Department of social anthropology seminar with Victor de Munck

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Victor de Munck from SUNY New Paltz. He will present the following paper:

"A Selective Survey of Theories of Culture: the Collective-Individual; Particulate-Distributive Conundrums"


Abstract
What is culture? Where is it located? Why is it such a popular and misused concept? Is it important to have a unified concept of culture to have a discipline called anthropology or can the “discipline’ persist ‘in good health’ without it or without arriving at some consensus on the definition?” We begin with a discussion on basic understandings and problems with the concept of culture that have significant real world (i.e., political, social and economic) consequences. This sets the stage for a survey on selected and central writings by researchers and thinkers on the “nature of culture” who have tackled some of the key problems with the concept of culture. Using a synthesis of old and new approaches a solution to the question ‘what is culture’ is posited.


Bionote
Victor de Munck is a Professor at SUNY New Paltz. He is also affiliated with Vytautus Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. His specialty is cognitive anthropology with a focus on cultural models theory as it applies to romantic love, notions of the self, and social identities. His cultural areas of specialization are: Sri Lanka, Lithuania, Macedonia, and the U.S.A. He has authored 9 books (four co-authored) – three methods books, an urban ethnography on Vilnius (with three co-authors); an ethnography of a Sri Lankan village, and a book titled “Culture, Self and Meaning.” In 2012 he co-edited a book for I.B. Tauris titled Macedonia: The Political, Social, Economic and Cultural Foundations of a Balkan State for which he wrote the introduction and article on gender and another on Albanian-Macedonian perceptions of each other. In 2011 he co-edited and wrote an article for a Handbook on Cognitive anthropology for Blackwell; he is currently completing a book on Cultural Models for Oxford. He has edited a number of volumes and special issues for academic journals as well as published over fifty scholarly articles. He has a number of projects on hand including writing a cognitive ethnography on Albanians and Macedonians in Skopje, and a textbook on cross-cultural and cultural psychology (contracted with Routledge) as well as a grant on conceptions of nature and climate change in Lithuania.


All interested are welcome!

Best regards
BSAS Comittee