Cognitive Anthropology

Key Words: cognitive anthropology, emic, etic, phonemics, phonetics

By the time Franz Boas died, his grip on American anthropology had loosened. In the post-
Boasian era, historical particularism faded into the background of an increasingly crowded
landscape of anthropological theories.
One of these theories was cognitive anthropology. Cognitive anthropology was rooted in
Boasian cultural relativism with input from anthropological linguistics. Its theoretical orientation
was emic, contrasted with etic. This contrast originated in the 1950s with linguist Kenneth Pike
(1912–2000), who made an analogy with the contrast between phonemics and phonetics in
linguistics. Phonemics is the study of linguistic meaning created through sound, while phonetics
is the study of linguistic sounds themselves. Linguists can study the sound systems of
languages for their own sake, with language speakers supplying raw data. To discover which
sounds are meaningful, however, they must rely on language speakers as authorities. Phonetics
represents the point of view of the “outsider,” the linguist investigator, while phonemics
represents the point of view of the “insider,” the speaker being investigated. Relating this
distinction to the anthropological fieldwork technique of participant-observation, Pike decided
that participation was “emic” because, in principle, its goal was to enable anthropologists to
think and behave like native peoples, while observation was “etic” because its goal was to have
anthropologists remain detached. The emic approach was “seeing things from the native’s point
of view,” which, according to Pike, would promote cross-cultural understanding and combat
ethnocentrism in accordance with the doctrine of cultural relativism. Pike advocated both emic
and etic approaches to anthropology, but he preferred the emic.
Edward Sapir
Key Word: Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Another precursor to cognitive anthropology was the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, named after
anthropological linguist Edward Sapir and his associate Benjamin Lee Whorf. Sapir (1884–
1939) was a student of Boas and close friend of Benedict and Mead. Like them, he wrote poetry
and explored the relationship between personality and culture. Talented both artistically and
mathematically, Sapir devoted most of his career to the study of language, first in Canada, then
at the University of Chicago, and finally at Yale University, where he co-founded the
anthropology department. Whorf (1879–1941) was a chemical engineer who worked for the
Hartford Fire Insurance Company in Hartford, Connecticut. Developing an interest in the
indigenous languages of Mesoamerica, he
began to study with Sapir at Yale in nearby New
Haven. Under Sapir’s influence, Whorf
disciplined his penchant for philosophizing about
the relationship between language and culture
and in the 1930s collaborated with Sapir in the
formulation of their hypothesis.
FIGURE 3.1 The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: The hypothesis of Edward Sapir (1884– 1939) and
Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) states that languages classify experiences differently.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, sometimes called the principle of linguistic

relativity, expresses the view that the mental structures of languages and cultures are correlated
—each one influences the other. Sapir and Whorf were especially interested in the influence of
language on culture, which Whorf in particular held to be significantly determining. Their chief
example was a contrast between the Hopi language and culture (Hopi is a language spoken in
the southwestern United States) and a combination of European languages and cultures called
Standard Average European, or SAE. In SAE languages, the concept of time is “objectified” by
being quantified in expressions such as “ten days.” In contrast, in the Hopi language, time is
“subjectified” by lacking quantification in expressions that instead represent time as a process of
“becoming later.” SAE languages also use objective “mass” nouns such as “food” and “water,”
which must be individualized with adjectives such as “some” and adjectival phrases such as “a
glass of.” The Hopi language, on the other hand, lacks mass nouns; instead, every noun is
individualized, rendering it subjective without the need for qualification. Furthermore, SAE
speakers objectify the concept of space by using spatial metaphors in rhetorical expressions
such as “make a point,” “grasp an idea,” and “come straight to the conclusion.” However, Hopi
speakers subjectify space with special parts of speech called “tensors.” In each of these cases,
according to Sapir and Whorf, the contrast between the structure of SAE and Hopi languages is
correlated with a contrast between objectifying SAE and subjectifying Hopi cultures, which
“structure” the world differently. Like French structuralists, Sapir and Whorf believed that culture
is carried around in people’s heads as a classificatory logic that creates meaning. Different
cultures have different meaning systems, which, like the phonemic systems of language, are
equally worthy yet mutually incomprehensible in the absence of a means of cross-cultural
communication.

Cognitive anthropology emerged during the 1960s when a faction of American anthropologists,
growing out of the tradition of Boas, sought to make their emic orientation explicit and, inspired
by linguistics, to improve their methodological rigour. The school, sometimes called
ethnoscience,
ethnolinguistics, or the New Ethnography, is best known for its investigative techniques, devised
mainly by practitioners Harold Conklin (b. 1926), Charles Frake (b. 1930), and Ward
Goodenough (1919–2013). The object of these techniques was to describe native cognition, or
perception, as a semantic domain, or domain of meaning, with a cognitive “code” that could be
“cracked.” The most compelling technique of this sort was componential analysis, which
generated folk taxonomies of meaning resembling the Linnaean taxonomy of Western biology.
Just as the Linnaean taxonomy classifies living things using a hierarchy of categories defined by
biological criteria, folk taxonomies classify cultural realms using hierarchies of categories
defined by cultural criteria. The goal of componential analysis was to uncover these criteria. By
interviewing native informants in the manner of anthropological linguists, who utter contrasting
sounds and then ask informants whether the contrasts are meaningful, componential analysts
produced “cultural grammars,” or “maps” of semantic domains, ranging from Subanun boils and
Zeltal firewood to “ethnobotanical” classifications of Amazonian pharmaceutical plants.
Cognitive anthropologists shared the view that culture is a formal system of rules for thought
and behaviour. Unlike in Western biology, however, where
the Linnaean classification has traditionally been held to be “right” and folk classifications of
living things “wrong,” in cognitive anthropology all classifications were treated as culturally
contextdependent. The popularity of cognitive anthropology peaked in the 1960s and then
declined. Today, by name, cognitive anthropology is an uncommon anthropological subfield.
Anthropologists interested in cognition are more likely to associate themselves with other
cognitive sciences, including cognitive linguistics, computer science, and even the study of
artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, at the peak of its popularity, cognitive anthropology had
attracted criticism from anthropologists of opposing theoretical orientations, conspicuous among
them new cultural evolutionists and materialists and those more interested in hermeneutically
based approaches to the study of culture.