The word cognition comes from the Latin verb meaning ‘to know’ and it denotes the knowledge we are able to draw upon to make sense of our environment. Cognition is usually contrasted with perception, which is the way we receive information from the outside world. However, many recent theories in both psychology and anthropology have stressed that there cannot be a hard and fast distinction between the two processes.
The study of cognition is the study of how human knowledge is learnt, stored and retrieved. Clearly what people know includes what they have learnt from others and what they will pass on to the next generation.
This is what anthropologists usually call ‘culture’ and which they consider the subject matter of †cultural anthropology. That part of anthropology which is concerned with culture is therefore concerned with some aspects of cognition but not all. First of all, there is much human knowledge which is not learnt, or not entirely learnt, from others. For example most psychologists would now agree that although people learn specific languages, the ability to learn language is inherited as part of the general human genetic inheritance and is not learnt from other individuals. Second, although anthropological studies of culture have been concerned with what people know, on the whole, anthropologists have been less concerned with the processes of the acquisition of knowledge and the way knowledge is organized; this has been left to *psychologists.
This is the complete article, containing 236 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
