Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

COGNITION

(1969) have convincingly argued for an understanding of people‘s perception of colour not in terms of a physical spectrum of light being arbitrarily and differently divided up per culture, but a matter of the same cognitive principles being applied with only limited variation.

Similarly, from assertions of ethnoscientific diversity, anthropology has moved to an appreciation of underlying, universal principles in human cognitive structurings of the individual or person, of self and other, of relationships and causality, of recognition and classification, of narration, and of space and time (cf. Sperber 1985). This is not to say that people will not differ vastly in their cognitions; (indeed, transformative differences may represent the only permanency and sameness in human cognition). But the logic of difference is a common and human rather than cultural and particular issue. As Jack Goody concluded (1977), neither binaristic not relativist theorizing will suffice in accounting for the patent universalities in human intellection and intuition.

Cognition and practice

Since the rise of symbolic or interpretive anthropology, from the 1970s onwards, debates over cognition have shifted somewhat. Cognition now becomes part of the continuous process by which the world is symbolically constructed: the focus is on the precise knowledge held by individual actors within a socio-cultural milieu, their ‘systems of meaning’ (Geertz 1973), and the contexts in which that knowledge is practised. The key issue is less whether cognition is a matter of cultural variation than the extent to which individual members of a social group could be said to partake in a social consensus concerning the structure and content of the way they knew the world.

As Holy and Stuchlik (1981) elucidate, social life is a matter of intention and performance: the impacting of meaningful, goal-oriented actions upon the world so as to maintain or change a status quo. Cognitive models are responsible for constituting the worlds of human being (through the application of given criteria of evaluation), while actions taken in the light of those models are responsible for continuously reconstituting the worlds of human being. Anthropological analysis must encompass both: intention and performance, model and action. Even though only the enacted or performed is visible, anthropology must study the relationship between it and the intentioning cognitive models if the social structures which emerge from performance are to be understood.

Two central questions now arise: how to gain access to those cognitive models by which individual members construct social reality,

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COGNITION

and how to explain the forms the models take over time. As Toren warned (1983), while the interface between individual cognition and observable practice is the key to anthropological knowledge, a yawning gap could open up between anthropological interpretations and those to whom the practice, as symbolic vehicle, belonged. Symbolic meanings could be imaginatively construed in potentially limitless ways; anthropologists needed a conceptual guide by which they could model and typify the way local imaginations and cognitions tended to operate.

The notion of cognitive ‘schemata’ or ‘scripts’ had been developed by the psychologist F.C.Bartlett, working in Cambridge in collaboration with the anthropologists Rivers and Bateson earlier in the century (1932). Memory and mind, Bartlett suggested, work by way of mental representations of prototypical events, behaviours and things. These define for the person the nature of any situation in which they are likely to become involved, including the emotions they might feel there and the goals they might attain.The representations are simple and simplified models but they significantly frame and inform perception and knowledge. If nothing else, it is the taken-for-granted background anticipations which enable the person to take more notice of less predictable aspects of life.

These ideas have been significantly developed in social psychology since then by the likes of Neisser (1976), and have remained influential with anthropologists. Perceiving, imaging, thinking, remembering and speaking are skilful exploratory activities, Neisser suggests, which are directed by certain pre-existing cognitive structures or schemata. The latter prepare the person to anticipate, perceive and accept a certain kind of reality (and the meaningful events of which it is composed), while remaining open to certain modifications on the basis of exact information which is received. Cognition therefore represents a dialectical relationship with an environment, wherein schemata assure a certain continuity over time but are themselves in a continuous process of change; perceiving changes the perceiver while at the same time what is perceived is a matter of what has already been perceived. Schemata may be more or less general (‘anticipate someone laughing at a joke’, ‘anticipate Uncle George laughing cynically’), more or less overarching (‘win in life’, ‘win this football match’), and more or less proactive (involving patterns for action as well as patterns of action), but people will possess many and these will be related together in complex ways.

Ordinarily, anthropologists have read work on ‘schemata’ as means of both generalizing cognitive norms to collectivities and explaining social reproduction. Gellner, for instance, has claimed (1970) that schemata (and the concepts and beliefs which are their individual elements) can be

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COGNITION

treated like other social institutions.They exist in the context of people- in-society not in isolated individual minds, and they provide a fairly permanent coercive frame, independent of any one individual, within which conduct takes place (cf. Zijderveld 1979). Hence, the anthropologists can chart their correlations with other institutions, and, indeed, must do so for their use to make sense; through such activities as religious rituals they can examine the ways in which society endows its members with conceptual schemata and imposes their acceptance.

But then, examining another activity in which it might seem as though societies were simply ‘endowing and imposing’ schemata— child-rearing—Toren (1993) shows how schemata are actually transformed and reconstituted in the process of their being made available and learned. It is never a simple matter of individuals’ being taught by others how to experience, think, feel and know within certain social configurations and historical conditions, then, for children end up constituting their own ideas of themselves and their worlds, and changing these equally idiosyncratically over time (cf. James 1993).

Cognition as personal construct

This introduces a more individually oriented approach to cognitive schemata, such as has been psychologically championed by the likes of George Kelly (1969). Kelly has urged an understanding of schemata as ‘personal constructs’: as ad hoc anticipatory frameworks, reference axes, contexts, plots, criteria of judgement and identity which each person devises for and by heror himself. Personal constructs are properly seen to be neither dictated by environmental events, nor a property extracted from them, but as beholden to the person; they are psychological, not logical, abstractions and they have no existence independent of the person whose cognition they characterize. They are the outcome of individuals’ defining their own stimuli, and also determining their own responses, in contexts of their own devising. Individuals thus confront themselves with people and events of their own creation, and their behaviour amounts to an experiment made in terms of their created cognitions.

For nature is open to an infinity of constructions, and human environments derive from the particular constructions placed upon it: ‘Man develops his ways of anticipating events by construing—by scratching out his channels of thought. Thus he builds his own maze’ (Kelly 1969:86). ‘Only human imagination sets limits to the constructions which can be employed to this effect. Moreover, since human beings are intrinsically active—since human lives, as such, are

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COGNITION

forms of movement or process—personal constructs are always changing. Not only do these systems of anticipation link past to future, then, they are also being transformed and created anew: in relation to what is construed, and often in terms of what is already known, but also possibly ab initio. Finally, this implies that no two persons are likely to share the same construction system, the same cognitive schema. Communication between the ‘private universes’ of personal constructs is, therefore, a matter of time, effort and chance: a matter of developing an empathetic understanding of another person’s constructs by endeavouring to ‘share’ experiences with them.

An ethnographic exploration of cognitive schemata as personal constructs is provided by Rapport (1993a; also cf. Ewing 1990; Briggs 1992). In a micro-social analysis of the interaction largely between two individuals in an English village, Rapport attempts to identify personal constructs in the process of being used—as they are put into practice or enacted—and also to describe the individual worlds (the ‘world-views’) from which they derive.

Exploring cognition as a matter of personal construct in an empirical setting, a number of general points are arrived at (cf. Rapport 1993a: 150–8). First, individuals can be found defining themselves in relation to a wide array of ‘others’—things, people and events—in the universe around them.The individual self becomes the hub, the anchoring point, of a constellation of other objects; this practice both provides individuals with contexts (social and physical) in which to act and also a measure of significance for their actions. Individuals claim significance for themselves by construing the possible relevance of their actions for these others and vice versa.The denser the relations, the more the evidence of the individuals’ own existence, the greater its importance and the more precise its nature. In sum, individuals place themselves within full social- cum-natural environments and so construct for themselves meaningful identities and satisfyingly full, rich and varied social lives.

Not only do individuals construe personal relations between themselves and a host of others but they also ‘realize’ these relations; the things, people and events they construe become part of their real experience. Thus do individuals’ abstract personal constructs have concrete consequences. Indeed, it is by claiming a relevance which a host of others has for them, and which they have for others, that individuals’ own selves become real to them. Cognizing and naming objects in the universe is to give them shape and stability, to impose form upon an otherwise ‘entropic’ universe and so to create ‘information’ (in Bateson’s terms (1951:217)), and acting with their selves upon their assumptions is for individuals to vitalize both.

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COMMON SENSE

Individuals’ selves are fleshed out and animated in terms of a populous environment of relevant others with which relationships have been effected or could be, if desired, in future.

To realize one pattern of things, however, to configure one order of people, things and events in the universe, is to exclude and eschew other ones; every concept and organization of information represents a type of taboo against other potential orderings and meanings. For individuals to realize one set of identities, therefore, is to negate others those same individuals might have assumed. Not only that, existing schemata tend to act as canalizing devices for what is cognized in future. The schemata serve as self-fulfilling prophecies, their meanings self-sustaining. Hence, individuals can usually be found seeing what they expect to see, reaffirming objects in the universe which their cognitive schemata have led them to expect all along; perceiving familiar things from preconceived perspectives, hypotheses about environments are reconfirmed and cognitive schemata come to be reinforced. In short, produced in compliance with prior expectations, the features of the universe which individuals ‘recognize’ around them usually come to seem not only obvious but inevitable.

However, if individuals come to see largely what their personal cognitive schemata lead them to expect, then there is a sense in which this makes for satisfaction. For, to find in new situations echoes and reflections of old ones is both to have one’s prior assumptions and evaluations vindicated, and to reaffirm that the world around one is governed by principles which are consistent and amenable to one’s reason and comprehension. Of course, fulfilled expectations do not necessarily mean pleasant ones and often, indeed, occasion anxiety. Nevertheless, the ‘discovery’ of worrying scenarios still brings with it a kind of security; for, the disharmony is of a certain, expectable kind, of which the individual has past experience. By way of an individual’s personal constructs, ‘familiarity breeds content’ (Young and Wilmott 1974:116).

See also: Consciousness, Stereotypes, World-View

COMMON SENSE

In a famous formulation, Alfred Schuetz (1953), building on the phenomenological insights of Husserl, argued that individuals regularly and habitually apprehend the world around them courtesy of a set of

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