CULTURE AS SCHEMAS

Linda Garro’s presentation demonstrated cognitive anthropology’s contribution to the study of culture and cultural knowledge. The content-oriented perspective, which emphasizes differential knowledge of cultural domains, is compatible with the focus on cultural models, which mediate information processing. Her process-oriented perspective stresses the interaction between historically-contingent available cultural resources and structure.

Cultural models (or cultural schemas or schemata) theory was introduced in the 1980’s. It states that in a large measure, information processing is mediated by innate mental structures (see Shore 1996). This perspective is compatible with the content-oriented view, which stemmed from the cognitive anthropology notion that culture is not a material entity. Rather, it is the form of things that people have in mind; a socially-transmitted information pool with which we do our own thinking.

While placing culture in the mind, this view does not necessarily contradict Urban’s claim that culture is essentially publicly-accessible. Asserting that culture is socially-transmitted implies that it also exists outside the mind, although this point was not delved into during the presentation or ensuing discussion (see “Introduction” in Strauss and Quinn 1997 for statement on cultural meanings as interaction between extrapersonal and intrapersonal realms).

Interest in intracultural variation stems from this cognitive definition, as well as interest in the ways in which differential opportunities to learn (such as those structured by gender) may contribute to that variability. In other words, this perspective seeks to understand why some people know more about certain domains and cultural practices than others. Intracultural variation, therefore, is accounted for by people having differential knowledge about cultural content (see Garro 2000).

Cognitive anthropologists developed an explicit methodology for discerning how people construe their world of experience from the way they talk about it. Methodologically, cultural schemas research tends to rely on conversations- you infer the existence of the cultural models from what informants say.

Garro favors an orientation towards process that revolves around the interplay between the range of historically-contingent cultural resources available for endowing experience with meaning, and the socially and structurally grounded processes through which individuals learn about, orient towards, and interpret possibilities. This dynamic view of culture is concerned with variability and change, and requires viewing individuals as actively involved in the construction of meaning, although only at times consciously (see Harkness, Super and Keefer 1992 for example on how cultural models gain directive force).

This form of meaning construction can often been seen as a socially-embedded narrative thinking, dependent upon culturally available resources that shape motives (see Strauss 1992). Individuals can simultaneously hold alternative interpretive frameworks, and what is seen as relevant may change through time and in relation to ongoing events. Emphasizing process in a content-oriented perspective allows one to study culturally-shared understandings of a particular phenomenon, and how these reflexive assessments that may be altered by new experiences.

Discussion following this presentation centered upon:

· How to move from cultural schemas perspectives to the types of claims that family demographers want to make

· What determines the different availability of schemas for people

· How new information is integrated into pre-existing models

Cultural models can be thought of as prepackaged units insofar as they are composed of a set of ideas. People are exposed to models through social interaction and social structure. If a model no longer works, then people will use another one and in the process face different kinds of constraints.

Date: 2015-01-12; view: 761