A decade later the geographer Roger Downs (1970) published his landmark paper that was followed by an anthology he edited with David Stea in 1973. According to Zoltán Cséfalvay (1990), Lynch, who incidentally held a degree in architecture, had paved the way for the coming revolution in the field of geography. The impact of ethology, especially Konrad Lorenz’s work, can be discovered in Kevin Lynch’s seminal book (1960) on how people orientate in cities. Early rat experiments in psychology (Edward Tolman 1948) closely linked the perception of space, mental mapping and the analysis of animal/human behavior. In the field of cognitive mapping the results of radically different scientific approaches, such as linguistics, psychology and geography, have mutually influenced one another. Zoltán (1990) draws a locally perceived picture of a village in Székelyföld, based on comments collected in the course of participative inquiry. Our representations of space are not primarily based on objective reality, instead they are determined by subjective perceptions of reality. Man creates culture and at the same time domesticates himself: he perceives reality according to his cultural context, while the built (urban) environment is also the outcome of culture’s filtering and selective mechanisms. Amongst many of his significant discoveries, Hall points out that man and his environment are in constant interaction with one another. In some scientific approaches this phenomenon is illustrated by the use of ’proxemic graphs’. Hall uses the term ’proxemics’ to map the interconnectedness of human perceptions of time and space in different cultures and communities. This book deals with how people’s knowledge of their environment is determined by differing cultural backgrounds and discusses resulting issues of language and communication. Hall (1966, 1975) is one of the most known anthropological writings. For Hungarian readers, The Hidden Dimension by Edward T. In many aspects the areas of linguistics and anthropology developed parallelly, in close interaction with one another. The authors studied the use of time and space in Hungarian peasant society.Īs a result of structuralist and cognitive change in the field of cultural anthropology in the 1950’s and 60’s, the analysis of spatial representation gained increasing significance. With regard to Hungarian ethnographical literature, the work of Tamás Hofer and Edit Fél (1964, 1997) must be mentioned due to its international acclaim and impact. This perception had significant impact on the development of commercial relations. Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) did not discuss cognitive mapping in his writings, however when he describes the chain of commerce linking the Trobriand Islands, he remarks that the islands considered close by islanders were the ones directly neighboring theirs. However, according to some, the analysis of mental maps is as old as cultural studies itself and had already appeared in ethnographical and anthropological literature at the turn of the century under the label ’spatial use’. Cognitive mapping is an interdisciplinary research area that emerged in the 1960’s, almost simultaneously in different fields, such as geography, psychology, linguistics and social sciences, primarily cultural anthropology.
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