Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life » (1st Edition)

In this innovative study, Jean Lave moves the analysis of one particular form of cognitive activity--arithmetic problem-solving--out of the laboratory and into the domain of everyday life. In so doing, she shows how mathematics in the "real world", such as that entailed in grocery shopping or dieting, is, like all thinking, shaped by the dynamic encounter between the culturally-endowed mind and its total context, a subtle interaction that shapes both the human subject and the world within which it acts.

List of figures; List of tables; Preface;

1. Introduction: psychology and anthropology I;

Part I. Theory in Practice:
2. Missionaries and cannibals (indoors);
3. Life after school;
4. Psychology and anthropology II;

Part II. Practice in Theory:
5. Inside the supermarket (outdoors) and from the veranda;
6. Out of trees of knowledge into fields for activity;
7. Through the supermarket;
8. Outdoors: a social anthropology of cognition in practice; Notes; References.