10 Facts About Cognitive anthropology

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 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.

The thinking process in cognitive anthropology puts the importance of culture at the center of examining thoughts.

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In cognitive anthropology language is seen as an important source for analyzing thinking processes.

Cognitive anthropology uses quantitative measures as well as the traditional ethnographic methods of cultural anthropology in order to study culture.

Cognitive anthropology is linked to psychology because studying the way social groups reason and categorize raises questions about the basic nature of cognitive processes.

Cognitive anthropology anthropologists gather ethnographic, linguistic, and experimental data, which is then analyzed quantitatively.

Cognitive anthropology psychologists have criticized cognitive anthropologists for their chaotic research methods, such as forming instruments of observation and data acquisition using language that natives use in their interviews with fieldworkers.