Cognitive anthropology 1-2

Cognitive Anthropology

As per Andrade. cognitive Anthropology is the study of relationship between society and human thought. They study the social groups' cognition about the objects and phenomena which built their world - abstract and physical.
Cognitive Anthropology wants to comprehend

how people from various societies use their knowledge in everyday life and how the organised knowledge. How they pass on and maintain the knowledge. How knowledge becomes part of culture tradition.
culture is defined as knowledge. It is a system of ideas that exists in the mind not outside.
Investigates knowledge is embedded in worlds folklore and materials.

Method

focus on intellectual and rational aspects of culture particular study of language use. It assume that semantic categories of linguistic forms are related to meaningful cultural categories. it aims to reveal meaningful cultural categories and language and this method has expanded to more general ethnographic methods with focus on emotions and culture.
Cognitive changes created by experience and environment.
How people categorised colour and plants and diseases.

Three factors. Behaviour factors personal factors and environment.
Knowledge is part of culture and thought process creates knowledge. Knowledge is created the experiences and environment.
culture is extremely flexible and rapidly adaptive. It can be acquired transmitted and modified very fast Henry 1985.
Is culture has distinct ecological adaptation.
History. 1950. 8 9 science or new ethnography. Which emerged as critique of traditional ethnography. argue that there is no one method which is followed by anthropologist and everyone studied and wrote their own interpretation. Therefore ethnographies cannot be compared. To make it more scientific they are good for new methodology which is emic perspective.
K pike. Phonetics is the sounds that humans can produce but phone amix phonology focuses on sound differentiated on basis of contrast with other sounds. Therefore attic is what outsider can observe. But emic is the meaningful contrast within a specific language known to insiders.
Marvin Harris used the concept of MS. In 1965 of hypothesis came that language altered human thought. Good enough and freak explain the methods to conduct field work and analyse data. Method of domain analysis and component shall analysis emerged. By 1970 psychology Anthropology and artificial intelligence show that human cognition was more complex than cognitive methodology.
schemata represent knowledge about concepts: objects and the relationships they have with other objects, situations, events, sequences of events, actions, and sequences of actions.
A simple example is to think of your schema for dog. Within that schema you most likely have knowledge about dogs in general (bark, four legs, teeth, hair, tails) and probably information about specific dogs, such as collies (long hair, large, Lassie) or springer spaniels (English, docked tails, liver and white or black and white, Millie).
this affects the interpretation of knowledge comprehension and it keeps changing with new information.
Later proved that intellect is non linguistic and not governed by language. Today cognitive anthropologists and psychologists use the ID of connectionism in where intellect is connected and Nexus built by elements like neurones involves processing.
But extreme cultural relativism followed by Thomas scientists was making cross cultural comparisons unattainable.
Four faces

First phase. Combined linguistic with Anthropology by good enough.
Second phase buy in-depth study of cultural wisdom and studying component shall analysis of kinship terminology. Language was still Central idea. Techniques from psychology used.
Third ways. Telenor rosh link between language based units and psychological units. Shifted from prototype theory to schema theory.
4th phase is the recent one with emotion socialization and concerns on cognitive structure with physical construct.

Conklin

Worked in the area of ethnoecology and linguistics. Work on hanunoo folk botany. The way languages distinguish colour differs from one another.
Social relevance of artefacts is also based on colour categories like uncooked fresh vegetables are seen as Aakar colour objects. Their surrounding is forest therefore artefacts of green colour are considered unattractive.

Critical analysis

developing ethnoscience let them to formulate new methods and methodology. Keesing criticized the inability of new ethnography to move ahead their analysis of various domains. It has been unable to describe the generative grammar of any culture. Failure in discovering the internal cultural working that can be compared.
it deals with very static and synchronous analysis of their cosmology which does not change.
They ignore the past when studying phenomena.
Keesing. new ethnography could not move beyond studying simple categories like colours and plants and could not provide understanding culture.
They tried to move towards universal grammar of culture.
they conduct with their experiment in English language.

Later. Works on study of metaphor was done by anthropologists like Basso and

Cognitive anthropology trends now appear to be leaning towards the study of how cultural schemas are related to action. This brings up issues of emotion, motivation, and how individuals internalize culture during socialization. And finally, cognitive structure is being related to the physical structure of artifacts and the behavioral structure of groups (D’Andrade 1995:248).