Chapter 9 completes a general account of the development of cognitive anthropology. This account is not a full history; a number of areas of research in cognitive anthropology have not been discussed or have been mentioned only in passing. For example, research on narrative and discourse analysis has not been described here (Labov and Fanshel 1977; Colby and Colby 1981; Agar 1980a). Also undescribed is work in the 1960s and early 1970s on decision making (see Quinn 1975 for a review of this field). A related line of research being carried out by the soviet activity school and those interested in situated cognition has also not been discussed (Cole 1989; Lave 1988; Suchman 1987). The large amount of research on metaphor has been discussed here only briefly.

The account presented in this book is biased by my own interests and perspectives. But whatever the incompleteness of this history, it should at least serve as enough of a sample to give the reader a general understanding of the general enterprise and make possible an appraisal of the contribution of this enterprise to anthropology and the social sciences.

A bird's eye view

A bird's eye view of the thirty-five years of work gives a picture in which there are four major periods. The first period is an introductory phase in which the agenda of the field was formulated. The general movement towards more study of symbolic systems in anthropology, plus the advances in linguistics, led to a formulation by Ward Goodenough and others of culture as knowledge.