Cognitive anthropology focuses on the cultural understanding, which is encased in words, narrative and material culture, and is grasped and shared with others. Thus cognitive anthropology addresses the ways in which people conceive of and think about events and objects in the world. It provides a link between human thought processes and the physical and ideational aspects of culture. It arose as a separate area of study in the 1950s, as ethnographers sought to discover “the native’s point of view,” adopting an emic approach to anthropology.
Cognitive anthropology is a broad field of inquiry; for example, studies have examined how people arrange colors and plants into categories as well how people conceptualize disease in terms of symptoms, cause, and appropriate treatment. Cognitive anthropology not only focuses on discovering how different peoples organize culture but also how they utilize culture.
Contemporary cognitive anthropology attempts to access the organizing principles that underlie and motivate human behavior.
Cognitive anthropologists regard anthropology as a formal science. They maintain that culture is composed of logical rules that are based on ideas that can be accessed in the mind. Thus, cognitive anthropology emphasizes the rules of behavior, not behavior itself. It does not claim that it can predict human behavior but delineates what is socially and culturally expected or appropriate in given situations, circumstances, and contexts.
Harold Conklin : Hanunoo Color Categories (1955)
In an important paper published in Southwestern Journal of Anthropology in 1955, Harold Conklin presented a description of the color categorization system of Hanunoo, a Philippine language spoken in the southern part of the Mindoro island.
First he makes clear that ‘western color’ is not global phenomena. That is to say, our linguistic understanding of color cannot be imposed on other cultural conceptions of color. That’s not to say that all humans do not see the spectrum of color, but rather that “the manner in which different languages classify the millions of ‘colors’ which every normal individual discriminate differ”
His attempts begin with several colored cards, fabrics and other such materials used in comparison with each other, and the items of the natural world. This produces two ways categories color classification.
The first is a four-part categorization that he discovers has implications and variations depending of the state of the item in reference: Distinction between light and dark; the next between categories of red and blue respectively. However there exists an inference as to the freshness or dryness of the item when using the terminology of color.
- 1. (ma) biraˀ “relative darkness…” (black)
- 2. (ma) lagtiˀ “relative lightness…” (white)
- 3. (ma) raraˀ “relative presence of red..” (red)
- 4. (ma) lutuy “relative presence of green..” (green)”
Conklin describes this as his Level I classification. In it he notes that there are two basic sets of dichotomy. The first: reference to the lightness or darkness, the second: “an opposition between dryness or desiccation and wetness or freshness”. His examples speak volumes.
“to eat any raw or fresh uncooked fruits or vegetables is known as pag-laty-un (”. From this example we can make the connection between the foundational word Lutuy and his inferred connection to the freshness of the item.
He uses a similar example to describe a dichotomy of economic/social value in the vibrancy of color rather than the freshness concept. He concludes that the colors that are most like their natural surroundings.. i.e greens, browns, and the other colors of the forest are not held as in high regard or trade value as those of the brighter reds, oranges or higher contrasting hues.
The level II classification is only used when the level I classification fails to capture the specificity needed to communicate the object. Shades of color, texture, and other describing constructs are used in conjunction with the four level I classification.
Our perceptions of color aren’t necessarily defined by how many words we have for a color, but rather the ways in which these colors are perceived in our social constructs. Conklin, being a proponent of “Ethno science” was using this field of study to gain a further understanding of what cultural lexicon can incorporate and utilize in their perception.
Why is any of this Important?
The focus of Conklins article (was) at the time a challenge of Linguistic influence to the hotly debated Saper-Whorf Hypothesis (which they explained that, language is not just way of communicating but also fabricated people’s thinking of the world). His use of ethno science provided an excellent categorical foundation to develop an understanding of the linguistic characteristics.