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Process / pipelineCognitive anthropology

Cultural Domain Analysis

Cultural domain analysis is the integrated framework in cognitive anthropology for discovering the content and structure of a cultural domain — a coherent set of related items such as illnesses, animals, kin terms, or emotions — as the members of a culture themselves organize it. It chains together elicitation methods (free listing, pile sorting, triad tests) and analytic methods (salience, multidimensional scaling, clustering, consensus analysis) to move from 'what items are in this domain?' to 'how are they organized and how widely is that organization shared?'

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Sources

  1. Borgatti, S. P. (1994). Cultural domain analysis. Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, 4(4), 261–278. link
  2. Borgatti, S. P., & Halgin, D. S. (2011). Mapping culture: Freelists, pilesorting, triads and consensus analysis. In J. Schensul & M. LeCompte (Eds.), The Ethnographer's Toolkit, Vol. 3. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. link

How to cite this page

ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Cultural Domain Analysis (CDA). ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/anthropology/cultural-domain-analysis

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Referenced by

ScholarGateCultural Domain Analysis (Cultural Domain Analysis (CDA)). Retrieved 2026-06-24 from https://scholargate.app/en/anthropology/cultural-domain-analysis · Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20539026