Roy D'Andrade has written a lucid historical account of the growth and development of the field of cognitive anthropology. The origins of cognitive anthropology can be traced back to the late 1950s when anthropology was grappling with the problem of understanding native systems of categorization. This book starts with an evaluation of these formative years, portraying the way in which research evolved across more than thirty years to the present.

It traces the way in which the early notions about semantics and taxonomies evolved into more sophisticated theories about prototypes, schemas, and connectionist networks, seen as the cognitive mechanisms underlying the organization of folk models and reasoning in ordinary life. This is followed by a review of the most recent research on the social distribution of cultural knowledge and the relation of cultural models to emotion, motivation, and action.

The final section summarizes the general theoretical perspective of cognitive anthropology, which treats culture as particulate, socially distributed, variably internalized and embodied in physical structures - a view which opposes structuralist, interpretive, and post-modern conceptions of culture.