Sharon N. Solomon xerexes@yahoo.com
Dept. of Anthropology University of Toronto Dec. 2000
Abstract
Cognitive anthropology assumes that each culture orders events, material life and ideas, to its own particular criteria. The fundamental aim is to reliably represent the logical systems of thought of other people according to criteria which can be discovered and replicated through analysis. Its methodology and theoretical basis stem from the fields of both psychology and anthropology. The field can be divided into three phases: 1) ethnoscience, an early formative period in the 1950’s; 2) the middle period during the 1960’s and 1970’s, commonly identified with the study of folk models; and 3) the growth of schema theory and the development of consensus theory in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
Many advances have been made in a relatively short period of time in understanding the human mind and in understanding people’s world views through cognitive anthropology. It has something to offer each of anthropology’s four fields: archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology. Moreover, it has significantly changed the face of cultural anthropology, particularly with respect to its methodological development.
Introduction
Cognitive anthropology is an extremely broad field of study. It is closely aligned with psychology, and has adopted theoretical elements and methodological techniques from structuralism and linguistics. In researching this paper, the divisions amongst the various subfields of anthropology became glaringly obvious. Theoretical approaches are well documented in the fields of linguistics and social/cultural anthropology, however, even though similar methods are employed in the fields of physical anthropology, primatology and archaeology, the theories employed are not treated as being equivalent. Thus, while it should be noted that Ian Hodder (1999), Colin Renfrew and Ezra Zubrow (1994) have employed cognitive methods in archaeological interpretation, and most theories of human evolution and primate behaviour rely heavily upon cognitive theories (Tattersal and Schwartz 2000; Boyd and Silk 1997), this paper will concentrate upon the specific field of cognitive anthropology.
Cognitive anthropologists view anthropology as a formal science. They maintain that culture is composed of logical rules that are based on ideas that can be accessed in the mind (Moore 1999:5). There are four basic categories in cognitive anthropology: semantics, knowledge structures, models and systems, and discourse analysis (D’Andrade 1995:1). Semantic studies of terminology systems formed the basis of early cognitive anthropology. The analytical and ethnographic methods developed in these studies provided the foundation for ethnoscience (also called the new ethnography) (ibid.). In contrast with some earlier anthropological approaches to culture, cultures were not regarded as material phenomena, but rather as cognitive organizations of material phenomena (Tyler 1969:3).
Cognitive anthropology not only focuses on discovering how different peoples organize culture but also how they utilize culture. It does not claim to predict human behaviour but attempts to describe what is socially and culturally expected or appropriate in given situations, circumstances and contexts (Moore 1999:16). However, it is not concerned with describing events in order to explain or discover processes of change. Furthermore, this approach declares that every every culture embodies its own unique organizational system for understanding things, events and behaviour. Thus, cognitive anthropology has produced both descriptive accounts of cultural categories and generative models.
To the core of ethnographic semantics and ethnoscience practiced in the 1950’s and 1960’s, decision models and narrative grammars were added to the agenda of cognitive anthropology in the 1970’s (Colby 1996:209). D’Andrade (1995:245-248) states that the linguistic preoccupation in cognitive anthropology has given away to more psychological approaches. This shift began in the late 1970’s and became more prominent in the 1980’s with interest in ‘connectionist networks’ (ibid.).
Connectionist networks “ put together schematic cluster of features into complex objects without any necessary linguistic base” (D’Andrade 1995:246-247). Discourse semantics, consensus mapping and applications of artificial intelligence were incorporated in the 1980’s. Throughout the 1990’s, cognitive theories of emotions, interests in health and well being, religious symbolism and computer aided discourse analysis were all explored (ibid.)
