Cognitive anthropology or ``Methodology''

see ``Cognitive Anthropology'' by Jennifer Cash
http://www.indiana.edu/ wanthro/cog.htm
cites Benjamin Colby, 1996, and Roy D'Andrade, 1995.

Cognitive Anthropology has been characterised by use of new/ cognitive/ formal/ rigorous methodologies. Its aim is to discover and represent mental processes; also, the use of cognitive techniques to elicit information for the purpose of ethnographic description. Focus is on intellectual and rational aspects of culture, specifically through studies of language use. Both theoretical elements and methodologies of CA have been derived from structuralism in social/cultural anthropology and linguistics.

Anthropology till the late 1950s largely took the form of ethnography which was influenced by Malinowski and Boas. Categories used by this traditional ethnography were, the technology and techniques for providing material needs, village or local group composition, family and extended group composition and the roles of various members, political organization and the nature of magic, religion, witchcraft, cosmologies and other forms of native beliefs and values (Roy D'Andrade (1995) The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. CUP, Cambridge). The sources of anthropological evidence were mainly myths and customs.

In a model popular in British social anthropology, especially in the functionalist tradition of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, individual peoples were written about by lone anthropologists after prolonged and intensive immersion in their societies.

However it was found that the recorded ethnographies of communities changed significantly with time - accuracy and reliability were questioned and ethnographic validity became a critical issue (eg. Redfield-Lewis controversy on contradiction between two ethnographies of the Mexican village of Tepoztlan recorded in the late 1920s and late 1940s).

• The search for more objective methods led to the field of Ethnoscience - devising measures to assess the thinking process of peoples everywhere - try not to impose categories but discover them; systematic data collection, structured interviewing, statistical analyses.

• Analogous to the phonetic-phonemics distinction which allowed linguists to free themselves of their own bias, was the distinction between etics (seen from outside) and emics (seen from inside the culture). (Kenneth Pike (1912-2000), followed by Marvin Harris)

• Cultures were regarded not as material phenomena, but rather as cognitive organizations of material phenomena, i.e., as knowledge.

• Descriptive accounts of cultural categories: structural as well as generative models (Dan Sperber, student of Lévi Strauss)

• 1960s and 70s - the study of ``folk models'' or ``cultural models'': the unconscious set of assumptions and understandings shared by members of a group or society. Also Decision models, Narrative grammars.

• Componential analysis: inspired by de Saussure's structuralism; sought to analyse domains of meaning on the model of structural linguistics, to reveal simple rules which underly seemingly complex decisions made by members of a cultural group.

  (see Gardner MNS, for an example)

• 1980s and 90s - Shift of focus from rules to (culturally specific) schemas.

• Consensus mapping/theory: patterns of agreement among respondents (correctness determined by respondents themselves) are analysed.

• Applications of AI: computer-aided discourse semantics, connectionist networks.

• Shift to a broader definition of language and to nonlinguistically coded understandings. Cognitive theories of emotions, of interests in health and well being, of religious symbolism.

• Linguistic approaches (though still dominant) have partly given way to more psychological approaches.

The representational level insistence in Cognitive Science, though new to more experimentally oriented disciplines like psychology and linguistics, was natural to anthropology. Yet due to a tension in methodologies, anthropology remained on the periphery of cognitive science. Predictably perhaps the new empirical procedures of cognitive science met with problems in anthropology. There has been since the late 1970s (strongly influenced by postmodernists like Clifford Geertz) a return trend to holistic methods, like ethnography and in-depth case studies: an alignment more with the humanities than with the other cognitive sciences. This trend to some extent also in turn affected cognitive science.