Saturday, April 25, 2009

History

Cognitive anthropology is a recent subfield of anthropology (D’Andrade 1995:1). In 1950’s, cognitive anthropology came to be regarded as a distinct theoretical and methodological approach within anthropology. However, its intellectual roots can be traced back much further in time. Tarnas (1991:333) and Sperber (1985:2) identify Enlightenment thinkers, such as Rousseau, Hobbes and Locke, with the contention that this interaction was of utmost importance for the understanding of society.

Rousseau postulated that humans were essentially good, but were detrimentally influenced by civilization and society (ibid.). Hobbes maintained that humans’ are by nature brutish and selfish, therefore it was the role of society and government to control and curb basic human nature (ibid.). Locke rejected the Cartesian theory of innate ideas and presumed that humans are at birth ‘blank slates’ (Garbarino 1983:12-13). Locke believed that knowledge of the world had its roots in sensory experience. While Kantian rationalism holds that human cognitive capacities already have categories and principles that structure human knowledge and limit variability (Sperber (1985:2).

However, while Rationalist thinkers contended that the mind alone could achieve knowledge, the Enlightenment thinkers maintained that reason depended on sensory experience to know anything about the world, “excluding the minds own concoctions” (Tarnas 1991:334). Science was regarded as a mechanism for discovering the truths of human existence, not as a device for attaining absolute knowledge of general, universal truths (D’Andrade 1995:4).

Although operating form various theoretical assumptions, early intellectuals concentrated on the relationship between the mind and society but emphasized the impact of society on the mind (Tarnas 1991:335). In 1750, Turgot wrote The Historical Progress of the Human Mind, which suggested that humanity passed through three stages of increasingly complexity: hunting, pastoralism and farming (Garbarino 1983:15).

Condorcet’s, The Outline of Progress of the Human Mind (1795), divided history into ten stages, cumulating with the French Revolution (ibid.). In the early nineteenth century, Auguste Comte developed a philosophy which became known as positivism (Garbarino 1983:20). He proposed that earlier modes of thought were imperfect and that knowledge should be gained by empirical observation. He reasoned that intellectual complexity evolved, just as societies become more complex over time (ibid.).

One concept which is central to cultural and cognitive anthropology, is the psychic unity of mankind. This concept was developed by Adolf Bastian around the end of the nineteenth century (Garbarino 1983:32). After observing similarities in customs throughout the world, Bastian concluded that all humans must have the same basic psychic or mental processes, and thus this unity produced similar responses to similar stimuli (ibid.).

Cognitive studies in modern anthropology can be traced back to Franz Boas (Colby 1996:210). Boasian anthropology incorporated interests in mental and cognitive concerns, while promoting the study of ideas, beliefs, values and cosmologies. Anthropologists involved in culture and personality studies, specifically Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead , have been claimed as forerunners of cognitive anthropology (Moore 1999:15). Boas realized that different peoples had different conceptions of the world around them. He devoted much of his work on understanding the relation between the human mind and the environment (Shore 1996:19). Boas encouraged investigations of tribal categories of sense and perception, such as colour. These topics would be critical to the later development of cognitive anthropology (Shore 1996:20-21).

Cognitive anthropology arose as much of the interest in “classical” culture and personality was waning. As such, it can be seen as a reaction against the traditional methods of ethnology practiced prior to the late 1950’s (Moore 1999:16). These ethnographies were strongly influenced by the works of Malinowski and Boas. Traditional ethnography stressed the “technology and techniques for providing material needs, village or local group composition, family and extended group composition and the roles of various members, political organization and the nature of magic, religion, witchcraft and other forms of native beliefs” (D’Andrade 1995:5).

As more scholars entered the field, it was found that the ethnographies of places revisited did not always match the ethnographies of the previous generation (ibid.). Ethnographic validity became a critical issue in cultural anthropology with the Redfield-Lewis controversy in the early 1950’s (Colby 1996:211). Redfield had worked in the Mexican village of Tepoztlan in the late 1920’s. In the late 1940’s, Oscar Lewis and a team of ethnographers revisited the site. Although some of the differences in Lewis’ findings could be attributed to culture change, the degree of differences caused the anthropological community to generally question the accuracy and reliability of ethnographic research methods (ibid.).

Early practitioners of cognitive anthropology attempted to increase the validity of ethnography by using “interview techniques and analytical processes to bring out native categories of thought instead of imposing the analyst’s own cultural system on the data” (Colby 1996:211). One of its early goals was the construction of frameworks for cross-cultural comparisons of human behaviour. Additionally, linguistic anthropologists such as Kroeber, Whorf and Sapir, and the works of Saussure, Chomsky and Bloomfield, all exerted direct influence on the earliest cognitive anthropologists (D’Andrade 1995:1).

Ethnographic studies were often equated with laboratory experiments of the natural sciences and other social sciences, and thus crucial to anthropology’s claims to scientific authority (Colby 1996:211). The discovery of the phoneme, the smallest unit of meaningful sound, gave anthropologists the opportunity to understand and record cultures in the native language (ibid.). This method was thought to be a way of getting around the analyst’s imposition of his own cultural bias on a society. These frameworks were rooted in an analogy which “linked the linguistic distinction between phonetics and phonemics to the anthropological distinction between etics and emics” (ibid.). It became a recognizable field of study within anthropology in the mid-1950’s with ethnoscience studies at Yale University (ibid.).

Much of the development of cognitive anthropology has been credited to Floyd Lounsbury and Ward Goodenough (Applebaum 1987:409). Goodenough laid out the basic premises for the "new ethnography," as ethnoscience was sometimes known (1957 cited in Moore 1999:102). A simple description of what was observed by the ethnographer was no longer sufficient. The new aim was to find the underlying structure behind a peoples’ conception of the world around them.

The primary theoretical underpinning of the ethnoscientific approach was that culture exists only in people’s minds (Applebaum, 1987:409). The methodology of ethnoscience attempted to remove the ethnographer’s categories from the research process. The principal research goal identified by cognitive anthropologists was to determine the content and organization of culture as knowledge. From the late 1950s to the 1970s, research was strongly oriented towards method, formalization, and quantification (D'Andrade 1995:246).

The attraction for many was that the field was using methods developed in the study of semantics, and served as an access to the mind (D'Andrade 1995:246). Much of this early work centered on taxonomies and domains such as kinship, plants, animals, and colors. While the methodology was productive in reducing the anthropologist’s bias, ethnoscience was subject to several criticisms, most focused on the limited nature and number of domains. Some critics charged that it appeared that some cognitive anthropologists valued the “eliciting technique more than the actual data produced from the procedures” (ibid.). Moreover, the data often did not lead to explanations of the respondents’ world view (Applebaum, 1987:407).

Other critics noted that “the ethnoscientific approach to culture implied extreme cultural relativism” (ibid.). Since ethnoscience stressed the individuality of each culture, it made cross-cultural and comparisons very difficult. Practitioners claimed they were trying to capture the indigenous, not the anthropologist’s, view of culture. However, these native views of culture depended on who the anthropologist chose to interview (e.g. male or female, young or old, high or low status) (Applebaum, 1987:407-408).

During the 1960s and 1970s, a theoretical and methodological shift occurred within cognitive anthropology. While linguistic analyses continued to provide methods for understanding and accessing the cognitive categories of indigenous people, the focus was no longer restricted to items and relationships within indigenous categories (Colby 1996:212). Instead, the focus was upon analyzing categories in terms of mental processes. It was assumed that there were mental processes based on the structure of the mind which was common to all humans. This approach extended its scope to study “not only components of abstract systems of thought but also to examine how mental processes relate to symbols and ideas” (Colby 1996:213).

For example, Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin (1956 cited in D’Andrade 1995:93) proposed that there are two primary mechanisms for reducing the strain on short-term memory: attribute reduction and configurational recoding. Attribute reduction was defined as the tendency to contract the number of criterial features of an object down to a very small number (ibid.). Configurational recoding was based upon the grouping or ‘chunking’ together of several features to form a single characteristic. Chunking was defined as a mental process where the short-term memory segments information by grouping items together (D’Andrade 1995:94). The reliance upon meaning, along with the broader goal of attempting to establish cross-cultural frameworks for comparison, soon came under fire from symbolic anthropologists who called for the (re)injection of “richer”, “more true-to-life” meaning into ethnographic accounts (ibid.).

By the early 1980s, schema theory had become the primary means of understanding the psychological aspect of culture. Schemas are entirely abstract entities which are unconsciously enacted by individuals (D'Andrade 1995:246). They are models of the world that organize the experiences and understandings shared by members of a group or society. Schemata, in conjunction with connectionist networks, provided even more abstract psychological theory about the nature of mental representations (ibid.).

Schema theory created a new class of mental entities. Prior to schema theory, the major pieces of culture were thought be either material or symbolic in nature. Culture, as conceptualized by cognitive anthropologists, was now thought of in terms of parts instead of as a whole (D'Andrade 1995:247). Contemporary questions within cognitive anthropology include the following (ibid.): (1) are cultural ideologies shared; (2) if they are shared, to what extent; (3) how are these units distributed across persons; and (5) which distribution of units are internalized. These issues have in fact taken cognitive studies away from the mainstream of anthropology and moved it closer to psychology.

Cognitive structure is being related to the physical structure of artifacts and the behavioral structure of groups (D'Andrade 1995:248). The future path of cognitive anthropology seems to be heading toward the study of how cultural schemas are related to action. Issues of emotion, motivation, and how individuals during socialization internalize culture have now become defined areas of research (ibid.).