"Cognitive anthropology"

The Strauss & Quinn book makes me happy. They've been explaining resistance to psychology among anthropologists, then they moved on to presenting ideas from Bourdieu (with whom they mostly concur, though their theory also agrees with some of his critics), and now they're explaining connectionism - with the caveat that when connectionism gets so enamored with computer models that it loses sight of real humans, they'll be parting ways with it, too. It's way more interesting than the book I expected to be reading this week.

(Bourdieu is an author who comes highly recommended, though I haven't gotten to him yet. Maybe he can come after Bennett and Hume. We still have eight weeks before fall term starts.)

Edit. I feel like making a note that although connectionism makes a lot of sense to me in the psychological sense (although I don't believe the mind-as-computer metaphor is desirable, so I stay away from the AI part of connectionism), I have to wonder how grandmother neurons fit into the story. That is, the connectionist model of brain functioning has associations widely distributed across the brain, and when they're activated together, it strengthens bonds between them, which isn't consistent with the idea of single neurons that correspond to a complex entity or idea, such as a particular person. I glanced at the Plato entry for connectionism, which brushes aside the latter idea as not empirically supported - the author must not have heard about the Jennifer Aniston neurons!