Weaving Together Culture and Cognition: An Illustration from Madagascar

This paper presents the results of an interdisciplinary collaboration between an anthropologist and two cognitive developmental psychologists. It pits the anthropological study of cultural representations against the psychological study of innate representational constraints. More specifically, it pits the ethnographic account of how Vezo adults in Madagascar describe the processes by which babies come to resemble people other than their birth parents against the claim that the development of concepts of birth parentage and biological inheritance is guided by innate constraints. Once woven together, the two accounts raise issues of theoretical import for both the anthropological study of culture and the psychological study of cognition and cognitive development.