Cognitive Anthropology

Question 1

Cognitive Anthropology

Answer 1

• 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.

Question 2

What are the three phases in the history of cognitive anthropology?

Answer 2

1. An early formative period in the 1950s called ethnoscience
2. The middle period during the 1960s and 1970s, commonly identified with the study of folk models
3. The most recent period beginning in the 1980s with the growth of schema theory and the development of consensus theory

Question 3

Does cognitive anthropology view its self as a true science or humanity?

Answer 3

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.

Question 4

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.

Answer 4

It was not until the 1950s that cognitive anthropology came to be regarded as a distinct theoretical and methodological approach within anthropology.

Question 5

Which three enlightenment thinkers could be identified with cognitive anthropology and why?

Answer 5

1. Rousseau- Our State of Mind is corrupted by society and prevents us from being happy.
2. Hobbes- Our State of Mind is inherently evil and needs and institution of force and authority to provide the illusion of higher moral right.
3. Locke- Man is born a blank slate and is influenced by culture and society.

Question 6

Define Locke’s empiricism

Answer 6

• 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.

Question 7

E.B. Tylor’s definition of culture.

Answer 7

The complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

Question 8

Psychic unity of mankind.

Answer 8

• 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.

Question 9

Franz Boas

Answer 9

• “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.

Question 10

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,

Answer 10

Malinowski and Boas.

Question 11

Redfield-Lewis Debate

Answer 11

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.

Question 12

Ethnoscience

Answer 12

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.”

Question 13

Cultural Relativism

Answer 13

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.

Question 14

Goodenough’s “Componential Analysis” of 1956

Answer 14

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 “.

Question 15

Linguistics as a hedge against bias?

Answer 15

Useing the culture’s words that you are studying could theorectically alleviate some of the anthropologist’s own cultural bias.

Question 16

Anthony Wallace’s,

Answer 16

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.

Question 17

Criticisms of Ethnoscience

Answer 17

• 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?

Question 18

Discuss schema theory.

Answer 18

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).

Question 19

Componential Analysis

Answer 19

• 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.

Question 20

Charles Frake,

Answer 20

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.

Question 21

Harold Conklin.

Answer 21

Harold Conklin made important contributions to the study of kinship terminology.

Question 22

Roy D’Andrade,

Answer 22

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.

Question 23

Consensus Theory

Answer 23

• 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.

Question 24

Three central assumptions of consensus theory.

Answer 24

1. That there is a single, shared conglomerate of answers that constitute a coherent domain.
2. Each respondent’s answers are given independently and only afterwards is the correlation between respondents known.
3. Items are relatively homogeneously known by all respondents.

Question 25

Cultural Models

Answer 25

• Also known as folk models,
• cultural models generally refer to the unconscious set of assumptions and understandings members of a society or group share.
• They greatly affect people’s understanding of the world and of human behavior. Cultural models can be thought of as loose, interpretative frameworks.
• They are both overtly and unconsciously taught and are rooted in knowledge learned from others as well as from accumulated personal experience.

Question 26

Domain

Answer 26

A domain is comprised of a set of related ideas or items that form a larger category. Weller and Romney (1988: 9) define domain as “an organized set of words, concepts, or sentences, all on the same level of contrast that jointly refer to a single conceptual sphere”.

Question 27

Folk Models:

Answer 27

Folk Models: “Games, music, god sets, and other cultural phenomena in one domain can be seen as models for behavior and conceptualization in another domain. The model domain is an area with little conflict or anxiety, but the domain mapped by the model is often conflicted, anxiety producing, and stressful. Thus, a child may learn how to judge speed and distance from hide and seek, which can then be translated into crossing a busy street.
— Some folk and decision models, such as god sets with well-recited attributes, form larger cognitive systems, such as divinatory readings. The diviner, by collecting several readings and training under another diviner learns to read people, and produce divinations that are socially acceptable

Question 28

Folk Taxonomies.

Answer 28

How people organize certain classes of objects or notions.

Question 29

Knowledge Structures.

Answer 29

Knowledge structures: Knowledge structures go beyond the analysis of taxonomies to try to elucidate the knowledge and beliefs associated with the various taxonomies and terminology systems. This includes the study of consensus among individuals in a group, and an analysis of how their knowledge is organized and used as mental scripts and schemata.

Question 30

Mazeway

Answer 30

Mazeway: Wallace defines mazeway as “the mental image of society and culture” .

The maze is comprised of perceptions of material objects and how people can manipulate the maze to reduce stress.

Wallace proposed this concept as part of his study of revitalization movements. Wallace postulated that revitalization movements were sparked by a charismatic leader who embodied a special vision about how life ought to be. The realization of this vision required a change in the social mazeway.

Question 31

Mental Scripts

Answer 31

Mental Scripts: Scripts can be thought of as a set of certain actions one performs in a given situation. Examples would include behavior in a doctor’s office, or in a restaurant.

Question 32

Schemas

Answer 32

The individuals slight variations of a cultural notion.

EXAMPLE: Writing.

Question 33

Semantic Studies

Answer 33

Terminology of classifications, particularly kinship classifications.

Gaining ground in modern anthropology.

Question 34

Methodology:

Answer 34

Cognitive anthropologists stress systematic data collection and analysis in addressing issues of reliability and validity and, consequently, rely heavily on structured interviewing and statistical analyses.

Define things in their own language.

Question 35

Triad Model

Answer 35

List things from most to least.