BACKGROUND It is commony claimed that changing the culture of health organisations is a fundamental prerequisite for improving the National Health Service (NHS). Little is currently known about the nature or importance of culture and cultural change in primary care groups and trusts (PCG/Ts) or their constituent general practices. AIMS To investigate the importance of culture and cultural cha...

Anthropological demography is a specialty within demography which uses anthropological theory and methods to provide a better understanding of demographic phenomena in current and past populations. Its genesis and ongoing growth lie at the intersection between demography and socio-cultural anthropology and with their efforts to understand population processes, mainly fertility, migration, and m...

WHEN GREGORY BATESON was conducting fieldwork in New Guinea, his friends among the native Iatmul could not understand why he had to work so hard to learn their language: “But our language is easy to understand” they told him, “we just talk.”1 I wonder how Romans would react to an American studying their gestures from a distance of two millennia. A predictable response would be that their body l...

As Kertzer and Fricke note in their introduction to Anthropological Demography: Toward a New Synthesis, the relationship between sociocultural anthropology and demography has been less than harmonious—spanning a spectrum ranging from ambivalence to mutual distaste and distrust (Kertzer and Fricke 1997, 1). The emphasis in anthropology on small samples, long-term fieldwork, and qualitative analy...

Cultural neuroscience has documented factors that affect biological and psychological processes that reciprocally shape beliefs and norms shared by groups of individuals. Here we highlight open questions regarding the stability versus malleability of these findings across time, environments, and cultural settings. By borrowing points from population neuroscience (Falk et al., in Proc Natl Acad ...

OBJECTIVES Cultural variability (CV) is introduced as an overlooked dimension of cultural identity development pertaining to emphasizing and de-emphasizing the influence of a single cultural identity (i.e., cultural influence [CI]) on daily interactions and behaviors. The Cultural IDentity Influence Measure (CIDIM) is introduced as a novel measure of CI and CV, and hypothesis-driven validation ...

In recent years, far from arguing that evolutionary approaches to our own species permit us to describe the fundamental character of human nature, a prominent group of cultural evolutionary theorists has instead argued that the very idea of 'human nature' is one we should reject. It makes no sense, they argue, to speak of human nature in opposition to human culture. The very same sceptical argu...

The study of culture and biology has long stood stratified within the social and natural sciences, a gap that physicist C.P. Snow (1959) famously called "the two cultures." Cultural neuroscience is an emerging, interdisciplinary field that examines the bidirectional influence of culture and genes to brain and behavior across multiple timescales. Integrating theory and methods from cultural psyc...