While many anthropologists in the early postwar years, especially in Britain, rejected attempts to turn anthropology into an accurate science, others went in the opposite direction. This was not only the case with the American cultural ecologists and the British methodological individualists, but also –perhaps surprisingly – with people working within the broad framework of American linguistic anthropology. Several of Sapir’s successors explored semantics and language structures in traditional societies in an accurate way. Some of these devised quantitative methods tailored to measure frequencies and connections between native terms, and worked closely with psychologists, linguists and others engaged in the emerging interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. Among the foremost of these were Harold Conklin, Charles Frake and Ward Goodenough, who all contributed to the development of ethnoscience in the 1950s.

Ethnoscience was concerned with describing ‘cultural grammars’, through identifying the building-blocks of semantic universes or systems of knowledge. They drew on both the culture and personality 100 A History of Anthropology school’s interest in socialisation, on formal linguistics and on the comparative study of classification, where both Sapir and Whorf (and, before them, Durkheim and Mauss) had done ground-breaking work. In its most technical form, ethnoscience appeared as componential analysis, which combined linguistic anthropology and quantitative methods with the general 1950s concern with kinship. In its original form, ethnoscience died out some time during the 1960s, but the general issues it raised have been pursued later in cognitive anthropology (see D’Andrade 1995; Shore 1996). Regardless of methodology, they largely concern the relationship between the universal and the culturally specific in human knowledge systems. Colour classification was an early,
Ethnoscience was concerned with describing ‘cultural grammars’, through identifying the building-blocks of semantic universes or systems of knowledge. They drew on both the culture and personality 100 A History of Anthropology school’s interest in socialisation, on formal linguistics and on the comparative study of classification, where both Sapir and Whorf (and, before them, Durkheim and Mauss) had done ground-breaking work. In its most technical form, ethnoscience appeared as componential analysis, which combined linguistic anthropology and quantitative methods with the general 1950s concern with kinship. In its original form, ethnoscience died out some time during the 1960s, but the general issues it raised have been pursued later in cognitive anthropology (see D’Andrade 1995; Shore 1996). Regardless of methodology, they largely concern the relationship between the universal and the culturally specific in human knowledge systems. Colour classification was an early,and relatively simple field, which was explored in this way. There were also interesting parallels between the concerns of ethnoscience and the emerging rationality debate in Britain on the one hand, and the concerns of Lévi-Straussian structuralism on the other hand. However, unlike both Winch and Lévi-Strauss, the ethnoscientists worked inductively, amassing huge amounts of data which were processed by the massive, sluggish computers of the day.



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