March 1 Francisco Gil-White, UCLA Anthropology
The ugly duckling: a story about ducks and swans, or a metaphor of ethnicity? An exploration of ethnic groups and their cognition as natural living kinds.
A neglected area in cognitive psychology is the issue of how social groups are processed by the human brain.  This paper argues that ethnic groups in particular, and a few other related social categories, are processed by the natural ‘living kinds’ module that processes species and genus level categories. The most important criteria for a social group to be processed in this manner are (1) category-based endogamy, and (2) descent-based membership, for these two make such social groups very similar in appearance to living kinds. By the same token, groups which lack these two requirements should not be processed as living kinds, but rather more like human artifacts. Evidence from the cognitive psychology literature, and a recent cognitive field-experiment by the author with ethnic groups in Western Mongolia, are brought together to support the main hypothesis. An attempt is made to detail and explain the main features of the ‘living kinds’ module and how each of these is relevant to the processing of ethnic groups. Anthropological questions that may benefit from this perspective are identified and briefly explored. In addition, the outline of an evolutionary argument is advanced for why ethnic groups have become inputs to the ‘living kinds’ module. This argument relies on the likelihood of norm-bounded communities forming in the ancestral environment, and the problems of coordination that would have resulted across such boundaries, with the ensuing need to make interactional discriminations. Treating ethnic groups as living kinds, it is argued, solves these functional imperatives.