Cognitive Anthropology

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Cognitive Anthropology

• S4 Advanced Social Anthropology I
• Thought, Belief and Ethics
• Jonathan Mair

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Introduction to Cognitive Anthropology

• What is cognitive anthropology?
• Critique of anthropology
• Critique of psychology
• A synthesis

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1. What is cognitive anthropology?

• The study of cognition is the study of how human
  knowledge is learnt, stored and retrieved.
• Maurice Bloch
• Learning and pedagogy
• Memory
• Practice and habituation/embodiment
• Literacy
• Distribution of knowledge
• The content of knowledge

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1. What is cognitive anthropology?

• Research topics include
• The way knowledge about the natural world is
  organised in different languages
  (ethnoscience/folkbiology)
• The way people know how to act in culturally
  typical situations (cultural schemas, scripts,
  models)
• How the structure of the mind influences which
  ideas spread and which die out (epidemiology of
  representations)

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2. Critique of anthropology

• There is no theory of what happens in cultural
  interaction without some strong hypothesis about
  what is happening in the actors minds.
• Pascal Boyer, Tradition as Truth and Communication

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2. Critique of anthropology

• Standard view cultural knowledge is
• 1. Idealist
• 2. Uniform
• 3. Systematic
• 4. Language-like
• 5. Conservative

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2. Critique of anthropology

• Idealist
• Reification
• Cultural realm / sphere
• Culture meaning / text
• Symbolic/Interpretive anthropologists
• Talcott Parsons
• David Schneider
• Clifford Geertz
• Edmund Leach

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2. Critique of anthropology

• 2. Uniform
• Individual, shared or ideal representation?
• Socialization is automatic and uniform
• Distribution of knowledge unproblematic

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2. Critique of anthropology

• 3. Systematic
• Culture is a coherent whole
• Adds up to a world view
• Pervasive cultural themes or traits
• Mead, Benedict Culture and Personality

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2. Critique of anthropology

• Language-like
• Thoughts come in sentences
• Concepts are minimal definitions
• Cognition is sequential reasoning
• Cultural knowledge is explicit

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2. Critique of anthropology

• 5. Conservative
• People are naturally conservative and value
  whatever their ancestors thought, said and did

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2. Critique of anthropology

• Standard anthropological view of cultural
• knowledge is
• 1. Vague and ambiguous
• 2. Conflicts with science
• Anthropology is mind-blind

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3. Critique of psychology

• Focus on the universal
• Context-blind
• Sample bias
• Focus on replicability
• Arbitrary, unnatural stimuli
• Focus on explicit knowledge

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4. Cognitive Anthropological Synthesis

• So we should try to make these hypotheses
  explicit if they are not plausible, we should
  change them so that the anthropological theories
  are at least compatible, if not altogether
  congruent, with what psychologists know about
  mental processes.
• Boyer 1990

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4. Cognitive Anthropological Synthesis

• From psychology
• Concrete theories about cognition
• Scientific mode of explanation
• Seek laws, regularities, correlations
• Materialism, naturalism, reductionism
• Testable hypotheses
• Precision in description
• Units of analysis concepts, schemas, etc.

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4. Cognitive Anthropological Synthesis

• From anthropology
• Context-sensitivity
• Comparative perspective
• Intensive Participant-Observation F/W

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4. Cognitive Anthropological Synthesis

• What we need is an ethnographic conception of
  the mind
• Bradd Shore