The Anthropology of the Mind

What Is Thought?

 Not: what is cognition, what is the neuroscience of consciousness, from which perspective not only trees but lizards, amoeba and even rocks can be said to think, but what is thought as a human experience? Our answer must include the observation that that thought involves a relationship between a felt sense of an inner reality and an outer one—an awareness of a difference between one who is aware and something of which that one is aware. Yet if the blunt sense of an inner and an outer is human, the way in which inner and outer are imagined is social and particular. These judgments are so intimate that we may not recognize that that they have a cultural dimension. But they do, and the way people define mind has real consequences for the way that we understand what is real. The Anthropology of Mind sets out to explore the way these cultural dimensions affect basic human experience.

Our PNAS summary paper