Most critically, however, the presence of psychologists, their methods and theories, forces anthropologists to recognize the need to describe action and interpretation at the individual level in terms of individual minds. The weekly seminar , taught by the codirectors, is the center of Culture and Cognition, in the sense that it is the point of entry into the program. It is a forum in which all students and faculty participate and it is the setting in which collaborative research is initially organized. All students in their first and second years enroll in the weekly seminar for four consecutive terms. The seminar orients students toward an interdisciplinary enterprise.
Much effort goes into helping students develop a shared analytic and methodological vocabulary.
Initiation to collaborative research . Throughout the four-semester sequence, but particularly during the second year, students begin to develop projects with interdisciplinary goals under the guidance of the primary teaching faculty. Considerable faculty effort is spent both within and outside class directing students toward this approach. As an example, over the past four years a group of students from anthropology and psychology has worked on a project exploring the culture of childhood. Children think differently than adults, speak differently, and behave differently.