Key points
Culture as a knowledge system
The school treats culture as shared mental organisation. The field task is to recover native categories instead of importing the ethnographer’s filing cabinet.
- Cognitive anthropology asks how people classify plants, kin, colours, illness and space — the folk models that make a world thinkable.
- Ward Goodenough: culture is what one must know or believe to operate acceptably as a member; the ethnographer reconstructs that knowledge, not only outward custom.
- Theory of mind in the teaching notes: people attribute beliefs and intentions to others; without that, classification-and-talk ethnography cannot start.
- Native conceptual categories (NCC) and domains (furniture, kin, crops) are the units: first ask what the people group together, then how they split the group.
| Tool | Question it answers | Classic illustration |
|---|---|---|
| Domain analysis | What belongs together for them? | Hanunoo plant world; furniture set |
| Componential analysis | Which features split the set? | Kin terms; colour contrasts |
| Ethnoscience / ethnolinguistics | How does language carry the model? | Sapir–Whorf; Conklin’s dictionary work |
Language
Sapir, Whorf and the language–thought hook
- Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf argued that grammatical and lexical habits incline speakers toward particular cuts on reality — language is not a neutral pipe.
- Strong ‘prison of language’ readings are too crude for Mains; use a weak version: vocabulary and obligatory categories make some distinctions easier to notice.
- Bilingual speakers are the usual counter: they do not live in two sealed universes. Treat that as a limit, not as a reason to drop the insight.
Examples
- Cattle vocabulary among Nuer, or rice/forest lexicons in highland farming, show economy sitting inside language — pair with socio-cultural answers.
Thinker
Harold Conklin and the Hanunoo
- Conklin’s Hanunoo (Mindoro, Philippines) work is the set-piece: a dictionary and agricultural ethnography built from the language itself.
- Hanunoo Agriculture (1957): more than 1,600 plant distinctions, sorted by use, texture, growth and cultural load, not only Linnaean botany.
- Colour: Hanunoo contrasts lightness/darkness and freshness/wetness rather than only Western hue charts — mabiru as darkness/wetness is the usual classroom example.
- Lesson: imposing English colour or species names hides the native science.
India case
Stephen Tyler and the Koya
- Stephen Tyler’s Koya (Andhra) work is the Indian-optional illustration of the same method: recover how a Dravidian-speaking community carves domains.
- Two-step teaching method: (1) what do they group? (2) what logic joins the group?
- Americans splitting ‘weed’ vs ‘crop’ versus Koya distinctions that follow use and season are the contrast to write in 30 words.
Critique
Limits and why it still scores
- Roger Keesing: too much energy on trivial domains (kin terms, colour chips) while missing culture as political and historical whole.
- Validation is hard: two analysts can split a domain differently; there is no single laboratory test.
- Mental models are described more often than explained — where do they come from?
- Even so, the school trained ethnographers to stop translating everything into English first. That discipline still saves answers on kinship, ethnomedicine and classification PYQs.
Cognitive anthropology
- Native categories and domains
- Language as a map of knowledge
- Ethnoscience, componential analysis
Postmodern critique
- No single objective grid
- Power in who names
- Reflexivity about the ethnographer’s own categories
WRAP Exams coaching notes for UPSC Anthropology optional. Pair with the official syllabus when you need every heading in order.