Cognitive Anthropology A Primer
Introduction
Cognitive anthropology is in the midst of a maelstrom.
Questions of its methodologies, research interests, and even its status within the broader cognitive science community are ever swirling. Are anthropologists necessary to the great hunt for a unified theory of mind? Will cognitive anthropology decisively confirm whether anthropology as a whole is part of the humanities or the sciences? Are cognitive anthropological methodologies compatible with the research methods of other subfields of cognitive science?
These are the big questions, of course, and to address them exhaustively is a near-impossible task for any researcher, and there is indeed conflict among anthropologists, even those who identify specifically as cognitive anthropologists, as to how this field can and should proceed. The goal of this brief article is to act as a primer, an introduction to this colorful and, I will argue throughout this series, necessary pillar of human cognitive studies.
Defining Cognitive Anthropology
In his landmark book, Cognition in the Wild, Edwin Hutchins outlines his definition of cognitive anthropology: “….Human cognition in its natural habitat – that is, to naturally occurring culturally constituted human activity” (1995). A simpler definition might entail situating human knowledge – what anthropologists refer to as “content” – in context. For researchers, that context is primarily cultural.
Hutchins also developed a new formalism within cognitive science and anthropology known as distributed cognition, which entails expanding the borders of where we locate cognition from the individual brain to the complex socio-cultural world (2001). He asserts in Cognition in the Wild that content cannot be unaffected by culture.
What this means is that cognitive anthropologists are seeking to define their subfield as something complementary to other divisions in the cognitive science apparatus. Boster (2012) asserts that cognitive anthropology’s main research technique of ethnologies complements psychology’s system of analyzing the thought processing of individuals. “[Cognitive anthropology] is prototypically the study of the content of thought, or knowledge, as distributed through communities of individuals and observed in natural settings.” Or, as Boster stated in a chapter for A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology, “Cognitive psychologists examine trees and cognitive anthropologists contemplate forests” (2011).
For the purposes of this primer, a working definition of cognitive anthropology will be the study of the human mind and shared content from the perspective of its context in culture, as well as its development across time and social membership. Before going further, however, we must also establish the world that cognitive anthropology emerged into when it was born in the 1950s, a world dominated by the Cognitive Revolution.
Cognitive Science: A Background View
By the midpoint of the 20th century, researchers in a handful of fields realized that they were asking the same questions, flailing in the same murky waters, and pushing against the same walls of inquiry. This was the inquiry of mind: What it was, what sustained it, and how to mechanically recreate it.
The philosophers were attempting to conceptualize the nature of knowledge using a bouquet of terms, from epistemology to ontology. The psychologists were developing experimental methods to strip the individual mind out of the theoretical and into the realm of the concrete. At the same time, the newly-born neuroscientists were honing in on the neural substrates that underlay behavior. The linguists, buoyed on by the revolutions proposed by Noam Chomsky, were questioning the very foundations of their field. And the computer scientists, their field as nebulous as the neuroscientists’, dreamt of simulating the process of thinking itself in machines.
Philosophy. Psychology. Neuroscience. Linguistics. Computer science.
To turn the pentagon of cognitive science into a hexagon, we add in anthropology, and thus the science of cognition was born through a series of interdisciplinary activities known as the Cognitive Revolution.
In his personal account of the Revolution, psychologist George A. Miller presents the evolution of the hexagon into a cohesive, unified field. The Cognitive Revolution represented a pivot of the social sciences away from Behaviorism (in black and white terms, the assumption that we and our behavior are the extreme products of our conditioning). Miller also gives us a glimpse of practical reasons cognitive science evolved as an interdisciplinary field – namely, the foundations that funded the research had a hand in choosing the diverse cast that came together at symposiums (2003).
A Brief History of Cognitive Anthropology and Its Status Within Cognitive Science
Ben Blount, a retired anthropology researcher with the University of Georgia, pinpoints the origins of cognition as an inquiry of anthropology all the way back to the first definition of culture produced by the field. This definition was termed by E.B. Tylor, who stated, “Culture…is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Blount in his opening chapter of A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology emphasizes and hones in on the word “capabilities” within Tylor’s definition. Such capabilities are mental fitness to function in a social world. It would appear that anthropologists have, whether they stated explicitly or not, always had a hand in the realm of defining what it meant to own a mind.
Blount identifies a major development in cognitive anthropology as the publication of 1987’s Cultural Models in Language and Thought, edited by Naomi Quinn and Dorothy Holland. Cultural models and Cultural Model Theory presented their own revolution within the subfield. We can define these models as propositions that mental knowledge is shared by members of a community, which is further defined as any group that shares self-identity, irrespective of size (Bennardo and de Munck, 2020). Cultural Model Theory has been adopted by anthropologists across a wide array of methodological ideologies, both qualitative and quantitative.
Anthropology’s status as a subfield of cognitive science is the subject of far more debate. Miller cites it as a “peripheral” field (2003) while researchers in the same volume and publication of Topics in Cognitive Science debated its role in the broader field. Beller, Bender, and Medin (2012) outlined what they referred to as “challenges for rapprochement,” which include practical concerns such as the divergent methods for gathering and interpreting information between anthropology and, most specifically, psychology. They also present an image of a divided cognitive science, one where psychology and anthropology focus on two completely different loci of mind, one in which the former zeros in on individuals (and test subjects, beside this, are sometimes overwhelmingly undergraduate students), a focus which anthropologists eschew as ignoring the environment in which people live and take their cues. In effect, Beller, Bender, and Medin argue that there are major structural and philosophical issues preventing cognitive anthropology from enjoying, perhaps, more spots in cognitive science publications.
In response to this, Boster (2012) reiterates that psychology and anthropology are a yin and yang and validate each other’s research, that there is natural symmetry between a field that investigates the individual and one that examines communities. “Cognitive anthropology is like cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience in that it is an empirical discipline encompassing a wide range of cognitive phenomenon” (Boster, 2012). Boster thus paints a far rosier portrait of cognitive anthropology’s standing and future.
Conclusion
What remains to be analyzed further is the core issues cognitive anthropologists tackle, as well as the methodologies that they employ. This will be the second part of this series. What is key to take away in this opening chapter is that cognitive anthropology is a field with a great variety in its goals and statuses, and one that merits extensive study.
References
Beller, S., Bender, A., & Medin, D.L. (2012). Should anthropology be a part of cognitive science? Topics in Cognitive Science, 4, 342 – 353.
Bennardo, G. & de Munck, V.C. (2020). Cultural model theory in cognitive anthropology: recent developments and applications. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 4, 1 – 2.
Blount, B. (2011). A history of cognitive anthropology. In D.B. Kronenfield, G. Bennardo, V.C. de Munck, & M.D. Fischer (Eds.), A companion to cognitive anthropology (pp. 11 – 29). Blackwell Publishing.
Boster, J.S. (2011). Data, method, and interpretation in cognitive anthropology. In D.B.
Kronenfield, G. Bennardo, V.C. de Munck, & M.D. Fischer (Eds.), A companion to cognitive anthropology (pp. 131 – 152). Blackwell Publishing.
Boster, J.S. (2012). Cognitive anthropology is a cognitive science. Topics in Cognitive Science, 4, 372 – 378.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. The MIT Press.
Hutchins, E.. (2001). Cognition, Distributed. 10.1016/B0-08-043076-7/01636-3.
Miller, G.A. (2003). The cognitive revolution: a historical perspective. Trends in Cognitive Science, 7(3), 141-144.
