Cognitive Anthropology
The theoretical school of Cognitive Anthropology examines how people perceive the world around them. The Cognitive Anthropologists believe that the world itself is chaotic and humans understand it through classification. In other words, we put in order the world by noticing some phenomena and ignoring others or by grouping some aspects together and excluding others. Cognitive Anthropologists argue that each culture has its own system of classification. People perceive and organize phenomena, such as materials, events, behaviors and emotions. For example, although the Americans distinguish between dew, fog, ice and snow, the Koyas of India do not. They call all of these forms mancu and do not think the differences among them are significant. On the other hand, the Koyas distinguish seven different kinds of bamboo by giving them different names while the Americans call all of them simply bambo. This example shows that people in different cultures may perceive the same phenomenon differently because of their own cultural systems.
The purpose of Cognitive Anthropologists is to discover how different people perceive the world based on their cultural systems. They use linguistic analysis, especially naming, as one of the main methods. For example, Harold C. Conklin examined how people name and categorize colors and revealed the order that people create in their culture. Instead of attempting to search for universal laws that apply to all cultures, Cognitive Anthropologists revealed classification systems which are unique to each culture.
The approach of Cognitive Anthropology forced anthropologists to rethink their traditional ethnographic methods. If each culture has its own classification system, anthropologists have inappropriately classified the behavior of different people based on anthropologists’ cultures’ classification systems. The relativistic approach of Cognitive Anthropology contributed to the development of Symbolic Anthropology and Postmodernism.
Source:
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McGee, R. Jon and Richard L. Warms. 2004 Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. New York: McGraw Hill.