The International Cognition & Culture Institute (ICCI) was founded in September 2008 thanks to an initial grant from the London School of Economics and Political Science and support from the Institut Jean Nicod (ENS, EHESS, CNRS) in Paris. (We welcome support from other scholarly institutions and foundations!).

The rationale for this Web Institute is twofold:

* Scholars in the emerging cross-disciplinary field of cognition and culture studies are scattered around the world and few (if any) institutions has a sufficient number and variety of them for optimal research and teaching.

* It is in the very nature of this field to call for international and interdisciplinary collaborations.

A number of programs are, of course, already contributing to the networking made necessary by the emergence of this new field. We see our Web Institute, with no time limit and no fixed agenda, as complementary to these more focused initiatives.

The website of the International Cognition & Culture Institute has, as permanent features, a blog meant to stimulate and news meant to inform. While more personal posts are obviously for the blog, and more impersonal one for the news, there is no strict demarcation between these two functions, and, on the homepage of the site, posts to the blog and posts to the news are intermingled (You may, if you prefer, see just the blog, or just the news by selecting "Blog" or "News" in the Home menu).

In 2010, we are co-sponsoring a series of conferences on cognition and culture to take place at the department of anthropology of the LSE. The videos of these conferences will be put online on this site.

We are actively planning several online workshops, and other initiatives to be announced in due time.

We have other uses of the Institute in perspective (collaborative research and online training, for instance) and we of course welcome initiatives and suggestions. Successful web institutions typically evolve in directions that had not been foreseen, let alone planned, and we look forward to being observant participants in such an evolution.

The ICCI team:

Rita Astuti (LSE)
Nicolas Baumard (Oxford)
Pascal Boyer (Washington University, St Louis)
Nicolas Claidière (ICCI Webmaster, St Andrews)
Hugo Mercier (University of Pennsylvania)
Olivier Morin (ICCI Blogmaster, Institut Nicod)
Dan Sperber (ICCI Director, Institut Nicod and LSE),
Charles Stafford (LSE).