Cognitive anthropology

Anthropology
Fields
Archaeology Biological anthropology Cultural anthropology Linguistic anthropology Social anthropology
Frameworks
Applied anthropology Ethnography and Ethnology Participant observation Qualitative methods Holism Cultural relativism
Key concepts
Culture · Society Prehistory · Evolution Kinship and descent Marriage · Family Material culture · Gender Race · Ethnicity Functionalism Colonialism · Ethnocentrism Postcolonialism
Areas and subfields
Anthropology of religion Biocultural anthropology Cognitive anthropology Ecological anthropology Economic anthropology Evolutionary anthropology Forensic anthropology Media anthropology Medical anthropology Palaeoanthropology Transpersonal anthropology Urban anthropology Visual anthropology
Related articles
Sociology Prehistory History of anthropology Outline of anthropology Category:Anthropologists
v t e

Cognitive anthropology is an approach within cultural anthropology in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural innovation, and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences (especially experimental psychology and evolutionary biology) often through close collaboration with historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, linguists, musicologists and other specialists engaged in the description and interpretation of cultural forms. Cognitive anthropology is concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledge changes the way people perceive and relate to the world around them.^[1]

From a linguistics stand-point, cognitive anthropology uses language as the doorway to study cognition.^[2] Its general goal is to break language down to find commonalities in different cultures and the ways people perceive the world.^[3] Linguistic study of cognitive anthropology may be broken down into three subfields: semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics.

One of the techniques used is Cultural Network Analysis, the drawing of networks of interrelated ideas that are widely shared among members of a population.^[4] Recently there has been some interchange between cognitive anthropologists and those working in artificial intelligence.^[5]

See also

• Componential analysis

Notes

References

• Colby, Benjamin; Fernandez, James W.; Kronenfeld, David B. (1981). Toward a convergence of cognitive and symbolic anthropology. New York: Blackwell Publishing. 
• D'Andrade, R. (1995), The Development of Cognitive Anthropology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 
• Gomm, Roger (2009). Key concepts in social research methods. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 0-230-21499-1. 
• Quinn, N. (2005), Finding Culture in Talk: A Collection of Methods, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 

Further reading

• Sieck, W. R. (2010). Cultural network analysis: Method and application. In D. Schmorrow & D. Nicholson (Eds.), Advances in Cross-Cultural Decision Making, CRC Press / Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

This article relating to anthropology is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e