08/02/2008 by Jon.

All the materials for the cognitive anthropology course are now available from this site - see the posts below. Please do use this site to post comments and especially to ask questions if you have any — I will do my best to respond. I will also continue to add posts if I come across anything relevant. If you want to be informed of new posts and comments, you can register and subscribe using the link in the menu bar (bottom left). 

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08/02/2008 by Jon.

Download lecture files:

Lecture 3 - Cognitive anthropology of religion - PP presentation

Lecture 3 - Cognitive anthropology of religion - handout 

We began this lecture by noting that contemporary cognitive anthropologists mostly deal with questions of religion. We mentioned five key theories in the cognitive anthropology of religion:

1. Minimally Counter-Intuitive (MCI) concepts (Boyer);
2. Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device (HADD) and Theory of Mind Module (ToMM) (Barrett, Guthrie);
3. The Hazard-Precaution System (Boyer and Lienard);
4. The ritual forms hypothesis (MacCauley and Lawson);
5. the Divergent Modes Theory (Whitehouse).

In order to understand some of these theories, we looked at the modular theory of mind as it has been developed in the fields of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. The following quotation from Pinker’s How the mind works sums this up nicely:

The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life, in particular, understanding and out manoeuvring objects, animals, plants, and other people. This summary can be unpacked into several claims. The mind is what the brain does; specifically, the brain processes information, and thinking is a kind of computation. The mind is organised into modules all mental organs, each with a specialised design that makes it an expert in one arena of interaction with the world. The modules basic logic is specified by our genetic program. Their operation was shaped by natural selection to solve the problems of hunting and gathering life led by our ancestors in most of our evolutionary history. The various problems for our ancestors were sub tasks of one big problem for their genes, maximizing the number of copies that made it into the next generation. (Pinker 1997:21) 

We then looked in detail at Pascal Boyer’s attempt to explain the universal distribution of supernatural concepts and anthropomorphism using the cognitive science model and ‘minimally counter-intuitive’ ideas…and at its extension by writers such as Guthrie and Barrett who attempted to explain the predominance of agent concepts among supernatural concepts in terms of the operation of the Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device and the Theory of Mind Module.

Finally, we briefly noted the main categories of criticism that are levelled at this kind of work:

1. Is it good? - various moral or political objections to the cognitive anthropology/cognitive science project;
2. Is it good biology/psychology - methodological objections to the biological and psychological principles on which the subdiscipline is based.
3. Is it good anthropology? Anthropologists have objected that this project is simply irrelevant to many traditional anthropological lines of enquiry, and that it need not — as some of its practitioners suggest it will — supplant those concerns. See Laidlaw’s paper in Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2007 for a sustained critique along these lines.

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07/02/2008 by Jon.

Cognitive science is unfortunately a JRD (Jargon-Rich Discipline) with lots of TLAs, some of which are explained here.

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01/02/2008 by Jon.

I have added links to the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast, and to the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology and Centre for Anthropology and Mind , Oxford.

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01/02/2008 by Jon.

Download lecture files:

Development of cognitive anthropology…epidemiology of representations - handout 

Development of cognitive anthropology… epidemiology of representations - PP presentation 

The last lecture looked at how cognitive anthropologists distinguish themselves from other anthropologists…what they promise is a materialist, rigorous science which can take account of context-rich comparative material in a way that makes cooperation with cognate disciplines possible.Today’s lecture looked at the three main ways in which cognitive anthropologists have tried to do this: (1) ethnooscience - the application of the methodology of structural linguistics to cultural knowledge, mainly to hierarchically organised semantic domains such as kinship, colour terms, zoological and botanical taxonomies [key names: Goodenough, Lounsbury, Frake, Conklin, Berlin, Kay]; (2) schema theory/cultural models - developed out of psychological ideas about the role of prototypes in concept formation (Rosch 1977) - schemas are simplified models of the world that allow us to process information and make choices quickly and flexibly - can be semantic or image-based…focuses on cultural variability of cognition [see edited volume by Holland and Quinn]; (3) in reaction to emerging trends in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology that emphasise the universal aspects of human cognition, contemporary cognitive anthropology mostly tries to explain why certain kinds of ideas persist, in terms of the interaction of universal cognitive mechanisms and ecological condtions. This last methodology was first proposed by Dan Sperber, under the rubric ‘epidemiology of representations’ - we spent the last part of the lecture on his version of this method, a good (but very repetitive) statement of which can be found in his Explaining Culture (1996). 

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