Language and

Culture in Cognitive
Anthropology
JUDITH S. FETALVER
Master of Arts in English
 Cognitive anthropology has been defined as ‘the study
of the relation between human society and human
thought’. Human thought has two aspects: it is both a
process (thinking) and a product (thoughts). Cognitive
anthropologists tend to divide between those who focus
on the process of thinking (e.g., cognition in practice,
distributed cognition studies) and those who study the
content, form, organization, and distribution of cultural
understandings (e.g., cultural models, cultural consensus,
and cultural domain studies).
 Culture is analyzed differently in these two main approaches.
For cognitive anthropologists who study thinking processes, the
immediate social and material context is more important than
shared cultural understandings. By contrast, culture is central to the
work of cognitive anthropologists who study thoughts. In the latter
approach culture includes a significant ideational component that
differs between human groups and portraying those ideas is their
primary concern.
Language plays different roles in these two paradigms as well.
In the study of thinking as a process language is considered to be
one tool or resource among many, whereas in the study of cultural
beliefs, lexicons or discourse are the primary data that researchers
mine for category systems, explicit beliefs, and implicit
understandings.
 Cognitive anthropologists dispute that the cultural meanings
lie in collective representations themselves; instead, meanings
arise when people create, learn, interpret, and use these collective
representations. Methodologically, cognitive anthropologists’
conclusions do not rest on decentered discourses, texts, or
symbols, but on observations of what specific people say and do.

A cognitive anthropologist concerned with thinking processes

might look at how people use characters from movies or slogans
from self-help books as motivational tools or at the specific social
contexts in which people learn a group’s success-striving
practices.
 Cognition as
Thoughts: The Study
of Cultural
Understandings
5
 A society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to
know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to
its members, and to do so in any role that they accept for any
one of themselves. Culture, being what people have to learn
as distinct from their biological heritage, must consist of the
end product of learning: knowledge, in a most general, if
relative, sense of the term. By this definition, we should note
that culture is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist
of things, people, behavior, or emotions. It is rather the
organization of these things. It is the forms of things that
people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating,
and otherwise interpreting them.
6
 Goodenough defined culture as ideational rather than material
and located those ideas in people’s minds rather than in public
symbols and events. Cognitive anthropologists do not have to
subscribe to Goodenough’s narrow definition of culture as only
mental representations is enough to appreciate his point that such
knowledge is a significant part of culture, it is structured, and it
directs the way people interpret what is going on and act (see also
Hallowell 1955).
At this stage one of the key roles of linguistics was to provide
the analogy of grammatical descriptions. Goodenough’s doctoral
dissertation was entitled ‘A grammar of social interaction’ and
another early practitioner, Charles Frake, stated that the goal was
‘productive descriptions … which, like the linguist’s grammar,
succinctly state what one must know in order to generate culturally
acceptable acts and utterances appropriate to a given socio-
ecological context’.
 To have psychological reality, it was necessary to understand ‘the world
as [a member of the society] perceives and knows it, in his own terms’. In
Goodenough’s definition of culture, the psychological validity of a model was
not a concern: a cultural description was adequate if following it would
produce behavior that was judged normal in a society.
However, from the early 1960s on, many cognitive anthropologists went
further, devising additional procedures to see, for example, if the implicit
semantic dimensions that the analyst thought were important in fact seemed to
guide similarity judgements made by members of the society.
As described below, there have been significant shifts in the methods and
theories of cognitive anthropologists who study cultural understandings since
the late 1950s, but a consistent emphasis that has differentiated the cognitive
approach from run-of-the-mill anthropological studies of cultural knowledge
has been a commitment to pointing out what particular members of a society
think.
 Cultural
Knowledge as
Meanings of
Words in
Contrast Sets 9
 Ethnosemanticists devised a variety of procedures for determining local
category systems. Their emic descriptions could be very insightful and some of the
ingenious methods they devised are still used in cultural domain analysis, described
below. A particularly important development was to move beyond word
denotations, that is, the local criteria that define what makes something an x rather
than a y, to the culturally vivid area of word connotations.
Researchers began paying attention to connotations when they listened to
what was important in local discourse. For example, the defining features of a
lexicon for alcoholic beverages might be the main ingredient (barley, rye, grapes,
etc.) and whether the drink is distilled. Depending on what group you listened to
however, the kinds of connotations that might be salient would have to do with
whether the drink is sophisticated, how quickly it gets you drunk, whether it is
appropriate to serve at certain kinds of social gatherings, and so on.
Researchers interested in such connotative features could then create an
elicitation frame to systematically inquire for each item in the lexicon whether it has
that feature.
 Studying word connotations based on locally salient
features was an important step towards greater psychological
reality and broader cultural understandings. Yet that too was
limited. For some topics there is not a large vocabulary
labelling different types of objects. There is no lexicon that
would begin to reveal the moral, religious, social, economic,
and political interpretive frameworks they draw upon. Even in
domains where there is a large lexicon, the study of words in
a contrast set does not take us very far towards uncovering
cultural knowledge, as some commentators began observing
by the 1970s.
 Domain
Analysis and
Consensus
Analysis
12
 Consensus analysis was developed by Romney, Weller, and
Batchelder (1986) to study what beliefs are shared and by whom.
This view draws upon a definition of culture as a ‘socially
transmitted information pool’. The basic assumption of consensus
analysis is that in many cultural domains there are some agreed-
upon propositions among expert members of a group – but not
everyone is an expert.
If the researcher observes a response pattern in which there is
convergence among some participants on a set of answers and no
competing agreed-upon answers (and they are not discussing the
topic with each other while answering the questions), the consensual
answers are considered cultural knowledge and those who gave the
culturally correct responses are considered to have greater
competence in that domain. Consensus analysis is generally
conducted with true–false or multiple-choice questions.
 Consensus analysis is useful for studying the distribution
of beliefs, including patterns of subgroup variation. This
method can also be used to uncover competing
understandings of the correct answer and can suggest
underlying social flows of information (Boster, 1986). One of
its weaknesses is that its standardized elicitation procedures
limit participants’ opportunity to reveal their thinking beyond
the questions asked. It is common for cultural consensus
modelers to begin with open-ended interviews to derive
their closed-choice questions. Others also use cultural
models research, described next, to present a fuller
description of members’ beliefs.
Cultural
Models
15
 Cultural schemas are derived from learned, shared experiences, either
ones personally experienced by multiple members of a group or ones
communicated among them.
Cultural schemas are local models of how the humanly created,
natural, supernatural, interpersonal, and wider sociopolitical worlds work.
Since a schema is an interrelated whole, anything that evokes part of
the schema will bring the rest to mind, consciously or unconsciously. Thus,
we can leave a lot unsaid because a hint or indirect reference will evoke the
rest of the schema in the hearer’s mind. Schemas have been posited to
enter into all phases of cognition, explaining how we interpret perceptions
and emotions, how we reconstruct memories, and how we plan future
actions, in addition to producing and interpreting ongoing verbal and
nonverbal behavior. Schemas are simplified, generic concepts like
stereotypes, but without the connotation of prejudicial beliefs necessarily,
although they can include prejudicial stereotypes because schemas encode
our assumptions regarding what is typically associated with what.
 Another important characteristic of cultural models is that they
are connected to feelings and motivations. In D’Andrade’s (1984)
words, cultural schemas have ‘directive force’, that is, they are not
neutral explanations but also include evaluations and goals that
motivate action, or at least create discomfort if they are not enacted.
For D’Andrade it is not a schema unless it comes to mind as a
unit, and if it comes to mind as a unit, it is restricted in size and
complexity by the number of chunks that can be held in working
memory, hence the terminological distinction he draws between
simpler cultural schemas and more complex cultural models, which has
led to a current preference on the part of some researchers for the
former term over the more familiar latter one
 In Quinn and Holland’s introduction to Cultural Models in
Language and Thought (1987), by contrast, the definition of schemas
as bite-sized enough to arise in working memory is not mentioned.
They chose to narrow the idea of cultural models as follows: ‘Cultural
models are presupposed, taken-for-granted models of the world that
are widely shared (although not language, culture, cognitive
anthropology necessarily to the exclusion of other, alternative
models)’.
That puts the focus of cultural research on beliefs that have
become so naturalized that they are not even seen as beliefs, the
aspect of culture that Pierre Bourdieu termed doxa rather than dogma.
It is common in cultural studies to focus on explicitly propounded
dogmas; in the cultural models approach, by contrast, the focus is
turned to understandings that are so generally accepted that they
form the shared presuppositions underlying different opinions about a
topic.
Cognition as
Thinking
19
 An alternative major approach within cognitive
anthropology is to focus on cognition as an activity
(thinking) rather than on shared mental representations.
Anthropologists who study thinking as a process do
not start with Goodenough’s definition of culture as what
members know and believe. For example, Edwin Hutchins
(1995) rejects Goodenough’s definition and criticizes
D’Andrade’s (1981) division of labor in which psychologists
study cognitive processes and anthropologists study
cognitive contents. Instead, for Hutchins, ‘Culture is a
human cognitive process … and the “things” that appear on
list-like definitions of culture are residua of the process.
Culture is an adaptive process that accumulates partial
solutions to frequently encountered problems’.
 These theoretical differences among different approaches to the study
of cognition as a process have methodological implications. Nardi points
out that close analysis of videotaped interactions are useful for distributed
cognition or cognition in practice or situated action studies of interactions
in the immediate situation, but long-term observation and interviews with
participants are more appropriate for activity theorists concerned with
participants’ goals in a continuing activity.
Researchers who focus on the immediate context of thinking have
tended to polemically reject the importance of mental representations or
have downplayed their importance as a reaction to mainstream cognitive
anthropology. More recent writings by at least some researchers
acknowledge that some earlier work went too far in that direction. These
researchers now more fully integrate mental representations into thinking
in context.