Cognitive Anthropology - Introduction (Fakultet) 500-KS1-2XCAI

What is the relationship between culture and the human mind? Cognitive anthropology sits at the heart of this question, exploring how cultural contexts shape the way people perceive, categorise, remember, and reason about the world.
This course is designed with cognitive science students in mind, offering a window into how anthropological methods and findings can enrich our understanding of human cognition. Rather than treating the mind as a universal, context-free processor, cognitive anthropology asks: how much of what we think of as "basic" cognition is actually culturally constructed?
You will explore foundational topics such as folk taxonomies, colour perception across cultures, mental models, and the role of language in shaping thought. The course also examines how concepts like kinship, illness, or causality are organised differently across societies — and what this tells us about the architecture of the mind itself.
If you are curious about where cognitive science meets the diversity of human experience, this course will challenge your assumptions and broaden your theoretical toolkit.