Introduction

Over more than a decade analyses of the various connections between cognition and collective representations, mind and culture, and between ‘mundane’ and ‘symbolic’ classifications, have all received a certain degree of prominence in the professional anthropological literature. In contrast to some writers [e.g. Bloch, 1977; Bloch, 1985], my own view is that the interrelationships between these apparent opposites, as evident in particular substantive cases, are often far from clear [Ellen, 1979a; c.f. Harris and Heelas, 1979]. In large part, the present book is an attempt to vindicate this view in relation to a specific body of data. Having said as much, it is clear that some confusion has arisen from a failure to distinguish clearly instruments (means or agents) of cognitive process from the medium of belief and cultural representation. A generation of anthropologists, most distinguished of which are perhaps Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas, have tended to conflate cognition with collective representations, but as Bloch [Bloch, 1985: 30] has insisted, we cannot treat cognition as some arbitrarily-imposed scheme. The kinds of cognitive process which I have outlined are apparent in the social construction of categories across the complete range of human experience, ‘mundane’ no less than ‘symbolic’.