Paper short abstract:

By embracing a Cognitive Ethnography of Cultural Transmission (CECT) we aim to reconceptualize the relationship between cognition and culture in ontogenetic terms to account for the situated and embodied dimensions of cognition as well as the way cognitive skills spread and emerge locally.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we would like to introduce a specific way of reconciling cognitive and ethnographic approaches of culture by embracing a cognitive ethnography of cultural learning (CECL). CECL is an alternative framework for a naturalistic approach to cultural learning from an ethnographer's point of view. From cognitive anthropology it holds to the aim of elucidating how our cognitive architecture constrains cultural transmission; from cognitive ethnography it promotes a situated approach to cognition, notably relying on the so-called embodied cognition. By adding the topic of cultural transmission to cognitive ethnography, our aim is to support a theoretical and methodological framework focused on learning processes, able to take into account the material, cognitive, emotional and perceptual contexts of action and communication in a temporal framework at the level of activity and individual learning. By putting emphasis on ethnography, we address primarily the constraint of local activity and its specific temporality, focusing on how cognitive skills spread and emerge locally.

Basically, the question we want to address is the one of the « power of culture » (Candau & Halloy, n.d.), i.e. how deep and to what extent cultural practices and environments may act upon evolved mechanisms of thinking, feeling and perceiving. The project of CECL addresses thus one of the current disciplinary divides between cognitivist and culturalist approaches to cultural transmission and seeks to engage in cross-cultural ethnographic research drawing on the recent upsurge in cognitive studies of cultural transmission.