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Intersection Between Cognitive Anthropology and Cognitive Science
Cognitive anthropology intersects with several other fields within its parent cultural anthropology sphere. Whereas cultural anthropologists had always sought to identify and organize certain salient facets of culture, cognitive anthropologists appreciate the reflexive nature of their study. Instead of analyzing facets of culture as they appear to the anthropologist, they place special emphasis on emic viewpoints of culture to understand what motivates different populations, eventually coming to an understanding of universal cognition. These goals form the basis of the argument merging cognitive anthropology and cognitive science.

Advocacy
Advocate and presidential researcher Giovanni Bennardo put forth three categories of data in 2013 that warrant this grouping. Cognitive anthropologists gather ethnographic, linguistic, and experimental data, which is then analyzed quantitatively. For example, medical rituals provide more direct data that informs linguistic analysis and a greater insight into cognitive motivations, hence the field’s similarity to linguistic relativism. To advocates, the mind is a cultural facet (as is kinship to the pioneering cultural anthropologist) that generates language, which provides insight into human cognition.

Other advocates for cognitive anthropology’s categorization with cognitive science have pointed out that cognitive psychology fails to encompass several fields that cognitive anthropology does, hence its pivotal role in cognitive science. Professor of Psychology at University of Connecticut, James S. Boster, points out in the Journal of the Cognitive Science Society that while cognitive psychology studies a human’s thought process, cognitive anthropology studies what exactly different humans ponder—what they sense and perceive of their own culture and surroundings in different settings.

Criticism
There has been longtime conflict between cognitive scientists and cognitive anthropologists on the intersection of their respective fields. The grouping has received much backlash in the literature, such as from Edward Evans-Pritchard on the basis of methodology and subject matter.

Cognitive psychologists have criticized cognitive anthropologists for their chaotic research methods, such as forming instruments of observation and data acquisition using language that natives use in their interviews with fieldworkers. "CA has been alienated from the rest of cultural anthropology because it is seen as too quantitative and scientific for the prevailing post‐modern aesthetic, while at the same time seen as too ethnographic and natural historical for the tastes of CP."

Some cognitive scientists have devalued anthropology's influence in the cognitive sciences, which was extensively discussed by Sieghard Beller, Andrea Bender, and Douglas Medin in the Journal of the Cognitive Science Society. In their widely cited journal article, they attribute this rejection to cognitive anthropology's lack of credibility as a subset of the psychological sciences, focus on common narratives throughout different cultures rather than on the individual mind, and difficulty of getting published. "They strive for insights that explain something about the human mind in general and therefore consider cross‐cultural comparisons as just one means to test assumptions on universals."

Critics have also disputed the scientific nature of cognitive anthropology in general and argued that it studies content of thought rather than process, which cognitive science centers on. Resistance from more established subfields of cultural anthropology has historically restricted resources and tenure for cognitive anthropologists.