Cognitive Anthropology Flashcards
Cognitive Anthropology
- Idealist
- Culture studied as cognitive responses to material phenomena.
- Focuses on persception.
- The fundamental aim of cognitive anthropology is to reliably represent the logical systems of thought of other people according to criteria, which can be discovered and replicated through analysis.
What are the three phases in the history of cognitive anthropology?
- An early formative period in the 1950s called ethnoscience
- The middle period during the 1960s and 1970s, commonly identified with the study of folk models
- The most recent period beginning in the 1980s with the growth of schema theory and the development of consensus theory
Does cognitive anthropology view its self as a true science or humanity?
Cognitive anthropologists regard 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.
Despite the fact that its theorectical history goes back much further, when was it that cognitive anthropology came to be regarded as a distinct theoretical and methodological approach.
It was not until the 1950s that cognitive anthropology came to be regarded as a distinct theoretical and methodological approach within anthropology.
Which three enlightenment thinkers could be identified with cognitive anthropology and why?
- Rousseau- Our State of Mind is corrupted by society and prevents us from being happy.
- Hobbes- Our State of Mind is inherently evil and needs and institution of force and authority to provide the illusion of higher moral right.
- Locke- Man is born a blank slate and is influenced by culture and society.
Define Locke’s empiricism
- Evidence based of the senses and expiereces.
- Rejected Decartes’s idea of innate ideas.
- Foundation of scientific thought, battled with rationalism during the enlightenment.
- When sensory ideas are reflected upon, we have truth.
E.B. Tylor’s definition of culture.
The complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
Psychic unity of mankind.
- Developed by the German, Adolf Bastain at the end of the 1800s.
- After observing similarities in customs throughout the world, Bastian concluded that all humans must have the same basic psychic or mental processes, and that this unity produced similar responses to similar stimuli.
Franz Boas
- “Father of American Anthropology”
- Boas encouraged investigations of tribal categories of sense and perception, such as color, topics that would be critical in the later development of cognitive anthropology.
- Anit-racism
- Cultural relativism
- Promoted empiricism and induction over Specerian dedecution.
In many ways, cognitive anthropology was a reaction against the traditional methods of ethnology practiced prior to the late 1950s, much of it the result of the influence of fieldwork pioneers and master teachers,
Malinowski and Boas.
Redfield-Lewis Debate
Refield studied a Mexican-Indian group in 1930. Lewis went back in 1951. The two studies were very different and ethnographic validity was called into question.
Ethnoscience
Ethnoscience has been defined as an attempt “to reconstitute what serves as science for others, their practices of looking after themselves and their bodies, their botanical knowledge, but also their forms of classification, of making connections, etc.”
Cultural Relativism
Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual human’s beliefs and activities are understood by others in terms of that individual’s own culture. This principle was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized by his students. Boas first articulated the idea in 1887: “…civilization is not something absolute, but … is relative, and … our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.”[1] However, Boas did not coin the term.
Goodenough’s “Componential Analysis” of 1956
Goodenough laid out the basic premises for the “new ethnography,” as ethnoscience was sometimes known. He states that “culture is a conceptual mode underlying human behavior “.
Linguistics as a hedge against bias?
Useing the culture’s words that you are studying could theorectically alleviate some of the anthropologist’s own cultural bias.
Anthony Wallace’s,
notion of the mazeway, “a mental image of the society and its culture” . He applied this concept to explain the Iroquois revitalization movement brought about by the Seneca prophet, Handsome Lake. While the mazeway concept was useful for reformulating traditional terms such as religion and magic, the concept lacked specificity in addressing how to determine the organization of these elements. From the late 1950s to the 1970s, research was strongly oriented towards method, formalization, and quantification. 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. Much of this early work centered on taxonomies and domains such as kinship, plants, animals, and colors.
Criticisms of Ethnoscience
- The significance that color, kin terms, and plant classifications had for understanding the human condition was questioned.
- It appeared that some cognitive anthropologists valued the eliciting technique more than the actual data produced from the procedures. Moreover, the data often did not lead to explanations of the respondents’ worldview.
- The ethnoscientific approach to culture implied extreme cultural relativism.
- Stressed the individuality of each culture it made cross-cultural comparisons very difficult.
- Native views of culture depended on who the anthropologist chose to interview (for example, whether male or female, young or old, high status or low). The question then became whose view was the anthropologist capturing and how representative was it?
Discuss schema theory.
By the early 1980s, schema theory had become the primary means of understanding the psychological aspect of culture. Schemas are entirely abstract entities and unconsciously enacted by individuals. They are models of the world that organize experience and the 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. 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 anthropologists, started to become thought of in terms of parts instead of wholes. The concept of parts, however, was not used in the traditional functionalist sense of static entities constituting an integrated whole, but was used in the sense that the nature of the parts changed. Through the use of schemata, culture could be placed in the mind, and the parts became cognitively formed units: features, prototypes, schemas, propositions, and cognitive categories. Culture could be explained by analyzing these units, or pieces of culture. Contemporary questions include (1) if cultural pieces are in fact 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 (D’Andrade 1995:246-247).
Componential Analysis
- Ward Goodenough
- Borrowing its methods from linguistic anthropology, involved the construction of a matrix that contrasted the binary attributes of a domain in terms of plus, a code for the presence of a feature, and minuses, the code for the absence of a trait. The co-occurrence of traits could then be analyzed as well as attribute distribution. For specifics refer to “Property, Kin, and Community on Truk”
- Componential analysis presently serves as only a part of analytic methodology instead of its primary method.
Charles Frake,
wrote an interesting article in the late sixties in which he comments extensively on the nature of current ethnographic data collection beyond kinship studies. Instead of collecting data by attaining “words for things” in which the ethnographer records discrete linguistic terms of the other’s language as they occur by matching the terms against his own lexicon, he purposes that an ethnographer should get “things for words” (1969:28). He also emphasizes that the ethnographer “should strive to define objects according to the conceptual system of the people he is studying” (1969:28), or in other words elicit a domain. He argues that studies of how people think have historically sought evidence of “primitive thinking” instead actually investigating the processes of cognition. He contends that future studies should match the methodological rigor of kinship and should aim for developing a native understanding of the world. He promotes a “bottom up” approach where the ethnographer firsts attains the domain items (on the segregates) of different categories (or contrast sets). The goal, according to Frake, is to create a taxonomy so differences between contrasting sets are demonstrated in addition to how the attributes of contrasting sets relate to each other.
Harold Conklin.
Harold Conklin made important contributions to the study of kinship terminology.
Roy D’Andrade,
Roy D’Andrade has been a most influential cognitive who has made important contributions to methodology and theory. One of his earlier studies is particularly noteworthy for its methodology. In 1974 D’Andrade published an article criticizing the reliability and validity of a widely practiced method of social sciences. Researchers conducted studies of how people judge other’s behavior. Judgements of informants, he argued, were influenced bot only by what they witnessed, but also by the cultural models they entertained about the domain in question. He noted that their judgement is related to the limitations of human memory.
Consensus Theory
- A. Kimball Romney
- Searches for things a culture has a consensus on.
- Competency of individual informants is called into question.
- Tries to make it more objective.
Three central assumptions of consensus theory.
- That there is a single, shared conglomerate of answers that constitute a coherent domain.
- Each respondent’s answers are given independently and only afterwards is the correlation between respondents known.
- Items are relatively homogeneously known by all respondents.
