Universals of Human Thought: Some African Evidence

by Edited by Barbara Bloom Lloyd , John Gay

• ISBN13: 9780521298186
• ISBN10: 0521298180
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1981-04-30
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book was originally published in 1981 and the theme of universals attracted a great deal of attention in the decade preceding publication. Psychologists and linguists in particular attempted to identify substantive universals that underlie the social diversity across cultures, which anthropologists and others documented. The contributors to this volume all focus on the relevant data in Africa to explain and test the major questions at issue. The book is divided into three main sections, dealing respectively with perception, cognitive development and language. There is also a general Review and Prospectus by Jerome Bruner, and a wide-ranging introduction to the philosophical background by Ernst Gellner. The volume will be of particular interest to cross-cultural psychologists, linguists, Africanists and anthropologists.

Table of Contents

Preface

Michael Ogbolu Okonji: African psychologist

Contributors

General introduction: relativism and universals

Perception

Pictorial perception and the problem of universals

Tallensi children's drawings

Space and community behaviour: a discussion of the form and function of spatial order in settlements

Taxonomic and multi-dimensional representations of reality

Cognitive Development

'Strong' and 'weak' universals: sensori-motor intelligence and concrete operations

Psychological differentiation

Cognitive development, education and social mobility

Language

Language and learning: some observations on the linguistic determination of cognitive processes

The formation of relative clauses

Literacy and literature

Review and prospectus

Indexes

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.