The formal development of the sub-discipline is often attributed to anthropologist Franz Boas and some of his students, among whom were Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Edward Sapir.
Unlike most, Wundt believed that the mind of both 'primitive' and civilised groups had equivalent learning capabilities but that they simply used that capacity in different ways.
Though intimately connected in many ways, the fields of anthropology and psychology have remained two distinct disciplines, in part because of their differing methodologies and disciplinary objectives.
[6] Some practitioners look specifically at mental illness cross-culturally (George Devereux) or at the ways in which social processes such as the oppression of ethnic minorities affect mental health (Abram Kardiner), while others focus on the ways in which cultural symbols or social institutions provide defense mechanisms (Melford Spiro) or otherwise alleviate psychological conflicts (Gananath Obeyesekere).
[8] Others who might be considered part of this school are a number of scholars who, although psychoanalysts, conducted fieldwork (Erich Fromm) or used psychoanalytic techniques to analyze materials gathered by anthropologists (Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, Géza Róheim).
Major figures: Vincent Crapanzano, Georges Devereux, Tobie Nathan, Catherine Lutz, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, Renato Rosaldo, Charles Nuckolls, Bradd Shore, and Dorinne K. Kondo Cognitive anthropology takes a number of methodological approaches, but generally draws on the insights of cognitive science in its model of the mind.
A basic premise is that people think with the aid of schemas, units of culturally shared knowledge that are hypothesized to be represented in the brain as networks of neural connections.
From the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, attention focused on categorization, componential analysis (a technique borrowed from structuralist linguistics), and native or folk systems of knowledge (ethnoscience e.g., ethnobotany, ethnolinguistics and so on), as well as discoveries in patterns of color naming by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay.
The third phase looked at types of categories (Eleanor Rosch) and cultural models, drawing on schema theory, linguistic work on metaphor (George Lakoff, Mark Johnson).
[15] Some cognitive anthropologists continue work on ethnoscience (Scott Atran), most notably in collaborative field projects with cognitive and social psychologists on culturally universal versus culturally particular models of human categorization and inference and how these mental models hinder or help social adaptations to natural environments.
[17][18] Related work in cognitive linguistics and semantics also carries forward research on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and looks at the relationship between language and thought (Maurice Bloch, John Lucy, Anna Wierzbicka).
[19][20] While not forming a school in the sense of having a particular methodological approach, a number of prominent psychological anthropologists have addressed significant attention to the interaction of culture and mental health or mental illness (see Janis H. Jenkins), ranging through the description and analysis of culture-bound syndromes (Pow-Meng Yap, Ronald Simons, Charles Hughes);[21] the relationship between cultural values or culturally mediated experiences and the development or expression of mental illness (among immigrants, for instance more particularly) (Thomas Csordas, George Devereux, Robert Edgerton, Sue Estroff, Arthur Kleinman, Janis H. Jenkins, Roberto Beneduce, Robert Lemelson, Theresa O'Nell, Marvin Opler); to the training of mental health practitioners and the cultural construction of mental health as a profession (Charles W. Nuckolls, Tanya Luhrmann), and more recently what Janis H. Jenkins refers to the cultural creation of a "pharmaceutical self" in a globalizing world (Jenkins 2011).