The ups and downs of space and time: topography in Yupno language, culture, and cognition

Much prior research has investigated how humans understand time using body-based contrasts like front/back and left/right. It has recently come to light, however, that some communities instead understand time using environment-based contrasts. Here, we present the richest portrait yet of one such case: the topographic system used by the Yupno of Papua New Guinea, in which the past is construed as downhill and the future as uphill. We first survey topographic concepts in Yupno language and culture, showing how they constitute a privileged resource for communicating about space. Next, we survey time concepts in Yupno, focusing on how topographic concepts are used to construe past, present, and future. We then illustrate how this topographic understanding of time comes to life in the words, hands, and minds of Yupno speakers. Drawing on informal interviews, we offer a view of the topographic system that goes beyond a community-level summary, and offers a glimpse of its individual-level and moment-to-moment texture. Finally, we step back to account for how this topographic understanding of time is embedded within a rich cognitive ecology of linguistic, cultural, gestural, and architectural practices. We close by discussing an elusive question: Why is the future uphill?

Rethinking Culture and Cognition

Paul DiMaggio's (1997) Annual Review of Sociology article urged integration of the cognitive and the cultural, triggering a cognitive turn in cultural sociology. Since then, a burgeoning literature in cultural sociology has incorporated ideas from the cognitive sciences—cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and philosophy—significantly reshaping sociologists’ approach to culture, both theoretically and methodologically. This article reviews work published since DiMaggio's agenda-setting piece—research that builds on cross-disciplinary links between cultural sociology and the cognitive sciences. These works present new ideas on the acquisition, storage, and retrieval of culture, on how forms of personal culture interact, on how culture becomes shared, and on how social interaction and cultural environments inform cognitive processes. Within our discussion, we point to research questions that remain unsettled. We then conclude with issues for future research in culture and cognition that can enrich sociological analysis about action more generally.

Welcome to the Real World: Escaping the Sociology of Culture and Cognition

Recent developments in cultural sociology show that our field remains entrenched in a troubling pattern. As Lizardo (2014) demonstrated, sociologists have a pathological relationship to interdisciplinarity. We tend to create internal “avatars” of other disciplines rather than working with them directly. This fools us into thinking that we’re interdisciplinary when, in reality, “[t]hese subdisciplinary avatars have been created by sociologists for sociological consumption” (Lizardo 2014: 985). Little has changed in the past seven years. In this paper, I will briefly examine one recent case - values - where some sociologists are actively resisting interdisciplinary engagement. I argue that most of their objections are unfounded. I then examine other, less obvious, mechanisms that discourage cultural sociologists from interdisciplinary dialogue.