Jerome Bruner
Biographic Data
| ID | 137464 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jerome Bruner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jerome |
| FAMILY NAME | Bruner |
| SIGNATURE | BRUNER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Arizona State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1505-5883 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1805 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1941 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Image and Imagination in Photographing American Religion: A Review Essay
Power Circuits: Asymmetries of Global Christianity
This article examines the idea of global Christianity in scholarship and the postcolonial and present imperial conditions that underlie it. Through an analysis of the fields of World Christianity and the anthropology of Christianity, it considers how Western Christian histories and power dynamics have impacted Christian traditions of the Global South and seriously considers the pervasive logics of geopolitical power that transform local contexts–…
Intra-Christian Violence and the Problematisation of the World Christian Paradigm
Violence is a crucial lens for inquiring historically into Christianity worldwide. The field of World Christianity, however, has been oriented by a paradigm of growth, success and Christian converts’ creative agency. This article establishes the need for a historiographical intervention in the literature on World Christianity through a critical analysis of texts that have formed the field, followed by examinations of anti-Evangelical violence in …
Imagining Persecution: Why American Christians Believe There Is a Global War against Their Faith
Many American Christians have come to understand their relationship to other Christian denominations and traditions through the lens of religious persecution. This book provides a historical account of these developments, showing the global, theological, and political changes that made it possible for contemporary Christians to claim that there is a global war on Christians. This book, however, does not advocate on behalf of particular repressed …
Under Caesar’s Sword: How Christians Respond to Persecution , edited by Daniel Philpott and Timothy Samuel Shah
If one only read the most prominent selections of World Christianity texts—Andrew Walls’s The Translation Principle in Christian History, or the late Lamin Sanneh’s West African Christianity, for example—one would likely see the assumptions that underlie the field in general: that Christianity is diverse and expanding; that the reasons for its expansion and diversity are due more to the creative agency of non-Euro-American converts than to Wester…
New Approaches to 'Converts' and 'Conversion' in Africa: An Introduction to the Special Issue
It is our goal in this special issue on "Religious Conversion in Africa" to examine the limitations of a long-standing bias toward Christianity with respect to the study of "conversion." Furthermore, we want to use this issue to prime other scholarly approaches to cultural change on the continent, beginning as early as the medieval period, including the colonial and early postcolonial eras, and extending to the contemporary. There are several rea…
Investigating comparative genocide teaching in two high school classrooms
This exploratory case study examined how two teachers used a comparative approach to teach genocide histories in a Holocaust Literature elective course. Through interviews and observations, we studied how the teachers guided students in comparing genocides as well as how they used survivor testimonies in their instruction. We found that teachers engaged in three types of comparison throughout the unit under study: defining genocide as the basis o…
Conversion and the Problem of Discontinuity in the East African Revival
This essay focuses upon particular elements of testimonies within the East African Revival in late colonial Uganda, giving analytical priority to the voice-hearing experiences of converts that often precipitated their conversion. While conversion within this movement aligns broadly with recent interest in discontinuity in Christian conversion, this essay highlights the roles of non-Christian spirits in fomenting radical religious change, includin…
What is a European hospital but a pagan shrine?” Missionaries, progress, and the problem of materiality in colonial Uganda
Western missionaries frequently stood at the forefront of altering African systems of healthcare and belief. Medical missionaries often spoke of their work as a means of combatting “superstition” and re-orienting African concepts of disease and illness towards Western notions of causality and treatment. Amidst missionary panegyrics, however, were a range of perceptions of and reactions to missionary medicine from Christian and non-Christian Afric…
Religion, Medicine, and Global Health in Uganda: Reflecting Critically on an Afternoon at Mulago Hospital
In this article, I use three scenes from an afternoon of ethnographic fieldwork at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, Uganda as the occasion to consider the various ways in which religion, medicine and global health are imagined, reified and dissolved as contemporary categories. I use historical and contemporary literature to illuminate how these interactions are contextualized products of broader historical processes. I conclude by arguing that researc…
The uneasy relation of culture and mind
The Cambridge Seven, Late Victorian Culture, and the Chinese Frontier
While some gender studies have examined dimensions of British masculinity with regard to the empire, they often have neglected the constitutive role that Christian faith played in the formation of British masculinity and the ways that British Christians constructed ideal masculine character. This essay reassesses the Cambridge Seven’s significance in the construction of a British evangelical masculinity in the late Victorian period. It argues tha…
The Testimony Must Begin in the Home: The Life of Salvation and the Remaking of Homes in the East African Revival in Southern Uganda, c. 1930-1955
The late colonial era in Uganda was not an easy time to keep families intact. Colonial officials, missionaries, and concerned East Africans offered their diagnoses of the problems and prescriptions for responding to the dilemma. In this context, Balokole Anglican revivalists articulated new patterns and ideals of family life. These new patterns of family life were not uniform across Uganda or East Africa, but they did share common characteristics…
Public Confession and the Moral Universe of the East African Revival
When the East African Revival emerged as a distinct movement in Rwanda and Uganda in the early 1930s, one of its most noticeable and controversial characteristics was the prevalence of public confession of personal sin. The revival made public many of these sins that African converts had kept hidden. Many confessed to stealing objects or money from mission stations or other employers, others admitted to sexual indiscretions, others even brought ‘…
Keswick and the East African Revival: An Historiographical Reappraisal
The history of the East African Revival has been understood predominantly from the perspective of British missionaries who were associated with the movement in the 1930s and 1940s. The most enduring of these narratives defined the revival by its relation to the English Keswick-influenced evangelicalism of the Western missionaries associated with the revival. This bias can be observed not only in the basic narrative of the revival, but also in the…
Contents, Vol. 33, 1990
Celebrating Divergence: Piaget and Vygotsky
Contrasting Piaget’s emphasis on the invariant logic of growth with Vygotsky’s emphasis upon the centrality of culturally patterned dialogue in the enablement of growth, one is led to conclude that their two approaches were incommensurate. This incommensurateness may expresss a deep and possibly irreconcilable difference between two ways of knowing: one seeking to ‘explain’ and the other to ‘interpret’ human growth and the human condition. We are…
Commentary
Plot, Plight, and Dramatism: Interpretation at Three Ages
There is a good deal of interest today in cultural psychology and its central forms of thought, which are interpretive or meaning making rather than computational or algorithmic. At the same time, there is a good deal of concern that such a focus is incompatible with the praxis of empirical or scientific psychology. The research described in this article is an attempt to exemplify one way that a scientific study of interpretive processes might pr…
Inquiring into Empire: Princeton Seminary’s Society of Inquiry on Missions, the British Empire, and the Opium Trade, Ca. 1830‐1850
Princeton Seminary was intimately involved in the North American foreign missions movement in the nineteenth century. One remarkable dimension of this involvement came through the student-led Society of Inquiry on Missions, which sought to gather information about the global state of the Christian mission enterprise. This paper examines the Society’s correspondence with Protestant missionaries in China regarding their attitudes to the British Emp…
Culture and Mind: Their Fruitful Incommensurability
I reflect here on the historical junctures where anthropology and psychology cross paths, creating foundations for a general cultural psychology in the present.1I am particularly attuned to those points of intersection that inform understanding of mind in culture and culture in mind. I focus on institutions as means for canonizing the ordinary, on narrative as a mode of positioning the extraordinary vis-à-vis mundane expectations, and on agency, …
A short history of psychological theories of learning
University, where he teaches principally in the School of Law. With George Miller he founded Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies in the early 1960s. He has published widely, his work principally focusing on the interaction of mind and culture. His latest book is Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (2002). -L/earning remains an elusive topic, de spite the endless research lavished on it. And what we mean by it, of course, is shaped by how we …
Life as Narrative
Jerome Bruner Life as Narrative I WOULD LIKE TO TRY OUT AN IDEA THAT MAY NOT BE QUITE READY, indeed may not be quite possible. But I have no doubt it is worth a tiy. It has to do with the nature of thought and with one of its uses. It has been traditional to treat thought, so to speak, as an instrument of reason. Good thought is right reason, and its efficacy is measured against the laws of logic or induction. Indeed, in its most recent computati…
Tributes to Howard E. Gruber
Minding the Law
The Narrative Construction of Reality
Actual Minds, Possible Worlds
Bruner sets forth nothing less than a new agenda for the study of the mind. He examines the irrepressibly human acts of imagination that allow us to make experience meaningful; he calls this side of mental activity the “narrative mode,” and his book makes important advances in the effort to unravel its nature.
Life as Narrative
Jerome Bruner Life as Narrative I WOULD LIKE TO TRY OUT AN IDEA THAT MAY NOT BE QUITE READY, indeed may not be quite possible. But I have no doubt it is worth a tiy. It has to do with the nature of thought and with one of its uses. It has been traditional to treat thought, so to speak, as an instrument of reason. Good thought is right reason, and its efficacy is measured against the laws of logic or induction. Indeed, in its most recent computati…
Culture and Human Development: A New Look
Each culture generates a ‘folk psychology’ in the form of narratives about how people are, how and why they act, and how they deal with trouble. These narratives typically depict a canonical state of things and a deviation from that state. Stories are means for making these deviations comprehensible, if not acceptable. Typically, a culture’s institutional structure serves to ratify and even enforce its folk psychology. Studies are cited to show h…
Culture and Mind: Their Fruitful Incommensurability
I reflect here on the historical junctures where anthropology and psychology cross paths, creating foundations for a general cultural psychology in the present.1I am particularly attuned to those points of intersection that inform understanding of mind in culture and culture in mind. I focus on institutions as means for canonizing the ordinary, on narrative as a mode of positioning the extraordinary vis-à-vis mundane expectations, and on agency, …
Vygotsky's zone of proximal development: The hidden agenda
What are the roles of consciousness and of collectivism in Vygotsky's theory
The Autobiographical Process
The social context of language acquisition
Narratives of aging
What is a Narrative Fact
This article explores the manner in which culturally prevalent narratives lead us not only to interpret facts in a particular way but also to generate those very facts through the acts we perform in consonance with these narratives
Models of the Learner
Topics, including the topics of keynote addresses to learned societies, have a hermeneutic history. The hermeneutic history of a topic, we are cautioned, must be taken into account if we are fully to interpret its meaning. The topic of my paper, Models of the Learner, is no exception. It has such a history and has a proximal origin in a set of exchanges-first as a conversation and then as the topic of a more formal learned discussion. Let me set …
Play, thought, and language
(1983). Play, thought, and language. Peabody Journal of Education: Vol. 60, No. 3, pp. 60-69
A short history of psychological theories of learning
University, where he teaches principally in the School of Law. With George Miller he founded Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies in the early 1960s. He has published widely, his work principally focusing on the interaction of mind and culture. His latest book is Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (2002). -L/earning remains an elusive topic, de spite the endless research lavished on it. And what we mean by it, of course, is shaped by how we …
Another look at New Look 1
The dimensions of propaganda: German short-wave broadcasts to America
In order to correlate changes of opinion with changes in propaganda pressure, systematic methods of expressing variation in propaganda must be developed and used. With the construction of adequate dimensions comes the opportunity for intelligible parallel study of propaganda campaigns. German broadcasts were studied and some of them compared with British broadcasts when common topics were used as bases for the broadcasts. The following dimensions…
Investigating comparative genocide teaching in two high school classrooms
This exploratory case study examined how two teachers used a comparative approach to teach genocide histories in a Holocaust Literature elective course. Through interviews and observations, we studied how the teachers guided students in comparing genocides as well as how they used survivor testimonies in their instruction. We found that teachers engaged in three types of comparison throughout the unit under study: defining genocide as the basis o…
Public Confession and the Moral Universe of the East African Revival
When the East African Revival emerged as a distinct movement in Rwanda and Uganda in the early 1930s, one of its most noticeable and controversial characteristics was the prevalence of public confession of personal sin. The revival made public many of these sins that African converts had kept hidden. Many confessed to stealing objects or money from mission stations or other employers, others admitted to sexual indiscretions, others even brought ‘…
Keswick and the East African Revival: An Historiographical Reappraisal
The history of the East African Revival has been understood predominantly from the perspective of British missionaries who were associated with the movement in the 1930s and 1940s. The most enduring of these narratives defined the revival by its relation to the English Keswick-influenced evangelicalism of the Western missionaries associated with the revival. This bias can be observed not only in the basic narrative of the revival, but also in the…
The New Educational Technology
Professor Bruner, of Harvard, whose recent works on psychology and philosophy in education have aroused much favorable attention, presents here the new view of education, advocates more prescriptive research, and warns of complacency resulting from apparent early victories
The strategy of terror: Audience response to Blitzkrieg im Westen
Reactions to this German terror propaganda film fell into 4 classes: belligerent, defeatist, alarmist, and indifferent. The majority of individuals were in the first and last groups. The belligerent group were predominantly interventionists and anti-German, and stood out against feelings of the futility of resistance. The passive defeatists' response was thrill. The frightened alarmists knew fear as their sole emotional reaction to the film, with…
Conversion and the Problem of Discontinuity in the East African Revival
This essay focuses upon particular elements of testimonies within the East African Revival in late colonial Uganda, giving analytical priority to the voice-hearing experiences of converts that often precipitated their conversion. While conversion within this movement aligns broadly with recent interest in discontinuity in Christian conversion, this essay highlights the roles of non-Christian spirits in fomenting radical religious change, includin…
The uneasy relation of culture and mind
On searching for Bruner
The strategy of terror: Audience response to Blitzkrieg im Westen
Reactions to this German terror propaganda film fell into 4 classes: belligerent, defeatist, alarmist, and indifferent. The majority of individuals were in the first and last groups. The belligerent group were predominantly interventionists and anti-German, and stood out against feelings of the futility of resistance. The passive defeatists' response was thrill. The frightened alarmists knew fear as their sole emotional reaction to the film, with…
The dimensions of propaganda: German short-wave broadcasts to America
In order to correlate changes of opinion with changes in propaganda pressure, systematic methods of expressing variation in propaganda must be developed and used. With the construction of adequate dimensions comes the opportunity for intelligible parallel study of propaganda campaigns. German broadcasts were studied and some of them compared with British broadcasts when common topics were used as bases for the broadcasts. The following dimensions…
The New Educational Technology
Professor Bruner, of Harvard, whose recent works on psychology and philosophy in education have aroused much favorable attention, presents here the new view of education, advocates more prescriptive research, and warns of complacency resulting from apparent early victories
The achievement and antecedents of labelling
The achievement of labelling was investigated in a longitudinal study of one mother–infant dyad, using video-recordings of their free play in a period between 0; 8 and 1; 6. Analysis of joint picture-book reading revealed that this activity had very early on the structure of a dialogue. The child's lexical labels might be regarded as more adult-like substitutes for earlier communicative forms that he had utilized in the dialogue. These were smili…
Games, social exchange and the acquisition of language
The nature of early games and how they might assist the infant in language acquisition were explored in a longitudinal study of two mother–infant dyads, using video-recordings of their free play. Analysis of appearance and disappearance games, in particular, revealed: (1) a restricted format, with a limited number of semantic elements, and a highly constrained set of semantic relations; (2) a clear repetitive structure, which allowed both for ant…
The Developing Child Series
The social context of language acquisition
Play, thought, and language
(1983). Play, thought, and language. Peabody Journal of Education: Vol. 60, No. 3, pp. 60-69
Vygotsky's zone of proximal development: The hidden agenda
What are the roles of consciousness and of collectivism in Vygotsky's theory
Models of the Learner
Topics, including the topics of keynote addresses to learned societies, have a hermeneutic history. The hermeneutic history of a topic, we are cautioned, must be taken into account if we are fully to interpret its meaning. The topic of my paper, Models of the Learner, is no exception. It has such a history and has a proximal origin in a set of exchanges-first as a conversation and then as the topic of a more formal learned discussion. Let me set …
Actual Minds, Possible Worlds
Bruner sets forth nothing less than a new agenda for the study of the mind. He examines the irrepressibly human acts of imagination that allow us to make experience meaningful; he calls this side of mental activity the “narrative mode,” and his book makes important advances in the effort to unravel its nature.
Culture and Human Development: A New Look
Each culture generates a ‘folk psychology’ in the form of narratives about how people are, how and why they act, and how they deal with trouble. These narratives typically depict a canonical state of things and a deviation from that state. Stories are means for making these deviations comprehensible, if not acceptable. Typically, a culture’s institutional structure serves to ratify and even enforce its folk psychology. Studies are cited to show h…
The Narrative Construction of Reality
Another look at New Look 1
On searching for Bruner
The View from the Heart's Eye: A Commentary
The “remembered” self
The expression the remembered self is, I suspect, a cunningly designed oxymoron – rather like, say, the title of a recent book, The Remembered Present (Edelman, 1990), which also poses a conceptual challenge. I gladly accept the challenge, for I shall want to argue in what follows that Self is not an entity that one can simply remember, but is, rather, a complex mental edifice that one constructs by the use of a variety of mental processes, one o…
The Autobiographical Process
The Culture of Education
What is a Narrative Fact
This article explores the manner in which culturally prevalent narratives lead us not only to interpret facts in a particular way but also to generate those very facts through the acts we perform in consonance with these narratives
Narratives of aging
Minding the Law
A World of Babies: Imagined Childcare Guides for Seven Societies
Are babies divine, or do they have the devil in them? Should parents talk to their infants, or is it a waste of time? Answers to questions about the nature and nurture of infants appear in this book as advice to parents in seven world societies. Imagine what Dr Spock might have written if he were a healer from Bali ... or an Aboriginal grandmother from the Australian desert ... or a diviner from a rural village in West Africa. As the seven childc…
Minding the Law
Journal Article Minding the Law Get access Amsterdam Anthony G. Bruner Jerome, Minding the LawCambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. x, 453 pp. $35.00. James L. Kainen James L. Kainen Fordham University School of Law Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Journal of Legal History, Volume 44, Issue 4, October 2000, Pages 498–500, https://doi.org/10.2307/3113831 Published: 01 October 2000
Tributes to Howard E. Gruber
Psychology (26 works) · Philosophy (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · History (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Linguistics (11 works) · History (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works)