A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1374

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology offers a comprehensive overview of the development of cognitive anthropology from its inception to the present day and presents recent findings in the areas of theory, methodology, and field research in twenty-nine key essays by leading scholars. * Demonstrates the importance of cognitive anthropology as an early constituent of the cognitive sciences * Examines how culturally shared and complex cognitive systems work, how they are structured, how they differ from one culture to another, how they are learned and passed on * Explains how cultural (or collective) vs. individual knowledge distinguishes cognitive anthropology from cognitive psychology * Examines recent theories and methods for studying cognition in real-world scenarios * Contains twenty-nine key essays by leading names in the field

Leseprobe

Contents

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I History of Cognitive Anthropology; Nature and Types of Cultural Knowledge Structures

1 A History of Cognitive Anthropology B. G. Blount

2 The History of the Cultural Models School Reconsidered: A Paradigm Shift in Cognitive Anthropology Naomi Quinn

3 The Cognitive Context of Cognitive Anthropology Jürg Wassmann, Christian Kluge, and Dominik Albrecht

4 The Limits of the Habitual: Shifting Paradigms for Language and Thought Janet Dixon Keller

5 Types of Collective Representations: Cognition, Mental Architecture, and Cultural Knowledge Giovanni Bennardo and David B. Kronenfeld

6 Personal Knowledge and Collective Representations John B. Gatewood

PART II Methodologies

7 How to Collect Data that Warrant Analysis W. Penn Handwerker

8 Data, Method, and Interpretation in Cognitive Anthropology James Boster

9 Multi-Item Scales and Cognitive Ethnography Kateryna Maltseva and Roy D’Andrade

10 Consensus Analysis Stephen P. Borgatti and Daniel S. Halgin

11 Narrative, Mind, and Culture Benjamin N. Colby

12 Simulation (and Modeling) Michael Fischer and David B. Kronenfeld

PART III Cognitive Structures of Cultural Domains

13 Mathematical Representation of Cultural Constructs Dwight Read

14 Kinship Theory and Cognitive Theory in Anthropology F. K. L. Chit Hlaing (F. K. Lehman)

15 Numerical Cognition and Ethnomathematics Andrea Bender and Sieghard Beller

16 “Indigenous Knowledge” and the Understanding of Cultural Cognition: The Contribution of Studies of Environmental Knowledge Systems Roy Ellen

17 Emotions, Motivation, and Behavior in Cognitive Anthropology E. N. Anderson

18 Social Networks, Cognition, and Culture Douglas R. White

PART IV Cognitive Anthropology and Other Disciplines

19 Culture and Cognition: The Role of Cognitive Anthropology in Anthropology and the Cognitive Sciences Norbert Ross and Douglas L. Medin

20 Cultural Models, Power, and Hegemony Halvard Vike

21 Cognitive Anthropology through a Gendered Lens Carol C. Mukhopadhyay

22 Sociality in Cognitive and Sociocultural Anthropologies: The Relationships Aren’t Just Additive Lynn Thomas

23 Cognitive Anthropology and Education: Foundational Models of Self and Cultural Models of Teaching and Learning in Japan and the United States Hidetada Shimizu

24 Archaeological Approaches to Cognitive Evolution Miriam Noël Haidle

PART V Some Examples of Contemporary Research

25 The Distributed Cognition Model of Mind Brian Hazlehurst

26 A Foundational Cultural Model in Polynesia: Monarchy, Democracy, and the Architecture of the Mind Giovanni Bennardo

27 Cognitive Approaches to the Study of Romantic Love: Semantic, Cross-Cultural, and as a Process Victor C. de Munck

28 Trouble as Part of Everyday Life: Cognitive and Sociocultural Processes in Avoiding and Responding to Illness Linda C. Garro

29 Using Consensus Analysis to Investigate Cultural Modelsof Alzheimer’s Disease Robert W. Schrauf and Madelyn Iris

Afterword: One Cognitive View of CultureDavid B. Kronenfeld

Index

A Companion toCognitive Anthropology

The BlackwellCompanions to Anthropology offers a series of comprehensive syntheses of the traditional subdisciplines, primary subjects, and geographic areas of inquiry for the field. Taken together, the series represents both a contemporary survey of anthropology and a cutting edge guide to the emerging research and intellectual trends in the field as a whole.

1. A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology edited by Alessandro Duranti

2. A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics edited by David Nugent and Joan Vincent

3. A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians edited by Thomas Biolsi

4. A Companion to Psychological Anthropology edited by Conerly Casey and Robert B. Edgerton

5. A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan edited by Jennifer Robertson

6. A Companion to Latin American Anthropology edited by Deborah Poole

7. A Companion to Biological Anthropology edited by Clark Spencer Larsen

Forthcoming

A Companion to Medical Anthropology edited by Merrill Singer and Pamela I. Erickson

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Notes on Contributors

Dominik Albrecht is a medical doctor at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Magdeburg. He holds an additional master’s degree in neuroscience involving research performed at the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology. His scientific interests range from the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders to cognitive and social neuroscience.

E. N. Anderson is professor of anthropology, emeritus, at the University of California, Riverside. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967. He has done research on human ecology in several countries, with most time spent in Hong Kong, British Columbia, and Quintana Roo (Mexico), focusing on how people think about and manage plants and animals. He has published several books, including The Food of China (1988), Ecologies of the Heart (1996), Everyone Eats (2005), and The Pursuit of Ecotopia (2010).

Sieghard Beller is research fellow at the University of Freiburg, Germany, where he received his doctorate and habilitation in psychology. His research covers reasoning processes and language effects in a broad range of domains and from a cross-cultural perspective. He is the author of a textbook on empirical research methods and coauthor of textbooks on thinking and language and on culture and cognition. His most relevant publications are “The Limits of Counting: Numerical Cognition between Evolution and Culture” (together with Andrea Bender, Science, 2008), “Weighing Up Physical Causes: Effects of Culture, Linguistic Cues and Content” (together with Andrea Bender and Jie Song, Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2009), and “Deontic Reasoning Reviewed: Psychological Questions, Empirical Findings, and Current Theories” (Cognitive Processing, 2010).

Andrea Bender is Heisenberg Fellow at the University of Freiburg. She received her doctorate in cultural anthropology, completed her habilitation in psychology, and has carried out repeated fieldwork in the Pacific, particularly in Tonga. She is coauthor of textbooks on thinking and language and on culture and cognition; her most relevant publications are “The Limits of Counting: Numerical Cognition between Evolution and Culture” (together with Sieghard Beller, Science, 2008) and “Anthropology in Cognitive Science” (together with Edwin Hutchins and Douglas L. Medin, Topics in Cognitive Science, 2010).

Giovanni Bennardo is an associate professor in linguistic and cognitive anthropology and founding member of the Cognitive Studies Initiative at Northern Illinois University. His primary geographic focus is Oceania, in particular, western Polynesia, the Kingdom of Tonga, where he has conducted extensive fieldwork. His research and publications examine the relationship between language, cognition, and cross-modular and cross-domain interactions. In his recent book Language, Space, and Social Relationships: A Foundational Cultural Model in Polynesia he investigated features of the mental representations of space instantiated in various cultural realms such as exchange, navigation, kinship, land distribution, social networks, and politics. His current research interest is on the conceptualization (cultural models) of nature and the environment across cultures.

B. G. Blount retired from the University of Georgia and the University of Texas and is currently a consultant and owner of SocioEcological Informatics, consulting on NOAA-funded research on the resilience and vulnerability of fishing communities on the US Gulf Coast. Recent publications include “Responses to Globalization,” in MAST (Maritime Studies), and “An Anthropological Research Protocol for Marine Protected Areas: Creating a Niche in a Multi-Disciplinary Cultural Hierarchy,” with Ariana Pitchon, in Human Organization.

Stephen P. Borgatti is the Paul Chellgren Endowed Chair of Management at the University of Kentucky, where he is affiliated with the LINKS Center for Organizational Social Network Analysis. He is the author of Anthropac, a software package for cultural domain analysis, and a coauthor of UCINET, a software package for social network analysis. He is a past director of the NSF Summer Institute for Ethnographic Research Methods.

James Boster is a professor of cognitive, psychological, and linguistic anthropology at the University of Connecticut. His earlier work concerned how patterns of intracultural variation reflect the ways in which culture is learned and transmitted, and how the patterns of correspondence between different systems of biological classification reflect pan-human perceptual strategies drawing common inferences from similar experience. His current research focuses on how people understand themselves and each other, and in how intra- and intercultural variation in emotions, personality, and values is patterned.

F. K. L. Chit Hlaing (F. K. Lehman) has engaged in fieldwork largely in Burma and Southeast Asia, where he grew up. His BA was in mathematics, his Ph.D. in anthropology and linguistics. He has applied mathematics in his ethnographic and linguistic work, beginning with his dissertation, which was on the cultural history of India. This led him early into cognitive science and generative linguistics from the end of the 1950s. He is a specialist in southeast Asian ethnology, history, and languages, and in formal theoretical analysis. He is emeritus professor of anthropology and linguistics and in the program for cognitive science in the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Recent publications include “Formalism and Empiricism: On the Value of Thinking Mathematically about Social Grouping and Corporateness” in Structure and Dynamics (e-journal), and “The Central Position Of Shan/Tai Buddhism for the Sociopolitical Development of the Wa and Kayah Peoples” in Journal of Contemporary Buddhism.

Benjamin N. Colby is emeritus professor of anthropology at University of California, Irvine and a member of the social dynamics and complexity group at the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at UC Irvine. He is editor of the University of California electronic journal, Structure and Dynamics. His current research involves the development of new tests for a theory of adaptive potential and related variables such as health, nutrition, and new indicators of cultural well-being. Additionally he is doing an ethnography of agricultural practices, carbon sequestration, and other responses to climate change in Sonoma County, California.

Roy D’Andrade is emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Connecticut. His research interests focus on culture and cognition, social theory, and quantitative methods. He has recently completed a study of values among Americans, Japanese, and Vietnamese (A Study of Values: American, Vietnamese and Japanese) and is currently working on a theory of cultural life worlds within modern societies.

Victor C. de Munck is an associate professor at SUNY New Paltz. His specialty is cognitive anthropology and his cultural areas of specialization are Sri Lanka, Macedonia, Lithuania, Russia, and the USA. He is the author of five books – two on methods, an urban ethnography on Vilnius (with three co authors), an ethnography of a Sri Lankan village, and a book entitled Culture, Self and Meaning – and of over 50 articles in academic journals. His areas of research are cross-cultural research, cultural models, self and identity, romantic love, and the synthesis of qualitative and quantitative methods. Two recent areas of research are a focus on psychic unity or sameness across people and cultures, and processes of the development of intimate dyads versus public identities.

Roy Ellen is professor of anthropology and human ecology at the University of Kent and director of its Centre for Biocultural Diversity. He received his anthropological training at the London School of Economics and has worked largely on issues relating to the environment and knowledge systems in the Moluccas. His recent publications include a monograph, On the Edge of the Banda Zone: Past and Present in the Social Organization of a Moluccan Trading Network (2003); a collection of essays, The Categorical Impulse: Essays in the Anthropology of Classifying Behaviour (2006); and two edited works, Ethnobiology and the Science of Humankind (2006) and Modern Crises and Traditional Strategies: Local Ecological Knowledge in Island Southeast Asia (2007). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and President of the Royal Anthropological Institute between 2007 and 2011.

Michael D. Fischer is professor of anthropological sciences at the University of Kent and has written Applications in Computing for Social Anthropologists (1994).

Linda C. Garro holds doctorates in social sciences (anthropology) and cognitive psychology and is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research activities are in the areas of medical and psychological anthropology and include representing cultural knowledge about illness; variability in cultural knowledge; health care decision-making; health and everyday family life; illness narratives; and remembering as a social, cultural, and cognitive process. Her articles have appeared in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Ethos, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Social Science and Medicine, Transcultural Psychiatry, and other journals. In 1999 she received the Stirling Award from the Society for Psychological Anthropology.

John B. Gatewood is a cognitive anthropologist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. His principal research interest is the social organization of knowledge or socially distributed cognition, which he has studied in a variety of contexts, such as commercial fishing boats, university admissions, credit unions, and tourism sites. His recent research focuses on conjoining the cultural models approach with cultural consensus analysis, as well as methodological refinements to cultural consensus analysis.

Miriam Noël Haidle received her doctoral and habilitation degrees in prehistory and paleoanthropology from the University of Tübingen, Germany, in 1996 and 2006. She is the coordinator of “The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans” Research Center of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Current work about her special focus on tool behavior and the evolution of mind has been published in “Working Memory Capacity and the Evolution of Modern Cognitive Capacities – Implications from Animal and Early Human Tool Use” (Current Anthropology 51/S1, 2010, S149–S166).

Daniel S. Halgin is a visiting assistant professor of management at the University of Kentucky. He is also affiliated with the LINKS Center for Organizational Social Network Analysis. His program of research focuses on social network theory, identity dynamics, and research methodologies.

W. Penn Handwerker was trained as a general anthropologist with an emphasis on the intersection of biological and cultural anthropology, and has published in all four fields of the discipline. His book The Origin of Cultures (2009) develops the idea that the shared assumptions, norms, and patterns of behavior that constitute cultures originate unexpectedly and are subject to selective processes that optimize a cultural participant’s ability to survive and eat well reliably. He is currently developing the implication that cultures shaped our cognitive abilities in ways that improved how cultures worked, in a forthcoming book The Evolution of Teamwork.

Brian Hazlehurst is a senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research where he studies how clinicians think, make decisions, and use technology such as electronic medical records. He believes that these technologies shape cognitive performance in specific ways, which can affect patient safety, efficiency, and the quality of care. He has a Ph.D. in cognitive science and anthropology from the University of California, San Diego and was formerly Chief Scientist and Director of Research and Informatics at WebMD, Inc. Recent publications include “Distributed Cognition: An Alternative Model of Cognition for Medical Informatics,” coauthored with P. N. Gorman and C. K. McMullen in the International Journal of Medical Informatics, “Distributed Cognition in the Heart Room: How Situation Awareness Arises from Coordinated Communications During Cardiac Surgery,” coauthored with P. N. Gorman and C. K. McMullen, in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, and “Orienting Frames and Private Routines: The Role of Cultural Process in Critical Care Safety,” coauthored with C. K. McMullen in the International Journal of Medical Informatics.

Madelyn Iris, director of the Leonard Schanfield Research Institute, CJE SeniorLife, has worked for over 20 years studying topics related to Alzheimer’s disease and diagnosis-seeking, protective services for older adults, and social service program evaluation. She is an adjunct associate professor in the departments of Psychiatry and Preventive Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine and the Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University. Her current research focuses on factors related to time to diagnosis of AD, how family caregivers make decisions about AD diagnosis seeking, cultural and social factors related to beliefs about AD, as well as elder abuse and self-neglect. She has recently published “The Development of a Conceptual Model for Understanding Elder Self-Neglect” with John Ridings and Kendon Conrad in the Gerontologist (2010).

Janet Dixon Keller is professor of anthropology and associate dean of the Graduate College at University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. Past editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist, she currently edits Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. She coedited Symbolism and Cognition (1981–82), edited Directions in Cognitive Anthropology (1985), and is author or coauthor of Cognition and Tool Use (1996), “Human Cognitive Ecology: An Instructive Paradigm for Comparative Primatology” (American Journal of Primatology, 2004), and “Geographies of Memory and Identity in Oceania” (in Intangible Heritage Embodied, 2009).

Christian Kluge is a medical doctor at the Department of Neurology at the University of Magdeburg, Germany. He also holds an honorary research fellowship at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. Besides medicine, his background covers empirical neuroscience, especially emotional memory and attention, as well as philosophy, particularly philosophy of neuroscience. He has published research articles ranging from cellular physiology to cognitive science.

David B. Kronenfeld, an emeritus professor of anthropology, has spent his professional career at University of California, Riverside. His major fieldwork was in Ghana; other fieldwork has been in Mexico and in the United States. His major substantive research topic has been kinship and more broadly the semantics and pragmatics of ordinary words; he has used that and other work to explore and develop a theory of culture as a differentially shared system of distributed cognition. Other interests include stranger communities, ethnicity, and formal methods.

Kateryna Maltseva earned her Ph.D. degree in anthropology from the University of Connecticut where she currently teaches. She is interested in the use of multi-item scales to research complex cultural dimensions (such as values, norms, attitudes, etc.) and in quantitative methods to address conceptual problems in social sciences. She has done fieldwork in Sweden, the Ukraine, and the United States.

Douglas L. Medin is Louis Menk Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, with a joint appointment in the School of Education and Social Policy. His research interests include science learning in and out of the classroom, decision-making, categorization and reasoning, and culture and cognition. He is a coauthor of Culture and Resource Conflict: Why Meanings Matter (2006) and The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature (2008).

Carol C. Mukhopadhyay, professor of anthropology, San Jose State University, specializes in gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and education, with field research in India and the United States, primarily on gendered activities in domestic and public life. Recent publications include How Real is Race? A Sourcebook on Race, Culture and Biology (with R. Henze and Y. Moses, 2007), “A Feminist Cognitive Anthropology: The Case of Women and Mathematics” (Ethos, 2004), “How Exportable are Western Theories of Gendered Science?” (in N. Kumar, ed., Women and Science in India, 2009), “Getting Rid of the Word ‘Caucasian’ ” (in M. Pollock, ed., Everyday Antiracism, 2008).

Naomi Quinn is professor emerita of cultural anthropology at Duke University. She is a psychological anthropologist whose career-long interest has been in the nature of culture, understood as shared cognitive schemas. Her most extended research has been on Americans’ cultural schema for marriage. She is coauthor, with Claudia Strauss, of A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning (1997) and editor of Finding Culture in Discourse: A Collection of Methods (2005). Major essays include “Universals of Child Rearing” (Anthropological Theory, 2005) and “The Self” (Anthropological Theory, 2006).

Dwight W. Read received his Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles in mathematics, with focus on abstract algebras. He is a professor of anthropology and of statistics at UCLA and publishes in all the sub-disciplines of anthropology (transition from biological to cultural evolution, theory and method of artifact classification, mathematical representation of cultural constructs, especially kinship terminologies). His current research focuses on the interrelationship between the material and the ideational domains in human societies. He had a visiting scientist affiliation with the IBM Los Angeles Research Center from 1986 to 1989. He has edited two special issues of the Journal of Quantitative Anthropology and a special issue of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation. He has developed a major computer program (Kinship Algebraic Expert System, or KAES) which constructs a formal (algebraic) model for the logic underlying the structure of a kinship terminology.

Norbert Ross is associate professor in anthropology and psychology at Vanderbilt University. His interests focus on the relation of culture and cognition with a special focus on categories, concepts, and decision-making. He has conducted research on folk biology and folk medicine, incorporating developmental studies with research among adults. His work focuses on Maya people in Mexico and Guatemala, as well as Native Americans in the USA. He has published several books, including Culture and Cognition (2004) and Culture and Resource Conflict (with D. L. Medin and D. G. Cox, 2006).

Robert W. Schrauf is associate professor of applied linguistics at Pennsylvania State University in the United States. His background is in medical anthropology and cognitive psychology, and he conducts research in three areas: cross-cultural gerontology; cognitive aging and cognitive impairment; and multilingualism and aging. Recent publications include Language Development across the Lifespan (2009), coedited with Kees de Bot, and “Using Freelisting to Identify, Assess, and Characterize Age-Differences in Cultural Domains” (with Julia Sanchez) in Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences (2008).

Hidetada Shimizu is a psychological anthropologist at Northern Illinois University. His research interests are acculturation of individuals, cultural influence on personality and behavioral development, cultural phenomenology of self, and multivocal visual ethnography. His publications include Japanese Frames of Mind: Cultural Perspectives on Human Development (coedited with Robert LeVine, 2001) and “Japanese Cultural Psychology and Empathic Understanding: Implications for Academic and Cultural Psychology” (Ethos, 2000).

Lynn Thomas works at a small liberal arts college in Claremont, California. He has done work on kinship as practiced in West Sumatra, Indonesia and on political ideologies, mainly justificatory ones, in the United States.

Halvard Vike is professor of anthropology at the University of Oslo. He has carried out extensive research on local politics, planning, public organizations, history, gender, and cultural heritage in Norway, and is currently working on issues relating to comparative political culture. His previous publications include Maktens Samvittighet (The Conscience of Power, 2002), Culminations of Complexity (2002), L’État de la morale et la morale de l’État (2009), and “Utopian and Contemporary Time: Temporal Dimensions of Planning and Reform in the Norwegian Welfare State” (in Simone Abram and Gisa Weszkalnys, eds., Elusive Promises: Planning in the Contemporary World).

Jürg Wassmann is professor emeritus and founding professor of the Institute of Anthropology, University of Heidelberg. His field area is Papua New Guinea, where he has carried out fieldwork among the Iatmul and the Yupno, and Bali, Indonesia. His main research interests are culture and cognition, memory, and concepts of personhood, space, and time. He is the author of The Song to the Flying Fox (1991), “The Yupno as Post-Newtonian Scientists: The Question of What is Natural in Spatial Descriptions” (1993), “Balinese Spatial Orientation” (with P. Dasen, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, 1998), “The Politics of Religious Secrecy” (in A. Rumsey and J. Weiner, eds., Emplaced Myth, 2001), has edited Pacific Answers to Western Hegemony (1998), and is editor of the series Person, Space and Memory in the Contemporary Pacific.

Douglas R. White is professor of anthropology and chair of social dynamics and complexity at the Institute of Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine; editor-in-chief of Structure and Dynamics; recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Distinguished Senior Scientist award; and serves on the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute (complexity sciences). He does social network analysis, ethnosociology, long-term field site and historical analysis, as in his book Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems: Process Models of a Turkish Nomad Clan (2005), with Ulla Johansen. His coauthored paper “Economic Networks: The New Challenges” appeared in Science (2009), and his Kinship, Class, and Community is forthcoming.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge with thanks the help, support, and patience provided by Rosalie Robertson, Julia Kirk, Sarah Dancy, and Jacqueline Harvey from the Wiley-Blackwell team. We are also grateful to our contributors – and for the patience that many of them have shown. Thanks also to J. Scott Bentley who first suggested the idea of this collection.

Acknowledgment is made for permission to reproduce the following:

Figures 10.1 and 15.3, reprinted by permission of Sage Publications.

Figures 15.4 and 15.8, copyright © Taylor & Francis LLC.

Figure 15.5, copyright © 2004, The American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Introduction

This Companion volume is aimed at providing an overview of where cognitive anthropology is today and at giving a sense of where the field is going. The overview necessarily entails some attention to what in the past shaped the field’s current nature. Cognitive anthropology, while clearly a sub-field of cultural anthropology, is and has been closely related to linguistics and linguistic anthropology. Additionally cognitive anthropology was one of the important early constituents of cognitive sciences – a connection that we aim at revivifying. Thus we see this volume as speaking importantly to elements of mainstream anthropology, linguistics, and cognitive sciences, as well as more narrowly to the intersection of the three.

Cognitive anthropology is a diverse field, and that diversity is well reflected in this volume – as one can see both from the range of topics and from the range of citations in the various contributions. To give a fuller range of this diversity, later on in this introduction I will talk a little about what we were not able to include in the volume. But under this diversity lie some consistent elements: a concern with culturally shared and variable distributed complex cognitive systems, including how such systems work, how they are structured, how they differ from one culture to another, how they are learned and passed on, and how they are adapted by people to contexts. As we shall see, different researchers concentrate more on some of these concerns than on others. The focus on cultural (or collective) vs. individual knowledge distinguishes cognitive anthropology from cognitive psychology, though, obviously, the one builds on the other and the line between the two can be subtle.

The stuff of cognitive anthropology is the stuff of human societies and cultures, and thus ultimately entails all the complexity that human groups can embody. And, to remind us of the obvious academic disciplines are human groups with specific social organizations and with specific shared and distributed cognitive systems. As anthropologists (or linguists or cognitive scientists) we are no different from the people we study or model; we have no privileged position beyond the power of the theories and models that we create to account for target phenomena. At the same time, as maybe particularly curious and rigorous people, we are in a position to call on all of the folk wisdom and folk insights that have been produced by our various cultural histories and by our interpersonal experience. Thus, at one extreme, anthropology includes the interpretative approach that Thomas treats (Chapter 22), while, at the other, we get the complex models such as that of Schank and Abelson (1977; see discussion in Chapter 12). In another direction, we get the kind of careful delineation of cognitive differences across cultures (Ross and Medin, Chapter 19).

The Companion is organized in parts. Part I – a “how we got here and where we are” section – treats the history of cognitive anthropology, the role of cognition and linguistic thought in cognitive anthropology, and the nature and types of collective cognitive structures. In Chapter 1 Benjamin Blount provides a broad and insightful overview of the history of cognitive anthropology. Naomi Quinn, in Chapter 2, provides a more personal perspective on the history of the important strand to which she has been central. Chapter 3, by Jürg Wassmann and his colleagues, describes – in a rich analytic overview – the cognitive context of cognitive anthropology. Janet Keller (Chapter 4) provides an extensive coverage of scholarship in anthropology and related fields pertaining to the relationship, in a cultural context, between language and thought. In Chapter 5 Giovanni Bennardo and David Kronenfeld discuss the types and range of collective representations that are important to cognitive anthropology and related parts of linguistics. Part I concludes with Chapter 6, John Gatewood’s use of three relatively prosaic topics to provide clear and insightful explication of what we mean by collective representations, and how these relate to personal knowledge.

Part II covers methodologies. In Chapter 7 Penn Handwerker leads off with data collection – not just the methods but also how to approach the enterprise. James Boster (Chapter 8) carefully examines the interpretation of data in cognitive anthropology, especially in contrast with cognitive psychology. Kateryna Maltseva and Roy D’Andrade, in Chapter 9, explore in depth the uses of one form of data (multi-item scales) and its analysis. Chapter 10, by Stephen Borgatti and Daniel Halgin, provides a very clear and understandable explanation of how consensus analysis works and what it can be used for. In Chapter 11 Benjamin Colby uses a discussion of narrative structures and their analysis to offer us, also, a neuroscience-based approach to mind and culture, including the role of narrative in these. And, finally, in Chapter 12 Michael Fischer and David Kronenfeld offer characterizations of a wide range of simulations, models, and simulation studies, with a view to showing the usefulness of these for enabling an experimental approach to the study of collective cognitive systems.

In Part III we turn to the cognitive structures of various specific domains. In Chapter 13 Dwight Read looks at the role of mathematic structure in the organization of cultural domains including Zapotec wedding ritual, kinship terminologies, “sidedness” in moiety systems, and so forth. F. K. L. Chit Hlaing focuses on the formal, mathematical analysis of kinterm systems in Chapter 14, relating the attributes of kinterms to the system by which they are defined, and while doing so provides a history of relevant kinship studies. Andrea Bender and Sieghard Beller (Chapter 15) tell us about the cognition of number systems, including their cognitive architecture, the mental and material tools needed of number representation and numerical operations, and the implications those tools have for cognitive processes in general. Roy Ellen, in Chapter 16 gives us a rich and full treatment of indigenous knowledge systems, including work on ethnobiological systems, on taxonomies and taxonomic thinking including universals, on technology and its products, and on the psychology that underlies these (along with related questions of intracultural variation and transmission). In Chapter 17 E. N. Anderson provides a timely and insightful discussion of the role played by emotion in cognition; his discussion includes the role of emotions in motivation and the universality of emotions. In Chapter 18 Douglas White offers a network perspective on cognition and culture; he provides some key network definitions, illustrates how social groups and associated cognitive sharing (consensus) emerge from this perspective, and offers a way of discerning implicit social structures as well as stability and instability.

Part IV’s chapters explore the relationship – both as it is and as it might become – of cognitive anthropology to other, neighboring disciplines. In Chapter 19 Norbert Ross and Douglas Medin offer an extensive and insightful discussion of the role of cognitive anthropology in cultural anthropology and cognitive science – both what the relationship has been and what it should be in the future, including what cognitive anthropology has to do, including both methods, concepts, and perspectives. Halvard Vike’s Chapter 20 looks at the way in which cognitive approaches can contribute to our understanding of how power works in society, and considers how individual actors draw on their cultural knowledge in negotiating their lives and understanding the forces that impinge on them. In a related vein, Carol Mukhopadhyay (Chapter 21) uses a relatively personal perspective to look at cognitive anthropology’s interactions with feminist theory. She looks at what that interaction has been (and has not been, given some substantial overlap of personnel), and explores what it might become. Next, in Chapter 22, Lynn Thomas considers the relationship between mainstream contemporary cultural anthropology (with its strong interpretivist orientation) and cognitive anthropology, especially as the field is evolving. Thomas notes significant, if under-recognized, relevance, but goes on to suggest ways of improving both relevance and salience. With Hidetada Shimizu’s Chapter 23, we shift gears a bit and go on to a new format. Shimizu uses a particular set of interrelated research projects (with findings) to exemplify how cognitive anthropology can serve important educational purposes – and how work on education might help the rest of us out. Completing Part IV, Miriam Haidle in Chapter 24 considers the relationship between archaeology and cognitive studies, especially in regard to cultural issues. She looks at the history of cognitively oriented approaches and at core themes. Her coverage includes archaeological perspectives and insights regarding human cognitive evolution.

Our final section, Part V, consists of some extended examples of contemporary empirical research. We lead with Brian Hazlehurst’s account in Chapter 25 of the distributed cognition that is involved in Swedish fishermen’s understanding of sonar pictures; he frames that account in a comparison of two contrasting approaches to cognitive architecture: the Turing machine mind (TMM) and the distributed cognition mind (DCM), which latter, unlike the former, takes account of information embedded in their environments and of people’s use of that information. Next, in Chapter 26, comes Giovanni Bennardo’s explication of a Tongan foundational cultural model (radiality). His explication includes both a detailing of how the model works and an indication of the rich array of empirical work across a number of domains on which his account is based; he explicitly roots his account in a particular modular view of human cognition. Victor de Munck (Chapter 27) describes the variety of methods and analytic perspectives he used to try to get at the contrasting understandings of romantic love in US and Lithuanian communities. These ranged from ethnographic interviews to a variety of insightful cognitive experiments. Linda Garro in Chapter 28 looks at the cognitive framework within which people process illness. She considers the role of narrative for understanding life in time, for ordering experience and constructing reality (including interpretations of illness events and their treatment), and does this via a small number of specific cases from a couple of different cultural communities. Finally, Robert Schrauf and Madelyn Iris (Chapter 29) offer us a description of whether older members of several contrasting ethnic communities have a coherent model (embodying a useful understanding) of Alzheimer’s disease and contrastingly of non-Alzheimers’s “age-associated memory impairment.” They take us through the phases of their study and the methods used.

In any collection such as this numerous relevant topics are necessarily omitted. In the interest of giving readers a more complete and filled-out picture of cognitive anthropology it seems useful to briefly review some of what we were not able to include.

First are a variety of topics and approaches which are discussed in various chapters, but which get no full explication or separate treatment. Theories and assumptions concerning modularity of mind are treated extensively from one perspective by Giovanni Bennardo in Chapter 26, and more thinly elsewhere. But we were not able to include a focused consideration of the fuller range of modularity versions that one sees in the discipline.

Similarly, cultural models show up throughout the volume, but we were not able to have the overview of the history and range of cultural model treatments that we would have liked. And the same holds for systems of orientation, specifically Frames of Reference (FoR), that represent one of the most fertile and groundbreaking research areas in contemporary cognitive anthropology (see Senft 1997; Bennardo 2002; Levinson 2003; Levinson and Wilkins 2006). Closely intertwined with it is the cross-cultural research on gesture (McNeill 2000; Kita 2003; Kendon 2004).

Second, there are a variety of approaches that have not been covered, to which it’s worth calling attention. These include:

the classic ethnoscience approach of Goodenough, Lounsbury, Conklin, Frake, Metzger and Williams, and Wallace and Atkins;the psychological version of ethnoscience and early cognitive anthropology of Romney, D’Andrade, and their students;the decision-making approach developed by Christina Gladwin, Hugh Gladwin, Robert Randall, James Young, and Carol Mukhopadhyay;the study of indigenous knowledge systems, as exemplified in the work of Jean Lave;the interpretative version, as seen in the work, for example, of Maurice Block and Pascal Boyer.

Finally, there is kinship, a conceptual system that has been of great importance in the development of cognitive anthropology, and whose importance continues. Kinship is brilliantly treated in Chapter 15 by F. K. L. Chit Hlaing from one perspective. But there exist several other important perspectives that are well worth mentioning:

Sydney H. Gould’s (2000) formal algebraic system, similar in some ways to the system of Dwight Read (discussed by Chit Hlaing), but based directly on the Ms and Fs that Chit Hlaing speaks of;Ian Keen’s (1985) direct use of natural language categories and native speaker calculations;the Marking Theory approach of Per Hage (see 1997, 1999, 2001) based on the work of Joseph Greenberg and subsequently elaborated by Doug Jones (in press);the set of socially and linguistically oriented approaches brought together in Trautmann and Whiteley (in press), including Allen (1998).

Next, there exist several important topics and issues that we could not get this time, but might aim for in future editions. Theories of mind loom large in much cognitive work, whether cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, or cognitive science. The topic is alluded to in several of our chapters, but not ever focally addressed.

A related topic is the evolution of the capacity for culture. How did the human ability (and then propensity) to develop systems of collective knowledge emerge? What other species are relevant, and how? Are both language and culture products of the same evolutionary process or do they – and to what degree – represent separate developments?

Given that humans have the propensity to create and learn systems of collective knowledge, how does the propensity evince itself in the cognitive development of human children, and how does that propensity, combined with the experience of communities using such systems, show itself in the child’s learning – construction or reconstruction – of the systems of culture and language. That is, some sense of the processes of child development seems important for cognitive anthropology.

A different kind of topical issue which we see running through our chapters but which is nowhere foregrounded is the contrast between top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to understanding cultural cognitive systems. The contrast is, in one sense, that between (1) creating models of whole systems or sub-systems and then assessing how well these account for observed empirical regularities (see Chapter 13 for examples) and (2) working up to a broader understanding through a cumulation of observed empirical findings in theoretically guided studies. The former approach can be seen in Edwin Hutchins’s (1980, 1995; see Chapter 25) pathbreaking work while the latter can be seen in the careful and insightful studies of Douglas Medin and his colleagues (see Chapter 19). In a sense this contrast can be seen as one between a focus on systems themselves vs. a focus on attributes of pertinent systems (though nothing is ever quite that neat!).

We have not been able to include all of the sub-disciplinary interactions with cognitive anthropology that we would have liked. In particular, one important omission is applied anthropology. Important here is the effective, practical use that is made in it of methods, analytic tools, and theories from cognitive anthropology, as well as cognitive science and cognitive psychology. Important also are the insights that cognitive anthropology has gained from practical, applied work such as that in, for example, John Gatewood et al.’s (2006 and 2008) study of credit unions and Gatewood and Cameron’s (2009) study of tourism in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Similarly, it would have been useful to have a full and focused discussion of the relationship between cognitive anthropology and work in humanistic branches of anthropology. It seems that there exists a potential usefulness of both cognitive methods and theories for a number of kinds of humanistic studies, while well-drawn subjective or interpretative portrayals have always provided an important stimulus to the anthropological imagination. Lynn Thomas (Chapter 22) hints at what might be there, but his focus is elsewhere.

I began by saying that cognitive anthropology is a diverse field. The diversity can be seen in specific research goals, in theoretical perspectives and modes of attack, in data collection and analytic methods, and in the kinds of conclusions that are reached. It follows that there can exist no overview that will simply summarize it, or pull it all together. At the same time I suggested that behind this diversity are some consistent elements – including the idea that culture exists in minds and a concern with culturally shared and variable distributed complex cognitive systems. In the Afterword at the end of this collection I offer one particular view of how culture might look from a dynamic, distributed cognitive perspective. The Afterword represents no consensual bottom line, but it does represent the kind of perspective that we think can rejoin anthropology and cognitive studies, and make both better than they have been.

REFERENCES

Allen, N. J.

1998 The Prehistory of Dravidian-Type Terminologies. In Transformations of Kinship. Maurice Godelier, Thomas R. Trautmann, and Franklin F. Tjon Sie Fat, eds. Pp. 324– 331. Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Bennardo, G., ed.

2002 Representing Space in Oceania: Culture in Language and Mind. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.

Gatewood, John B., and Catherine M. Cameron

2009 Belonger Perceptions of Tourism and Its Impacts in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Final report to the Turks and Caicos Islands Ministry of Tourism. http://www.lehigh.edu/~jbg1/Perceptions-of-Tourism.pdf.

Gatewood, John B., and John W. Lowe

2008 Employee Perceptions of Credit Unions: Implications for Member Profitability. Madison, WI: Filene Research Institute. http://www.lehigh.edu/~jbg1/credit_unions_2008.pdf.

Gatewood, John B., and John W. Lowe, with Carolyn E. Kelly

2006 Employee Perceptions of Credit Unions: A Pilot Study. Madison, WI: Filene Research Institute.

Gould, Sydney H.

2000 A New System for the Formal Analysis of Kinship. David B. Kronenfeld, ed. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Hage, Per

1997 Unthinkable Categories and the Fundamental Laws of Kinship. American Ethnologist 24:652–667.

1999 Marking Universals and the Structure and Evolution of Kinship Terminologies: Evidence from Salish. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5:423–441.

2001 Marking Theory and Kinship Analysis: Cross-Cultural and Historical Applications. Special issue, “Kinship,” Anthropological Theory 1:197–211.

Hutchins, Edwin

1980 Culture and Inference: A Trobriand Case Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

1995 Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Jones, Doug

In press Human Kinship, from Conceptual Structure to Grammar. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Keen, Ian

1985 Definitions of Kin. Journal of Anthropological Research 41:62–90.

Kendon, A.

2004 Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kita, S., ed.

2003 Pointing: Where Language, Culture, and Cognition Meet. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Levinson, S. C.

2003 Space in Language and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Levinson, S. C., and David Wilkins, eds.

2006 Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McNeill, D.

2000 Language and Gesture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schank, Roger, and R. P. Abelson

1977 Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Senft, G., ed.

1997 Referring to Space: Studies in Austronesian and Papuan Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Trautmann, Thomas R., and Peter M. Whiteley

In press Crow–Omaha: New Light on a Classic Problem of Kinship Analysis. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

PART IHistory of Cognitive Anthropology; Nature and Types of Cultural Knowledge Structures

CHAPTER 1A History of Cognitive Anthropology

B. G. Blount

Cognitive anthropology as a distinct area of inquiry is a relatively recent one, dating from the early 1960s. Antecedents exist, of course, even from the beginnings of anthropology in the mid-19th century, but focal questions on mental constructs and their underlying principles have appeared systematically only during the past 50 or so years. Aspects of the early history relevant to cognitive anthropology will be traced below, but some introductory comments are in order. An initial concern is to locate cognitive anthropology within the discipline of anthropology.

INTRODUCTION

Although cognitive anthropology is typically seen as one of the sub-fields of cultural anthropology, that placement has always been problematic. There are two related issues. One is the identification of cognitive anthropology as psychology. While there is a Society for Psychological Anthropology section of the American Anthropological Association, it is relatively small, reflecting the general disinterest or even antipathy of many cultural anthropologists to the discipline of psychology. There are historical grounds for those sentiments. In the late 19th century, anthropology was struggling to become an academic discipline in its own right, which meant independence from an already established psychology. Anthropology needed a perspective or orientation definitive of the discipline and differentiating it from psychology. The concept of culture emerged to play that role. It became the key concept of the discipline, and many, but certainly not all, anthropologists continue to see it in that way.

In addition to competition for departmental independence, anthropologists in the late 19th century were opposed to psychological theory as it was then practiced. Psychologists tended to view the mind as consisting of innate properties. Levels and types of mental activity were to be explained, through reductionism, as properties of the brain. By contrast, anthropologists saw knowledge as cultural, as socially based, and as mutable. From the beginnings of the discipline, cultural anthropologists were opposed to reductionism, opting instead for radical relativity and for societies with unique sets of traits, to be described ethnographically. The perspective came to be known as historical particularism. While that perspective is no longer in vogue, at least in those terms, opposition to reductionism has remained, and in fact appears to have become more steadfast.

Cognitive anthropologists have also been concerned with accurate ethnographic description, but in addition they have sought principles that underlie behavior. A search for underlying order within kinship systems has been a prime example. Cognitive anthropology is, in fact, reductionist in the sense that observable behavioral phenomena are recognized as expressions of more basic and fundamental underlying organizational order and principles. Differences in perspective between cultural anthropologists and cognitive anthropologists still center on reductionism, but that difference is emblematic of a broader academic issue, humanities versus science. Anthropologists sometimes claim that anthropology is both a humanity and a science (a classic statement is by Wolf 1964), but the two approaches are not equally weighted and valued within the discipline. A good argument can be made that, in terms of number of practitioners and dominant theoretical perspectives, anthropology has always been much more a humanistic than a scientific discipline. Historical factors drive much of the character of the discipline, especially through the idea that ethnography must be qualitative, but cultural relativism plays an even more significant role. At issue is how ethnographic data are to be interpreted, as will be discussed below. The pursuit of explanatory principles in cognitive anthropology differentiates it from cultural anthropology.

The place of cognitive anthropology within the discipline of anthropology, then, has been and remains problematic. The “fit” within cultural anthropology is forced, at best. Given its history and problem of “disciplinary place,” it is perhaps not surprising that claims are sometimes heard that cognitive anthropology is moribund or even dead. An aim of the discussion here will be to present the counterclaim that cognitive anthropology is alive and well and that its place within anthropology lies within scientific anthropology, not within fine gradations of cultural anthropology.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CULTURE CONCEPT: COGNITIVE FROM THE OUTSET

Given that cognition has not been a central topic of inquiry in anthropology, it is perhaps ironic that the first anthropological definition of culture was fundamentally cognitive. That definition was provided by E. B. Tylor, the first academic anthropologist, who was engaged in an intellectual competition for several decades in the 19th century to account for the “place” among humankind of recently “discovered” people of Africa, Asia, and the Americas (1865, 1871). Rather than viewing the people as sinners degraded from a state of grace, he argued that they had not advanced as far comparatively as European folk toward civilization. The concept of culture was a centerpiece of his argument. Culture, in his view, was an intellectual capacity of humankind, a capacity that allowed all people to become more advanced, eventually to civilization. Tylor’s definition of culture was the predominant view of culture for several decades in the early history of anthropology: “Culture … is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (1871:1). The operant concept is “capabilities,” referring to the ability of people to acquire and produce knowledge, beliefs, etc. In contemporary terms, ability would include cognition.

Concerns with definitions of culture reappeared in the 1930s. Cognitive capacity continued to be a central aspect of definitions, expressed typically as “ideas” or “knowledge.” In an effort to bring clarity to the abundance of definitions, two leading anthropologists of the time, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, produced a book based on extant definitions (1952). They identified 164 complete definitions and 300 partial ones, which they collapsed into a synthetic definition. The definition was too complex and cumbersome to be very useful (Marvin Harris [1968:10] referred to it as a theory), but it is noteworthy that their proposal contained the statement “the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values” (1952:357). As was the case for Tylor, knowledge was at the core. The book, incidentally, provides an excellent and detailed discussion of the history of the culture concept during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Not until 1957 did a definition of culture appear that was intended to support research toward cognitive ends, provided by Ward Goodenough. Anthropology at the time was heavily influenced by structural linguistics, which was often seen as the most scientific of the sub-fields within anthropology. Goodenough saw the structural and taxonomic approaches in linguistics as applicable to cultural phenomena and proposed a definition of culture accordingly: “A society’s culture consists of whatever one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and do so in any role that they accept for any one of themselves” (1957:167). The definition placed culture squarely within knowledge and belief systems but without an iteration of kinds of knowledge or their application. The intent was to encourage anthropologists to produce classification and nomenclature systems to replace the simple iteration of traits. His definition required discovery procedures to identify domains and their content, organization, and underlying features.

THE EMERGENCE OF COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY

The decade of the 1960s was one of change in the linguistic sciences. Linguistics was revolutionized by the work of Noam Chomsky (1965), who redirected linguistic theory from surface descriptions to an underlying, generative, and transformational basis. Sociolinguistics began to be developed as a new sub-field of linguistics and linguistic anthropology (Gumperz and Hymes 1964, 1972; Labov 1972; Blount 1974), searching for social and cultural factors that structured discourse. At the same time, taxonomic linguistic principles were being applied innovatively in anthropology. The intellectual center of the new perspective was at Stanford University, developed in the early 1960s by Kim Romney, Roy D’Andrade, Charles Frake, and their students, including Brent Berlin, David Kronenfeld, and Naomi Quinn, among others. A second locus later in the 1960s was at the University of California at Berkeley, led by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. The theoretical perspective was first labeled as “ethnoscience,” the study of the ways in which domains of knowledge in traditional societies were distinguished and organized. In time, a number of other labels were applied, including “ethnosemantics,” “componential analysis,” “lexical semantic analysis,” and eventually “ethnographic semantics.” A research procedure was established, in which the anthropologist began with a domain such as kinship or color, then elicited exhaustively the terms for the types of objects (kin types, color types) within the domain, followed by an analysis of the components (semantic features) from which the objects are uniquely constructed. Lastly, the psychological reality of the analysis could be demonstrated, through feedback from the folk whose domain was under description. Descriptions of the procedure can be found in the now classic articles by Frake (1962), “The Ethnographic Study of Cognitive Systems” and Conklin (1962), “Lexicographical Treatment of Folk Taxonomies.”

A particular interest within ethnographic semantics, perhaps not surprisingly, was in kinship. Kinterms and their determinants has been a dominant theme in anthropology, since L. H. Morgan’s monumental work in 1871, to G. P. Murdock’s lineage-based account (1949) and sociological approaches in British social anthropology (Radcliffe-Brown and Forde 1950). To touch on only two prominent areas of inquiry within ethnographic semantics, Floyd Lounsbury proposed a formal procedure for kinship analysis (1964b), “The Structural Analysis of Kinship Semantics,” and he also carried out a reanalysis of Crow and Omaha kinship systems (1964a), “A Formal Account of the Crow- and Omaha-Type Kinship Terminologies,” showing how generational skewing rules clarified some of the terminological challenges of the two systems. In each system, some kinterms are applied to individuals (kin types) in generational levels both above and below ego, a seeming anomaly in kinship systems.

The second arena of lexical semantic analyses of kinship was in a series of publications on American English kinship, providing different outcomes and sharp intellectual debates about relevance. The first publication was by Wallace and Atkins (1960), “The Meaning of Kinship Terms,” in which a componential paradigm was presented as evidence of the psychological relevance of the terminological system. Their publication was followed, however, by a publication by Romney and D’Andrade (1964), “Cognitive Aspects of English Kin Terms,” presenting a different analysis and an argument for its psychological validity, based on the typological representation of the results and on a series of confirmatory tests given to native speakers. A second discussion on American English kinship was between Ward Goodenough (1965), “Yankee Kinship Terminology: A Problem in Componential Analysis,” and David Schneider (1965), “American Kin Terms and Terms for Kinsmen: A Critique of Goodenough’s Componential Analysis of Yankee Kinship Terminology.” Schneider’s criticism was essentially against the formalism of componential analysis, bringing to bear various types of sociological and psychological variables external to a domain-based analysis.

Each of the two sets of discussions is important in the history of cognitive anthropology for the focus of analytic attention to the psychological reality of the native speakers who utilize the terminological systems. Accurate representation of informant knowledge continued to be a central concern in subsequent research, including major advances in color terminology at the end of the decade and in later developments in ethnobiology. The paper by Schneider is important on different grounds, as it illustrates the types of criticisms that cultural anthropologists tended to make of lexical semantic analysis. Critics argued that the research was focused much too narrowly on single or isolated domains, thereby missing even broader traditional domain based knowledge (see Burling 1964), much less the larger picture and broader concerns of cultural anthropology (Geertz 1973). The core of the latter type of criticism was that formal analysis could never provide overarching cultural descriptions of individual societies of the types expected in information-rich ethnographies. Formal analysis was perceived by critics as too narrow and piecemeal for holistic ethnographic descriptions. The response of cognitive anthropologists was that their method of representing informant knowledge was more principled and thus more accurate, in contrast to impressionistic, non-replicable ethnography.

There were three signal publications in the 1960s. A special publication in 1964 of the American Anthropologist, entitled “Transcultural Studies in Cognition,” edited by A. Kimball Romney and Roy Goodwin D’Andrade, contained papers on linguistic, anthropological, and psychological approaches to cognition, reflecting the cross-field nature of the field from the outset. The first reader, Cognitive Anthropology, edited by Stephen A. Tyler (1969), included many of the classic papers in the emergence of cognitive anthropology. Basic Color Terms (1969), was based on the groundbreaking work by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay on color terminology. Their work spawned interest in color terms that continues to the present, and their research helped to usher in prototype theory cognitive anthropology. In 1972 Harold Conklin published a topically arranged bibliography with over 5,000 entries in eight sections, including kinship, ethnobotany, ethnozoology, ethnomedicine, orientation, color, and sensation.

By the 1970s, however, cognitive anthropology had moved away from componential analysis, mainly from their recognition that the results of their research could be seen as enriched lexical semantics but not necessarily of features that actually reflected informant knowledge. A goal of lexical semantics research was to produce an analysis in which each term within a domain could be defined by a unique set of semantic features. In English kinterms, for example, the semantic description of father as “male, generation +1, lineal,” mother as “female, generation +1,” uncle as “male, generation +1, collateral,” et cetera for all of the kinterms, allowed for a taxonomic display of lexical features. There was no assurance, however, that the kinterms were processed cognitively by native speakers in those forms. It seemed unlikely that native speakers relied on sets of lexical features in their mental computation – perception and production – of kinterms. Lexical semantic analyses provided a set of possibilities that might be used for cognitive computation, but there were no principled ways in which one possibility among others could be clearly demonstrated as the most fundamental. Classificational and nomenclatural systems based on feature distributions of lexical items were increasingly called into question, not only in ethnographic semantics but also in linguistics (Fillmore 1975).

By the end of the 1960s, a newer theoretical approach held greater promise for studies of cognition, specifically prototype theory. Cognitive anthropologists began to use the new perspective with the objective, as before, to provide an accurate description of native knowledge. The central aim of the domain-based research remained in place, to characterize knowledge of the types of objects belonging to a domain, including their relationships to each other, but to make the results more psychologically real.

PROTOTYPES