CATEGORY COHERENCE IN CROSS-CULTURAL-PERSPECTIVE

Cognitive psychologists and cognitive anthropologists alike have been concerned with how the human mind divides entities in the world into categories. Cognitive psychologists have recently begun approaching this issue by asking a question long of interest to anthropologists: To what extent are the categories given by structure in the environment, and to what extent are they created through constructive processes on the part of the human categorizer? Despite this shared question, relatively little of the data available in the anthropological literature has become familiar to psychologists. Psychologists stand to benefit from greater acquaintance with this literature, since the cross-cultural studies have often addressed the relative roles of structure in the environment vs constructive processes by the observer more directly than psychological studies have. Furthermore, cross-cultural data provide a unique opportunity to separate culture-specific from universal aspects of categorization. This paper sketches positions on the nature of category formation that have been put forth in the psychological literature. It then reviews in detail four areas of anthropological research that are relevant to evaluating the psychological perspectives. The cross-cultural data provide substantial constraints for theories of category coherence. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.