5 - Cognitive Cultural Studies

Summary

An emerging set of approaches

‘Cognitive Cultural Studies’ refers to an emerging interdisciplinary group of approaches, which is developing into one of the most interesting and dynamic areas of inquiry relevant to Literary Studies today. At its core is an interest in the interplay between brain and environment – cognitive architecture and cultural forces – a focus that requires a genuine interdisciplinary crossing of the arts/science divide that has been a desideratum in Psychology and Anthropology for at least two decades. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides laid out the argument very clearly in 1992 in their integrated model of human social and cognitive functioning:

The rich complexity of each individual is produced by a cognitive architecture embodied in a physiological system, which interacts with the social and nonsocial world that surrounds it. Thus humans, like every other natural system, are embedded in the contingencies of a larger principled history, and explaining any particular fact about them requires the joint analysis of the principles and contingencies involved.

During the last two decades, developments and cross-disciplinary research into this complex interaction of culture and cognition from a range of social and hard sciences have provided the context for a more nuanced consideration of the ‘culture’ side of the issue, using the tools and concepts developed in the humanities. This mutual impact of social and mental functioning plays out in several different forms of scholarly inquiry, and has gained momentum in the last few years particularly, in the emergence of the scholarly collective, ‘Cognitive Cultural Studies’.