Cognitive anthropology

Anthropology
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Archaeology Biological anthropology Cultural anthropology Linguistic anthropology Social anthropology
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Applied anthropology Ethnography and Ethnology Participant observation Qualitative methods Holism Cultural relativism
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Culture · Society Prehistory · Evolution Kinship and descent Marriage · Family Material culture · Gender Race · Ethnicity Functionalism Colonialism · Ethnocentrism Postcolonialism
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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
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Sociology Prehistory History of anthropology Outline of anthropology Category:Anthropologists
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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, pragmatics.

See also

• Componential analysis
• Cultural Network Analysis

Notes

1. ^ D’Andrade (1995)
2. ^ Quinn (2005)
3. ^ Colby, Fernandez & Kronenfeld (1981)

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 0230214991. 
• Quinn, N. (2005). Finding Culture in Talk: A Collection of Methods. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• 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.