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This chapter examines the ways that memory as a meaning-preserving system develops in human infancy and early childhood. In addressing how changes in meaning affect memory and the process of recollection, it considers the nature of experience in the social and cultural world of childhood and the related developing meaning system of the child. It further explores the idea that functional changes in memory accompany an expansion of consciousness, a product of interlocking systems of the developing child and social and cultural transactions during the critical early years. The chapter is organized as follows. First, it sketches the systems involved in basic memory and considers how recollection may relate to that construct. Next, it discusses the general outlines of experience and memory within dynamic developmental systems, noting constraints on early developments of the meaning and memory system. Finally, it describes how the scope of consciousness expands from the intersection of experiential and social-cultural change and its relation to the developing personal memory system.

This chapter focuses on group interview data from Bosnian and Palestinian youth, most of whom had spent at least three of their teen years in the midst of severe and sustained political violence. The results illustrate the variability with which adolescents process their experiences with political violence and how the availability of explanatory meaning during conflict can shape their identity. The construct identity-relevant meaning systems is presented in order to capture the type of meaning that was revealed in these interviews.

This chapter reviews a number of perspectives on the components and functions of the therapeutic relationship, and examines relationship guidelines offered by traditional cognitive therapy models. It goes on to offer the C-I perspective on the relationship and provides practical suggestions and examples that practitioners can utilize to maintain a balance between relational acceptance and challenge, and between openness and adhering to boundaries that protect the main purpose of the worker-client encounter. The main relationship strategy discussed and exemplified involves entering into the client's meaning system: listening, feeling, and extending one's own memory patterns in order to get a first hand sense of the client's reality. This kind of close connection to the client's experience allows the practitioner to offer responses that will both fit with the client's sense of things and offer useful challenges. In addition, this level of understanding almost always generates an authentic attitude of respect for the client.

An increasingly popular approach to thinking about religion from a psychological perspective is to treat religions as “meaning systems.” A lot of research in the psychology of religion has been conducted within this “meaning systems” paradigm. Such research also demonstrates the positive role religious meaning-making can play in health and resilience, stress and coping, and pro-sociality. The research cited in this book suggests that our embodiment directly impacts our understanding of how meanings are arrived at. This, in turn, affects the ways in which we understand religious meaning-making and moves the concern with justifying the religiously lived life in a more pragmatic direction.

In looking into meaning systems, symbols, and the emic aspects of their cultural studies, several North American anthropologists have drawn attention to interpreting the behavior of people. As such, meaning is associated with various social, ecological, economic, and political variables in explaining human behavior. This chapter argues that analysis relies heavily on meaning and this proves to be insufficient in explaining behavior because of the flexible nature of cultural symbols. The chapter attempts to look into how modern Nahua are able to infuse human body ideas into symbolism and religious thought. While the notion of the corn spirit represents the human body and is a fundamental symbol in Nahua religious ideology, understanding the role of the body is crucial to understanding what these symbols mean. Also, understanding Mesoamerican religion is shown to be best achieved through ethnographic, ethnohistorical, and archaeological studies.

This chapter explains why the choice of sex partner and the outcome of the resultant relationship are consistently patterned within and organized by particular communities, social networks, organizations, and meaning systems. These vignettes highlight some of the themes of the chapter: the constructed, highly organized venues in which individuals search for sex partners; the role that group cultures and community norms play in structuring sexual relationships and behavioral repertoires; the limited efforts of institutional actors, such as churches or social-service agencies, to regulate relationships and behaviors as well as the limited effects of those efforts; the importance of urban space as a facilitator of sexual transactions; and the social, family, and health consequences of sexual decision making. The chapter also explains recurrent patterns of partner selection and relationship formation in different urban subpopulations, and the unintended outcomes of different patterns of sexuality.

Religions puzzle the scientific imagination for two reasons: First, why do people believe in the existence of supernatural agents, despite the absence of empirical evidence? Second, why do religious beliefs cause people to behave in ways that seem so costly, such as the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son to his God? Evolutionists who study religion are faced with the same puzzle, but they have made more progress than traditional religious scholars because evolutionary theory is designed to answer questions about the presence and absence of functional organization. The most important insight to emerge from evolutionary theory, however, is that the study of religions must be nested within the more general study of meaning systems, defined as sets of beliefs and practices that receive environmental information as input and result in action as output. Almost everything that holds for religions (including adaptive fictions) also holds for other meaning systems.

This chapter broadly canvasses the strategic logic of the Islamic State’s (IS) propaganda strategy by examining how its key constituent parts are interlocking in a sophisticated approach to communications that is multidimensional, comprehensive, and cohesive. It explains how these parts connect together to produce a full-spectrum propaganda effort that maximizes the reach, relevance, and resonance of the groups’ message, with different outputs deployed with both a singular specific purpose and a particular role in the overall synchronization of all constituent elements. By broadly mapping the constituent parts of IS’s propaganda strategy, explaining variations throughout the group’s “boom-bust” history, and analyzing their connections with IS’s military activities and territorial situation, this chapter is designed to frame the “deep dive” chapters that explore individual components of IS propaganda.

Chapter 6 explores how the theological and political standpoints are put to work in the Urban Monastery’s social organization and strategies of action. Neo-monasticism’s break with the individualistic theology of traditional evangelicals finds expression in new ways of organizing community and practicing holistic mission in the world. Chapter 6 examines how Urban Monastery participants explicitly draw on core symbolic elements of their distinctive holistic communitarian meaning system to construct lines of individual and collective action in the world. Urban Monastery participants’ practice of holistic communitarianism demonstrates how the vigilant application of a system of cultural meaning can become a unifying principle of action of remarkable strength and scope. Unlike Weber’s ascetic Protestants, however, the Urban Monastery practices a type of celebratory asceticism that is communitarian rather than individualistic in emphasis.