Dan Sperber - Explaining Culture (Blackwell, 1996) ***

 If anything needs to be taught in schools, it's cognitive science. Why do we think what we think? And how do we think what we think? What and who influences our thinking and how can we make sure that we can get to the truth or a correct observation and interpretation without being biased by the filters of our eduction, context and culture? 

Anthropologist Dan Sperber tries to provide answers by first making the distinctions between different categories of representation: public representations, mental representations and cultural representations. He tries to bridge anthropology with psychology to really understand how our mind acts in a cultural context. 

He expands on the epidemiology of beliefs, and how they spread, after which he tackles the issue of cultural evolution and beliefs. 

Sperber's book is very theoretical and abstract, and it dates from 1996. Cognitive science has evolved over the last decades, and I'm sure many of his thoughts have been confirmed in the meantime, and some possibly challenged. Despite this, the questions he raises and the theory he advances are more than worth reading and will shed some light on how we live our daily lives in a cultural environment.