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Concept
Cognitive anthropology
Summary
Cognitive anthropology is an approach within cultural anthropology and biological 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 cognitive psychology) 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, in the sense of what they think subconsciously, changes the way people perceive and relate to the world around them.
Cognitive anthropology arose as part of efforts designed to understand the relationship between language and thought, with linguistic anthropologists of North America in the 1950s spearheading the effort to approach cognition in cultural contexts, rather than as an effort to identify or assume cognitive universals.
Cognitive anthropology became a current paradigm of anthropology under the new ethnography or ethnoscience paradigm that emerged in American anthropology toward the end of the 1950's.
Cognitive anthropology studies a range of domains including folk taxonomies, the interaction of language and thought, and cultural models.
From a linguistics stand-point, cognitive anthropology uses language as the doorway to study cognition. Its general goal is to break language down to find commonalities in different cultures and the ways people perceive the world. Linguistic study of cognitive anthropology may be broken down into three subfields: semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics.
Cognitive anthropology is separated in two categories, thought in society/culture and language. Thought is concerned with the procedure and outcome of thoughts. The thinking process in cognitive anthropology puts the importance of culture at the center of examining thoughts.
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