Culture, Identity, and Essentialism: Anthropological and Psychological Approaches

This Open Access book examines how people often treat social group membership as inherent, immutable, informative and even intergenerationally inherited. Such essentialism remains one of the more puzzling folk intuitions, at odds with social science maintaining that people become culturally competent group members through enculturation, and that norms can change how group boundaries are defined quite substantially. Essentialism also features prominently in much rhetoric that justifies intergroup hostility and in researchers’ attempts to explain it. Nonetheless, social scientists have not reached a consensus about essentialism’s causal role in intergroup relations.

In this Open Access book, contributors from a range of perspectives tackle fundamental questions in this field:

• Do humans share a tendency to essentialise groups?
• If so, where does this tendency come from?
• How is essentialism expressed in cognition, behavior, and institutions?
• What are its consequences for cooperation and social conflict?

Psychologists, cultural anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists weigh in on these questions in this volume, often using specific cultural contexts as case studies to elucidate both the particularities and common patterns in the ways essentialism does, or does not, work in the real world.

Wolfgang Wagner is professor of social psychology at the University of Tartu, Estonia. His interests are in theoretical and empirical issues on social and cultural knowledge, intergroup relations, public understanding of science, and social representation theory. He authored and edited several books and is board member of several scholarly journals. He held visiting positions at various universities in California, Brazil, France, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and UK.

Cristina Moya is associate professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She takes an evolutionary approach to understanding why human social behavior and cognition is different from that of our primate relatives, and how it is culturally patterned. She conducts research in the Peruvian Altiplano along the Quechua-Aymara language boundary and using cross-cultural datasets to investigate how people think about ethnic categories, why social relations influence reproductive decisions, and why some people adopt new and costly behaviors such as religious pilgrimage, while others resist.