Jürg Wassmann Livres

The ascription of desires or beliefs to other people is a milestone of human sociality. It allows us to understand, explain, and predict human behaviour. During the last years, research on children's knowledge about the mental world, better known as theory of mind research, has become a central topic in developmental psychology and the role of cultural impact is subject of various theoretical yet hitherto few empirical accounts. This book is the result of intensive collaboration between anthropologists and psychologists in the field of cross-cultural research on social cognitive development. Five interdisciplinary research teams, coming from the University of Heidelberg, were investigating five Pacific Island societies. All together, they were interested in the question of how and when children in these different cultures come to assign mental states to others. This unique research project combines sound ethnography of different Pacific cultures with thoroughly conducted experimental work, done by developmental psychologists; it presents a shared, thoughtful analysis of the results and provides deeper insight into current debates on the ontogeny of theory of mind competencies.

This in-depth ethnography presents new and otherwise not easily accessible results of thirty years of anthropological field research among the Yupno people of Papua New Guinea. Anthropological studies about cultures in the Finisterre Range, where the Yupno live, have been quite scarce, and this comprehensive monograph about a local knowledge system offers an important contribution to this hitherto ethnographically little-known area. Ideas about personhood, including a unique personal melody as an individual’s acoustic representation and sign of social belonging, and cultural conceptualisations of time and space are the main topics of this book. Following a strictly interdisciplinary approach, a cross-cultural psychologist, an anthropologist, a linguist, cognitive scientists and a musicologist participated in this study. These diverse forms and intensities of collaboration are mirrored in the distinctive structure of this book, with an emphasis on co-authored chapters to represent the joint research experience.

der kognitive Ansatz im interdisziplinären Dialog