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.