Research on shared task solutions
Claudia Strauss, Naomi Quinn · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 1998
Cultural sharing has been the focus of my work over the past fifteen years. When I began this work, I was agnostic about the existence of such sharing. It is true that in my more recent collaboration with Claudia Strauss, leading up to this book, it is typically I who remind her to consider evidence for and examples of sharing and the other “centripetal” properties of culture, while she has always reminded me to include instances of nonsharing and the other “centrifugal” properties of culture in our discussion. She and I jokingly interpret this predilection as a generational one: in my training in the sixties I was primed to think about how culture was shared; trained some fifteen years later, she was primed to think about how culture was not. But by the time I began the research program to be described in these two chapters, my own early researches and perhaps the beginnings of a new climate in cultural anthropology had made me pessimistic about how shared culture might really be. I am certain of this because of one incident in my career that I have never forgotten. When I came to Duke, in the spring of 1972, to be interviewed for the faculty position I hold today, one of my interviewers was the late Weston LaBarre, the distinguished culture-and-personality theorist then on the faculty.