Theoretical Foundations and Fields of Application

Research Abstract

Cognitive anthropology aims at identifying the discover and represent mental processes; also, the use of cognitive techniques to elicit information for the purpose of ethnographic description., Cognitive anthropology is the study of the relation between human society and human thought. The cognitive anthropologist studies how people in social groups conceive of and think about the objects and events which make up their world .,For many years cognitive anthropologists focused on the study of semantic models and folk taxonomies. But it became apparent that cognitive structures were more complex than previously thought. By the early 1980s, a new paradigm, schema theory, had become the primary means of understanding psychological aspects of culture. A schema (also called script) is mentally organised experience, a cognitive mental plan that facilitates the processing and interpretation of what is perceived, and provides a framework for acting on this information.. Bloch defines schemas as "chunked networks of loose procedures and understandings which enable us to deal with standard and recurring situations, for example, 'getting the breakfast ready', that are clearly culturally created.. Cognitive anthropology attempts to link social anthropology with the cognitive sciences. In the period of ‘ethnoscience’ in cognitive anthropology post-1956, the central definition of ‘culture’ followed W. Goodenough: ‘Culture does not exist of things, people, behaviour, or emotions, but in the forms or organizations of the things in the minds of people’ Culture consists of shared cognitive representations in the minds of individuals. These ‘forms or organizations’ were constructed as taxonomies or paradigms, as holistic expressions of culture and were abstracted from linguistic material, e.g. from semantic domains such as ‘kinship,’ ‘colour,’ ‘ethnozoology,’ ‘ethnobotany,’ and ‘illness.’ Recently, cognitive anthropology has adopted the ‘information-processing approach.’ This paradigmatic change resulted in the redefinition of ‘cognition’ as the mental activity of individuals who actively apply knowledge in different contexts towards the applications of knowledge in everyday life Cognitive anthropology seems to accept the existence of universal cognitive processes. . Cognitive anthropology aim is to discover and represent mental processes; also, the use of cognitive techniques to elicit information for the purpose of ethnographic description.It Began in the 1950s when anthropologists at Yale applied the formal methods and theories of structural linguistics to semantic fields related to cultural knowledge. it qustoned What material phenomena are significant for the people of a culture?” and" how do they organize these phenomena?”cultures were not regarded as material phenomena, but rather as cognitive organizations of material phenomena. Cognitive anthropology not only focuses on discovering how different peoples organize culture but also how they utilize culture. It attempts to describe what is socially and culturally expected or appropriate in given situations. the way people perceive and relate to the world around them. Cognitive Anthropology has been characterised by use of new/ cognitive/ formal/ rigorous methodologies By the early 1980s, schema theory had become the primary means of understanding the psychological aspect of culture. Tyler outlines the theory of cognitive anthropologyhe defines culture as “cognitive organizations of material phenomena”. Harold Conklin made important contributions to the study of kinship terminology, Ward Goodenough (1956) and Floyd Lounsbury’s (1956) pioneering papers on the semantics of kinship terms established the programme . . The foundation of cognitive anthropology is the notion that cultures are seen as systems of knowledge. According to Good enough (1981), a society's culture represents "what one has to know, or profess to believe, in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members in every role that they accept for any one of themselves, Ethnographic semantics, ethnoscience, the new ethnography: All of these terms refer to the new directions that the practice of ethnographic collection and interpretation began to take in the 1950s. This approach regards culture as knowledge .Folk taxonomies as briefly alluded to above, are also aimed at understanding how people cognitively organizeinformation.Ethnoscience, or the ‘New Ethnography’ as it was often called in the 1960s, consists of a set of methods for analysing indigenous systems of classification,for example, of diseases, species of plants or types of food, Componential analysis is a method of formal analysis or of ethnographic description whose origin is usually traced to Goodenough’s article ‘Componential Analysis and the Study of Meaning’ (1956).

Research Keywords

Theoretical Foundations and Fields of Application