The cultural dimension of environment: Ethnoscientific study on Santhal community in eastern India

This study explores the Santhal community to enhance the understanding of the human-nature relationship that fully captures distinct intricacies of ethnoecology. Relying on a qualitative research design, this study focuses on the perception and interpretation of environmental aspects using ethnoscientific methods among Santhals in West Bengal, India. It reveals that Santhals are still unique in perceiving the environment learned through folk models. Santhal’s perception of environmental domains is constituted by various cognitive elements (resource distributions, care, feelings, attachment, myths, and superstitious credence toward their environment) and multifaceted interpretations (living beings, nonliving objects, natural and built environment). Based on its evidence, this study recommends that indigenous worldview-based ethnoscientific knowledge is the identity of indigenity that shapes ethnoscientific knowledge can be used in sustainable resource management practice. Furthermore, the study proposes a view that ignoring this unique ethnoscientific knowledge-based worldview base may degenerate the indigenous culture.

Going Beyond the Western Pass: Chinese Folk Models of Danger and Abandonment in Songs of Separation

From the early Qing dynasty (1644–1911) to the beginning of the People’s Republic, men in northern China from drought-prone regions of northwestern Shanxi province and northeastern Shaanxi province would travel beyond the Great Wall to find work in western Inner Mongolia, in a migration known as “going beyond the Western Pass” 走西口. This article analyzes anthologized song lyrics and ethnographic interviews about this migration to explore how songs of separation performed at temple fairs approached danger and abandonment using traditional metaphors and “folk models” similar to those of parents protecting children from life’s hazards and widows and widowers lamenting the loss of loved ones. I argue that these duets between singers embodying the roles of migrant laborers and the women they left behind provided a public language for audiences to reflect upon and contextualize private emotions in a broader social context, offering rhetorical resolutions to ambivalent anxieties.

Walking Gastrolinguistic Landscapes, with Metonymy as a Travel-guide

The present article is concerned with the role of metonymy in gastrolinguistic landscape, specifically with its role in creating a message for guests in the names of restaurants. Linguistic landscape is a relatively novel concept in contemporary linguistics, its methodology still in the flux, while its topics and approaches keep diversifying. The purpose of this article is to show that there is also a very important cognitive linguistic aspect to it. Specifically, the article points out the role of metonymy in creative examples of restaurant names that contain one or more elements from a language different from the rest of the restaurant name, focusing on the gastrolinguistic landscape of Central and Eastern Europe, primarily Croatia and Hungary. It is demonstrated that that in addition to some more general cultural models of language, speakers also have a multitude of specific folk models of particular languages, mostly based on stereotypes, which in turn are also metonymic. These activate a series of metonymic inferencing steps most of the time resulting in complex cumulative metonymies such that one is superimposed on the other, the target of one simultaneously functioning as the source for the next one, and so forth.

The cultural evolution of mind-modelling

I argue that uniquely human forms of ‘Theory of Mind’ (or ‘ToM’) are a product of cultural evolution. Specifically, propositional attitude psychology is a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind, invented by our ancestors for a range of tasks and refined over successive generations of users. The construction of these folk models gave humans new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental states—and so imbued us with abilities not shared by non-linguistic species. I also argue that uniquely human forms of ToM are not required for language development, such that an account of the cultural origins of ToM does not jeopardise the explanation of language development. Finally, I sketch a historical model of the cultural evolution of mental state talk.

Going Beyond the Western Pass: Chinese Folk Models of Danger and Abandonment in Songs of Separation

From the early Qing dynasty (1644–1911) to the beginning of the People’s Republic, men in northern China from drought-prone regions of northwestern Shanxi province and northeastern Shaanxi province would travel beyond the Great Wall to find work in western Inner Mongolia, in a migration known as “going beyond the Western Pass” 走西口. This article analyzes anthologized song lyrics and ethnographic interviews about this migration to explore how songs of separation performed at temple fairs approached danger and abandonment using traditional metaphors and “folk models” similar to those of parents protecting children from life’s hazards and widows and widowers lamenting the loss of loved ones. I argue that these duets between singers embodying the roles of migrant laborers and the women they left behind provided a public language for audiences to reflect upon and contextualize private emotions in a broader social context, offering rhetorical resolutions to ambivalent anxieties.

Cultural Models of Stages in the Life Course

It is clear that societies differ with respect to their locally constructed, cultural, or ‘folk’ models of the life course. However, predictable transitions can be found as children progress through naturally occurring stages (walking, talking, gaining sense, puberty). Societies draw upon these predictable transitions to construct models of development. Ethnographic and historic records provide evidence of behavioural changes in children and the response of family members that signal a shift in the child’s status. Drawing on these data, we construct a broadly applicable cultural model of child development. This model coalesces around six life cycle stages, which correspond to evolutionary biologists’ analyses. This entry draws on a long-term project designed to develop an anthropological perspective on human development. Our database consists of archival accounts of childhood from nearly 1,000 societies, ranging from the Palaeolithic to the present and from every area of the world.