Cognitive Anthropology and Structuralism

This essay hasn't yet been marked by one of our teachers

You can view all our essays on Anthropology that have been Marked by Teachers

The first 200 words of this essay...

Cognitive Anthropology and Structuralism

Jonathan Quaade

Developed in the 20th century, cognitive anthropology is a concept concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledges changes the way people relate to the world around them. The concept can include subcategories called ethnoscience and symbolic anthropology. A french anthropologist also dealt with cognitive process, he established a theory that there are unobservable social structure that generate social phenomena. He named the concept structuralism.

As the name suggest, cognitive anthropology has a strong emphasis on human cognition; however, the concept hasn't been universally agreed upon or conventionalized. An anthropologist and structural linguist, Edward Sapir, stated that "cultural behaviour is symbolic behavior shared by culture bearers, and cultures are abstractions of ideas and behavior patterns" with different meanings for each individual. He meant that anthropologist should describe the observable patterns of the society, and from the information gathered, she/he should derive meaning from the people studied, rather than use his own categories to create meaning of his/her data. It was an effort to get at organizing principles that lie underneath the behaviour within a society, and trying to understand the natives categories.