Cognition 74 (2): 149-175.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Yzerbyt, Vincent, Charles M. Judd, Olivier Corneille. 2003. The Psychology of Group Perception. New York: Psychology Press.
Přejít k původnímu zdroji... - Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1999. Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press.
Tento článek je publikován v režimu tzv. otevřeného přístupu k vědeckým informacím (Open Access), který je distribuován pod licencí Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), která umožňuje nekomerční distribuci, reprodukci a změny, pokud je původní dílo řádně ocitováno. Není povolena distribuce, reprodukce nebo změna, která není v souladu s podmínkami této licence.


