Conceptual Ethnography: Integrating Disciplinary Practice

conceptions of anthropology and ethnography are interlinked. Here I examine cognition and social networks in relation to the concept of culture, exemplified in the study of kinship. Concepts used in network analysis of the context and behaviors involved in kinship lead to new understandings of patterns of cohesion. Within cohesive groups, people in various communities are shown to use the network itself to compute categories of kinship in unexpected ways that do not require the kinds of assumptions anthropologists often make about the connection between kinship terminology and behavior. It is shown that this lends support to the view that cognition cannot be considered a strictly internal mental process but involves the social environment itself as part of the cognition in the wild, as Ed Hutchins has aptly put the case in referring to cognition in naturally occurring culturally constituted human activity. The goal here is to show how basic topics such as kinship have not been understood properly by anthropologists because its cultural content – both mental models and social rules -has been improperly interstook in terms of categories such as features and components. The case studies (powerpoint slides) will show how a relational approach to kinship that can operate independently of named categorical rules (like categorical descent groups) if we look at how people use other to ‘count’ and identify relevant relational features of kinship in a network context. For this reason it is not useful to consider culture in terms of purely internalized cultureal models and without dealing with the various layers of interconnections between behavior, networks, cognition, and socially cohesive units such as community or organizations in which people interact. Meaning does not always come packaged with intrinsic attributes (e.g., componential features) but often relies to relational calculation, counting on other people or the environment to supply conditional and criteria of meaning. Culture is not then simply distributed in the sense that individuals carry different components of chunks to which they have differential access internally, but that much of cognition is constructed on-the-fly, relationally ‘on-line’, i.e., the individual’s cognition extends significantly to those extrinsic relations.