Culture and Cognition: Some Problems and a Suggestion

Abstract

An area within anthropology which is currently attracting interest is and cognition. and cognition refer to way a given people view their world, specific premises they hold, and reasoning they use to arrive at conclusions based on these premises. This subdiscipiine, however, raises certain problems crucial to scientific enterprise of anthropology. Wallace indicates in his article Culture and Cognition (1962: 1) that in studying a culture ethnographer infers the system of rules which these people are attempting to apply. The ethnographer describes cognitive processes which have become standardized. He infers system of rules people attempt to apply in their daily activities. He further states: Much of culture, then, can be regarded as an archive of Plans. These Plans are rules, techniques, recipes or programs for getting things done (1962:5). is conceived as being a collection of formal calculi.