Cognitive anthropology is driven by methodology. Emphasis is given to systematic data collection in an effort to attain reliable and valid results (Colby 1996:210). The ultimate aim is the discovery and representation of mental processes. However, many anthropologists are using cognitive techniques for the purpose of “eliciting information to facilitate ethnographic description” (ibid.). In general, the focus is upon the intellectual and rational aspects of culture, particularly through studies of language use (Cerroni-Long 1999:86). This is reflected in its origins as an attempt to fit formal linguistic methods into linguistic and social anthropology.
Cognitive anthropology has experienced two major and linked shifts over its first half century (Colby 1996:211). The first shift was theoretical. This was a move from a focus on rules, to a focus on schemas as means of characterizing cognition. The second was empirical. This was a change in the focus solely on language as the denotative meaning of terms, to a much broader definition of language, as well as “nonlinguistically coded understandings as the sources of data for characterizing cognition” (D’Andrade 1995:14).
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. There are seven principle concepts within cognitive anthropology: the cultural or folk model, domain, the mazeway, mental scripts, prototype theory, schemata and semantic theory.
Ethnoscience
Cognitive anthropology has ties to linguistic and psychological anthropology, linguistics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology and other cognitive sciences. One important linguistic methodology employed during this period was componential analysis. Initially inspired by the work of Saussure, componential analysis, sought to analyze domains of meaning with structural linguistics as a model (Moore 1999:111). Componential analysis sought to reveal the simple rules which underlie the “overtly complex distinctions made by members of a cultural group” (D’Andrade 1995:220).
The other important methodology of this period was the cultural or folk model. The cultural model "served as a catchall phrase for many different kinds of cultural knowledge" (Shore 1996:45). In other words, the unconscious set of assumptions and understandings members of a society or group share. These were believed to greatly affect people’s understanding of the world and of human behavior. Cultural models are assumed to be malleable structures which are effected by experience (ibid.). As an experience is ascribed meaning, it can reinforce models. However, specific experiences can also challenge and change models, if the experiences are considered distinct. In general, cultural models are believed to be connected to the emotional responses of particular experiences, so that “people regard their assumptions about the world as natural" (ibid.).
Ethnoscientists tended to study such things as color categories and folk taxonomies, without being able to clarify their relevance to understanding culture as a whole. They attempted to discern how people construe their world from the way they label and talk about it. However, this study of elements rather than relational systems “failed to reveal a generative cultural grammar for any culture, and while generating elaborate taxonomies, failed to discover any internal cultural workings that could be compared internally or externally” (Cerroni-Long 1999:119).
