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Cultural Domain Analysis×Folk Taxonomy Analysis×
FieldAnthropologyAnthropology
FamilyProcess / pipelineProcess / pipeline
Year of origin19941979
OriginatorStephen P. Borgatti (synthesis of cognitive anthropology methods)Ethnoscience / cognitive anthropology (systematized by Spradley)
TypeIntegrated framework for eliciting and analyzing cultural domainsProcedure for reconstructing hierarchical folk classifications
Seminal sourceBorgatti, S. P. (1994). Cultural domain analysis. Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, 4(4), 261–278. link ↗Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN: 9780030444968
AliasesCDA, Domain Analysis (cognitive anthropology), Cultural Domains Approach, Cognitive Domain AnalysisTaxonomic Analysis, Folk Classification Analysis, Folk Taxonomies, Ethnotaxonomy
Related43
SummaryCultural 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?'Folk taxonomy analysis — taxonomic analysis in Spradley's terms — reconstructs how a culture hierarchically classifies the items of a domain through the inclusion relationship 'is a kind of.' It takes the terms surfaced in domain analysis and arranges them into nested levels, revealing the folk classification system: which broad categories contain which narrower ones, and how deep the hierarchy goes. The result is the culture's own taxonomy, which may differ markedly from any scientific one.
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ScholarGateCompare methods: Cultural Domain Analysis · Folk Taxonomy Analysis. Retrieved 2026-06-25 from https://scholargate.app/en/compare