Abstract
This review describes the conditions that have established the subfields of cognitive anthropology and symbolic anthropology as major clusterings of anthropologists. It discusses the influences in anthropology as well as in related areas of cognitive science, linguistics, and literary criticism that can bring the two subfields closer together. It also looks at future directions of study and suggests some of the characteristics that might be included in a single, unifying theory. [cognitive anthropology, symbolic anthropology, history of anthropology, method, theory, review of field, social anthropology]
Highlights
Powered by the California Digital Library University of California toward a convergence of cognitive and symbolic anthropology
There i s a new fermentation in social anthropology that crosses the boundaries of what have usually been seen as distinct subfields
This paper examines the conditions that have brought about the emergence of the two subfields as distinct groupings of anthropologists, describes the recent changes that are bringing the two closer together, and suggests future directions that may lead to a convergence and even, possibly, to a single theoretical base which is more developed and interesting than the separate formulations of earlier writings
Summary
Cross-cultural codings were shown by Naroll(1962) to be related t o such observer effect variables as length of time in the field It was Murdock’s ethnological work that triggered a new surge of concern with ethncgraphic description and ethnographic analysis, and it was his students who initiated this “new ethnography.”. All of these have direct anthropological relevance and relate t o much older concerns with “elementary thoughts,” ”themes,” etc This new linguistic influence, along with systemic linguistics which subsumes the above alternative areas (including sociolinguistics) in a single theory (which will be discussed later), is one of the factors that we think suggests a convergence of cognitive and symbolic anthropology. This sense that any sort of native conceptual relationship could be ethnoscientifically explored was systematically outlined by Frake (1964a) in his article on "Notes on Queries. . . ."
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