The case of curers, noncurers, and biomedical experts in Pichátaro, Mexico. Resiliency in folk-medical beliefs.

We explore potential conceptual and cultural change in folk-medical models within a Mexican community that may have taken place over the past 30 years. Building on a study from the 1970s, we explore the effects a government-supported biomedical clinic had on the content and distribution of folk-medical concepts. Surprisingly, we find that despite a dramatic increase in access to biomedicine and a host of socioeconomic shifts opening access to new medical ideas, folk-medical knowledge in Pichátaro, Michoacán, Mexico has remained largely unchanged with respect to its distribution and content. Curers and noncurers not only agree with one another but also continue to agree with a general model held in the 1970s. It is the medical models of clinic personnel that stand out as odd within the community. Yet, despite these conceptual differences, the biomedical facilities of the town are well attended.

Gendered experiences of migration and conceptual knowledge of illness.

Migration is a gendered process which may differentially alter conceptual models of illness as variation and change within specific sub-domains reflect unique experiences and interactions. Forty Mexican migrants completed a questionnaire consisting of 30 true/false questions regarding the symptoms, causes, and treatments of 19 illnesses (570 total questions). Results were analyzed using the Cultural Consensus Model and residual agreement analyses to measure patterns of inter-informant agreement. While men and women share overall agreement, they differ significantly in conceptions of treatment. In general, men over-extend the efficacy of treatment options while women restrict the abilities of folk healers and emphasize dietary changes in treating many illnesses. Variations reflect different social roles and interactions as migration patterns and living conditions reinforce gendered roles in medical decision-making. Women have greater experience with illnesses and interactions with biomedical services, which causes them to approximate biomedical providers' model of treatment.

Folkbiological reasoning from a cross-cultural developmental perspective: early essentialist notions are shaped by cultural beliefs.

In 2 experiments, the authors examined the evolution of folkbiological reasoning in children (4 to 10 years of age) and adults from 4 distinct communities (rural Native American, rural majority culture, and suburban and urban North American communities). Using an adoption paradigm, they examined participants' intuitions regarding the inheritance of properties and the mechanisms underlying the transmission of kindhood. Across all communities and ages, there was a strong biological component underlying reasoning about the inheritance of properties. There were also differences in children's intuitions about the mechanisms underlying kindhood: Native American children were more likely than their counterparts to consider blood as a candidate biological essence. This suggests that as children search to discover the underlying essence of a biological kind, they are guided by broad essentialist notions that are shaped by discourse within their community.

Folkbiology of freshwater fish.

Cross-cultural comparisons of categorization often confound cultural factors with expertise. This paper reports four experiments on the conceptual behavior of Native American and majority-culture fish experts. The two groups live in the same general area and engage in essentially the same set of fishing-related behaviors. Nonetheless, cultural differences were consistently observed. Majority-culture fish experts tended to sort fish into taxonomic and goal-related categories. They also showed an influence of goals on probes of ecological relations, tending to answer in terms of relations involving adult fish. Native American fish experts, in contrast, were more likely to sort ecologically. They were also more likely to see positive and reciprocal ecological relations, tending to answer in terms of relations involving the full life cycle of fish. Further experiments support the view that the cultural differences do not reflect different knowledge bases but rather differences in the organization and accessibility of knowledge. At a minimum the results suggest that similar activities within a well-structured domain do not necessarily lead to common conceptualizations.

The cultural mind: environmental decision making and cultural modeling within and across populations.

This article describes cross-cultural research on the relation between how people conceptualize nature and how they act in it. Mental models of nature differ dramatically among populations living in the same area and engaged in similar activities. This has novel implications for environmental decision making and management, including common problems. The research offers a distinct perspective on cultural modeling and a unified approach to studies of culture and cognition. The authors argue that cultural transmission and formation consist primarily not in shared rules or norms but in complex distributions of causally connected representations across minds interacting with the environment. The cultural stability and diversity of these representations often derive from rich, biologically prepared mental mechanisms that limit variation to readily transmissible psychological forms. This framework addresses several methodological issues, such as limitations on conceiving culture to be a well-defined system, bounded entity, independent variable, or an internalized component of minds.

Ideal is typical.

A well-established finding in research on concepts and categories is that some members are rated as better or more typical examples than others. It is generally thought that typicality reflects centrality, that is, that typical examples are those that are similar to many other members of the category. This interpretation of typicality is based on studies in which participants had little knowledge about the relevant categories. In the present study, experienced fishermen were asked to give goodness-of-example ratings to familiar freshwater fish. These fishermen were of two cultural groups with somewhat different goals and ideals. Typicality was well predicted by fishes' desirability and poorly predicted by their centrality. Further, the two cultural groups differed in their typicality ratings in ways that corresponded to their different goals and ideals. For knowledgeable reasoners typicality in natural taxonomic categories appears based on ideals rather than on centrality.