4 - Cognitive anthropology

Summary

Cognitive anthropology across four decades

What is the relationship between language and thought? How do language and other cultural semiotic systems influence the way humans think? How is knowledge organized in the mind, and what is the role of language in constraining this organization? Such questions have stirred an enormous amount of speculation, controversy, and research across a number of fields: especially philosophy, logic, linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. Cognitive anthropology arose as a specific approach to these questions, with well-defined aims and a methodology that focused on exploring systems of concepts through their linguistic labels and comparing them across languages in different cultural settings in order to find their underlying principles of organization. The field has diversified so that today there are a number of different schools within self-styled ‘cognitive anthropology’ as well as much work in related disciplines which speaks directly to the same issues. There are certain chronic tensions among adherents of different approaches, especially between (i) those who emphasize universals of human cognition vs. those who stress the importance of cultural differences, and (ii) those who treat cognition as ‘in the head’ vs. others who insist on its embodied, interactional, and contextually dependent nature. What they all share, however, is an anthropological, comparative approach to the study of human cognition in its cultural context and an insistence on the interaction of mind and culture.