Representing Relationships: Modes of Cognition and Connection - Hardcover

Fiske, Alan Page

 
9781108837729: Representing Relationships: Modes of Cognition and Connection
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1108837727 ISBN 13: 9781108837729
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2025

Synopsis

The four fundamental forms of sociality structure our relationships. By comparing hundreds of cultures across more than 5,000 years, this book builds on relational models theory to reveal how each of the four basic types of relationship is conceived in their own distinctive cognitive medium. The text demonstrates how people use their food and bodies to foster affiliation, spatial dimensions to form hierarchy, concrete operations of one-to-one matching to create equality, and employ arbitrary, conventional symbols for proportion-based relationships. Originating from the author's ethnographic fieldwork in a West African village, this innovative social theory integrates findings from social, cognitive, and developmental psychology, linguistics and semiotics, anthropology, archeology, art history, religious studies, and ancient texts. The chapters offer compelling insights into readers' everyday social relations by showing what humans think their social relationships actually are.

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About the Author

Alan Page Fiske is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and known for creating the relational models theory. His notable publications include Structures of Social Life (1991), Virtuous Violence (2014, with Tage Shakti Rai), and Kama Muta: Discovering the Connecting Emotion (2020).

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Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Publication date
2025
Language
English
ISBN 10 
1108837727
ISBN 13 
9781108837729
Binding
Hardcover
Number of pages
450