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Cognitive Anthropology
Cognitive Anthropology 529
Cœurdoux, Gaston-Laurent (1691–1779) K Karttunen, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
The French missionary and pioneer of Indology Gaston-Laurent Cœurdoux was born in Bourges, France, in 1691 and died in Pondicherry in the colony of French India in 1779. He joined the Jesuit order in 1715, departed for South India in 1732, and served as a member of Madurai Mission until his death. In 1744 he was named superior of the mission, a role he filled until 1751. Beside his missionary work, he showed keen interest both in science and in language studies. In addition to local Dravidian languages (Tamil and Telugu), he learned Sanskrit and was one of the first to note its resemblance with classical Greek and Latin (and German). In a wellknown memoir, he demonstrated the relationship between Sanskrit and European languages well before Sir William Jones; he sent the text to AnquetilDuperron to Paris for publication, but it remained in manuscript form and was printed only at the beginning of the 19th century (in Histoire et Me´moires de l’Acade´mie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 49, 1808: 647–667). Another work by Father Cœurdoux, a detailed account of South Indian customs, remained unpublished and was to a large extent copied by Abbe´ Dubois in the book he then published under his own name (published in French in 1825, in English translation 1817, rev. ed. Hindu manners, customs and ceremonies 1897). The original version is preserved in an abridged version that was published in 1987 by
Sylvia Murr, who also showed Dubois’s complete dependence on it. There are further some letters by Cœurdoux published in Lettres e´difiantes et curieuses, a manuscript dictionary ‘te´lougou–franc¸ais– samskroutam [i.e. Sanskrit],’ and some further manuscript works. See also: Missionary Linguistics.
Bibliography Cœurdoux G-L (1987). Moeurs et coutumes des indiens (1777). Un ine´dit du Pe`re G.-L. Coeurdoux S. J. dans la version de N.-J. Desvaulx. Texte e´tabli et annote´ par Sylvia Murr. Publications de l’E´cole franc¸aise d’Extreˆme-Orient 146, L’Inde philosophique entre Bossuet et Voltaire 1. Paris: E´cole franc¸aise d’Extreˆme-Orient. Dehergne J (1961). ‘Cœurdoux, Gaston Laurent.’ In Dictionnaire de biographie franc¸aise 9, 121. Dubois A J A. Hindu manners, customs and ceremonies. Translated from the author’s later French manuscript and edited with notes, corrections and biography by Henry K. Beauchamp. 3rd rev. edition, repr. by Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1978. Godfrey J J (1967). ‘Sir William Jones and Pe`re C.: A philological footnote.’ Journal of the American Oriental Society 87, 57–59 (see also 89, 1969, 416f.). Murr S (1987). L’indologie du pe`re Cœurdoux: strate´gies, apologe´tique et scientificite´. Publications de l’E´cole franc¸aise d’Extreˆme-Orient 146, L’Inde philosophique entre Bossuet et Voltaire 2. Paris: E´cole franc¸aise d’Extreˆme-Orient.
Cognitive Anthropology C Strauss, Pitzer College, Claremont, CA, USA ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Cognitive anthropology is the study of cultural knowledge and processes of cognition in a sociocultural context. While most cultural anthropologists study cultural knowledge, cognitive anthropologists do so distinctively by asking how specific people in a society think. Cognitive anthropology dates from the late 1950s, although there were many earlier precursors (e.g., the work of Evans-Pritchard).
In cognitive anthropology today, major schools can be distinguished by their answers to two questions. First, does the cultural part of cognition (D’Andrade, 1981) consist of mental representations or situated practices? Second, how significant are panhuman cognitive universals?
Cultural Cognition as Culturally Variable Mental Representations An early, influential statement of this approach, cultural cognition as cross-culturally variable mental
530 Cognitive Anthropology
representations, is Goodenough’s definition of a society’s culture as ‘‘whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members’’ (Goodenough, 1957: 167). From Goodenough on, language has been central to work in this approach, as both evidence for and the content of cultural knowledge, and linguistics has been an ongoing source of theoretical inspiration. From the 1950s through the 1970s, a major focus of research was lexical semantics (‘ethnosemantics’). Typically, all of the terms in a domain (e.g., kin terms, kinds of talk) are elicited, then an underlying mental structure of defining or salient features is inferred from contrasting patterns of use or judgments of similarity. Influenced by phonologists’ decomposition of sounds into distinctive features, componential analysts similarly analyzed word meanings as sets of semantic features (e.g., BACHELOR ¼ þMALE, MARRIED). Systematic methods were developed for eliciting terms and their relations (e.g., frame and slot elicitation: What words can fill the blank in a sentence like, ‘‘____is a kind of sport,’’ or pile sorts and triads tests, analyzed with multidimensional scaling, Weller and Romney, 1988). Work in this tradition sometimes focused on biological classifications and was called ‘ethnoscience’; however, that term covers later folk science studies using other methods as well. One current development of such work is the study of cultural knowledge as consensus in responses to standardized questions (Romney and Moore, 1998; Romney et al., 1986). Cultural consensus analysis can be used to determine patterns of disagreement as well as consensus, which can highlight the social distribution of knowledge (see, e.g., Boster’s 1985 study of the effect of kinship and residence on Aguaruna women’s knowledge of manioc varieties). While these methods have been extremely productive, a number of concerns arose about the older, lexically focused methods (these objections do not all apply to cultural consensus modeling). It was not always clear that the analyst’s structures corresponded to the mental representations of members of the society in question; in some domains, a study of key terms reveals only problematic cases, not the taken-for-granted normal scenario (Holland and Skinner, 1987); in many cases, lexical semantics omits crucial elements of cultural knowledge (e.g., eliciting meanings of disease terms in English will not reveal a germ theory of disease, D’Andrade, 1995); and distinctive features are not random assortments of attributes, but co-occur in patterned wholes, as discussed by Rosch and others (see summary in D’Andrade, 1995). Schema theory was adopted
from the work of linguists such as Fillmore and Langacker and psychologists (e.g., Schank and Abelson) to address these issues. Schemas (‘frames’) are mental representations of an underlying, typical pattern of features or connected set of ideas understood holistically. For example, my MINIVAN schema includes not only the features that distinguish it from other vehicles, but also a mental image and ideas about what sort of person is likely to drive one. Shared schemas are cultural models (Holland and Quinn, 1987). A speaker’s reference to one part of a cultural model will activate the whole schema, as well as related schemas, in a listener’s mind; hence, much can be left unsaid when culture is assumed to be shared. Cultural model researchers typically conduct in-depth, semistructured interviews, inferring the implicit understandings that are assumed in what is said (Holland and Quinn, 1987; Quinn, in press). While the focus of work in this approach has been on contents of cultural knowledge, some researchers have addressed cognitive processes and the way knowledge is used: e.g, in memory and personal narratives (e.g., Garro, 2000; see also memory research in studies of linguistic relativity), metaphor choice (Quinn, 1991), the pragmatics of opinion expression (Strauss, 2004), reasoning (Hutchins, 1980; Quinn, 1996), and motivation (D’Andrade and Strauss, 1992). Connectionist models have been proposed to address how cultural knowledge, including nonpropositional knowledge, is learned, changes, and is sensitive to the context of its use (Strauss and Quinn, 1997).
Cultural Cognition as Situated, Distributed Practices Cognitive processes, rather than cultural knowledge, dominate the work of cognitive anthropologists who study distributed cognition or ‘cognition in practice.’ They argue that studies in the first school neglect emergent cognitive effects as people interact with each other and the objects and structures in their environment. Thus, the primary method employed here is observation of ongoing activities (arithmetic while shopping, Lave, 1988 or navigation on board a ship, Hutchins, 1995), perhaps asking the person being observed to think out loud while they are in the midst of their activity. Drawing on Marxian psychology (e.g., Vygotsky, and Leontiev’s Activity Theory), some argue that a key way cognition is ‘cultural’ is that it depends on tools or ‘mediating devices’: concrete objects, symbols, and activities that are socially produced, and which evoke and
Cognitive Anthropology 531
direct thought (Holland and Valsiner, 1988). One example is Goody’s argument that the invention of writing, especially lists and tables, created the possibility for new structures of thought (but see Scribner and Cole, 1981 on the cognitive effects of the Vai script in Liberia). The means and social relations of communication are also relevant ‘structuring resources’ (Lave, 1988). Hutchins (1995), for example, considered how the bandwidth of communications media, the social ranking of who talks to whom, and the timing of their talk affect the propagation of cognitive representations among the members of a navigation team on a large ship (see Nardi, 1996 for a useful comparison of different cognition-in-practice approaches).
Universals in Human Cognition Other cognitive anthropologists agree with the first school in its focus on mental representations but disagree with its emphasis on cross-cultural variability. Thus, for example, Berlin and Kay (1969; Kay et al., 1997) analyzed basic color terms (ones that are monolexemic like ‘red,’ not subtypes of another color, etc.) first in 20, then in 110 languages. They found a restricted set of basic color terms with crossculturally stable focal referents, and comparable composite color categories across all languages. In addition, there is a fairly predictable relation between the number of basic color terms in a language and which colors are named. Atran (1990) and Berlin (1992) observed cross-cultural and historical similarities in classification of plants and animals. Lately, empirical studies have been joined by theories prioritizing cognitive universals. These draw on Chomsky and Fodor’s claims that human brains process much information with specialized modules, and those of evolutionary psychologists that human brains are the result of evolutionary adaptation during the Pleistocene, thus include innate knowledge and processing rules that are useful for social cooperation and categorization, mate selection, foraging, and predator avoidance (Cosmides, 1989; Hirschfeld and Gelman, 1994, but see criticisms by Donald, Karmiloff-Smith and others). The research on cross-cultural cognitive universals challenges extreme claims of linguistic relativity.
Directions for the Future Theoretical bridges have been proposed between cultural models and practice theory; thus, Holland and
Valsiner (1988) argued that learned schemas determine the purposes to which mediating devices are put, Keller and Keller (1993) studied feedback between external events and internal representations over the course of an extended activity, and Quinn (1996) argued that cultural models are internal mediating devices. Similarly, cognitive anthropologists in the first and last schools would agree that there are both universals and variation in cultural knowledge (see, e.g., D’Andrade, 1995; Romney and Moore, 1998; Sperber, 1985; Strauss and Quinn, 1997); the only question is of what sorts. An underexplored issue is differences in ways of knowing (Sperber, 1985; Strauss and Quinn, 1997: Chap. 8). Finally, an interest that cuts across all three approaches is what Sperber (1996) called the ‘‘epidemiology of representations’’: how ideas spread among people in groups, how they are transformed, and how they are used as they move between internal and external forms (Hutchins, 1995; Keller and Keller, 1993; Strauss and Quinn, 1997).
See also: Activity Theory; Ethnoscience; Fillmore, Charles
J. (b. 1929); Frame Semantics; Human Language Processing: Connectionist Models; Langacker, Ronald (b. 1942); Leont’iev, Aleksei Alekseevich (1936–2004); Modularity of Mind and Language; Sapir, Edward (1884–1939); Schank, Roger C. (b. 1946); Semantic Primitives; Vygotskii, Lev Semenovich (1896–1934); Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1897– 1941); Wierzbicka, Anna (b. 1938).
Bibliography Atran S (1990). Cognitive foundations of natural history: towards an anthropology of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berlin B (1992). Ethnobiological classification: principles of categorization of plants and animals in traditional societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Berlin B & Kay P (1969). Basic color terms: their universality and evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Boster J (1985). ‘‘‘Requiem for the omniscient informant’’: there’s life in the old girl yet.’ In Dougherty J (ed.) Directions in cognitive anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 177–197. Cosmides L (1989). ‘The logic of social exchange: has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task.’ Cognition 31, 187–276. D’Andrade R (1981). ‘The cultural part of cognition.’ Cognitive Science 5, 179–195.
532 Cognitive Anthropology D’Andrade R (1995). The development of cognitive anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D’Andrade R & Strauss C (1992). Human motives and cultural models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garro L (2000). ‘Cultural knowledge as resource in illness narratives: remembering through accounts of illness.’ In Mattingly C & Garro L (eds.) Narrative and the cultural construction of illness and healing. Berkeley: University of California Press. 70–87. Goodenough W (1957). ‘Cultural anthropology and linguistics.’ In Garvin P (ed.) Report of the seventh annual round table meeting in linguistics and language study, monograph series on language and linguistics, no. 9. Washington, DC: Georgetown University. 167–173. Hirschfeld L & Gelman S (eds.) (1994). Mapping the mind: domain specificity in cognition and culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holland D & Quinn N (eds.) (1987). Cultural models in language and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holland D & Skinner D (1987). ‘Prestige and intimacy: the cultural models behind Americans’ talk about gender types.’ In Holland & Quinn (eds.). 78–111. Holland D & Valsiner J (1988). ‘Cognition, symbols, and Vygotsky’s developmental psychology.’ Ethos 16, 247–272. Hutchins E (1980). Culture and inference: a Trobriand case study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hutchins E (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kay P, Berlin B, Maffi L & Merrifield W (1997). ‘Color naming across languages.’ In Hardin C & Maffi L (eds.) Color categories in thought and language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 21–56. Keller C & Keller J D (1993). ‘Thinking and acting with iron.’ In Chaiklin S & Lave J (eds.) Understanding practice: perspectives on activity and context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 125–143.
Lave J (1988). Cognition in Practice: mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nardi B (1996). ‘Studying context: a comparison of activity theory, situated action models, and distributed cognition.’ In Nardi B (ed.) Context and consciousness: activity theory and human-computer interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 69–102. Quinn N (1991). ‘The cultural basis of metaphor.’ In Fernandez J (ed.) Beyond metaphor: the theory of tropes in anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 56–93. Quinn N (1996). ‘Culture and contradiction: the case of Americans reasoning about marriage.’ Ethos 24, 391–425. Quinn, Naomi. (In press). Finding culture in talk: a collection of methods. NY: Palgrave. Romney A K & Moore C (1998). ‘Toward a theory of culture as shared cognitive structures.’ Ethos 26, 314–337. Romney A K, Weller S & Batchelder W (1986). ‘Culture as consensus: a theory of culture and informant accuracy.’ American Anthropologist 88, 313–338. Scribner S & Cole M (1981). The psychology of literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sperber D (1985). ‘Apparently irrational beliefs.’ In Sperber D (ed.) On anthropological knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 35–63. Sperber D (1996). ‘Anthropology and psychology: towards an epidemiology of representations.’ In Sperber D (ed.) Explaining culture: a naturalistic approach. Oxford: Blackwell. 56–76. Strauss C (2004). ‘Cultural standing in expression of opinion.’ Language in Society 33, 161–194. Strauss C & Quinn N (1997). A cognitive theory of cultural meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weller S & Romney A K (1988). Systematic data collection. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Cœurdoux, Gaston-Laurent (1691–1779) K Karttunen, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
The French missionary and pioneer of Indology Gaston-Laurent Cœurdoux was born in Bourges, France, in 1691 and died in Pondicherry in the colony of French India in 1779. He joined the Jesuit order in 1715, departed for South India in 1732, and served as a member of Madurai Mission until his death. In 1744 he was named superior of the mission, a role he filled until 1751. Beside his missionary work, he showed keen interest both in science and in language studies. In addition to local Dravidian languages (Tamil and Telugu), he learned Sanskrit and was one of the first to note its resemblance with classical Greek and Latin (and German). In a wellknown memoir, he demonstrated the relationship between Sanskrit and European languages well before Sir William Jones; he sent the text to AnquetilDuperron to Paris for publication, but it remained in manuscript form and was printed only at the beginning of the 19th century (in Histoire et Me´moires de l’Acade´mie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 49, 1808: 647–667). Another work by Father Cœurdoux, a detailed account of South Indian customs, remained unpublished and was to a large extent copied by Abbe´ Dubois in the book he then published under his own name (published in French in 1825, in English translation 1817, rev. ed. Hindu manners, customs and ceremonies 1897). The original version is preserved in an abridged version that was published in 1987 by
Sylvia Murr, who also showed Dubois’s complete dependence on it. There are further some letters by Cœurdoux published in Lettres e´difiantes et curieuses, a manuscript dictionary ‘te´lougou–franc¸ais– samskroutam [i.e. Sanskrit],’ and some further manuscript works. See also: Missionary Linguistics.
Bibliography Cœurdoux G-L (1987). Moeurs et coutumes des indiens (1777). Un ine´dit du Pe`re G.-L. Coeurdoux S. J. dans la version de N.-J. Desvaulx. Texte e´tabli et annote´ par Sylvia Murr. Publications de l’E´cole franc¸aise d’Extreˆme-Orient 146, L’Inde philosophique entre Bossuet et Voltaire 1. Paris: E´cole franc¸aise d’Extreˆme-Orient. Dehergne J (1961). ‘Cœurdoux, Gaston Laurent.’ In Dictionnaire de biographie franc¸aise 9, 121. Dubois A J A. Hindu manners, customs and ceremonies. Translated from the author’s later French manuscript and edited with notes, corrections and biography by Henry K. Beauchamp. 3rd rev. edition, repr. by Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1978. Godfrey J J (1967). ‘Sir William Jones and Pe`re C.: A philological footnote.’ Journal of the American Oriental Society 87, 57–59 (see also 89, 1969, 416f.). Murr S (1987). L’indologie du pe`re Cœurdoux: strate´gies, apologe´tique et scientificite´. Publications de l’E´cole franc¸aise d’Extreˆme-Orient 146, L’Inde philosophique entre Bossuet et Voltaire 2. Paris: E´cole franc¸aise d’Extreˆme-Orient.
Cognitive Anthropology C Strauss, Pitzer College, Claremont, CA, USA ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Cognitive anthropology is the study of cultural knowledge and processes of cognition in a sociocultural context. While most cultural anthropologists study cultural knowledge, cognitive anthropologists do so distinctively by asking how specific people in a society think. Cognitive anthropology dates from the late 1950s, although there were many earlier precursors (e.g., the work of Evans-Pritchard).
In cognitive anthropology today, major schools can be distinguished by their answers to two questions. First, does the cultural part of cognition (D’Andrade, 1981) consist of mental representations or situated practices? Second, how significant are panhuman cognitive universals?
Cultural Cognition as Culturally Variable Mental Representations An early, influential statement of this approach, cultural cognition as cross-culturally variable mental
530 Cognitive Anthropology
representations, is Goodenough’s definition of a society’s culture as ‘‘whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members’’ (Goodenough, 1957: 167). From Goodenough on, language has been central to work in this approach, as both evidence for and the content of cultural knowledge, and linguistics has been an ongoing source of theoretical inspiration. From the 1950s through the 1970s, a major focus of research was lexical semantics (‘ethnosemantics’). Typically, all of the terms in a domain (e.g., kin terms, kinds of talk) are elicited, then an underlying mental structure of defining or salient features is inferred from contrasting patterns of use or judgments of similarity. Influenced by phonologists’ decomposition of sounds into distinctive features, componential analysts similarly analyzed word meanings as sets of semantic features (e.g., BACHELOR ¼ þMALE, MARRIED). Systematic methods were developed for eliciting terms and their relations (e.g., frame and slot elicitation: What words can fill the blank in a sentence like, ‘‘____is a kind of sport,’’ or pile sorts and triads tests, analyzed with multidimensional scaling, Weller and Romney, 1988). Work in this tradition sometimes focused on biological classifications and was called ‘ethnoscience’; however, that term covers later folk science studies using other methods as well. One current development of such work is the study of cultural knowledge as consensus in responses to standardized questions (Romney and Moore, 1998; Romney et al., 1986). Cultural consensus analysis can be used to determine patterns of disagreement as well as consensus, which can highlight the social distribution of knowledge (see, e.g., Boster’s 1985 study of the effect of kinship and residence on Aguaruna women’s knowledge of manioc varieties). While these methods have been extremely productive, a number of concerns arose about the older, lexically focused methods (these objections do not all apply to cultural consensus modeling). It was not always clear that the analyst’s structures corresponded to the mental representations of members of the society in question; in some domains, a study of key terms reveals only problematic cases, not the taken-for-granted normal scenario (Holland and Skinner, 1987); in many cases, lexical semantics omits crucial elements of cultural knowledge (e.g., eliciting meanings of disease terms in English will not reveal a germ theory of disease, D’Andrade, 1995); and distinctive features are not random assortments of attributes, but co-occur in patterned wholes, as discussed by Rosch and others (see summary in D’Andrade, 1995). Schema theory was adopted
from the work of linguists such as Fillmore and Langacker and psychologists (e.g., Schank and Abelson) to address these issues. Schemas (‘frames’) are mental representations of an underlying, typical pattern of features or connected set of ideas understood holistically. For example, my MINIVAN schema includes not only the features that distinguish it from other vehicles, but also a mental image and ideas about what sort of person is likely to drive one. Shared schemas are cultural models (Holland and Quinn, 1987). A speaker’s reference to one part of a cultural model will activate the whole schema, as well as related schemas, in a listener’s mind; hence, much can be left unsaid when culture is assumed to be shared. Cultural model researchers typically conduct in-depth, semistructured interviews, inferring the implicit understandings that are assumed in what is said (Holland and Quinn, 1987; Quinn, in press). While the focus of work in this approach has been on contents of cultural knowledge, some researchers have addressed cognitive processes and the way knowledge is used: e.g, in memory and personal narratives (e.g., Garro, 2000; see also memory research in studies of linguistic relativity), metaphor choice (Quinn, 1991), the pragmatics of opinion expression (Strauss, 2004), reasoning (Hutchins, 1980; Quinn, 1996), and motivation (D’Andrade and Strauss, 1992). Connectionist models have been proposed to address how cultural knowledge, including nonpropositional knowledge, is learned, changes, and is sensitive to the context of its use (Strauss and Quinn, 1997).
Cultural Cognition as Situated, Distributed Practices Cognitive processes, rather than cultural knowledge, dominate the work of cognitive anthropologists who study distributed cognition or ‘cognition in practice.’ They argue that studies in the first school neglect emergent cognitive effects as people interact with each other and the objects and structures in their environment. Thus, the primary method employed here is observation of ongoing activities (arithmetic while shopping, Lave, 1988 or navigation on board a ship, Hutchins, 1995), perhaps asking the person being observed to think out loud while they are in the midst of their activity. Drawing on Marxian psychology (e.g., Vygotsky, and Leontiev’s Activity Theory), some argue that a key way cognition is ‘cultural’ is that it depends on tools or ‘mediating devices’: concrete objects, symbols, and activities that are socially produced, and which evoke and
Cognitive Anthropology 531
direct thought (Holland and Valsiner, 1988). One example is Goody’s argument that the invention of writing, especially lists and tables, created the possibility for new structures of thought (but see Scribner and Cole, 1981 on the cognitive effects of the Vai script in Liberia). The means and social relations of communication are also relevant ‘structuring resources’ (Lave, 1988). Hutchins (1995), for example, considered how the bandwidth of communications media, the social ranking of who talks to whom, and the timing of their talk affect the propagation of cognitive representations among the members of a navigation team on a large ship (see Nardi, 1996 for a useful comparison of different cognition-in-practice approaches).
Universals in Human Cognition Other cognitive anthropologists agree with the first school in its focus on mental representations but disagree with its emphasis on cross-cultural variability. Thus, for example, Berlin and Kay (1969; Kay et al., 1997) analyzed basic color terms (ones that are monolexemic like ‘red,’ not subtypes of another color, etc.) first in 20, then in 110 languages. They found a restricted set of basic color terms with crossculturally stable focal referents, and comparable composite color categories across all languages. In addition, there is a fairly predictable relation between the number of basic color terms in a language and which colors are named. Atran (1990) and Berlin (1992) observed cross-cultural and historical similarities in classification of plants and animals. Lately, empirical studies have been joined by theories prioritizing cognitive universals. These draw on Chomsky and Fodor’s claims that human brains process much information with specialized modules, and those of evolutionary psychologists that human brains are the result of evolutionary adaptation during the Pleistocene, thus include innate knowledge and processing rules that are useful for social cooperation and categorization, mate selection, foraging, and predator avoidance (Cosmides, 1989; Hirschfeld and Gelman, 1994, but see criticisms by Donald, Karmiloff-Smith and others). The research on cross-cultural cognitive universals challenges extreme claims of linguistic relativity.
Directions for the Future Theoretical bridges have been proposed between cultural models and practice theory; thus, Holland and
Valsiner (1988) argued that learned schemas determine the purposes to which mediating devices are put, Keller and Keller (1993) studied feedback between external events and internal representations over the course of an extended activity, and Quinn (1996) argued that cultural models are internal mediating devices. Similarly, cognitive anthropologists in the first and last schools would agree that there are both universals and variation in cultural knowledge (see, e.g., D’Andrade, 1995; Romney and Moore, 1998; Sperber, 1985; Strauss and Quinn, 1997); the only question is of what sorts. An underexplored issue is differences in ways of knowing (Sperber, 1985; Strauss and Quinn, 1997: Chap. 8). Finally, an interest that cuts across all three approaches is what Sperber (1996) called the ‘‘epidemiology of representations’’: how ideas spread among people in groups, how they are transformed, and how they are used as they move between internal and external forms (Hutchins, 1995; Keller and Keller, 1993; Strauss and Quinn, 1997).
See also: Activity Theory; Ethnoscience; Fillmore, Charles
J. (b. 1929); Frame Semantics; Human Language Processing: Connectionist Models; Langacker, Ronald (b. 1942); Leont’iev, Aleksei Alekseevich (1936–2004); Modularity of Mind and Language; Sapir, Edward (1884–1939); Schank, Roger C. (b. 1946); Semantic Primitives; Vygotskii, Lev Semenovich (1896–1934); Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1897– 1941); Wierzbicka, Anna (b. 1938).
Bibliography Atran S (1990). Cognitive foundations of natural history: towards an anthropology of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berlin B (1992). Ethnobiological classification: principles of categorization of plants and animals in traditional societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Berlin B & Kay P (1969). Basic color terms: their universality and evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Boster J (1985). ‘‘‘Requiem for the omniscient informant’’: there’s life in the old girl yet.’ In Dougherty J (ed.) Directions in cognitive anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 177–197. Cosmides L (1989). ‘The logic of social exchange: has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task.’ Cognition 31, 187–276. D’Andrade R (1981). ‘The cultural part of cognition.’ Cognitive Science 5, 179–195.
532 Cognitive Anthropology D’Andrade R (1995). The development of cognitive anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D’Andrade R & Strauss C (1992). Human motives and cultural models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garro L (2000). ‘Cultural knowledge as resource in illness narratives: remembering through accounts of illness.’ In Mattingly C & Garro L (eds.) Narrative and the cultural construction of illness and healing. Berkeley: University of California Press. 70–87. Goodenough W (1957). ‘Cultural anthropology and linguistics.’ In Garvin P (ed.) Report of the seventh annual round table meeting in linguistics and language study, monograph series on language and linguistics, no. 9. Washington, DC: Georgetown University. 167–173. Hirschfeld L & Gelman S (eds.) (1994). Mapping the mind: domain specificity in cognition and culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holland D & Quinn N (eds.) (1987). Cultural models in language and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holland D & Skinner D (1987). ‘Prestige and intimacy: the cultural models behind Americans’ talk about gender types.’ In Holland & Quinn (eds.). 78–111. Holland D & Valsiner J (1988). ‘Cognition, symbols, and Vygotsky’s developmental psychology.’ Ethos 16, 247–272. Hutchins E (1980). Culture and inference: a Trobriand case study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hutchins E (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kay P, Berlin B, Maffi L & Merrifield W (1997). ‘Color naming across languages.’ In Hardin C & Maffi L (eds.) Color categories in thought and language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 21–56. Keller C & Keller J D (1993). ‘Thinking and acting with iron.’ In Chaiklin S & Lave J (eds.) Understanding practice: perspectives on activity and context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 125–143.
Lave J (1988). Cognition in Practice: mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nardi B (1996). ‘Studying context: a comparison of activity theory, situated action models, and distributed cognition.’ In Nardi B (ed.) Context and consciousness: activity theory and human-computer interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 69–102. Quinn N (1991). ‘The cultural basis of metaphor.’ In Fernandez J (ed.) Beyond metaphor: the theory of tropes in anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 56–93. Quinn N (1996). ‘Culture and contradiction: the case of Americans reasoning about marriage.’ Ethos 24, 391–425. Quinn, Naomi. (In press). Finding culture in talk: a collection of methods. NY: Palgrave. Romney A K & Moore C (1998). ‘Toward a theory of culture as shared cognitive structures.’ Ethos 26, 314–337. Romney A K, Weller S & Batchelder W (1986). ‘Culture as consensus: a theory of culture and informant accuracy.’ American Anthropologist 88, 313–338. Scribner S & Cole M (1981). The psychology of literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sperber D (1985). ‘Apparently irrational beliefs.’ In Sperber D (ed.) On anthropological knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 35–63. Sperber D (1996). ‘Anthropology and psychology: towards an epidemiology of representations.’ In Sperber D (ed.) Explaining culture: a naturalistic approach. Oxford: Blackwell. 56–76. Strauss C (2004). ‘Cultural standing in expression of opinion.’ Language in Society 33, 161–194. Strauss C & Quinn N (1997). A cognitive theory of cultural meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weller S & Romney A K (1988). Systematic data collection. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.