Cognitive Anthropology: Definition and Origin of This Discipline

Anthropology has the human being as its object of study. What especially differentiates it from other branches of the humanities is that it does not limit its study to a cultural perspective, but also takes into account biological elements.

Within anthropology there are, as in most disciplines, various branches of study. In today’s article we will focus on cognitive anthropology: its meaning, its object of study and its trajectory to this day.

What is cognitive anthropology?

Cognitive anthropology is one of the branches of anthropology, a discipline that had its origins in the late 19th century and matured during the first years of the 20th. The general objective of anthropology is the study of human beings, both from a biological and cultural perspective.

And what exactly is cognitive anthropology? It is the science that studies the link that exists between cognitive phenomena and human culture Sergio Morales Inga, in his article Anthropology, a cognitive science?reflects the words of Roy d’Andrade, one of the fathers of this discipline: “Cognitive anthropology studies how people within social groups conceive and think about the objects and events that make up their world, including physical objects, such as plants. wild, or abstract, like social justice.”

Thus, for cognitive anthropologists, cultural elements are not simply objects and values, but also the organization that each culture establishes with all these elements Again in the words of Roy d’Andrade (recovered in the aforementioned article): “behavioral environments, which consist of complex messages and signals, rights and duties, roles and institutions, make up a culturally constituted reality.”

In summary, cognitive anthropology focuses its studies on the relationship that human beings, from their intellect, establish with their environment. Cognitive anthropology is not so much interested in understanding what culture itself is like, but rather how the individual understands it. Furthermore, this discipline seeks common patterns in the processes of human understanding of the environment; That is, it studies the relationship of various cultures with their environment and tries to find cross-cultural similarities.

The emergence of cognitive anthropology

At the beginning of the 20th century, anthropology had already begun to take its first steps as a discipline. The first theories began to circulate: Durkheim and Mauss in the early years of the century, Lévy-Bruhl in the 1920s, and Benedict, Kardiner, Mead, and Linton in the 1930s.

Émile Durkheim (1858 -1917) already realized, at the dawn of anthropology, that The hierarchy system with which the individual classifies the world around him varies from one culture to another, which means that it does not depend exclusively on a biological or physical manifestation. Durkheim stated that society determines what the individual thinks. In the same way, Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), nephew and disciple of Durkheim, viewed the social fact as a complex conjunction of economic, religious and legal factors.

Mauss, considered the “father of French ethnology,” coined the term “total man” to refer to society as a symbolic reality in which all its members participate. In other words, the internal and external human being lose their limits and merge into one.

For its part, Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939) emphasized that the so-called “primitive mentality” or “pre-logical”, which European ethnocentrism attributed to colonized peoples, was not an underdeveloped or infantile mentality, but simply a different way of seeing the world. That is to say: the phenomenon of magic, shamanism or witchcraft were not “inferior” manifestations, as some anthropologists maintained, but rather a different interpretation of the environment, which could not be understood with a scientific mentality (which was what prevailed then in the West). ). By the way, years later, thinkers like Levi-Strauss and Geertz demonstrated that the aforementioned “primitive mentality” was not real, and that the only thing that existed was the human need to make sense of the world.

All of these early thinkers laid the foundations for what, in the 1950s, began to be called cognitive anthropology. According to some authors, During those years the so-called “cognitive revolution” was witnessed, a kind of overcoming of behavioral theory. This idea of ​​revolution expanded and became radicalized in the 70s and 80s. Let’s see in more detail what this “revolution” consisted of.

Behaviorism versus cognitivism

In order to talk about the “crisis of behaviorism” that emerged in the 1950s, it is necessary to clarify what this concept means. Behaviorism is the philosophy behind the science of behavior. This discipline studies how the human being interacts with a stimulus, that is, his interaction with the environment, and excludes from its field of study any manifestation of the consciousness and interiority of the individual. As we can see, Broadly speaking, behaviorism is practically the opposite of cognitive anthropology

The father of the theory of behaviorism, at least in its psychological aspect, is John B. Watson (1878-1958). Your dissertation Psychology as the behaviorist views it (Psychology as the Behaviorist Sees It), delivered at Columbia University and published in 1913 in the journal Psychological Reviewmarks the beginning of behavioral psychology.

The robustness of the theory of behaviorism, which places emphasis on human behavior and almost completely excludes any introspective element it is evident if we stick to this famous quote from Watson: “Give me a dozen healthy, well-trained children to educate, and I undertake to choose one of them at random and train him to become a specialist in any type that I can choose – doctor, lawyer, artist, businessman and even beggar or thief – regardless of their talent, inclinations, tendencies, aptitudes, vocations and race of their ancestors (…) “

Although it is true that Watson himself recognized the exaggeration of these words, the radicalism of this theory is perceived in them, since it does not take into account the personal inclinations of the person and attributes any manifestation to the stimuli that society exerts on the person. individual.

Another of the great champions of behaviorism was Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904-1990). A firm defender of this theory, Skinner dedicated his work to defining the laws that govern behavior. One of his most famous experiments is called The Superstition of the Dove (1948). Eight pigeons were placed in a box (the “Skinner box”) and fed at regular intervals. Soon, Skinner noticed that each of the pigeons behaved differently before receiving the food: one walked around the box, another stuck its head against the walls, etc.

The conclusion that Skinner reached was the following: when the pigeon observed that, coincidentally, just before receiving the food it was performing a certain action, it understood that it was precisely that action that provided it with the food. Therefore, each animal reinforced the behavior that he believed was the cause of the receipt of food

From this experiment, Skinner stated that superstition is something inherent in human behavior: if, repeatedly, after accidental situations, a circumstance (pleasant or unpleasant) occurs, the individual will establish a correlation between both elements.

Criticisms of behaviorism and the “cognitive revolution”

From this “radicalism” we can understand the joy with which the so-called “cognitive revolution” was welcomed in scientific circles, since it represented the definitive “death” of a deterministic and almost mechanical conception of human behavior. Already in the 1950s, some voices were raised against Skinner’s radical behaviorism. Your book Verbal Behavior (1957), where Skinner proposes that language acquired during childhood is the result of reinforcement, was reviewed and criticized by linguist Noam Chomsky

Chomsky argues against Skinner’s theory that a non-human animal will never learn to speak no matter how much it is reinforced, which implies that human beings have a genetic predisposition to language.

Chomsky’s was a criticism, in reality, directed towards a theory that based human behavior on external stimuli and rewards. Other authors, such as John Pinel, Steven Barnes, Gerald Edelman and Antonio Damasio, have also been critical of behaviorist theory. Pinel and Barnes, for example, stated that behavior arises from both factors, environmental (Skinner) and genetic (Chomsky).

Criticism of behaviorism only grew throughout the second half of the 20th century However, as always, not everything is black and white. In his article The myth of the cognitive revolution, written by Ariel Minici, José Dahab and Carmela Rivadeneira and published in the Journal of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, it is stated that the cognitive revolution did not exist, since a revolution would obviously imply a total break with the past, when this was not the case. According to these authors, it is not true that the behavioral cultural paradigm is overcome and replaced with this revolution. Furthermore, and as George Miller states in his The end of behaviorismbehaviorist theory has never denied the existence of mental images, so, again, what is considered a revolution was not such.

Cognitive anthropology today

Currently, it seems indisputable that, To understand the human cognitive process, it is necessary to study the culture in which it is immersed Recently, in 2018, Colagè and d’Errico stated that culture directly influences people’s cognitive abilities. Not only that, but culture modifies the neuronal substrates, which is why it also affects the biological reality of the individual.

According to the latest studies, it is quite clear that the human brain is shaped by interaction with the environment, that is, by the culture that surrounds the individual and stimulates him. So wouldn’t reality be, then, a combination between the environmental stimulus (the cultural envelope) and neuronal morphology? Both realities influence each other and result in the behavior of the individual.

As we see, there is still a lot of field to explore. Everything that concerns human beings and their social manifestations is extremely complex, which is why cognitive anthropology still has a long way to go.