In this Article, I have analyzed the philosophical grounds on which stands the conception of law implied in legal transplants. On the one hand, behind the idea of legal transplants lurks the misleading assumption that two different legal cultures share common epistemological accounts of what is meant by law; on the other, the idea that a certain legal institution verbally framed may be exported to another culture and touch off similar interpretations and conceptual performances reflects, at its core, a conception of language based on an isomorphic correspondence between legal words and the meanings those words are to stand for. My goal has been to critically expose the philosophical backdrop that lies behind the conception of law implied in the idea of a legal transplant with an eye to the cultural perspective. To this end, I have availed myself of different but convergent perspectives gathered from Wittgenstein’s pragmatic philosophy of language, Geertz’s cultural anthropology, Eco’s semiology, Harris’ integrational epistemology, and Rosen’s cultural theory of law, as a methodological strategy to spotlight different facets of the problem in three dimensions: Language, knowledge, and law.

This paper provides landmarks for the study of the historical development and current expansion of academic psychology and clinical psychology education in Australia and three countries of the Malay Archipelago (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore). It reviews literature on the history of clinical psychology, and information from universities and psychological associations, and includes an overview of the current providers and forms of psychology education programmes and their curricula. A critical analysis informed by cultural anthropology indicates that psychology has only to a small extent been adjusted to different cultural contexts, while ‘western’ models of the discipline remain dominant. The neglect of attention to culture in psychology and clinical psychology raises important questions about the future of the discipline in the tropical regions of Australia and the Malay Archipelago.

This paper examines why fundamental freedoms are so unevenly distributed across the earth. Climato-economic theorizing proposes that humans adapt needs, stresses, and choices of goals, means, and outcomes to the livability of their habitat. The evolutionary process at work is one of collectively meeting climatic demands of cold winters or hot summers by using monetary resources. Freedom is expected to be lowest in poor populations threatened by demanding thermal climates, intermediate in populations comforted by undemanding temperate climates irrespective of income per head, and highest in rich populations challenged by demanding thermal climates. This core hypothesis is supported with new survey data across 85 countries and 15 Chinese provinces and with a reinterpretative review of results of prior studies comprising 174 countries and the 50 states in the United States. Empirical support covers freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of expression and participation, freedom from discrimination, and freedom to develop and realize one's human potential. Applying the theory to projections of temperature and income for 104 countries by 2112 forecasts that (a) poor populations in Asia, perhaps except Afghans and Pakistanis, will move up the international ladder of freedom, (b) poor populations in Africa will lose, rather than gain, relative levels of freedom unless climate protection and poverty reduction prevent this from happening, and (c) several rich populations will be challenged to defend current levels of freedom against worsening climato-economic livability.

We suggest that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution. This latter claim is tested by outlining the methods and approaches employed by the principal subdisciplines of evolutionary biology and assessing whether there is an existing or potential corresponding approach to the study of cultural evolution. Existing approaches within anthropology and archaeology demonstrate a good match with the macroevolutionary methods of systematics, paleobiology, and biogeography, whereas mathematical models derived from population genetics have been successfully developed to study cultural microevolution. Much potential exists for experimental simulations and field studies of cultural microevolution, where there are opportunities to borrow further methods and hypotheses from biology. Potential also exists for the cultural equivalent of molecular genetics in “social cognitive neuroscience,” although many fundamental issues have yet to be resolved. It is argued that studying culture within a unifying evolutionary framework has the potential to integrate a number of separate disciplines within the social sciences.