Cognitive Anthropology

Abstract

Cognitive anthropology attempts to link social anthropology with the cognitive sciences. In the period of ‘ethnoscience’ in cognitive anthropology post-1956, the central definition of ‘culture’ followed W. Goodenough: ‘Culture does not exist of things, people, behaviour, or emotions, but in the forms or organizations of the things in the minds of people’ (Goodenough 1957, p. 168). These ‘forms or organizations’ were constructed as taxonomies or paradigms, as holistic expressions of culture and were abstracted from linguistic material, e.g. from semantic domains such as ‘kinship,’ ‘colour,’ ‘ethnozoology,’ ‘ethnobotany,’ and ‘illness.’ Recently, cognitive anthropology has adopted the ‘information-processing approach.’ This paradigmatic change resulted in the redefinition of ‘cognition’ as the mental activity of individuals who actively apply knowledge in different contexts. This theoretical switch drew the interest away from the ‘omniscient informant’ towards the individual ‘just plain folks,’ towards the applications of knowledge in everyday life (away from knowledge as static system: taskonomy instead of taxonomy), and towards habitual actions in the sense of tacit knowledge or knowing how to do. This knowledge is represented individually in images, scripts, schemata, and cultural models: ‘… cultural models are composed of prototypical event sequences set in simplified worlds’ (Quinn and Holland 1987, p. 32). Cognitive anthropology seems to accept the existence of universal cognitive processes. The cognitive sciences, however, seem to be reluctant to accept the impact of culture on these processes, although the recently developed connectionistic models or neuronal networks could become a promising field of work for both disciplines.