description Charles Frake Overview
Charles O. Frake was an American anthropologist associated with cognitive anthropology, ethnoscience, and linguistic anthropology. His fieldwork among the Subanun of Mindanao examined how people classify illness, interpret signs of disease, and organize legal disputes, including litigation in Lipay. His work treated language and culturally shared categories as evidence for how knowledge is structured in everyday life.
help Charles Frake FAQ
Who were the Subanun studied by Charles Frake?
The Subanun are a people of Mindanao in the Philippines. Frake used Subanun language and cultural categories to study how people diagnose illness, interpret signs, and argue legal cases.
What is Frake's 1961 article The Diagnosis of Disease among the Subanun about?
The article analyzes how Subanun people identify and explain illness through locally meaningful signs and categories. It appeared in American Anthropologist, volume 63, issue 1, on pages 113 to 132. [Wiley article record](https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1961.63.1.02a00070)
Why is Charles Frake associated with cognitive anthropology?
Frake showed that anthropology could study the organized knowledge people use to classify disease, evidence, and social situations. His approach is often linked with ethnoscience because it reconstructs categories from the language and practices of the people being studied.
Did Charles Frake study law as well as illness?
Yes. His work on the Subanun included Litigation in Lipay: A Study in Subanun Law, which examined how legal disputes were narrated and organized. That combination of illness diagnosis and legal reasoning shows his interest in practical cultural classification.
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