Cognitive anthropology

Cognitive anthropology is “the study of the relation between human society and human thought” ( D'Andrade 1995 : 1). Human thought has two aspects: It is both a process (thinking) and a product (thoughts). Cognitive anthropologists tend to divide between those who focus on the process of thinking (e.g., cognition in practice, distributed cognition studies) and those who study the content, form, organization, and distribution of cultural understandings (e.g., cultural models, cultural consensus, and other cultural domain studies). Both approaches and various schools within them will be described in this chapter, as well as some that bridge the thinking–thoughts divide.