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"This essay presents Gould's distinctive system for analyzing kin terminologies showing the system's power, importance, and usefulness-and showing its relationship to other approaches and the payoffs each aims at. In revealing significant new empirical regularities and simplifications, Gould's analytic system implies important constraints on future analytic and interpretative approaches to kin terminologies. Some of these new insights involve the demonstration of the effect of distributed collective cognitive systems over and above the effects of repeated iterations of individual cognitive constraints or pressures. It is the peculiar nature of the kinterm domain that allows these findings to be so directly shown, but the implication is that these findings apply more generally to the collective cognitive systems that make up language and culture"--

Cover; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; 1 Introduction; 2 Linguistic background; semantics and pragmatics; 3 Linguistic relativity: Sapir, Whorf, and kinship; 4 Culture as shared differentially distributed pragmatic knowledge; 5 Cognitive structures and social units; 6 Prototype-extension view of concepts; 7 Kinds of collective cognitive structures I; 8 Kinds of collective cognitive structures II -- cultural models of action; 9 Individual knowledge and individual use of cultural knowledge; 10 Cultural models, methods and empirical data; 11 Conclusion

"This new companion traces the development of cognitive anthropology from its beginnings in the late 1950s to the present, and evaluates future directions of research in the field. In twenty-nine articles from leading anthropologists, there is an overview of cognitive and cultural structures, insights into how cognition works in everyday life and interacts with culture, and examples of contemporary research. The companion is essential for anyone interested in the questions of how culture shapes cognitive processes"--

Intro -- Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- The Fanti Study -- Book Structure -- A Note on the Relationship of Chapters to the Original Articles and Papers -- PART I -- 1. Fanti Kinship: The Structure of Terminology and Behavior -- Kinship Terminological System -- The Behavior Bases of the Terminology -- Behavior Among Kinsmen -- Comparison of Terminological and Behavioral Analyses -- 2. A Formal Analysis of Fanti Kinship Terminology (Ghana) -- I. Introduction and Ethnographic Settings -- II. Presentation and Formal Analysis of the Terminology -- Kernels -- Extension Rules -- III. Some Considerations of Formality and Marking -- IV. Conclusion -- 3. Particularistic or Universalistic Analyses of Fanti Kinterminology: The Alternative Goals of Terminological Analysis -- Introduction -- F Analysis -- Comparison and Discussion -- Conclusion -- 4. Fanti Kinship Behavior: What a Fanti Needs to Know to Treat a Kinsman Correctly -- Data Collection -- 2. Data Arrangement -- 3. Inductive Exploration of the Data -- 4. Identification of Actual Variables -- I. Trivial -- II. Categorical -- III. Categorical Plus Regression -- IV. Regression -- 5. Conclusion -- Appendix -- PART II -- 5. Context in the Late 1970s: Schneider, Needham, Scheffler, and Keesing -- 1. Schneider -- 2. Needham -- 3. Scheffler -- I. Conjunctivity -- II. Connotation and Denotation -- III. Typology -- 4. Keesing -- 6. Morgan vs. Dorsey on the Omaha Cross-Parallel Contrast: Theoretical Implications -- Terminologies -- Analytic Approach -- Comparison -- More on Morgan -- "Overdone" Kinship -- Conclusion -- 7. Comparison with Tax's Theoretic Approach (1980) -- 8. Kroeber vs. Radcliffe-Brown on Kinship Behavior: The Fanti Test Case -- I -- II -- 1. Traditional View -- 2. Structuralist View.

This theoretically motivated approach to pragmatics (vs. semantics) produces a radically new view of culture and its role vis-a-vis society. Understanding what words mean in use requires an open-ended recourse to pragmatic cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge makes up a productive conceptual system. Members of a cultural community share the system but not all of the system's content, making culture a system of parallel distributed cognition. This book presents such a system, and then elaborates a version of "cultural models" that relates actions to goals, values, emotional content, and context, and that allows both systematic generative capacity and systematic variation across cultural and subcultural groups. Such models are offered as the basic units of cultural action. Culture thus conceived is shown as a tool that people use rather than as something deeply internalized in their psyches.

The Ecology of Language Evolution. Salikoko S. Mufwene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 255 pp.