A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning (Publications of the Society for Psychological Anthropology)

Publications of the Society for Psychological Anthropology Editor Naomi Quinn, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University Editorial board Anne Allison, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University Daniel Fessler, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Hofstra University Allen W. Johnson, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Department of Anthropology, University of Hawaii John Lucy, Committee on Human Development and Department of Psychology, University of Chicago Claudia Strauss, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University

Publications of the Society for Psychological Anthropology is a joint initiative of Cambridge University Press and the Society for Psychological Anthropology, a unit of the American Anthropological Association. The series had been estabished to publish books in psychological anthropology and related fields of cognitive anthropology, ethnopsychology, and cultural psychology. It includes works of original theory, empirical research, and edited collections that address current issues. The creation of this series reflects a renewed interest among culture theorists in ideas about the self, mind-body interaction, social cognition, mental models, processes of cultural acquisition, motivation and agency, gender, and emotions. 1 Roy G. D'Andrade and Claudia Strauss (eds.): Human motives and cultural models 2 Nancy Rosenberger (ed.): Japanese sense of self 3 Theodore Schwartz, Geoffrey M White and Catherine A. Lutz (eds.): New directions in psychological anthropology 4 Barbara Diane Miller (ed.): Sex and gender hierarchies 5 Peter G. Stromberg: Language and self-transformation 6 Eleanor Hollenberg Chasdi (ed.): Culture and human development 7 Robert L. Winzeler: Latah in Southeast Asia: the history and ethnography of a culture-bound syndrome 8 John M. Ingham: Psychological anthropology reconsidered

A cognitive theory of cultural meaning Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn Duke University

1 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, VIC 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon 13,28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press 1997 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1997 Reprinted 1999, 2001 Typeset in Times 10/12 pt [VN] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Strauss, Claudia. A cognitive theory of cultural meaning / Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn. p. cm. — (Publications of the Society for Psychological Anthropology; 9) This work grew from a session at the 1989 meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 59409 X (hardbound) 1. Ethnopsychology - Congresses. 2. Cognition and culture ~ Congresses. 3. Connectionism - Congresses. I. Quinn, Naomi. 11 American Anthropological Association. Meeting (1989: Washington, D.C.) III. Title. IV. Series. GN502.S77 1997 155.8'2~dc21 97-14944 CIP ISBN 0 521 59409 X hardback ISBN 0 521 59541 X paperback Transferred to digital printing 2003

To my parents Lee Strauss and Robert Strauss Claudia

To my teachers Bea Whiting and Roy D'Andrade Naomi

Contents

List of List of tables Acknowledgments

figures

page ix x xi

Part I Background 1 Introduction Meanings and culture Psychology and cultural anthropology Summary of the book

2 Anthropological resistance Interpretivism: meanings are public Poststructuralism and postmodernism: culture and the self are constructed Historical materialism: people can resist cultural meanings Cognition in practice/discourse pragmatics: meanings depend on context Toward a more fruitful resolution: Bourdieu

3 Schema theory and connectionism Introduction to connectionism Connectionism for the somewhat more formally minded Final comments: symbols and meanings

3 5 8 10

12 13 23 36 42 44

48 50 60 82

Part H Implications for a theory of culture 4 Two properties of culture Durability in the individual Motivational force

5 Three further properties of culture Historical durability Thematicity Sharedness

89 89 101

111 111 118 122

Vll

viii

Contents

Part m

Practice and possibilities

6 Research on shared task solutions NAOMI QUINN Analysis 1. Metaphors for marriage and what they do Analysis 2. A shared schema for reasoning about marriage Conclusion

7 Research on the psychodynamics of shared understandings NAOMI QUINN Analysis 3. The psychody namic basis of marital love Conclusion

8 Research on cultural discontinuities CLAUDIA STRAUSS Analysis 1. How are conflicting discourses internalized? Analysis 2. The disparate motivational effects of different forms of culture learning Analysis 3. Disjunctures between shared understandings and public culture Conclusion

137 140 160 187

189 189 208

210 213 231 245 251

9 Beyond old oppositions

252

Notes References General index Name index

257 291 313 319

Figures

3.1 A US American address system - classical model page 62 (Ervin-Tripp 1969:95). Reprinted with the kind permission of Academic Press. 3.2 A US American address system - connectionist model 63 3.3 Interactive activation model (McClelland, Rumelhart, and Hinton 1986:22). 64 Reprinted with the kind permission of MIT Press. 65 3.4 Recurrent network (Rumelhart 1989:154). Reprinted with the kindpermission of MIT Press. 3.5 Modified connectionist US American address system 71 5.1 Sally Forth comic strip, originally published April 13,1994. 114 Reprinted with special permission of King Features Syndicate.

IX

Tables

3.1 Weights in connectionist model of US American terms of address - First layer 3.2 Weights in connectionist model of US American terms of address - Second layer 8.1 Lovett's multiple voices

page 68 70 221

Acknowledgments

The earliest version of what was to become this book was prepared for the invited session entitled "Assessing Developments in Anthropology" and organized by Robert Borofsky for the 87th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C., November, 1989. The authors are especially indebted to Roy D'Andrade, Jane Hill, Holly Mathews, Orin Starn, and Drew Westen for their close readings of all or substantial portions of one draft or another, and their numerous thoughtful suggestions. We are also grateful for helpful comments on various drafts or portions made by Felicia Ackerman, Robert Borofsky, Donald Brenneis, Donald Donham, Jane Fajans, Byron Good, Peter Hervik, Jennifer Hirsch, Allen Johnson, Stanley Kurtz, Stephen Levinson, Daniel Linger, Ernestine McHugh, Sherry Ortner, Gary Palmer, Terry Regier, Renato Rosaldo, Adam Russell, Nestor Schmajuk, Bradd Shore, Melford Spiro, Terence Turner, James Van Cleve, Harriet Whitehead, Beatrice Whiting, and an anonymous reviewer for the American Ethnological Society Monograph Series (which the manuscript then outgrew; the other two reviewers, Hill and Shore, identified themselves to us), as well as fruitful discussions with Dorothy Holland on related topics. In addition, students in the authors1 jointly taught class, "Culture and Cognition" at the First International Summer Institute in Cognitive Science, SUNYBurTalo in July, 1994, and in Claudia Strauss's "Psychological Anthropology," "Cognitive Anthropology," "Theories in Anthropology," and "Culture and the Brain" classes, are to be thanked for their valuable comments on our ideas at different stages, as are the audiences at a workshop, "Rethinking the Culture Concept," we jointly organized and chaired at the Society for Psychological Anthropology in Montreal in October, 1993; at a joint colloquium we gave in our own department at Duke in 1994; at Naomi Quinn's presentation to an interdisciplinary workshop in Culture and Cognition at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in December, 1994; and at the three-day workshop she gave, one of the Bergen Workshops on Core Questions in Anthropology, at Bergen, Norway, in Octob 1995. xi

xii

Acknowledgments

Readers should thank Lee Strauss, as we do fervently, for editing the entire manuscript and improving its readability and clarity immensely. We also thank Jessica Kuper at Cambridge University Press for her commitment to this book, and her role in bringing it to publication. A much condensed version of this book's argument, "A cognitive/cultural anthropology," appeared in a 1994 volume of papers, Assessing cultural anthropology, edited by Robert Borofsky. The second half of chapter 6 has been adapted from an article by Naomi Quinn, "Culture and contradiction: the case of Americans reasoning about marriage," published in Ethos in September, 1996. Some of the research reported in the first part of chapter 8 was adapted from an article by Claudia Strauss, "Partly fragmented, partly integrated: An anthropological examination of 'postmodern'fragmented subjects," Cultural Anthropology, 1997,12(3). The lengthy research project reported on by Naomi Quinn in chapters 6 and 7 was made possible by National Institute of Mental Health research grant #1 ROl MH33037O-O1, National Science Foundation research grant #BNS-8205739, a stipend from the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, National Science Foundation Visiting Professorship for Women #RII86-20166 (hosted by the University of California, San Diego), and grants from the Duke University Research Council and its successor, the Duke University Arts and Sciences Research Council. People who made the project successful are talented interviewer and research assistant Rebecca Taylor; undergraduate interviewer Laurie Moore: interview transcribers Phyllis Taylor, Donna Rubin, and the heroic Georgia Hunter; and the twenty-two husbands and wives who participated in the long interview process and shared their unique and creative, albeit culturally informed, ways of understanding their marriages. Thefirstresearch project reported on by Claudia Strauss in Chapter 8 was assisted by a grant from the Duke University Research Council. She, too, is grateful to the men and women who willingly shared their ideas and life stories with a stranger. Costs of creating originalfiguresin chapter 3, as well as the permission fee for reproducing the comic strip appearing in chapter 5, were kindly borne by the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University. Besides being responsible for the chapters addressing their own research, each co-author took primary responsibility, at a certain point in its drafting, for different parts of this book. Claudia Strauss was the main author of chapters 1,2, and 3, while Naomi Quinn was the main author of chapters 4,5, and 9. This said, each of us contributed some prose to every co-authored chapter, and there is no major idea or point in the book that we did not discuss and debate in the course of successive revisions.

Parti

Background

Once upon a time we anthropologists believed in the concept of culture. Not only did we believe in it, we proselytized for it, arguing in articles, books, and speeches that typical patterns of behavior, personality, and belief within a society are rarely a biological inheritance (due to "race") but are almost always socially learned ways of acting and thinking (due to "culture"). The idea of culture was to cultural anthropology what the cell is to biology or the unconscious is to psychoanalysis: a taken-for-granted basic concept within the discipline and our primary intellectual contribution to broader public discourse. We were successful in exporting the concept of culture, to both academics in other fields and the public. Within the academy there are professors of literature doing "cultural studies," historians specializing in "culture history," and psychologists interested in "cultural psychology." Outside the academy it is common to hear public discussions of "multiculturalism" and "cultural diversity," "organizational culture," or "the culture of poverty." Psychiatrists, lawyers, doctors, and businesspeople are learning that they will be more successful if they take "cultural" factors into account. Yet, surprisingly, the culture concept now sometimesfindsitself more appreciated abroad than back home. Cutting-edge theorists in other fields invoke the culture concept, but cutting-edge cultural anthropologists criticize it. While valuable, these criticisms have sometimes gone too far, eliminating the idea of culture rather than reworking it. This book, by two cognitive anthropologists, proposes a new analysis of culture. It argues that in order to rethink culture, we need to understand how human beings construct meanings.

Introduction

Culture theory is at an impasse. From the perspective of the late 1990s, descriptions of "the culture of the X" seem old-fashioned. In part this is because we have learned how problematic it is, in a world of shifting and multiple identities, to label any set of people as "the X." But to a greater extent the problem lies with the phrase "the culture of the X." In our discipline's past, such descriptions have too often made it sound as if all of the X thought, felt, and acted the same way, had shared this way of life for centuries and would have continued in their traditional ways, unchanged, if colonial education and modern mass media had not intervened. Past descriptions, too, sometimes missed the extent to which the story they told about traditional cultural values and practices was the interested account of one powerful class or faction or a public, "for show," version that hid alternative accounts, challenges to the powerful, or even mundane, widely shared practices and understandings that contradicted informants' conscious beliefs about what they were doing.l Yet to ignore the force of culture (in something like the old sense) is also problematic, if culture is not limited to official representations but includes shared understandings of all sorts as well as the publicly observable objects and events from which these understandings are learned. Our experiences in our own and other societies keep reminding us that some understandings are widely shared among members of a social group, surprisingly resistant to change in the thinking of individuals, broadly applicable across different contexts of their lives, powerfully motivating sources of their action, and remarkably stable over succeeding generations. To omit this older view of culture from current thinking about it is to ignore the fact that both domination and everyday practices (concerns of many current anthropologists) rest on shared interpretive schemes, schemes learned in ways that sometimes render them resistant to change. To leave this aspect of culture out of consideration is also to ignore the fact that contestation and change never arise in a cultural vacuum but always originate

4

Background

from existing conceptual systems, which can be widely shared despite apparent political differences. Even critics of the traditional culture concept recognize, or seem to recognize, that we cannot dispense with it altogether. Thus James Clifford (1986:19) states, "Culture is contested, temporal, and emergent," yet, in the introduction to The predicament of culture (1988) notes that he is "straining for a concept that can preserve culture's differentiating functions while conceiving of collective identity as a hybrid, often discontinuous inventive process," adding, "Culture is a deeply compromised idea I cannot yet do without" (1988d:10). Lila Abu-Lughod argues that "'culture,' shadowed by coherence, timelessness, and discreteness, is the prime anthropological tool for making 'other/ and difference . . . tends to be a relationship of power"; therefore, "anthropologists should consider strategies for writing against culture" (1991:147; see also Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1990). Yet Abu-Lughod observes in the same article, "Cross-cultural work on women also made it clear that masculine and feminine did not have, as we say, the same meaning in other cultures" (1991:140) and the (so-called) "essential human has culturally and socially specific characteristics" (1991:158), making it clear that culture is an idea she cannot do without, either. Most anthropologists today would probably agree with both sides of this debate. Most would probably agree both that "cultures" are not bounded, coherent, timeless systems of meanings (as we caution our advanced students), and that human action rests on networks of often highly stable, pervasive, and motivating assumptions that can be widely shared within social groups while variable between them (as we teach undergraduates in Anthropology 101).2 The problem facing the discipline is not which account isrightbut how to explain the fact that both are right How can we explain both cultural reproduction, thematicity, and force what Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) called the "centripetal" forces at work in social life - and cultural variation, inconsistency, and change - Bakhtin's "centrifugal" forces? More plainly, how do we handle the fact this is not a homogeneous world without creating separate entities ("the culture of the x," "the culture of the y," "the culture of the z") to explain the differences? In this book we argue that to go beyond this impasse we need to take another look at cultural meanings: what they are, where they come from, and why sometimes they are motivating, sometimes not; sometimes enduring (in persons and across generations), sometimes not; sometimes shared, sometimes not; and sometimes thematically unifying, sometimes not. Since it is the basis for everything that follows, we should address immediately thefirstof these questions: what are cultural meanings?

Introduction

5

Meanings and culture

Early anthropological definitions of culture (e.g., Tylor 1958 [1871]) equated culture with socially learned ideas and behaviors. However, as Ulf Hannerz (among others) notes, "in the recent period, culture has been taken to be above all a matter of meaning" (1992:3).3 But what is meaning? Philosophers have long debated this, particularly with respect to the meaning of words and sentences. Some have proposed that the meaning of a term or sentence is its referent (i.e., the thing or situation in the world it stands for). Others, most notably John Locke, argued that linguistic expressions are the external, public mark of ideas in people's heads and gain their meanings only in relation to those ideas. These two theories have fallen out of favor in the twentieth century. Taking their place for a while were behaviorist theories, which defined the meaning of a linguistic expression as the typical stimulus that gives rise to it and the response it evokes, and, more recently, theories that look for the meaning of a sign in either its pragmatic uses or its place in a larger system of signs. Of these last two possibilities, thefirst(look at use) was advocated by Ludwig Wittgenstein, the second (look at the place of a sign in a system of signs) initially by Ferdinand de Saussure and later by structuralists such as Claude LeviStrauss, as well as (coming from different concerns) such philosophers as W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson (Alston 1964, 1967; Tiles 1987). More recently poststructuralists such as Jacques Derrida (1982) have started with the structuralist approach to meaning but questioned whether there are any stable sign systems, which leads them to the claim that meanings are endlessly "deferred." These last three approaches are currently dominant in the philosophy of language, and we suspect that if our fellow anthropologists considered all these possibilities, most would favor one of the last three also. We reject all three of the current meaning-is-usey meaning-is-place-in-a system-of-signs, and meanings-are-endlessly-deferred approaches. The rea sons for this will be spelled out more in the following chapters, but can be summarized as follows. Meaning-as-use pretends that people act without having anything in mind. Meaning-as-emerging-from-a-system-of-sign assigns a reality to these abstract systems that they do not have. Finally, meanings-as-endlessly-deferred delights in the ceaseless play of signs, forgetting that in the meantime people need some meanings to get them through the day. Instead, our definition combines aspects of earlier behaviorist (meanings are defined by their stimuli and responses) and ideational (meanings are ideas in people's heads) approaches. While behaviorist and ideational theories have been seen as opposed in the past, we will present a cognitive paradigm that brings them much closer together and draws on

6

Background

the strengths of each approach while avoiding some of the criticism incurred by earlier versions of these theories. The meaning we will give to "meaning" here is the interpretation evoked in a person by an object or event at a given time. (Note: this includes, but is not restricted to, word meanings.) Our notion of interpretation will be explained in greater detail in chapter 3. For the time being, however, we should note that a person's interpretation of an object or event includes an identification of it and expectations regarding it, and, often, a feeling about it and motivation to respond to it. This definition makes meanings momentary states, as some current theorists would argue. Unlike these theorists, however, we also stress that these momentary states are produced through the interaction of two sorts of relatively stable structures: intrapersonal, mental structures (which we will also call "schemas" or "understandings" or "assumptions") and extrapersonal, world structures. The relative stability of the world and our schemas has the effect that both in a given person and in a group of people who share a way of life, more or less the same meanings arise over and over. Our definition also makes meanings psychological (they are cognitive-emotional responses), but highlights the fact that meanings are the product of current events in the public world interacting with mental structures, which are in turn the product of previous such interactions with the public world. We will have a great deal more to say about schemas later; for the time being they can be roughly defined as networks of strongly connected cognitive elements that represent the generic concepts stored in memory (Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClelland, and Hinton 1986:18). In other words, we are saying that what something (a word, an object, an event) means to somebody depends on exactly what they are experiencing at the moment and the interpretive framework they bring to the moment as a result of their past experiences. A cultural meaning is the typical (frequently recurring and widely shared aspects of the)4 interpretation of some type of object or event evoked in people as a result of their similar life experiences (cf. Spiro 1987a: 163). To call it a cultural meaning is to imply that a different interpretation would be evoked in people with different characteristic life experiences. Talk about "the meaning" of something tends to mystify the fact that this phrase is always a shorthand way of referring to cultural meanings. Nor is there an entity, "the culture of the X," which contains or causes the meanings of the X people. As D'Andrade puts it, we have to move beyond "the idea that culture is a thing" (1995:250). To the extent that "culture" carries the implication that there exists some entity above and beyond human products and learned mental structures, we agree with

Introduction

7

recent critics of the concept that it is misleading. We could keep the term "culture," however, if we stopped thinking of cultures as independent entities. To the extent people have recurring, common experiences - experiences mediated by humanly created products and learned practices that lead them to develop a set of similar schemas - it makes sense to say they share a culture. As Dan Sperber notes, "There exists... no threshold, no boundary with cultural representations on one side, and individual ones on the other. Representations are more or less widely and lastingly distributed, and hence more or less cultural" (1985a:74). Culture, in our formulation as in his, is thus not some free-floating abstract entity; rather, it consists of regular occurrences in the humanly created world, in the schemas people share as a result of these, and in the interactions between these schemas and this world. When we speak of culture, then, we do so only to summarize such regularities.5 This makes "culture," as we use the term, a fuzzy concept, because we are focusing on people's (more-or-less) shared experiences and the schemas they acquire on the basis of those experiences. We need to put some conditions on what sorts of shared experiences are cultural. For example, we do not think it is useful to use "culture" to refer to shared experiences of the natural world. But suppose we are referring to a plant, an animal, or a landscape that has been altered through human intervention? To allow for that we say that a schema is cultural to the extent that it is the product of humanly mediated experiences. Similarly, we do not want to label as cultural those schemas that are the product of experiences arising from innately programmed behaviors. But what about the great many experiences (some people would say this is true of the majority of our experiences) that are the product of general innate potentials gaining specificity in a particular human environment (Changeux 1985)? A similar sort of fuzzy boundary is necessary: a schema is cultural to the extent that it is not predetermined genetically. Finally, an implication of our view is that cultures are not bounded and separable. You share some experiences with people who listen to the same music or watch the same television shows you do, other experiences with people who do the same work you do, and still others with people who have had formal schooling like yours, even if you live on opposite sides of the world. This makes each person a junction point for an infinite number of partially overlapping cultures. Some people would object,rightly,that the context in which people experience, say, a television show, greatly affects the particulars of the schemas they acquire from that experience.6 We agree and will show later how this happens. Yet we do not want to return to the assumption that shared cultures belong only to spatially and temporally contiguous communities. Our proposal turns attention away

8

Background

from boundaries of this sort and focuses attention, instead, on people's experiences, which can be partiaUy shared even if never identical, across space and time. Psychology and cultural anthropology The following points sum up our initial statements and make explicit some of the other assumptions guiding our argument: 1 We cannot explain cultural meanings unless we see them as created and maintained in the interaction between the extrapersonal and intrapersonal realms. The force and stability of cultural meanings, as well as their possibilities for variation and change, are the outcome of this complex interaction. 2 Intrapersonal thoughts, feelings, and motives, on one side of this interaction, are not simply copies of extrapersonal messages and practices, on the other side, and the dynamics of these realms are different. 3 Therefore, we need to know how the mind works in order to understand how people appropriate their experience and act on it, sometimes to recreate and other times to change the public social world. 4 We need to examine socialization in greater detail to learn the concrete forms of extrapersonal culture in learners' worlds and to examine what learners internalize at different points in their lives from experiencing these things. It follows that we share with many other commentators the belief that the private/public (i.e., inner/outer or subject/world) divide, as currently conceived, is problematic.7 We differ from most, however, in exactly what we think the problem is and what would be a better way to think about it. We think that the inner world or psyche and the world outside of persons are not isolated realms and that too large a gulf has been posited between them in current theorizing. It is central to our view, however, that these realms are different, with distinctive characteristics not found in the other. In our view the intrapersonal and the extrapersonal realms are distinct but closely interconnected; they are separated by a boundary, but one that is permeable. A note on terminology: "private" and "public" are the terms usually used to refer to the intrapersonal and extrapersonal domains, respectively. The problem with these words is that they have been used to mark a number of other distinctions we do not want to confuse with the intrapersonal/extrapersonal difference. For example, that which is "private" might be secret or the property of one person only or restricted to the home or not belonging to the state (as in "private property"). To avoid these connota-

Introduction

9

tions, we will usually use "intrapersonal" and "extrapersonal" or "psychological" and "social" (or, sometimes, "culture-in-persons" and "public culture"). Another possibly confusing term is "internalization," because it carries misleading connotations of taking in whole. We will continue to use "internalization" but advise readers that the appropriative processes we describe can be selective and transformative.8 If the intrapersonal and extrapersonal realms function differently, as noted in the third of our listed assumptions, then we need to know how the intrapersonal realm works; that is, we need to know some psychology. This point is not new to our colleagues in cognitive anthropology or the larger field of psychological anthropology, of which it is a part.9 As the psychological anthropologist Melford Spiro has put it, "to attempt to understand culture by ignoring the human mind is like attempting to understand Hamlet by ignoring the Prince of Denmark" (1987a: 162).10 Still, we know we will encounter strong resistance from colleagues in cultural anthropology outside of our subfield. One anthropologist in our department, when told the title of this book, suggested we leave out the word "cognitive" if we wanted anybody to read it. This parallels the advice a senior anthropologist at another university gave to an undergraduate submitting applications to pursue graduate work in anthropology at our department and elsewhere. Drawing on his experience of finding his pioneering work in culture and personality ignored in recent years, he suggested that she describe her interests as "the self cross-culturally" or some such; anything other than "psychological anthropology." Nowadays in cultural anthropology it is perfectly respectable to talk about "the self," "meaning," "identity," "consciousness," "subjectivity," "experience," "reader response," "the imagined," and "agency";11 strangely, however, we are not supposed to talk about the psychological processes and structures that help explain12 these. If we ignore psychology, however, we are likely to make false assumptions about the way selves, meanings, identities, consciousness, subjectivity and experience are constructed and about the way people respond to texts, imagine communities, and resist hegemonic structures. Consider, for example, "identity" in its various forms (gender, sexual, ethnic, national, etc.). Given the importance, not just in anthropology but in the world today, of analyzing and understanding identities, it is very unfortunate that most academic discourses on identities tend to assume only two alternatives: Either identities are predetermined and fixed or identities are completely constructed and fluid. The psychological models we will present here help us to see a middle path: identity has an implicit (normally out of awareness)13 component, which is neither completely fixed nor entirely fluid. Without such psychological models, it is all too

10

Background

easy to see eitherfixedphysical attributes or the ever-changing immediate context as more determining than they are and to underestimate the out-of-awareness processes that shape conscious choices. Antipsychologism is not universal among anthropologists outside of psychological anthropology. Many anthropologists acknowledge the importance of Freudian and post-Freudian (e.g., Lacanian) psychoanalysis.14 It is more unusual for anthropologists to draw on cognitive psychology for inspiration, but Turner (1985) and Bloch (1985,1992a, 1992b) have done just that. Bloch (1992), in fact, has argued for the importance of the same cognitive paradigm (connectionism) that we will describe in chapter 3. Bourdieu's Outline of a theory of practice (1977), which we will discuss in greater detail at the end of chapter 2, relies heavily on the cognitive sciences of the 1960s and early 1970s. Among psychological anthropologists, Bradd Shore has recently argued, much as we do here, for a "cognitive view of culture" (1996:13) and Dan Sperber has been elaborating a cognitive account of cultural meaning and (in his terms) an "epidemiology" of the spread of mental and public representations for some time (e.g., Sperber 1975, 1985a, 1996). His view and ours differ primarily in the cognitive paradigms upon which we draw. *5 We were also much heartened to read the following sensible discussion at the beginning of Hannerz's recent treatise on the forms of social organization that regulate theflowsof cultural information within and between complex societies (Cultural complexity, 1992):

As I see it here, culture has two kinds of loci, and the cultural process takes place i their ongoing interrelations. On the one hand, culture resides in a set of public meaningful forms, which can most often be seen or heard, or are somewhat less frequentiy known through touch, smell, or taste, if not through some combinatio of senses. On the other hand, these overt forms are only rendered meaningful because human minds contain the instruments for their interpretation. The cultural flow thus consists of the externalizations of meaning which individuals produce through arrangements of overt forms, and the interpretations which individuals made of such displays - those of others as well as their own. (1992:4) That is exactly what we are saying. Hannerz goes on to present a sophisticated analysis of some complexities in the distribution of the extrapersonal forms. In what follows we aim to provide a similarly in-depth look at intrapersonal culture. Summary of the book In the chapters that follow, we expand on these assertions and back them up with many examples. Part I continues with chapter 2, in which we describe and reply to four contemporary anthropological arguments

Introduction

11

against studies of internalization. At the end of that chapter we turn to Pierre Bourdieu's practice theory. His model is similar to ours in many respects, but we argue that bis theory could be improved if it rested on a firmer psychological basis. Chapter 3 rounds out part I and describes the psychological theory we use most extensively, a way of modeling cognition called "connectionism." As we go on to demonstrate later in the book, connectionist models alone are not sufficient to understand cultural meanings, but they do provide the core of our thinking about them. Relying on connectionist and other psychological theories, chapters 4 and 5 (part II) outline some of the factors that explain both the centripetal and the centrifugal tendencies of cultural meanings. Part III shifts from theory to our research. In chapters 6 and 7 Quinn describes the research program she has undertaken to study cultural meanings; in chapter S Strauss does the same for her research. Finally, in chapter 9 we consider why psychological explanations have been excluded from anthropological discussions of cultural meanings and suggest directions for the future.

Anthropological resistance

Our insistence that anthropologists need to study internalization is not new: The point has been made by cognitive anthropologists (e.g., D'Andrade 1984 and Sperber 1985a) and other psychological anthropologists (e.g., Obeyesekere 1981,1990; Shore 1991,1996; and Spiro 1987a) for many years. Others who have made some of the same points include Bloch (1985), Barth (1975, 1987), and Wikan (1990). Still, our concern with psychology and our use of the term, "internalization/* is likely to meet with resistance from many anthropologists. Before we go any further we need to consider why, and try to disarm these objections. We expect dissent to come from several quarters, especially from Geertzian and neo-Geertzian interpretivists, Foucauldian poststructuralists and other postmodernists, some contemporary historical materialists, and those cognitive and linguistic anthropologists who study cognition in practice (or discourse pragmatics). Each of these schools is associated with a characteristic stance on psychology, meanings, and culture. Geertzian interpretivists have stressed the publicness of meaning, cognition, and culture. Foucauldian postmodernists have argued for the constructedness of culture and of the self. Some contemporary historical materialists highlight the importance of resistance to cultural meanings. Finally, many of our colleagues in cognitive and linguistic anthropology focus on the way thought and meaning are situated. We will present and counter these four possible critiques of our approach, showing that there is no incompatibility between a reasonable version of those claims and ours. While there is no logical incompatibility between our views and most of the others we will discuss, each does lead to a different research program. Our aim here is not to dismiss any of these approaches; each is valuable for understanding the extrapersonal realm of culture. (Indeed, too much anthropological debate these days seems akin to forms of urban renewal in which whole neighborhoods are razed. The new critics seem to believe that efforts to create better structures require complete elimination of the old. Instead, we need a less destructive form of intervention that conserves what is good in the old while not mindlessly preserving its blind alleys or 12

Anthropological resistance

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crumbling edifices.) At the end of each section we will explain how each of these analyses of culture is weakened by ignoring the interplay between the extrapersonal and intrapersonal realms. Anthropological understanding suffers if too many researchers focus on one realm to the exclusion of the other; we need to look at both. Interpretivisra: meanings are public The first line of anthropological objection to meaning as psychological states comes from interpretivism, the classic and most forceful statements of which are Clifford Geertz's essays in The interpretation of cultures (1973e) and Local knowledge (1983c). More than any other theorist, Geertz (drawing on the work of his teacher, Talcott Parsons)1 was responsible for the shift we described in the first chapter, from the use of "culture" as a loose covering term for all social learning and practice to current, narrower equations of culture with systems of meaning (see, e.g., Geertz 1973i:5). Although psychological anthropologists were concerned with actors' subjectivities long before 1973, it is in good measure to Geertz's eloquence that we owe a general acceptance of the importance of studying "the actor's point of view" - not only in anthropology, but in related social sciences. If Geertzian interpretivists and cognitive anthropologists like us are all interested in cultural meaning, where do we disagree? The disagreement comes from a false dichotomy that Geertz and later Geertzians established between meaning as public (in several senses) and meaning as a cognitiveemotional state. Geertz's statements about the publicness of culture, meaning, and mind (terms he used almost interchangeably) remained fairly consistent over the years, despite other changes in his model of culture. In his early writings Geertz retained some of Parsons's functionalism. While disputing necessary compatibility between culture and social structure (1973h), Geertz assumed that social relations are determined by the interaction of cultural, social structural, and personality systems (1973g:92, 122, 125 and 1973h: 145-6). In this early functionalist phase Geertz stressed that symbols act as models " o f and "for" reality: that is, they not only express social patterns but also motivate human action (1973g:93). From at least "Deep play" (1973a) on, however, he rejected functionalist models of interacting subsystems in favor of the metaphor of culture as a "text" (e.g., 1973a:448). At the same time he began to downplay the "model for" side of cultural symbols, their role in shaping action, leaving the "model o f side, their purely expressive role, to dominate (see, e.g., 1973a:444). In fact, this may not be as radical a change as it is often taken to be: Perhaps Geertz was arguing simply for a different way of thinking about culture,

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while continuing to assume that personality and social structural systems are as important as he ever thought they were (see, e.g., Geertz 1983b: 14; certainly, he continued to note that symbols do shape action, e.g., 1973a:451). Still, this shift from functionalism to interpretivism was an important one: it paved the way for later views that cultural texts are all there are2 and was explicitly associated for Geertz with a rejection of explanations in favor of "thick descriptions*' (1973i:14). Yet, even as Geertz shifted from images of societies as organisms to those of cultures as texts, he consistently advocated what he called an "outdoor psychology" (1983d: 153). Compare, for example, the following discussions of culture and thought, the first originally published in 1962, the second originally published in 1966, the third and fourth originally published in 1982: [Cjultural resources are ingredient, not accessory, to human thought. . . human thinking is primarily an overt act conducted in terms of the objective materials of the common culture, and only secondarily a private matter . . . man's mental processes indeed3 take place at the scholar's desk or the footballfield,in the studio or lorry^driver's seat, on the platform, the chessboard, or the judge's bench. (1973c:83) The view that thought does not consist of mysterious processes located in what Gilbert Ryle has called a secret grotto in the head but of a traffic in significant symbols - objects in experience . . . upon which men have impressed meaning makes of the study of culture a positive science like any other. The meanings that symbols, the material vehicles of thought, embody are . . . as capable of being discovered through systematic empirical investigation - especially if the people who perceive them will cooperate a little - as the atomic weight of hydrogen or the function of the adrenal glands. It is through culture patterns, ordered clusters of significant symbols, that man makes sense of the events through which he lives. (1973f: 362-3) For symbolic action theorists (... to whom, with some reservations, I would give my own allegiance), thinking is a matter of the intentional manipulation of cultural forms, and outdoor activities like ploughing or peddling are as good examples of it as closet experiences like wishing or regretting. (1983d: 151)4 It is a matter of conceiving of cognition, emotion, motivation, perception, imagination, memory . . . whatever, as themselves, and directly, social affairs. (1983d:153)5 These views are most compactly (and famously) expressed in the following formula, from "Thick description" (originally published in 1973):

Culture is public because meaning i s . . . The generalized attack on privacy theories of meaning is, since early Husserl and late Wittgenstein, so much a part of modern thought that it need not be developed once more here. What is necessary is to see to it that the news of it reaches anthropology; and in particular that it is made clear

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that to say that culture consists of socially established structures of meaning in terms of which people do such things as signal conspiracies and join them or perceive insults and answer them, is no more to say that it is a psychological phenomenon, a characteristic of someone's mind, personality, cognitive structure, or whatever than to say that Tantrism, genetics, the progressive form of the verb, the classification of wines, the Common Law, or the notion of "a conditional curse"... is. (1973i:12-13) What did Geertz mean in stressing the publicness of meaning, culture, and thought? We find that different commentators stress different things he might have meant. Some tell us that what he really meant was that public symbols are observable and psychological states are not and we should study only what we can observe; others stress that he really meant that meanings are intersubjectively shared; another contingent takes from Geertz the insight that meanings are socially established prior to an individual's learning them; and still another focuses on Geertz's point that thinking often relies on objects in the world. We agree with all of these points and think Geertz was correct to give emphasis to them. However, none is inconsistent with our stress on internalization and our definition of cultural meaning as the shared cognitive-emotional state that results when the mental structures of a group of people respond to typical objects and events in their world. Structures of meaning can be public in all of these senses and still be psychological states. Let us consider each of these points in turn. Only public forms are observable and we should study only what we can observe Obviously, we cannot observe cognitive-emotional states directly. But meanings, as Geertz usually used this term, cannot be directly observed either. (Shortly we will discuss the different meanings of "meaning" for him.) In his research and ours we start with something that is publicly accessible (in our case, ordinary talk and mundane actions; in his case, social dramas and other symbols) and draw inferences from these to something that is not directly observable (in our case, to people's mental structures and meanings; in his case, to cultural meanings that are somewhere outside of people).6 Meanings are intersubjectively shared (i.e., meanings are not only shared, but participants know that they are shared) When Geertz referred to Wittgenstein's and other philosophers' critiques of "private languages" he probably had in mind statements such as the following: "if language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but a l s o . . . in judgments" (Wittgenstein 1958: sec. 242). Although we think Geertz and Wittgenstein may have

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underestimated the extent of miscommunication that occurs (or the possibility that communication can be pragmatically sufficient without meanings being completely shared, see Wallace 1970), we do agree that there is substantial sharing of meanings within a social group. To the extent that people learn to interpret their worlds under similar circumstances or need to communicate about these, they will acquire similar mental structures and will arrive at similar meanings. (This topic is addressed thoroughly in chapters 5 and 6.) It is a fallacy to assume that if meanings are intrapersonal (private in the sense of not being observable by others), they are therefore idiosyncratic (private in the sense of not being held in common).7

Meanings are established prior to the individual's learning of the In Geertz's words, "culture . . . [is] an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions . . . " (1973g:89), and "From the point of view of any particular individual, such symbols are largely given" (1973d:45). We agree completely that individuals do not discover or make up cultural meanings on their own. Not only does most of the publicly observable world pre-exist us, but the mental structures by which we interpret that world are developed through explicit teaching and implicit observation of others' talk, actions, and material products. (Chapters 4 and 5 in this volume address how this learning takes place, with chapter 5 stressing, in particular, the factors that lead to the recreation of mental structures in new generations of learners.) Meanings are both psychological states and social constructions - although, as we will show, the process of social construction leads to cognitive results that are not apparent from study of symbols alone. Thought often relies on material objects As anthropologists we certainly agree that thought takes place not only in the psychologist's laboratory or at the philosopher's desk, but also in the kitchen, the playground, the factory, and the store. In fact, the way people think in such settings, making use of objects at hand and combining information contributed by different participants in face-to-face groups, is currently being addressed by a number of cognitive anthropologists.8 It does not follow, however, from the fact that most thought takes place in such settings, using props, and advancing through interactions with other people, that thinking itself is occurring in some nebulous space outside of people's bodies. Wefindthe proposal that thought (including interpretation) occurs in the air between people more mysterious than the assumption that it occurs in the brain and other parts of the nervous system. Our commonsensical point that thought is both private (in the sense of taking

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place in our bodies) and public (in the sense of occurring while we are out in the world, engaged in activity) could be illustrated by an image from the children's book, Inside, outside, upside down (Berenstain and Berenstai 1968). In that book a little bear crawls into a box, which is then turned upside down and carried outside. On the last page he tells his mother, "Mama! Mama! I went to town. Inside, Outside, Upside down!" Similarly, our understandings are always "going to town" both inside and outside (and sometimes upside down!). In sum, meaning can be public in each of the ways Geertz stressed and still be a psychological state. Next we will show that meaning has to be a psychological state; there is no other sensible way to conceive of meaning and still have it play a role in social action.

Three nonpsychological ways to conceive of meaning Over the course of his career Geertz used "meaning" in three different ways. None is the psychological definition we propose, and each sense of meaning is problematic. A Meanings Are Uses. This was Ludwig Wittgenstein's approach. Wittgenstein argued that "the meaning of a word is its use in the language" (1958:sec. 43). His arguments on this point correctly and importantly stress (among other things) the way the meaning of a term (or any sign) will vary depending on the "language game" in which it is embedded, and the impossibility of assigning most words clear-cut boundaries of their applicability (e.g., 1958:secs. 21ff and 66ff). (The fuzziness and contextvariability of meanings will be discussed further in this chapter and in chapter 3.) This meaning of "meaning" has the virtue of concreteness: the meaning of an expression is not an abstract definition or interpretation that resides nowhere in particular but is simply its use. But this is not the way most anthropologists would think about it: most of us would say that people use words or other signifiers in a certain way because of the cultural meanings of these things. Meanings lead to uses; if that is not the case, then people are just mechanically acting and meanings are only a way for outsiders to describe the pattern of others' behaviors. Indeed, Geertz is typical of most anthropologists in this regard (and seemingly unaware of Wittgenstein's dismissal of this common view, e.g., 1958:sec. 146rT and p. 216). On the one hand, Geertz (1973i:17 and 1973f:405n) invokes Wittgenstein and occasionally seems to identify culture with behaviors (e.g., 1973i:10). But for the most part Geertz is very careful to distinguish between behaviors and the meanings they impart: that is the whole point of his repetition of Gilbert Ryle's discussion of the difference between a wink and a twitch (19731:6-7). In "Thick description"

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(1973i), Geertz notes that "culture consists of socially established structures of meaning in terms of which people do such things as signal conspiracies and join them or perceive insults and answer them" (1973i: 12-13). Note that he says, "w terms of which people do such thing ...," in other words, structures of meanings are prior to the actions and are part of an explanation of why people act as they do. This implies that meaning is something added to bare actions; it is not simply use. In this respect, we agree with Geertz rather than Wittgenstein: we, too, believe that meanings lead to actions, and are not simply a way of describing them. But Geertz did not go on to think through, consistently, the implications of this position. If meanings influence action, they have to be someplace. Where are they? Geertz gave two answers to this question. In some passages he says that meanings are "in" public objects and behaviors; and in some passages he says or implies that meanings are abstract structures that are no place in particular. 2. Meanings are stored in symbols. Geertz used that very phrase in the essay, "Ethos, world view, and the analysis of sacred symbols': "[M]eanings can only be 'stored'" in symbols: a cross, a crescent, or a feathered serpent (1973b: 127). In "Religion as a cultural system" he used a metaphor of symbols as a "vehicle" that carries meaning:

[A symbol is] any object, act, event, quality, or relation which serves as a vehicle f a conception - the conception is the symbol's 'meaning'... (1973g:91)

The problem with these images of symbols as storing meanings or carrying them along for the ride, is - as Linger (1994) and Langacker (1991:508) show very clearly - that they all employ a misleading "conduit metaphor" (Reddy 1979) to describe the relation of words and other symbols to meanings. It takes only a moment of thought to see that meanings cannot literally be found in symbols. Consider, for example, cultural meanings of money. However hard we look, we will notfindthese ideas hidden somewhere in slips of paper, bits of metal, or the physical acts by which these bits of paper, metal, and their representatives are distributed. (It follows that meanings cannot be found - as more recent structuralist and poststructuralist theories would have it - infixedor shifting systems of symbols either.) Geertz probably realized this, and his unease with this misleading way of speaking is doubtless what led him to add the scare quotes around "stored" in thefirstquote in this section. But if meanings do not literally rest in symbols and are not identical with symbolic actions, where are they? 3. Meanings Are Abstract Structures. A third possible answer that coul be given to this question, and one that Geertz gave as well, is that meanings are nowhere in particular because they are abstract entities:

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If, leaving our winks and sheep behind for the moment, we take, say, a Beethoven quartet as an, admittedly rather special but, for these purposes, nicely illustrative, sample of culture, no one would, I think, identify it with its score, with the skills and knowledge needed to play it, with the understanding of it possessed by its performers or auditors, nor, to take care, en passant, of the reductionists and reifiers, with a particular performance of it . . . that a Beethoven quartet is a temporally developed tonal structure... is a proposition to which most people are, upon reflection, likely to assent. (1973i:l 1-12) And though Geertz notes in the middle of the preceding passage that neither is culture "some mysterious entity transcending material existence," he gives as further examples of culture, "Tantrism, genetics, the progressive form of the verb, the classification of wines, the Common Law, or the notion of 'a conditional curse'" (1973i:13). These are all abstract things. Quartets, Tantrism, and so on have concrete expressions, to be sure, but in these passages he claims that concrete expressions are not themselves structures of meaning.9 But meanings cannot be abstract structures that are nowhere in particular (or in a cloud hovering over Cincinnati, as a colleague of ours put it sarcastically).10 As we have already noted, if they are nowhere in particular, how can they ever come to motivate action? A reasonable slogan here would be, "Abstract entities cannot have concrete effects." And Geertz probably realized this, too, as the following passage indicates. Note, however, that even in this passage, which describes the "ontological status" of cultural actions as "things of this world," he also says culture is "unphysical" - slipping back into the idea that culture is an abstract structure:

Culture, this acted document, thus is public, like a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid. Though ideational, it does not exist in someone's head; though unphysi cal, it is not an occult entity... The thing to ask about a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid is not what their ontological status is. It is the same as that of rocks on the one hand and dreams on the other - they are things of this world. (1973i:10; emphasis ours) If culture (a pattern of meaning) is "unphysical," how can it have the same ontological status as a rock or a mock sheep raid? Meanings have to be psychological Geertz's inconsistency11 - indeed, the inconsistencies and unease of many anthropological expositors of meaning12 - is the result of his and their avoidance of the only position that makes sense: Meanings of things have to be in people's minds (and "hearts"; cf. Geertz 1973i:ll). There is no

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other place for meanings to be concretely, and they have to be concrete if they make a difference in the world.13 This can be illustrated with our example of cultural meanings of money. We have already pointed out the absurdity of saying these meanings are literally embodied in coins, bills, checks, and credit cards (Meanings are stored in symbols, definition 2). We could speak of these meanings as being an abstract system or structure (definition 3), but that would be to confuse the outsider's descriptive abstractions with insiders' internalized understandings about money and the concrete practices and objects created by those understandings (cf. Bourdieu's critique of objectivism, 1977:5). The most tempting view might be thefirst:meaning is use. Again, however, this confuses outsiders' and insiders* perspectives. Certainly an outside observer of the meanings of money for late twentieth century North Americans can only ascertain those meanings by observing people's uses of money, but for the people whose uses are being observed, each monetary transaction provokes meanings in them, and it is on the basis of these meanings that they act. For example, someone deciding to buy a lottery ticket does so because of what a sudden windfall of money would mean to them. These meanings are a combination of ideas (e.g., about the "good life"), feelings (e.g., of relief at being free from debt), and motivations (e.g., to win admiration through generous charitable donations) in them. True, these ideas, feelings, and motivations can only be observed from things people say and do publicly; they are probably held in common with many other people; they are learned through participation in social institutions and reinforced by being associated with symbols of various sorts (e.g., calendrical and life-cycle rituals, everyday talk, mass media); and they are enacted with concrete objects in everyday settings and can be improvised upon in these settings. But the point remains that these meanings are the actor's meanings: They are the actors' thoughts, feelings, and motivations, including out-of-awareness psychological states. As others have insisted before us, meanings can only be evoked in a person.14

Implications for current symbolic research Geertz's denigration of psychological analyses has fettered later theorists trying to deal with a central dilemma contributing to the current impasse in culture theory: how do we explain the force of culture (as both symbols and meanings) while acknowledging that culture (in whatever concrete forms it takes) does not make anyone do anything? This handicap is obvious in Ortner's (1989,1990) recent thoughtful attempts to resolve this dilemma along neo-Geertzian lines. Ortner rejects both a "hard/internal" position that socialization leads actors to '"do the cultural thing' under most circumstances" (1990:86) and

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a "soft/external" position that people generally act on the basis of universally understandable rational self-interest. Her compromise "internal/externar view is that not all of a culture's repertoire of symbolic frames make sense to all actors at all times... Yet at moments in the course of events the story seems to make sense of a person's circumstances and is thus appropriated and internalized .. . Yet the . . . loose fit, between the structure of the self and the structure of cultural models means that a cultural frame that has been taken into the self can also be put out again... (1990:89) Ortner's analysis makes an important contribution in highlighting the role of schemas that seem to be highly thematized across cultural domains and highly persistent across time in a society - in her case, a cultural "schema" (her word) 15 for fraternal and similar rivalries among Sherpa men that is embedded in Sherpa stories and rituals and motivates much Sherpa interpretation and action. The problem is that without a theory of the complex ways symbolic frames shape people's motives and understandings - of what it means for something to be "appropriated and internalized" Ortner cannot explain why some schemas are more motivating than others, why some are more thematized culturally than others, and why some are more historically persistent than others. She attributes historical persistence to the " 'freezing' of a variety of cultural practices into a particular narrative shape" (1990:8), an explanation that begs the question of why narratives are replicated. Instead of assuming that certain narratives will continue to be told, making the schemas they express continuously available, she might have asked why the values that are expressed in Sherpa stories about rivalry have remained compelling for Sherpa, leading them to repeat the narratives generation after generation. In her book-length treatment of the Sherpa case (1989), while adhering to the same argument about the relation between culture and the individual actor (see 1989:126-129 and 198), Ortner does provide an explanation for the sibling-rivalry schema. She (ibid.:33) suggests it emerges from "the contradictory nature of the brother relationship," which is "at once hierarchical (in the natural superiority and authority of elder over younger) and egalitarian (in the rule of equal inheritance)." She (ibid.:34) adds that "[A] major dimension of the Sherpa ethic of egalitarianism and achievement is a strong streak of competitiveness in the culture. Given the theoretical equality of all men, the fact that in reality some do better than others is a source of resentment and renewed striving." But this explanation seems to be missing something. For one thing, there are many societies, including our own, in which the natural authority of older siblings over younger coexists with equal inheritance (and, as in our society, with competitiveness). For another, there is something more than

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merely structural about the Sherpa preoccupation with sibling rivalry in particular and with rivalry more generally - in the "elaborate vocabulary pertaining to competition, envy, rivalry and so forth" that Ortner (ibid.:34) reports, in the preoccupation with competitive feelings and relations that she describes in Sherpa talk (ibid.:35), in the common Sherpa introspection about "not being able to stand seeing others get ahead" (ibid.). Something, dare we say, psychological. Pursuit of this line of thinking might have led Ortner to try to specify the dynamics behind the contradiction she identifies between hierarchy and equality. After all, we might reasonably expect a structural contradiction to translate into significant and sustained felt experience in order to have psychological consequences like the Sherpa preoccupation with sibling rivalry she describes. Suggestively, she comments in one place (1989:173) that, though inheritance is supposed to be equal, "in practice things do not always work out so evenly/* and goes on to describe how eldest sons are assured of respect and youngest sons of secure property, including the parental house, while middle sons* prospects for either status or property are not so secure. The youngest son, she (ibid.) explains, "is often the sentimental favorite of his parents.'* In trying to understand the rivalry brothers feel towards one another, can we ignore the way parents appear to discriminate among sons?16 An altogether different possibility, unmentioned by Ortner - but raised by Obeyesekere (1990:117-118) in the different South Asian context of Hindu Indian joint households - is that, in the often coerced arranged Sherpa marriages Ortner describes, in-marrying "stranger'* wives are moved to foster particularly intense symbiotic relationships with their first sons, thus setting up second and later sons for feelings of jealousy. Our more general point is that explaining Sherpa sibling rivalry requires a theory, whatever that theory proves to be, that addresses how people are socialized, the sorts of understandings and needs they gain as a result of this socialization, and the implications of this process for the way they go on to socialize their children. This, however, would take us deep into the "secret grotto" of psychology, entrance into which Geertz has proscribed (1973f:362).17 Significantly, Ortner frames her 1990 paper in the terms provided in Geertz's early "Religion as a cultural system": The lines are being drawn in the debate over the role of culture in history. On one side there is a set of authors denying culture anything other than a minor representational role. For them, culture operates largely as a set of markers of social phenomena (particularly as markers of group identity) but rarely as models for social phenomena, shapers of the social and historical process. On the other side there is a set of authors insisting that culture, in the form of complex templates/or thought, feeling, and action, plays a strong role not simply in representing the

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world but also in shaping its ongoing historical emergence. (1990:57; emphasis in original) But her attempts to reclaim the insights of the earlier Geertz are hobbled by the limits, imposed by the later Geertz, of what is sayable and thinkable. The following lines are telling:

One may even say that schemas are "in people's heads." Yet ultimately they get "into people's heads" and become part of people's repertoires for ordering, experiencing, and acting on the world, as a result of their enactment in real lived forms in stories that are told,ritualsthat are performed, kinship and political relations that are practiced. (1990:77) Why the scare quotes around "in peopled heads"? Probably because Ortner has not freed herself from the later Geertzian interpretivist dictum that cultural meanings are public - not only learned from public life, but strictly extrapersonal, outside of psyches. She starts from the assumption that culture is outside of persons, then has the difficulty of grappling with the fact that it is clearly inside persons as well. In sum, symbolic analysis needs to be supplemented by research that takes note of which symbols people attend to and which they ignore; varying ways a given set of symbols is interpreted by different social subgroups and over time (Roseberry 1989); and the socializing situations that lead some symbols to be motivating while others make no difference in what people do (Spiro 1987a).18 The simplistic model that publicly accessible symbols straightforwardly determine people's understandings could be called a "fax model" of internalization (Strauss 1992a): According to the fax model, extrapersonal messages are simply reproduced in people's psyches.19 Ortner's "loose fit" or "loosely structured relation" (1989:198) between extrapersonal cultural messages and individual actors' psychological states does not radically revise the fax model; it only introduces some noise into the system. The inadequacy of a fax model will be illustrated with examples from our own work in chapters 6, 7, and 8. Before that, however, we have a lot of other ground to cover, including a more recent version of the view that cultural meanings are public. Poststructuralism and postmodernism: culture and the self are constructed A new generation of anthropologists and allies from literary criticism, history and other disciplines20 share with the later Geertz and other symbolic anthropologists the method of analyzing the meanings of public "texts" and "performances" (e.g., movies, myths, architecture, and clothing) but reject what they see as the earlier generation's reification of culture

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and society. For this newer generation the concept of an internalized culture is suspect because it seems to imply static, tradition-bound actors who are out of place in the world today, if indeed they ever existed. This newer generation stresses that culture and the self are constructs. Theories that, like ours (or even Geertz's), speak of signs referring to something "deeper" (in our case, people's schemas; in Geertz's, a cultural ethos) are suspect because they seem to want to fix meanings and persons too much (cf. Jameson 1984). Culture is invented

There are two schools of research that could be summed up by the slogan, Culture is invented. Some stress the constructedness of anthropologists' (and other scholars') descriptions of culture. Others show that very often cultural identities and "traditions" are inventions of the participants for political or material advantage. We agree with these points but do not see how they threaten the concept of culture or cultural meanings that we have proposed here. In fact, our pared-down definition of culture as simply regularities in the world of public objects and practices as well as more-orless shared understandings learned from this public world fits very well with some postmodern critiques; we share their suspicion of culture as a superorganic, cohesive, bounded, timeless entity.21 Indeed, we have practiced for many years forms of ethnographic writing that present individual voices rather than descriptions of abstract systems (e.g., Quinn 1982). Cultural descriptions are constructions. Following Michel Foucault discussions of the forces shaping social scientific descriptions (e.g, 1977; see also Geertz 1973i:15), a number of analysts have argued persuasively that older descriptions of cultures overemphasized the stability, harmony, isolation, and uniformity of non-European peoples (Asad 1973; Clifford 1986c; Diamond 1974; Said 1978). According to these critics, whatever the motivation for earlier cultural research, it tended to support Western European imperial projects by painting images of people who were stuck in the past and needed outside assistance to become "unstuck" (Rosaldo 1986). Yet, as James Clifford argues in a critique of Edward Said's Orientalism while we should reject past descriptions of culture as static coherent wholes, it does not follow that we should ban cultural descriptions. If we are going to throw out one set of descriptions, they should be replaced by others that still allow us to talk about "collectively constituted difference" (Clifford 1988b:274).22 It is true that all representations are partial (we can never tell the whole truth), but it does not follow that all representations are false (that we are not telling part of the truth). And except for the lunatic fringe,23 most postmodernists would not deny that there are some regularities in people's

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practices, assumptions, and the institutions creating and created by these - if nowhere else, then in the regularities that produce hegemonic discourses (as Foucault's own work is dedicated to showing). Claimed identities are constructions. Closely related to the critique of past descriptions of culture are claims that "culture is invented" by players in the social game themselves, with identities put on or discarded, practices adopted or rejected, as needed to advance their own interests vis-a-vis other groups. Some of the authors advancing this argument start with Marxian rather than Foucauldian premises (and thus focus on social movements rather than intellectual discourses about movements), but all are postmodern in their stress on the interconnectedness of peoples and fluidity of identities. These authors would agree with Geertz, for example, that cultural meanings are socially established but would add that meanings are not established for all time but are constantly up for grabs as groups negotiate differences in their practices. In a well-known case study, Clifford presents this point of view clearly for the Mashpee Indians: Metaphors of continuity and "survival" do not account for complex historical processes of appropriation, compromise, subversion, masking, invention, and revival. These processes inform the activity of a people not living alone but "reckoning itself among the nations." The Indians at Mashpee made and remade themselves through specific alliances, negotiations, and struggles. It is just as problematic to say that their way of life "survived" as to say that it "died" and was "reborn." (1988a:338-9) He makes the same point more generally for everyone's culture: "Culture is contested, temporal, and emergent" (1986:19). Eric Wolf made similar claims earlier: In the rough-and-tumble of social interaction, groups are known to exploit the ambiguities of inherited forms, to impart new evaluations or valences to them, to borrow forms more expressive of their interests, or to create wholly new forms to answer to changed circumstances. (1982:387)24 We agree that groups do sometimes negotiate, exploit, reinterpret, borrow, and create cultural forms; they can also "invent traditions" (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) and "imagine communities" (Anderson 1983). However, that they do so does not rule out internalized schemas. Even when intent on reinventing themselves, people do not pluck new cultural forms out of the air; their imaginings and ^interpretations always rely on understandings learned and imbued with motivation. Culturally variable, internalized schemas shape both the ways people define what is in their self interest and the means they use to obtain those goals. This does not assume bounded cultural systems; learning can take place across national or ethnic borders as well as within them. But new forms are still always incorpor-

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ated, rejected, and remade in terms of previous schemas (as the movie Trobriand cricket makes clear; for other good examples see Bohannan 1966 and Hannerz 1992:238.) By focusing exclusively on conscious goal-striving theorists ignore the complexities of internalized beliefs and underestimate, especially, the force of out-of-awareness knowledge and feelings. How many of us vowed as adolescents that we would create new selves, only to find, as adults, that we are much more like our parents or peers than we had planned to be? Indeed, Clifford serves as his own best critic here: Perhaps this book goes too far in its concern for ethnographic presents-becomingfutures . . . its Western assumption that assertions of "tradition" are always responses to the new (that there is no real recurrence in history) may exclude local narratives of cultural continuity and recovery. I do not tell all possible stories. (1988a:15) Still, this set of critiques is right in pointing out that some accounts of culture have relied on the implicit assumption that we do not have to account for why people act in the culturally variable ways they do: People do "the cultural thing" because "their culture taught them to do it" (Fox 1985; Hannerz 1992). The notion of culture we favor is not subject to this criticism because in our sense, culture is not a being above and beyond people's schemas, practices, and the material causes and results of these things. In our framework it makes no sense to say "culture taught." Rather (as we will explain in chapters 4 and 5), people teach - both explicitly, through their words and consciously chosen actions, and implicitly, by their example - and the socially constructed world teaches as well, in the sense that by living in it, people acquire certain implicit understandings. The cultural understandings that are the result of these processes are often continuous historically but not necessarily so. New understandings can arise and can then serve as the basis for the production of new cultural forms. The self is constructed A much more radical critique of our approach comes from Foucauldian poststructuralists who argue that any talk of internalization relies on a particular notion of self- a being with inner states and processes - that is a flawed, ethnocentric construct and ignores the politics of identity construction (Gergen 1990). As Judith Butler puts it: "Pinner'* and "outer" make sense only with reference to a mediating boundary that strives for stability. And this stability, this coherence is determined in large part by cultural orders that sanction the subject and compel its differentiation from

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the abject (sic). Hence, "inner" and "outer" constitute a binary distinction that stabilizes and consolidates the coherent subject. When that subject is challenged, the meaning and necessity of the terms are subject to displacement. If the "inner world" no longer designates a topos, then the internalfixityof the self and, indeed, the internal locale of gender identity, become similarly suspect. The critical question is not how did that identity become internalized? as if internalization were a process or a mechanism that might be descriptively reconstructed. Rather, the question is: From what strategic position in public discourse and for what reasons has the trope of interiority and the disjunctive binary of inner/outer taken hold? (1990:134; emphasis in the original) Butler recommends instead that we look at identity as a performance. Gender, for example, is not a natural part of self but established through repeated performance of "signifying gestures" constrained by regulating discourses (in Foucault's sense) (Butler 1990:x; 1993:1). Butler draws her critique of internalization, and of person-centered studies, in part from Foucault (e.g., 1977). Foucault does not proscribe references to empirical individuals: "Of course, it would be ridiculous to deny the existence of individuals who write, and invent" (1972b:222).25 However, he writes about the "construction of subjects" and the creation of a certain kind of individuality during the Enlightenment in Western Europe: [Tjhe subject who knows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of powerknowledge and their historical transformations... To analyse the political investment of the body and the microphysics of power presupposes, therefore... that where knowledge is concerned - one abandons . . . the primacy of the subject. (1977:28). To sum up, it might be said that discipline creates out of the bodies it controls four types ofindividuality, or rather an individuality that is endowed with four characteristics: it is cellular [a separated unit]..., it is organic [endowed with natural functions] ..., it is genetic [continuously and progressively developing]..., it is combinatory [capable of being combined efficiently with other individuals in larger groupings], (1977:167; bracketed insertions our paraphrases of Foucault's descriptions)26 In The history of sexuality, volume I (1978) Foucault critiques, especially, the idea of the coherent subject: at any given time there are multiple social discourses "furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds" (1978:96).27 Implicit in this is that discourses do not represent realities: they create them. What is valuable in Foucault's work, and work (like Butler's) that he inspired, is the constant attention they draw to the political context of psychological development (to put their views into our terms - more on this shortly). Butler, for example, problematizes the prohibition of samesex desire that is so important in Freud's theory of the development of

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gender identity through resolution of the Oedipus Complex for boys and Electra Complex for girls (Butler 1990:57-72). Foucault forces us to pay attention to the mutual influence of social scientific descriptions and military, economic, pedagogical, reformatory, and other "disciplining" institutions, as well as the implications of all of these techniques and ideas for everyday modern life in Western Europe and the United States. Both writers have absorbed, and help demonstrate, the general post-Boasian cultural anthropological premise that much of what has been considered a biological inheritance is actually socially learned. Butler's (1990:128-141) emphasis, furthermore, on the "performative" aspect of sexual and gender identities, which implies the possibility of creating intermediate genders and sexualities or moving between them at different times, has been extremely helpful for people who reject selfidentification as all masculine, all feminine, all straight, or all gay. By extension, her theory has enormous practical value for other sorts of identities as well. Yet, as valuable as this de-essentializing move is for practice, it rests on very odd premises. If Foucauldians like Butler were saying only that we have to pay attention to the political context of psyche formation or identity performances, there would be no conflict between their views and ours. However, their view is much stronger than that: they would contend that in finding this area of agreement we have misrepresented their views because they do not see a person as something separate that is acted upon by social discourses but rather as a creation, construct, or "effect" of social discourses. In their terms society is not the context within which people develop. There is no real boundary between people (and their inner workings) and the social world outside them; any attempt to draw such a boundary itself serves as a means of trying to create normalized, disciplined selves. Butler claims, furthermore, that such boundaries are not drawn in societies or historical periods outside the modern West: "mundane operations of ordinary language - widely documented within anthropology. . .regard the subject/object dichotomy as a strange and contingent, if not violent, philosophical imposition" (1990:144; see also 1990:10). This is consistent with Foucault's claims that not only were new kinds of subjects, but also new kinds of ideas about individuals, created in the modern West. It is helpful for anthropologists to remember, when we suffer crises of confidence about the value of our studies of other societies, how much this research is relied upon by thinkers in otherfields.However, here we have to depart from the agreeable, both-sides-are-right stance we have taken so far in this chapter. This denial of the difference between the inner world of subjects and the outer world of objects goes too far; furthermore, the anthropological record does not support the idea that most people in the

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world see no difference between persons (and their inner thoughts, feelings, and motives) and the world outside them. In fact, denial of this difference is the more "strange and contingent'* philosophy. Note that the following discussion applies primarily to Butler's 1990 book, Gender trouble, rather than her 1993 book, Bodies that matter, which we will consider as it becomes relevant later. Are self/other and inner/outer distinctions not made in other societies? Although Butler does not cite any of the "widely documented" anthropological work to which she refers,28 it is true that a number of anthropologists have stated that the "self is conceived of as more autonomous from other people and outside influences in the modern West than in other times and places. The best known of such statements is Geertz's: The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures. (1983a:59)29 Catherine Lutz (1988) has contributed an influential, Foucauldian discussion of emotions on the Micronesian island of Ifaluk: As Clifford has noted of culture itself, emotion is "contested, temporal, and emergent" (1986:19). Once de-essentialized, emotion can be viewed as a cultural and interpersonal process of naming, justifying, and persuading by people in relationship to each other. Emotional meaning is then a social rather than an individual achievement - an emergent product of social life. (1988:5) Daily conversations on Ifaluk are pervaded by the assumption that people are oriented primarily toward each other rather than toward an inner world of individually constituted goals and thoughts. (1988:81)30 Yet, none of these authors shows that, in the societies where they did their research, the average person sees no boundary between themselves and the world or between the inner world of thoughts and feelings and the outer one of objects and others' actions. In fact, Lutz is very careful to say the opposite: Other cultural systems that cannot be characterized as having an ideology of individualism, such as that of the Ifaluk, also obviously talk about the emotions as located to some degree "inside" the person. It is clear that emotion words are everywhere used to talk about the relationship between the self and the world. (1988:223)

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Her data show this. On the one hand, Lutz found it was a faux pas in Ifaluk for her to say, "Do you want to come with me to get drinking water?"; she should have said "We'll go get water now, O.K.?" (1988:88). Her study does show that emotion statements are used by Ifaluk Islanders to make claims on each other and in Ifaluk it is assumed that one person's emotions are generated in response to another's. On the other hand, the Ifaluk use the term niferash, which she translates as "our insides" and is etymologically related to feral ("the center vein of a tree, through which sap rises" 1988:235,fn. 6), to refer to thought-feeling states (1988:92). A less commonly used term is nifitigosh, a literal translation of which is "inside our flesh" (1988:235, fn. 6). They also talk about human persons (yaremaf) and individual will/emotion/desire {tip-) (1988:87 and 93). M While Lutz emphasizes interpersonal emotion discourse but does not rule out inner emotional experiences, Dorinne Kondo goes further. Drawing on Butler's work, among others, Kondo challenges the "conventional trope [that] opposes 'the self as a bounded essence, filled with 'real feelings' and identity, to a 'world' or to a 'society' which is spatially and ontologically distinct from the s e l f (1990:33-4). She takes even Lutz to task for implying that the Ifaluk have selves who use words in certain typical ways (Kondo 1990:40-1). Kondo's own Japanese study, however, goes on to do the same sorts of linguistic analyses and shows that while her neighbors and coworkers in Tokyo assumed people to be highly interdependent, they still could distinguish self from other and inner thoughtfeelings from the outer world. Consider the following summary of the lectures she and some coworkers heard at a company-sponsored outing to an "ethics center":

The most relevant term in our discussion of the center's theories of selfhood . . . is kokoro, the heart, the seat of feeling and thought. To improve and polish the kokoro was our goal. The kokoro partakes of the energies of ki [breath or vital force]. These emotions and energies cannot be left on their own, to focus on themselves, lest the kokoro become intent on the expression of its own selfish desires, with no thought for others... ideally the desires of the kokoro and those of society should run parallel. The moral force of the ideal of sunao na kokoro emerge still more clearly in contrast to its opposite: hinekuretat i.e., twisted, eccentric, crochety, perverse, and prejudiced. These are the characteristics of someone who is self-indulgently anti-social, who allows egocentric quirks to disturb smooth social relations. Were people made aware of their social connectedness, they would also realize the inappropriateness of such selfish behaviors. (1990:104-5) Far from assuming the absence of a self/society distinction, these lectures imply that it takes great effort and discipline to bring self and society into harmony, effort that depends on training thoughts and feelings stated to be in "the heart." What can we conclude from all this? Anna Wierzbicka (1993) and

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Melford Spiro (1993) helpfully review cross-linguistic and cross-cultural data regarding the alleged peculiarity of the modern Western concept of the person. Wierzbicka concludes that while the Western concept of "self" (with its implications of complete autonomy, stability, and isolation) is culturally specific, every language has a way of referring to the "person" or "individual": [Tlhe presence in all languages of words meaning "someone" or "who" (with the same implications of "solidity," "unity," and "endurance" as the corresponding English words) testifies that in the folk model of ordinary speakers the world is indeed inhabited by "referentially solid" persons, with an "essential unity" and an "enduring nucleus," rather than by mere sums and swarms of participations. (1993:211) Similarly, while the English word "mind" does not have close semantic equivalents in other languages, there are words for the concepts covered by the English terms "thinking, "knowing," "feeling," and "wanting" in every language she knows of (1993:212). Spiro (1993) found that in many societies people value individualism less than it is valued in the United States, but none of the reports he analyzed shows that there are societies where people do not distinguish between oneself and others or between inner thought-feelings and the outer world. Unni Wikan (1987), for example, has criticized Geertz's description of Bali ethnopsychology, noting that Balinese see a "fundamental difference between the outer forms of conduct and the inner life of experience" (1987:348-9). Spiro also cites Ernestine McHugh's (1989) claim that "Geertz's characterization of the Western conception of the person 'would serve nicely to characterize the Gurung [of Nepal] conception of the person as expressed in beliefs about the sae [soul]'" (McHugh 1989:83; first bracketed insertion is ours, the second is McHugh's). Katherine Ewing (1991) states that the Pakistani women she interviewed, while "firmly embedded in interpersonal dependency relationships," (1991:132), still have "stable internal representations" (1991:157) differentiated from their representations of others. Mark Elvin's analysis of an ancient Chinese poem shows that, "The speaker has a clear inward vision of herself as a relatively coherent, enduring, and self-contained entity that makes decisions, carries responsibilities, is possessed by feelings, and in general has a fate, a fortune, and a history" (Elvin 1985:59). (All quoted in Spiro 1993:128-34.) Are ethnopsychologies right? In light of the preceding review, it is Butler's fascination with surfaces and rejection of inner depth ("... acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body" [ibid. 1990:136, emphasis in the original]; "If the body is not a 'being/ but a variable boundary, a surface . . ." [ibid. 1990:139]) that appears the more peculiar position cross-culturally and

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historically. Fredric Jameson has suggested that this theoretical discourse is a product of capitalism at the end of the twentieth century (e.g., the emphasis on advertising and other surface imagery in post-industrial societies): JTJhis is perhaps the moment to say something about contemporary theory, which has among other things been committed to the mission of criticizing and discrediting this very hermeneutic model of the inside and the outside and of stigmatizing such models as ideological and metaphysical. But what is today called contemporary theory... is also, I would want to argue, itself very precisely a postmodernist phenomenon . . . the poststructuralist critique of.. . what I will shortly call the' depth model, is useful for us as a very significant symptom of the very postmodernist culture which is our subject here. (1984:61/199la: 12) We should note that Butler's later Bodies that matter (1993) is less fascinated by surfaces and speaks instead of femaleness, maleness and intermediate possibilities as "a sedimented effect of a reiterative or ritual practice" (1993:10). In this work she does not mean sex as surface appearances only, because she "concedes" that they are "sexually differentiated parts, activities, capacities, hormonal and chromosomal differences" (1993:10). At the same time, however, she suggests that the very discourse conceding such differences contributes to a "further formation" of bodies (1993:10), an even stronger claim for discursive construction than might have been inferred from Gender trouble. We will turn to difficulties with this strong version of construction shortly. At this point Butler could retreat to the following position. Maybe the view of people as ontologically separable from their social environment and experiencing thought-feelings inside them is not so unusual crossculturally. Still, that does not make that view right. (For example, maybe she would argue that universally it exists to enforce power relations.) That, of course, would be a good point to make. After all, the argument that a position is right because nearly everyone believes it is no more valid than the argument that a position is wrong because very few people believe it. (Notice that the latter argument is used by both the politically correct left: "Your view is ethnocentric, hence is wrong" and the reactionary right: "Your view deviates from the norm in our society, hence is wrong.") However, there are a number of other difficulties with the strong stance Butler takes against internalization. Internal states are not necessarily innate or fixed. Butler claims that the inner (psyche, biological body)/outer (society, performance) distinction should be discarded, but, implicitly, she relies on this distinction in her assumption that inner = fixed and outer = fluid. In Gender trouble "internal," "interior," and "inner" are regularly linked to "fixity" for her: for example,"... the appearance of its own interior fixity" (1990:70) and "the internal fixity of the self" (1990:134). She appears to assume that the only theoretical choices are to state that one is born with one's identity fixed

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inside oneself or to claim that identity continually shifts on the "surface of the body." Those are not our only choices. As anthropologists have argued for most of the twentieth century, to a great extent identities are socially learned and cross-culturally variable yet are developed by building up psychological structures that give rise to powerful internal thoughts, feelings, and tendencies to act a certain way. For example, Foucaulfs discussion of the "inscription" of military, educational and other disciplines "on the bodies" of soldiers, school children, and others is entirely consistent with anthropologists* observations of learned, cross-culturally variable aspects of posture and movement and Bourdieu's (1977) and our discussion of the cognitive schemas produced by and producing such actions (see end of this chapter and the chapters to follow). It is true that some earlier anthropologists tended to assume a greater stability of identities in enculturated social actors than Butler would. In the rest of this book we will show how learning is consistent with both stability and a degree of flexibility and potential for change. Practice cannot signify without internalized schemas. Butler says gender is performed through repeated "signifying practices" (1990:144-145). In discussing the meaning of "meaning" for Geertz, however, we showed that it makes no sense to say that performances carry meanings "inside" them or are themselves equivalent to meanings or refer to meanings "in the air"; rather, they signify only by evoking internalized schemas. Discourses about desire (emotions, thoughts, the body, etc.) are not the same as desire (emotions, thoughts, the body, etc.). Anyone who has not read too much postmodern philosophy recognizes this from their own experience.32 Furthermore, analyzing dominant discourses and avoiding people's descriptions of their experiences allows Foucauldian discourse analysts to ignore evidence that might prove them wrong. Studying social discourses isolated from the meanings people give them can give a spurious plausibility to theories positing the demise of the meaning-seeking subject. Social discourses do not directly construct psychological realities. This is another version of the "fax" theory of culture acquisition that we criticized in talking about interpretivism.33 This is not confused, just wrong, as much of the rest of this book will undertake to show. For the time being, an example Spiro (1993) gives from his fieldwork in Burma will help make this point. Spiro went to Burma to learn how a society functions when people believe the Theravada Buddhist doctrine of Anatta (no self), which can be described as follows:

"Buddhism stands unique in the history of human thought in denying the existence of such a Soul, Self, or Atman. According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of the self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality." (Rahula 1959:51; quoted in Spiro 1993:119) After Spiro had spent a few months in Burma, however, he found that he

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had to change hisfieldworkplans because the Burmese villagers he talked to had not internalized the doctrine ofAnatta. This was based in part on their experience (they felt they had a self) and in part on their acceptance of a different religious doctrine: the idea of reincarnation. As they pointed out, why bother to avoid temptation in this life if there is no continuous self that will reap the reward in the next life? Spiro notes there is a Burmese couplet that expresses (and seemingly mocks) the Buddhist doctrine: "This body will enjoy, that body will suffer" (Spiro 1993:120). Thus, the villagers have adapted Buddhist teachings (reincarnation is internalized but anatta is ignored) to help motivate them to do therightthing (cf. Weber's 1958 description of the dissatisfaction of early Calvinists with the doctrine of predestination).34 Readers familiar with Butler's Bodies that matter are sure to point out that she leaves room there for effects of discourse that run counter to hegemonic norms (e.g., 1993:10,140) and thus she might not find Spiro's observations in contradiction with her own. Yet, lacking a theory of internalization, Butler cannot explain how dominant discourses and "reiterative orritualpractice" (1993:10) interact, leaving "gaps and fissures" for difference and change. Implications for current research on the constructedness of culture and self It is odd the way Foucauldians talk about the constructedness of "subjects" while ignoring the work of psychological anthropologists who have shown some of the subtle ways in which thoughts, feelings, and motives are shaped by power that runs all through society, as Foucault (1978) puts it, and is present not just in the state. In fact, substituting "culture" for "power" in Foucault's writings produces statements that look a great deal like Ruth Benedict's classic culture-and-personality theory in Patterns of culture (1959). Anthropologists interested in construction of cultural identities and products (rather than of selves) are similarly disadvantaged if they never look beyond such aspects of extrapersonal culture as linguistic structures, rituals, or the mass media. For different reasons in each case - slow evolution in the case of language, the aim of vivifying dominant values in the case of mostrituals,the need to appeal to a wide audience in the case ofmass media texts of this sort tend to be conservative. While we canfindsome examples of inventive performances by studying these things, many more examples and much more insight into the forms such invention takes would be accumulated by talking to people and observing their everyday actions to see how they selectively internalize or read new meanings into texts that would seem

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on the surface to simply reproduce dominant social structures (e.g., Radway 1984; Willis 1990). Moreover, without a model of how people learn and act on what they have learned, it is very hard to explain why some sorts of cultural inventions or creativejuxtapositions occur and others do not or why some "normalizing** practices (as Foucault puts it) are resisted and others are not. At its worst (typically in the hands of non-anthropologists practicing cultural studies), ignoring subjective meanings leads to ethnographic works that merely display exotic practices or surprising juxtapositions of the exotic with the analyst's own (nonexotic?) practices. Thus, even though many practitioners of this approach denounce "exoticizing" or "Othering," their practice tends to have the very effect they denounce. An egregious example is the film Reassemblage (Trinh 1982), which consists of lengthy footage of scenes from a Senegalese village. Guidance on this village tour - which focuses on flies, dead animals, naked breasts, and other exotica - is provided by a series of quirky voice-over remarks by Trinh Min-ha that are unrelated to the scenes shown, the villagers themselves remaining voiceless and unrepresented. While Trinh*s aim may be to question the authority of the ethnographicfilmmaker(Rice 1993), she ends up producing a typically postmodern spectacle that objectifies its subjects to a much greater extent than does the ordinary ethnographic film. Some descriptions go too far in the other direction, projecting onto the people they study the moral exhaustion and rootlessness that is probably more descriptive of postmodern theorists than of the subjects of this theorizing.35 Again, such attribution is a danger if one analyzes the productions of cultural elites, such as advertising or architecture, without finding out the meanings of those things for their consumers (Strauss, 1997). Some anthropologists in this camp recognize this. George Marcus and Michael Fischer, for example, praise psychoanalytic ethnographies such as Robert Levy*s Tahitians: mind and experience in the Society Islands (1973) on the same grounds we would: If Geertz seems to suggest a direct relation between public forms and emotional dynamics, Levy suggest a division between public surfaces and private behavior. Geertz is in the tradition of Durkheim (ritual or public form helps generate sentiment) and of philosophers George Herbert Mead and Gilbert Ryle (there is no private language; all consciousness is intersubjective, mediated by public communicative forms). Levy is in in the tradition of Freud (concentrating on layered notions of personhood and the self), yet he is able to establish the shared intersubjective nature of the most private behavior. Locating cultural organization at the level of personal emotional expression and self-definition is thus one of Levy's main achievements. (Marcus and Fischer 1986:50)

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Oddly, three pages earlier, Marcus and Fischer laud Geertz's "Person, time and conduct in Bali" for ignoring the intrapersonal realm: "The most appealing and effective aspect of Geertz's essay is that he does not resort to discussions of psychology, even though he is certainly talking about 'the Balinese mind"' (ibid.:47; emphasis added). Yet it is precisely Levy's "resort to . . . psychology" that enables him to produce the innovative ethnography Marcus and Fischer admire! Historical materialism: people can resist cultural meanings Concern with the changeability of ideas and practices typifies not only writers in thefieldof postmodern cultural studies, but also many contemporary historical materialists. Criticisms of psychological approaches come even from anthropological historical materialists who, unlike an earlier generation of Marxists, acknowledge the force of cultural meanings. Hegemony and cultural meanings For a long time most historical materialists - in anthropology as well as other disciplines - hewed to Marx's emphasis on the means and social relations of production and eschewed the "superstructural" realm of idea systems. Structural Marxists such as Althusser who were influenced by Levi-Strauss abandoned that stance beginning in the 1960s (as the Frankfurt School influenced by Freud had before them), and the shift toward acknowledging the importance of cultural meanings accelerated with Raymond Williams's (1977) promotion of (his version of) Antonio Gramsci's (1971) discussions of "hegemony."36 In Williams's terms, hegemony is

a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our sense and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values . . . It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society... It is, that is to say, in the strongest sense a "culture," but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes. (1977:110) In other words, some (all?) cultural meanings are part of a system of exploitation. In recent years, it has become increasingly common for anthropological historical materialists to grant cultural meanings a significant role in social action.37 Even in this intellectual environment, some anthropological Marxists are uncomfortable with theories of socialization that would explain how "shaping perceptions," "meanings and values," or a "sense of reality" are

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learned. For example, Richard Fox (1985) approvingly quotes Williams's definition of hegemony and acknowledges, in a later work (Fox 1989), that while his main concern is cultural innovation, "We also know that cultural understandings are compelling and condition human intention and action" (1989:266). Yet he adds disapprovingly, "Even in the recent guise of cultural scenarios, culture is taken to set the terms of social action in advance of individual cultural practice. Similarly, the individual is often seen as an assemblage of personality traits set in childhood socialization and subsequently compelling the adult's life-course" (1989:274). Rejecting both the images of individuals as "butterflies,flyingcarefree above their culture" and as "ants, grounded by the weight of cultural tradition" (1989:266), Fox argues that the best image is that of the grasshopper: "There are individual leaps, notflights,of cultural innovation, but they are of short duration, and they are propelled by bouncing off the resistance offered by the dominant cultural beliefs" (1989:272). In another example, Eleanor Leacock (1985) makes a laudable effort to develop a Marxist theory of individuals, arguing (exactly as we do in our introduction) that "although the societal is the more inclusive level, the psycho-social is not a mere response to social conditions but involves a specific dialectic of its own" (1985:79). However, in seeking a framework within which to investigate that dialectic she turns to work in symbolic anthropology, rejecting the possibilities offered by psychological anthropology, which she sees as currently too fragmented and atheoretical and formerly too dominated by a culture-and-personality approach she excoriates: "Personality and culture anthropology was functionalist to an extreme; all was primarily governed by internalized values; change, extrinsic to society, was reduced to happenstance; and resistance to exploitative systems no more than personal deviance" (1985:71).38 In response, we agree that work by culture-and-personality theorists in the middle of this century as well as some of the work on "cultural scenarios" now (Fox does not cite anyone, so we are not sure which work he has in mind) does paint an overly static picture of individual personalities and cultures. One of the goals of this book is to theorize socialization in a way that explains both change in individuals' understandings during their life and change in dominant cultural understandings historically. Theories of socialization are not necessarily functionalist, even if mid twentieth-century versions tended to be - along with most anthropological theories of that time. We think it important, however, to preserve what is valuable in functionalism. As we discussed earlier regarding arguments that "culture is invented," neither individuals nor societies constantly or completely remake themselves. Fox's whimsical image of the grasshopper "bouncing

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off the resistance offered by the dominant cultural beliefs" can be misleading if we forget that while human grasshoppers can make deliberate choices to bounce off certain cultural beliefs, the motivation to hop and the path of their travel will depend on internalized schemas of themselves and the world they occupy. Sometimes these schemas lead to a reproduction of current power structures. Not to acknowledge this centripetal tendency or understand it is particularly problematic politically, because it gives rise to the unrealistic expectation that it is easy to bring about fundamental social change (as Fox 1989 acknowledges and illustrates with the case study of Gandhi's only partially successful attempts at cultural innovation). Equally, cultural schemas can motivate action that leads to change. Thus we question the assumption made by Williams, Fox, and possibly Leacock, that all culture is a "weight" that drags people down and reinforces the power of the dominant class. We see in this metaphor an echo of the Enlightenment's rejection of religion and the other ruling ideologies of the time (cf. Marx's 1978:595 reference to "the traditions of all the dead generations"). Once we appreciate that "culture" is merely a name for all of the learned schemas that are shared by some people, as well as all of the diverse things from which these schemas are learned, we can see that even in their most creative and progressive actions, people are culturally motivated. The question is not, when is action culturally compelled and when does it escape culture and by how much? Rather, we should ask questions such as: what are the diverse experiences from which people gain their interpretive frameworks? Do some experiences create schemas that challenge the schemas gained from other experiences? On which schemas do people act in a given situation and why? 39 Implications for current studies of resistant consciousness One major aim of some anthropologists who are historical materialists is to explain and describe the "consciousness" - i.e., understanding of social inequalities and of their place in the social structures reproducing those inequalities - of some group of people. This is a topic, obviously, to which psychological anthropologists can contribute a great deal and any attempt that omits their contribution is likely to miss the mark. This can be seen from one of the best such recent attempts, Jean and John Comaroffs discussion of hegemony, ideology, consciousness, and culture in the Introduction to Of revelation and revolution, volume I (1991), The Comaroffs note that it is typical of Western social scientists to speak of consciousness as if it is either present or absent. They suggest instead that there is

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a chain of consciousness - . . . a continuum whose two extremes are the unseen an the seen, the submerged and the apprehended, the unrecognized and the cognized . . . Between the conscious and the unconscious lies the most critical domain of all for historical anthropology and especially for the analysis of colonialism and resistance. It is the realm of partial recognition, of inchoate awareness, of ambiguous perception, and sometimes, of creative tension: that liminal space of human experience in which people discern acts and facts but cannot or do not order them into narrative descriptions or even into articulate conceptions of the world; in which signs and events are observed, but in a hazy, translucent light; in which individuals or groups know that something is happening to them butfindit difficult to put theirfingerson quite what it is. It is from this realm, we suggest, that silent signifiers and unmarked practices may rise to the level of explicit consciousness, of ideological assertion, and become the subject of overt political and social contestation - or from which they may recede into the hegemonic, to languish there unremarked for the time being. As we shall see, it is also the realm from which emanate the poetics of history, the innovative impulses of the bricoleur and the organic intellectual, the novel imagery called upon to bear the content of symbolic struggles. (1991:29) The first pole of this continuum - that of extreme lack of awareness - the Comaroffs correlate with hegemonic representations, those representations of the world that "are so habituated, so deeply inscribed in everyday routine, that they may no longer be seen as forms of control - or seen at all" (1991:25). At the other pole of this continuum-complete awareness are ideological representations, the explicitly articulated values and beliefs of a particular social group (1991:24). This model is very suggestive.40 We should, indeed, expect ideas that are explicitly laid out in public representations (e.g., a speech about free enterprise) to be easier for individuals to bring to awareness and articulate than those that are only implicitly represented in symbols and institutions (such as the markets for stocks and bonds). Yet, too much is glossed over in this scheme. Much like Bourdieu's opposition between what is said and unsaid in society (dogma vs. doxa), which we will criticize in the final section of this chapter, several different cognitive states are lumped together at the hegemonic end where power is naturalized and in the "liminal space" in between hegemony (uncontested) and ideology (contested ideas). These different cognitive states have very different potentials for fuller consciousness and eventual (individual and social) change. Thus, at the hegemonic end, there is a clear difference between what is unsaid because it is unknown (e.g., ideas and practices of a very different society); what is unsaid because it is very well known, but as a motor habit or image rather than as a set of propositions; and what is unsaid because it would require new connections among scattered bits of knowledge people have. Let us take as an example of the first, most non-Native Americans'

40

Background

ignorance of the role of the berdache in many Native American societies. An example of the second might be the typically unstated, although well-known, expectation in late twentieth-century North America that professional women should wear subtle makeup and have short, wellgroomed hair. An example of the third would be the way power and authority are compatible with male sexuality but not with female sexuality for a large majority of middle-class North Americans today. In the first case there is no representation of these ideas in some people's schemas: unless they have taken cultural anthropology courses and read, for example, Walter Williams's The spirit and the flesh (1986), most nonNative Americans (and probably many contemporary Native Americans too) simply have no beliefs whatsoever about berdaches. Regarding the second example - that of the way professional women are supposed to look from the neck up - we would guess that a majority of North American adults have this schema, but it would come to awareness as an image, rather than a statement. This schema would be one of many that underlie the third example of an unsaid: that female sexuality is considered incompatible with power and authority by many contemporary middle-class North Americans. Other schemas that specify parts of this idea include those representing professional women's dress codes; those giving prototypical images of men in different positions of authority; those suggesting that popular girls in high school should not sound too sure of themselves in class; and those representing the appearance of the type of women who is supposed to be sexually attractive (schemas that are somewhat different for each person, but still similar in many respects for large numbers of men and women at any given time). Like the second sort of unsaid knowledge, this third sort is cognitively represented - but in this case not as one set of strongly interconnected cognitive elements but scattered among a large number of schemas that may be only loosely connected to each other. In thefirstcase people trying to create social change can bring the unsaid to awareness by introducing new ideas into popular discourse, but these ideas are unlikely to be accepted if people see no way to connect them to the knowledge they have. The second sort of unsaid knowledge is the easiest to bring to consciousness, but the result is likely to be an isolated bit of awareness that affects only an isolated bit of behavior. For example, in the movie Working girl, the central character is a secretary (played by Metanie Griffith) who wants her male bosses to stop seeing her as a sex object and start taking her ideas seriously. After she observes a new boss, a woman, Griffith's character cuts her long hair and scrubs off her heavy makeup. This was easy for her to do, but it does not change much. It is in the realm of the third sort of unsaid knowledge that there is the greatest potential for fundamental cognitive and behavioral change. Pointing out

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connections between previously isolated bits of people's assumptions can create both greater awareness of those bits and new cognitive links among them, the result of which will be a much more frequently accessed schema that becomes increasingly salient. This is what the consciousness-raising technique of "naming" does: by giving a wide-ranging set of practices a single label (e.g., "sexual harassment") one is not so much making it possible to say what could not be said but rather creating a set of links among previously disconnected memories and assumptions. This will tend to bring the whole set to awareness when one part is experienced. When what was unsaid becomes said in the first case this is likely to produce a distanced, "Huh, that's interesting" reaction; in the second a smile or nod of recognition; but in the third it may evoke that excited "aha!" that comes from feeling one has an important new insight. Similarly, there are different sorts of ambiguous, contradictory mental representations that lie in the space between the ComaronV poles of hegemony and ideology. In chapter 8 Claudia Strauss discusses several possibilities, including horizontally compartmentalized schemas (schemas deriving from conflicting social representations-that can come to a person's awareness with equal ease, but are activated in different contexts); vertically compartmentalized schemas (schemas deriving from conflicting social representations, one of which is more readily articulated by the person than the other and which are activated in different contexts); and integrated schemas (ones deriving from conflicting social representations, but which are interlinked in the person's cognitive network, hence activated together). Alexei Yurchak (1997) offers another possibility: a divided awareness in which, like Strauss's horizontally compartmentalized schemas, each can be voiced, but unlike Strauss's examples, there is subliminal awareness of the conflict between the parts that produces psychic discomfort. This divided awareness, he claims, was widespread in the 1970s and early 1980s in the former Soviet Union, with a large majority of the population expressing (and to a certain extent feeling) both allegiance to the established order in official settings and cynicism about it when they were with their friends. Critiquing the Comaroffs' model, he argues that this sort of divided awareness does not lead to resistance (in this case, because people do not imagine that any resistance could possibly succeed), but it does produce apathy and withdrawal that are debilitating to the established order. Obviously, there are many other cognitive possibilities as well, including psychic conflict of the sort described by Quinn (1992). This suggests that work combining psychological anthropology and critical theories of consciousness would be very fruitful (as it was, for example, in Mintz's 1960 book Worker in the cane, which combined materialist and psychological explanations of one Puerto Rican worker's life choices).41

42

Background Cognition in practice/discourse pragmatics: meanings depend on context

Afinalset of objections to theories of internalization has been raised by some of our fellow cognitive and linguistic anthropologists, including some of our closest colleagues and interlocutors. The concern raised by these theorists is that a focus on internalization ignores the way actions are shaped through ongoing interactions of people with each other and their material environment in the course of action.42 Within cognitive anthropology this approach ("cognition in practice*' or "situated cognition" or "activity theory")43 is sometimes contrasted with our "cultural models" approach. Meanings and context Most of these authors have no objection in principle to studies of culture in persons. Edwin Hutchins, for example, states very clearly that his studies of the way cognition is distributed among people and cultural artifacts is not meant to "dissolve the individual and the psychology of the individual" but only to "connect what is in the person to what is around the person" (1996:64, 65).44 Alessandro Duranti, while giving "situated discourse" central priority in the ethnography of speaking, also states that the ethnography of speaking "studies . . . how speech is related to and is constructed by . . . speakers' assumptions, values, and beliefs about the world" (1988:210). We hope it is obvious that an adequate ethnography of speaking would have to do this, because the context alone is not sufficient to determine people's action. For our part, we agree wholeheartedly that it is important to look at situated cognition: Interactions between people and their material environment or human peers can indeed lead to results that are surprising (e.g., Holland 1992a, 1992b). We have also found very helpful, and will apply in chapters 5 and 6, activity theory's attention to mediating structures that ease routine tasks. Some followers of Wittgenstein might be concerned, however, that even to speak of "internalized cultural schemas" as we do is problematic because it suggests that the learner is programmed with a dictionary or encyclopedia of clearly defined signs accompanied by context-independent rules of application, leaving no room for meaning to be affected by context. Wittgenstein provides insightful discussions of why such a model is utterly inadequate to account for the way people use, and learn from, most signs. We agree with him, and in chapter 3 we present an alternative model of internalization that can accommodate the complexities of social learning and the dependence of meanings on the context. We suspect that many of the objections that have been raised to meaning as a psychological state determined in part by mental structures are responses to older

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cognitive models of knowledge representation. With connectionist models it is much easier to see how meaning in our sense is completely compatible with context effects. In fact, one of the virtues of connectionist models is that they explain how people deal with unforeseen events. In the third chapter we will also show that meanings are not necessarily conscious; to say that "meanings shape action" is not to assume that people consciously deliberate about what to do most of the time. Implications for current research on situated meanings Older models of both culture and cognition may be responsible for more extreme statements, such as the following characteristic remark of Jean Lave's: [Tjt has become increasingly clear that "culture" and "cognition" are not the analytic units whose relations need clarification in order to proceed [with the study of everyday cognitive activity]. Certainly neither one is an element in "the activity of persons-acting in setting," the unit of analysis adopted here. (1988:177)45 But is neither an element? Lave's groundbreaking studies are useful in emphasizing, for one example, the degree to which shoppers rely on the packaging of food products and their organization on supermarket shelves to simplify their shopping. In one typical micro-analysis she describes a shopper who, suspicious that a wrapped chunk of cheese has been mispriced, avoids doing mental mathematics by simply comparing the price of that chunk with that of another, similarly-sized, one out of the same barrel. On the other hand, there is much else about shopping behavior that Lave leaves unexplained, such as - to continue her own example - why some shoppers habitually choose organic goat's cheese, some American cheese, and others brie. Shopping behaviors such as these depend on cultural understandings (about, say, gourmet cooking or health foods) that shoppers bring with them into the store and which, with sufficiently subtle methods, could be elicited in discussions held outside of the store. Are not such assumptions, too, "an element in 'the activity of persons-acting in setting,'" one that is just as significant a component of shopper's behavior as the store setting? By ruling out culture and cognition as inappropriate units of analysis, Lave's model leaves out this half of the "constitutive order" (1988:177ff.) and forecloses the possibility of analyzing what people bring with them from context to context and interaction to interaction, as it must be analyzed, in its own distinctive terms. And as useful as Hutchins's studies of cognition distributed over multiple actors and material artifacts have been, we must not lose sight of the fact that distributed cognition within a person works differently than distributed cognition

44

Background

among several people or between them and artifacts. Clearly, both learned dispositions and ongoing interactions are important; our emphasis on the former here is a necessary step toward a more encompassing model that incorporates both. Toward a more fruitful resolution: Bourdieu It is not enough to criticize: Our goal is to present a way of modeling internalization that will yield a better understanding of cultural meanings and social action. We end this chapter with a discussion of Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a theory of practice (1977), because his model is similar to ours in some crucial respects. While representatives of each of the positions we described have drawn on Bourdieu's insights (e.g., Duranti 1988; Fiske 1992; Fox 1985; Lave 1988; Ortner 1984, 1990; and Rosaldo 1989), all of them have missed his central insight into the importance of internalization. A fresh look at his arguments will set us on a more productive path toward a resolution of the dilemmas in current culture theory. Bourdieu begins Outline (1977) by declaring the need to provide an alternative to two extremes of social theory: theories in which action is simply the mechanical enactment of learned rules or unconscious structures versus theories in which action can be utterly unconstrained by social conditioning (in the shorthand of recent social theory, the structure/agency dispute). Bourdieu cites British structural-functionalism and Levi-Strauss's structuralism as examples of the first approach and Sartre's existentialism as an example of the second. Bourdieu's alternative is not to say (as does Ortner 1990) that sometimes humans enact learned structures and sometimes we are "free." Instead, he argues, we are always constrained by the dispositions learned from our experiences, but our habitual responses rest on knowledge that is not learned from or cognitively represented as hard-and-fast rules. Our internalized (in his words, "incorporated" or "embodied") knowledge is less specific than rules because it is learned through everyday practice. Everyday practice is somewhat variable from one day to the next but still tends to remain within the boundaries of what is culturally acceptable. The knowledge acquired from practices of this sort is thus not highly precise, but rather consists of more general categorical relations that can be realized in different ways, depending on the context. This form of internalization enables people to react flexibly to new contexts instead of enacting the same practices over and over again. This imprecise knowledge Bourdieu calls habitus (to distinguish it from invariant "habits"): "systems of durable, transposable dispositions . . . principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively 'regu-

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45

lated' and 'regular' without in any way being the product of obedience to rules . . . " (1977:72; also 82-3). That "habitus" refers to the internalized results of cultural experience is particularly clear from lines such as "The habitus is . . . laid down in each agent by his earliest upbringing . . . " (1977:81). Thus, Bourdieu (unlike some of his followers) does not contrast practice with learned understandings; instead, he contends that we cannot understand practice without rethinking the nature of learned understandings. One of the most important parts of Outline is Bourdieu's discussion of the way a person's habitus is structured by his or her experiences. Although he also discusses learning from explicit precepts and "structural exercises" (such as games) he places the greatest stress on "apprenticeship through simple familiarization" (1977:88) with regular patterns of associations enacted in everyday life. Apprenticeship by familiarization is nicely illustrated by his example of the way Kabyle children can learn from the arrangement of objects and space in the typical Kabyle house (1977:90-1). The child is not taught a rule: "Always put the loom on the wall facing the east" or "Light and heat are male" for example, but assimilates a general pattern: looms and other culturally valued objects are usually found in the part of the house that faces east and the objects men typically use are almost always found in the brightest, warmest parts of the house. To put it in the terms we set out at the beginning, the habitus (intrapersonal knowledge) is structured by objects and practices in culture learners' public environments (the extrapersonal realm). This is just one side of the interaction between the intrapersonal and extrapersonal realms, for the habitus in turn structures public culture as people act, creating new (or recreating old) objects and practices. In Bourdieu's theory, the tendency is toward social reproduction. However, the overall tendency toward reproduction is accomplished through individual actions that are never exactly the same from one context to the next because they are enactments of dispositions themselves acquired from varying practices. Our account is similar to Bourdieu's in several respects. We agree that a close examination of internalization is the key to explaining both the centrifugal and centripetal forces of culture, as well as advancing beyond old dichotomies of structure and agency.46 We, too, will argue that internalized cultural knowledge typically consists offlexiblyadaptive understandings, rather than unvarying rules, (Understandings as we model them, however, are not as reductive as the dualistic classification schemes that Bourdieu's own habitus, steeped as it is in Levi-Straussian structuralism, leads him to emphasize.) Finally, we share with Bourdieu the view that social life is a process of interaction between these imprecise private understandings and the public objects and events which are both their

46

Background

source and product. There are several other respects, however, in which our account diverges from his. First, it is never clear in Outline whether Bourdieu is setting forth a universal theory of the role of habitus or a theory that applies mainly to nonliterate societies without formal schooling (1977:89, 186). One of the greatestflawsof Outline is that too often he comes down on the latter side, ignoring the fact that in all societies by far the greatest proportion of what we know is not cognized in the form of rules.47 Second, Bourdieu lays down rather hard-and-fast lines between the "universe of discourse'* and the "universe of the undiscussed" (1977:168) assuming, at several points in Outline, that the unsaid is unsayable - for both cognitive and social reasons. He believes that the knowledge embodied in the habitus is unsayable because "schemes are able to pass from practice to practice without going through discourse or consciousness" (1977:87). This does not follow, however. Learning by modeling, which may occur largely out of awareness, is not forever after barred from awareness. While it is true and significant that such knowledge tends to remain backgrounded in consciousness, it is entirely possible to foreground it and describe it: Novelists and the authors of humorous "how to" texts (how to dress like a preppy, act like a real man, be a Southerner, etc.), among others, recognize and verbalize this typically unspoken knowledge all the time. Nor is this an ability limited to "advanced" societies. Throughout Outline, Bourdieu constantly cites or refers to traditional Kabyle proverbs and informant commentary that show a very clear recognition of what, a paragraph or so earlier, he had labeled unconscious knowledge (1977:8, 94, 98). Furthermore, the inability to recognize what one knows is consistently confused in his account with the social impropriety of discussing what one knows, particularly the impropriety in Kabyle and other precapitalist societies of discussing the potential material benefits of status maneuvers.48 Although in some places he claims that these benefits are not seen as such (1977:191,192,196), elsewhere he indicates that such benefits may well be recognized by Kabyle men and women and even discussed privately, although not alluded to in public discourse (1977:12,43,50,198, n.7).49 Third, while Bourdieu provides an insightful discussion of one aspect of centrifugality - flexible responses to new contexts that are similar to but not exactly the same as previously encountered situations - he underestimates other centrifugal effects such as change over time. One of the key sections of Bourdieu's Outline of a theory of practice (1977) is "The dialectic of objectification and embodiment" in chapter 2 (1977:87-95). This section makes the same point we are trying to make in this book: extrapersonal culture is the product of intrapersonal culture, that is, of

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minds structured a certain way, just as intrapersonal culture is structured by extrapersonal culture. Yet, in this section Bourdieu overstates the extent to which these will reflect each other: "the mental structures which construct the world of objects are constructed in the practice of a world of objects constructed according to the same structures . . . The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects which is itself but an endless circle of mutually reflecting metaphors" (1977:91). Bourdieu makes the same point for rituals, customary law, and other social practices and institutions. This metaphor of reflection greatly oversimplifies processes of cultural production - even in the preliterate nonurbanized societies where Bourdieu thought the dialectic of objectification and embodiment particularly held.50 As we will show in the next section, the same theory of cognition that accounts for the centripetal effects that Bourdieu emphasized will also allow us to account for centrifugal effects that he largely ignored in his overemphasis on the unchanging mutual reflection of mental structures and extrapersonal structures (e.g., ibid.: 91). Fourth, while Bourdieu has been an influential proponent of "embodied" knowledge, his use of "embodiment" ignores the role of emotion and motivation in action. His actors have gut reactions, but in his theory of practice it does not seem to matter how much they care about what they are observing and doing. Thus, he ignores the role of motivation and emotion as forces for either reproduction and uniformity or diversity and change, as well as the role of deliberate instruction, which (as we will show in chapter 4) sometimes has the purpose of arousing strong feelings to make lessons memorable.51 This last weakness is related to a further problem with Bourdieu's theory. He seems to assume that familiarity with social practices is sufficient for acquisition of their regularly associated features. We will argue, on the basis of psychological and neurologicalfindings,that the process is more complicated than that: Not all regularities in practice are remembered equally well because the learner's motivational state makes a difference in what learners pay attention to and how well their experience "sticks." Finally, for Bourdieu, actors' intentions are mostly or entirely epiphenomenal (1977:76-77; 1984:474). We disagree. Intentions can giveriseto deliberate problem-solving thought that builds upon but may transcend the workings of the habitus.52 This kind of problem solving sometimes leads to radical cultural innovation, other times to new ways of reproducing existing social structures. In other words, we believe Bourdieu's theory of the habitus is promising, but not completely satisfactory.53 In the following chapters we will present an alternative theory that is similar in many ways to his, but avoids the problems we have just described.

Schema theory and connectionism

We have said that meanings are based on cultural schemas,1 schemas that have come to be shared among people who have had similar socially mediated experiences.2 What are schemas? To illustrate what schemas are and how they work, imagine two television commercials for different brands of beer. In one, the scene is a party filled with attractive and well-mannered men and women in their late twenties or early thirties. The other ad features potbellied lumberjacks joking loudly. You, the viewer, immediately make some assumptions about these people. You might assume that thefirstgroup of people are middle-to-upper-middle class, probably college educated, while the second are probably not college educated. Based on these assumptions, you have some guesses about the kinds of beer they are touting: a somewhat more expensive brand in thefirstcommercial than in the second. The very words we used to describe these commercials probably led you to some further assumptions. You no doubt assumed that the lumberjacks were men. You may even have a picture of what clothing they were wearing (flannel shirts and pants held up with suspenders). Even if you did not arrive at these particular assumptions, surely you had some interpretations - some meanings - that were not contained in the information we gave you. On what basis did you arrive at your interpretations? The description we gave elicited your schemas for lumberjacks, for class differences, for beers or for consumer items, generally, and for television commercials. If you know what a lumberjack is, your schemas contained information about the general appearance and schooling of a typical one as well as the education and income of typical "attractive and well-mannered" people in their late twenties and early thirties. (Including, possibly, the sense that even if the current income of the latter group is not high, they probably aspire to an upper-middle-class lifestyle.) You may have a very detailed beer schema that distinguishes different brands by taste and price, but if not, at the very least (if you live in a society with a free-market economy), you have a general schema about consumer items that includes the information that goods usually come in different brands intended for different "market 48

Schema theory and connectionism

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niches," and that one of the functions of advertisements like television commercials is to arouse the interest of members of the relevant group of potential consumers. Somehow all of this information was readily available, without any effort on your part, and led you to interpretations that took you beyond the information given. This is what schemas do. The use of "schema" in this sense comes from a tradition of work in the cognitive sciences that can be traced back through Jean Piaget and Frederic Bartlett to Immanuel Kant.3 The essence of schema theory in the cognitive sciences is that in large measure information processing is mediated by learned or innate mental structures that organize related pieces of our knowledge. As we will explain shortly, schemas, as we think of them, are not distinct things but rather collections of elements that work together to process information at a given time. Cognitive scientists have traditionally used the term "schema" to refer to generic knowledge of any sort, from parts to wholes, simple to complex, concrete to abstract. Thus, there can be aflannel-shirtschema as part of a lumberjack schema, a beer schema and an alcoholic beverages schema, a television commercial schema and a postindustrial economy schema. A great many schemas are cultural schemas - you share them with people who have had some experiences like yours, but not with everybody. Another name for cultural schemas (especially of the more complex sort) is cultural models (D'Andrade 1995; D'Andrade and Strauss 1992; Holland and Quinn 1987).4 Some published examples of cultural models are Trobriand Islanders' models of land tenurerights(Hutchins 1980); Mexican men's and women's expectations about the gendered life course (Mathews 1992); and US Americans* models of romance (Holland and Skinner 1987), marriage (Quinn 1982, 1987, 1991, 1996, chapters 6 and 7 in this book), and the environmental movement (Kempton, Boster, and Hartley 1995). Schemas sometimes reconstruct our memories of past events,5 determine the meanings we impart to ongoing experience, and give us expectations for the future. Schemas also fill in missing or ambiguous information: just think of everything that can be left unsaid in any conversation because speakers assume their interlocutors share their schemas. Without these learned expectations regarding the way things usually go, it would be impossible to get anything done, plan for the future, or even interpret what is happening; and without schemas that were at least partly shared, social interaction would be impossible as well. While schemas are a necessary part of most action, they are not always good. Negative stereotypes are one sort of schema. Like any other kind of schema, negative stereotypes sometimes shape our interpretation of the present, memories of the past, and anticipations of the future.6 For example, if you assumed that attractive and well-mannered people in their

50

Background

late twenties or early thirties are likely to be college educated, do you also hold a negative stereotype of people without college educations as being less attractive or less well-mannered? (And if we misjudged your assumptions about this, what misleading schemas might we hold about the typical reader of this book?) To understand how such stereotypes are formed and the prospects for changing them, we need a more detailed explanation of schemas. The rest of this chapter provides one current way of thinking about schemas and the meanings that arise from them. Introduction to connectionism While schema theory is not new, there has been a radical change in the way some cognitive scientists model schemas. This new approach (actually, a revival of some older approaches) is called "connectionism'*7 (or "parallel distributed processing'*8 or "neural network modeling"). Why should anthropologists be interested in it? As we stated in chapter 1, theories of cultural meaning (and meaning in general) are caught between older views of meanings asfixed,shared and consistent in a society and newer ideas of meanings as variable, differentially distributed, and sometimes inconsistent. Many anthropologists (and theorists in other fields)9 assume that if they analyze meanings as psychological, they are committed to the older view of meanings and only a nonpsychological theory of meaning can explain the way meaning varies with context in a particular community, the changeability of meanings over time, contradictions in the meanings on which people act, or intracultural variation in meanings. (For example, recall, from the last chapter, our discussion of Judith Butler*s equation of interiority withfixity.)Such anthropologists may even be uncomfortable with terms like "cultural models,'* which perhaps bring to mind images of rigid structures. Current connectionist models of cognition J^VQ US a much lessrigidway of understanding schemas and the meanings to which they give rise (that is, less rigid than alternative ways of thinking about schemas that we will describe shortly). Meanings generated by schemas, in connectionist models, are mental states but are shaped by the learner's specific life experiences and are sensitive to activity in a particular context. While often similar from person to person, context to context, and one period of time to another, they can vary and change. For our purpose of reanalyzing cultural meanings, then, connectionist models are useful as a heuristic: They unstick our assumptions, helping us to imagine a way that meanings can be subjectively imposed yet responsive to the objective world. Connectionist models help provide new answers to other disputes in cognitive science as well. For example, are cognitive mechanisms domain specific or

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general purpose? Do nonhuman animals have mental representations? As we shall explain later, connectionists usually favor general-purpose mechanisms but always assume some domain-specific constraints, and connectionist models would apply as well to the mental representations of other species. Connectionism is not sufficient for a complete theory of cultural meaning, but it gives us a productive way to begin the process of rethinking what meanings are and how they arise. Metaphorsfor knowledge When we think about the form of internalized knowledge, what do we imagine? One way to think about the knowledge in our heads is to use a language metaphor. This metaphor suggests that when we learn something, there is a sentence in our head representing that knowledge. So if we know, for example, that guests should be offered something to drink, the language metaphor pictures that knowledge spelled out in a sentence that sits in our brain somewhere (OFFER GUESTS DRINKS - only not in English, but in whatever symbols and syntax the brain uses to store information). According to this model, learning is the inscription of these sentences into our brains. Applying this knowledge is a process of drawing logical inferences or satisfying if-then rules (THESE PEOPLE ARE GUESTS, THEREFORE OFFER THEM DRINKS); and revising this knowledge means deleting or amending old propositions (for example, learning the new rule, ASK IF THEY WANT DECAF OR REGULAR COFFEE). This approach is sometimes called a language of thought model (Fodor 1975).10 Artificial intelligence modelers who use a language of thought model are often called "symbolic processing" modelers. Connectionist artificial intelligence modelers use, instead, a neural metaphor to picture knowledge. Suppose, connectionists suggest, we think of knowledge not as sets of sentences but as implicit in the network of links among many simple processing units that work like neurons. Neurons are arranged in layers. Sensory neurons are activated by particular features of the world (e.g., the sight of bright red or smell of smoke); motor neurons are connected to muscle and gland cells, sending the signals that lead to behavior and feelings; and interneurons lie between, combining signals from, in some cases, over a hundred thousand other neurons and learning to react to complex combinations of features. In each layer beyond the first, all a neuron does is receive excitatory and inhibitory signals from other neurons, combine them, and, if it is activated past its threshold, send excitatory or inhibitory signals on to other neurons (or muscle or gland cells). No single neuron knows much, but thousands of them working in parallel produce intelligent action. The chemical synapses that predomi-

52

Background

nate in the brain are modified with experience; with learning, neurons undergo structural changes so that in the future the firing of one is thereafter more (or less) likely to contribute to the firing of another. In other words, learning leads to neural changes that determine the pathways through which activation spreads and the eventual interpretation and response that is evoked in someone by a given event or thing. Finally, cells seem to be clustered in functional assemblies or groups with every human action drawing on a great many of these cell assemblies widely distributed over the nervous system (Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessell 1991, 1995; Merzenich and Sameshima 1993). Connectionist computer models draw on these features of neurons to simulate human knowledge, learning, and action. In these models, knowledge is not represented by symbols strung together in sentences, but by simple processing units arranged in layers (input, output, and one or more layers in between). Aside from units in the input layer, which are activated by (computer-simulated or actual recorded) experiences, each unit simply sums the positive and negative signals it receives from other units and passes on a weighted positive or negative total to the other units with which it is connected. (Or so it is imagined. All that is really happening is numbers changing, but these numbers are supposed to represent units exciting and inhibiting each other.) The weights on connections between units are modified through repeated exposure to examples of associations that need to be learned. Typically, many units will be working in parallel until some units in the output layer are excited past their threshold and a stable answer is reached. No single unit knows much, but the combined action of many of them, linked by weights modified by repeated experience, leads to intelligent outcomes. Finally each particular connectionist model consists of a group of units that participate jointly in responding to a related set of inputs. In such models the belief that guests should be offered something to drink is not a sentence in a "language of thought" but rather a tendency of units representing aspects of guests and situations to activate other units (and those, still other units) that in the end, with sufficient training, initiate the behavior of offering an appropriate beverage. In this framework a schema (e.g., for company manners) is not a set of sentences but rather a pattern of interaction among strongly interconnected units. It follows that for connectionists, schemas vary in their schematicity, depending on the strength and density of the interconnections among the units of which they are composed. Schemas such as the one for company manners are typically learned when repeated participation (either as guest or host) in these sorts of social interactions creates a gradual strengthening of the weights of association among these units.

Schema theory and connectionism

53

If talk and other language are part of a model's input, they can also be represented, but unlabeled, undiscussed sensations (e.g., the distinctive cast of a person's face, Cottrell and Metcalfe 1991, summarized in Churchland 1995) can be represented as well. Language is not privileged in this formulation. "Embodied*' ideas can be represented as well as (and perhaps even more readily than) highly abstract ones.11 All kinds of experiences, including those provided by texts and other symbolic material, can be represented in a connectionist model. In these models new knowledge does not add or subtract sentences but rather consists of changing connection weights that shift the likelihoods of what units will activate which. (Hence the name "connectionism": knowledge is in these connection weights.) This process is much as Bourdieu describes it for learning the dispositions of the habitus (see chapter 2). Like Bourdieu, connectionists assume that knowledge (even knowledge that comes to consciousness as sentences) is not represented sententially in our heads and that much learning proceeds without need for explicitly stated rules (compare Bourdieu 1977:8 with Smolensky 1988b:4ff.). Schemas understood in this way can be highly context sensitive because they consist not of the simple pairs of links postulated in older associationist models, but of whole interlinked networks. For example, from repeated participation in encounters with guests we learn not a one-to-one association between guests and offers of something to drink but a whole network of links between features of the guest (Someone we hope will leave soon or someone we want to stay? Child, adolescent, or adult? Male or female?); features of the situation (Did they drop in or were they invited? Is it a morning, afternoon, or evening visit?); possible offers of hospitality (Nothing? Hot drink or cold? Alcoholic or non? If coffee, regular or decaffeinated?), and more. The meaning of any one situation is dependent on a whole network of learned associations of this sort. These networks process information holistically. An event activates all the units that respond to the features of that event; these units, in turn, then activate all the others to which they are strongly linked by associations learned from past experience, exciting some units and inhibiting others. This process continues until the network reaches a response that satisfies as many of the constraints as possible in the situation. As we will illustrate later, the combined influence of the units activated by the particular features of any given event can lead to different outcomes from one situation to the next. In other words, schemas as construed in connectionist models are welllearned butflexiblyadaptive rather thanrigidlyrepetitive. They can adapt to new or ambiguous situations with "regulated improvisation," to use Bourdieu's term (1977:11). The reactions that are the output of connec-

54

Background

tionist networks are improvisational because they are created on the spot, but regulated because they are guided by previously learned patterns of associations; they are not improvised out of thin air. This would always be the case, for instance, with the kind of "situated" cognition with which practice-oriented analysts (e.g., Lave 1988) are concerned,12 and the same argument would apply to the "invented traditions" pointed out by many anthropologists and historians (e.g., Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Both in people's everyday creative practices and in the more unusual worldhistorical instances of creation of salient cultural symbols, new practices draw upon associations learned from the past. (This does not mean that all creativity can be explained in connectionist models; see chapter 5.) This distinction between relatively stable cognitive networks and the ever-changing reactions that are the response of these networks to particular events is an important one. In the rest of this book we will use separate terms for each: "cultural models," "schemas," "networks," "understandings," "knowledge," and similar terms for the relatively stable cognitive structures; "meanings," or "interpretations," for the thoughts, feelings, and less conscious associations evoked when people's schemas meet the world at a given moment.13 Some of the dilemmas of culture theory (indeed linguistic theory and philosophy of language as well) are easier to resolve when we keep this distinction in mind. Using these terms, then, as we said in chapter 2, we readily agree with Wittgenstein that the meaning of a sign depends in part on the language game in which it is embedded. In fact, the associations evoked by a sign depend not only on language games as a generic type of practice, but on all the particulars of that practice at a moment. To return to our coffee-hospitality example, the meaning of an offer of a cup of coffee following a date is different from the meaning of an offer of a cup of coffee during an afternoon kaffeeklatsch. Furthermore, the offer of a cup of coffee following afirstdate, when it is undecided what will happen next, could be different from the meaning of an offer of a cup of coffee once it has become part of that couple's routine. Yet, just because meanings depend in part on the context in which they are evoked, and this context can shift, it does not follow that the meanings themselves are completely unstable. If we think of meanings as the associations elicited in actors at the moment, we can see that these associations are guided by the actors' well-learned understandings.14 Such interpretations of experience occur automatically and rapidly, often triggering actions before we are aware of them, which is why philosophers like Wittgenstein, trying to rind them through introspection, are unable to pin them down. It would be wrong to conclude from this failure of introspection that relatively stable understandings do not exist.

Schema theory and connectionism

55

Caveats and clarifications

It may already be apparent that while connectionism is guilty of being an associationist cognitive model, it is far more sophisticated than earlier associationist theories like Skinnerian behaviorism. Earlier associationist theorists ignored, indeed denigrated, the important role of cognitive schemas that are highly structured and enable our interpretations to go beyond the information given by the immediate stimulus. Connectionist models, by contrast, take seriously and explain the mediating effect of schemas, while providing an account of how schema-like properties of mind arise. At the same time, connectionism retains what was always the greatest contribution of associationist psychology: its focus on learning. Even if some associationist psychologies go too far in assuming the mind is a tabula rasa (an issue we will address at the end of this chapter), the extent of cross-cultural variation in human knowledge attests to the degree to which meanings are learned and makes it imperative to study the process of culture acquisition. A more complicated and easily misunderstood issue is what is really at stake in the difference between using a language metaphor (as "symbolic processing" modelers do) and a neural metaphor (as "connectionist" modelers do) to understand cognition. It is easy to get confused about this and reach incorrect conclusions (e.g., that connectionists cannot model processing of symbols or that symbolic processors cannot model procedural knowledge). To clear up any possible confusion, let us differentiate six things one could have in mind in championing a connectionist versus a symbolic processing approach: 1 2 3 4 5 6

how best to model cognition on computers, the content of what is learned, what the learner is aware of knowing, how information is learned, how information is processed, and the neural basis of cognition.

After we sort out these issues, it will be easier to state the strengths and limitations of connectionism for our purpose of understanding cultural meanings. L How best to model cognition on computers. Much of the confusion about the claims being made by connectionists comes from the fact that it is not always clear whether they and their critics are talking about psychological processes, brains, or computer programs. Connectionist models are, usually, computer programs. The superiority of one computer program over another can be judged by various criteria. Which sort of

56

Background

programming is easier to do? Which sort of model lets programmers come closer to getting machines to perform like human beings? Finally, which acquires its knowledge and reaches its responses in ways most similar to the ways humans do? Some of the excitement generated by connectionist models is due to the fact that, for some problems, they require less labor to create and respond more like humans than symbolic processing models do, (For other problems, on the other hand, they require more labor and may respond less like humans.) We are not computer programmers and do not care which style of programming is easier. Nor do we even care which style of programming lets machines mimic human abilities, if they reach those ends in ways very differently from human beings. What excites us about connectionist models is that they seem better than symbolic processing models at simulating how people build up cultural schemas and use them to extract meaningfromevents, a point to which we will return after considering the rest of this list. 2. The content of what is learned. Connectionist models are sometime seen as specializing in procedural knowledge ("know how," e.g., knowing how to whistle), and symbolic processing models are said to specialize in declarative knowledge ("know that," e.g., knowing that the Indus River cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa existed around 2000 B.C.E.). (See Giddens 1979 on "practical" versus "discursive" consciousness.) This is wrong: symbolic processing models often simulate procedural knowledge (think of all of the industrial robots that run on standard symbolic processing artificial intelligence programs) and connectionist models can simulate declarative knowledge (see, for example, Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClelland, and Hinton 1986, in which they present a model that could be said to have the declarative knowledge that a room with a refrigerator is very likely to have a stove, a room with a bathtub is quite likely to have a toilet, and so on). This focus on content misses the central point that symbolic processors represent procedural knowledge as if it were declarative, while connectionists represent declarative knowledge as if it were procedural. At stake is not so much what is known, but how it is known. 3. What the learner is aware ofknowing. Following from the last sectio it would seem that treating all knowledge as being like declarative knowledge should lead symbolic processing modelers to consider all knowledge as fully accessible to consciousness, while treating all knowledge as being like procedural knowledge should lead connectionists to consider all knowledge as largely out of awareness. It would be too hasty to reach this conclusion, however: Awareness is an ancillary concern for both connectionists and symbolic modelers, and, as far as we know, the issue is not often addressed by them.15 Some connectionists have proposed, sugges-

Schema theory and connectionism

57

tively, that "the contents of consciousness are dominated by the relatively stable states of the system" (Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClelland, and Hinton 1986:39). We read that to mean that schemas tend to remain out of awareness, with only the responses a network settles into arising to consciousness. If true, that would help explain the fact that we tend tofindit difficult to articulate fully the contents of our schemas. (See chapter 6 for further discussion.)16 But there is no reason why symbolic processing modelers could not make a similar claim. Nor is the form of knowledge in consciousness - sentences versus something less wordy - a reliable way of distinguishing connectionist from symbolic processing models. As we will discuss under (5), connectionist models can model verbal formulae such as an oft-repeated rule or poem or story. 4. How information is learned. This is a significant difference between the two approaches to modeling. Although symbolic processing models can learn (Carbonell 1990; Shavlik and Dietterich 1990), often they start with all the knowledge they need. This does not mean that they simulate innate knowledge, necessarily, only that symbolic processing models do not always deal with the issue of how noninnate knowledge is acquired. Connectionist models do not start out as blank slates either. However, instead of beginning with a complete understanding of some domain, they always start with some initial constraints only, and gradually acquire the rest of their knowledge through exposure to a variety of specific examples and repeated correction of inferences about those instances. As we will discuss further at the end of this chapter, this approach does not account for the full range of human learning. On the other hand, it does give us a way of starting to think about the issue of learning, one that could be built upon and modified as necessary to explain various forms of culture acquisition. In some interesting applications, connectionists have provided possible explanations of critical periods (Munro 1986) and stage-effects (McClelland 1994) in learning. 5. How information is processed This is another significant difference between the two approaches. Connectionist models are particularly good at simulating automatic information processing; they are usually thought to be much less adept than symbolic processing models at simulating what Norman (1986) calls "deliberate conscious control."17 An example of deliberate conscious control is the effortful thought that most of us go through in solving complicated arithmetic problems (What is the square root of 62?); an example of automatic information processing is our rapid response to single-digit multiplication problems (What is 5 times 5?). While it is difficult to pin down all the criteria separating these two forms of thought, we think that the distinction is important.18

58

Background

This difference granted, we should not make the mistake we have already exposed, in our discussion of point (2), of confusing process with content. As the multiplication problem indicates, we can automatically, effortlessly process many sorts of verbal formulae, such as the times table, jingles, poems, cliches, stories, and oft-heard rules. In fact, knowledge of these "verbal molecules'* (Strauss 1992b) is better explained by associationist models of involuntary automatic information processing than by models of consciously controlled information processing, because earlier parts of the text are needed to trigger our memory of later parts. It is hard to dip into the middle of a verbal molecule; instead we have to start from the beginning and repeat the whole thing until we get to the relevant part. Quick: how many days are there in November? Arriving at the answer to this is not effortful in the way figuring out the square root of 62 is effortful; it simply requires time to let each part of the formula, "Thirty days hath September . , ." activate memory of the next. (See chapter 5 for further discussion of this particular cultural mediating device.) This is one reason why the term "symbolic processing" is misleading; connectionist models have no difficulty processing symbols. The difference between them and so-called symbolic processing models is not whether they can process symbols, but that the latter models treat symbol processing as being like deliberate conscious thought, while connectionist models treat this task as being like an automatic pattern-completion task. 6, The neural basis of cognition. Earlier we said that connectionist modelers use a neural metaphor for cognition. Are they not, instead, just describing how cognition really works, because knowledge really is stored in neurons? But connectionist computer modelers do not aim to model brains in all of their details. A "unit" in a connectionist model might stand for the activity of thousands of neurons. And connectionists ignore some features of the brain altogether (for example, the disparate effects of the dozens of different neural transmitters). This is why connectionists call their models "neurally inspired" only (Smolensky 1988b).19 Symbolic processing modelers also agree that knowledge is stored in brains, and they agree with connectionists that the brain consists of neurons arranged in layers, processing in parallel, and so on. However, symbolic processing artificial intelligence modelers think the action of neurons passing on excitatory and inhibitory messages implements a mental language that looks like any standard computer programming or natural human language (i.e., symbols arranged in sentences). Connectionist and symbolic processing modelers also differ in whether they care about the ultimate translatability of their models to brain states and processes. Symbolic processing modelers do not even attempt to explain how representations and processes of the sort they describe could take place in real brains; connectionists do make this attempt and in

Schema theory and connectionism

59

general outline, at least, it corresponds to the way brains work (Churchland 1995).

Where we stand

Sometimes humans do engage in conscious, deliberate problem solving. This is usually thought to be difficult to model in the connectionist paradigm, we have noted, and may be a serious drawback of such models. On the other hand, this sort of effortful thought is not central to our focus in this book on cultural meanings. (Also - as we will explain in chapters 4 and 5 - even deliberate conscious thought still draws on understandings learned in the way connectionists describe.) Interpretations, such as the ones you had in response to the two beer commercials described at the beginning of this chapter, typically arise automatically; they are not pondered. Also, the general view that knowledge is internalized as sentences in the head leads us to imagine cultural knowledge and meanings as inflexible and may be in good part to blame for the current generation of anthropologists' rejection of the relevance of internalization. Connectionist models help us sort out what is likely to be stable, what changeable, in our knowledge and meanings. They are thus a very promising foundation for a solution to the problems of cultural meaning we are dealing with here. Yet, while wefindconnectionist models stimulating because they provide a comprehensive framework for understanding important properties of everyday human cognition, in the rest of the book we will not hesitate to depart from such models when they favor computational ease and efficiency over neurobiological, behavioral or social veridicality.20 Computers do not operate the same way as embodied and culturally embedded people, and even connectionist modelers grossly oversimplify culture learning and the complexities of human motivation. Some of these criticisms are included at the end of this chapter; other amendments are proposed in the next section of the book. This brief introduction to connectionism may indicate why we find it useful for a theory of cultural meaning that accommodates both older and newer views of culture and of meaning. Readers who do not want to learn about connectionism in any greater depth than this are encouraged to skip ahead to the Final Comments section at the end of this chapter and then go to part II, where we begin to draw out the implications for thinking about culture. In the course of that discussion of culture, we will have occasion to provide examples that should make our model clearer. Some readers, however, may have found the preceding discussion too vague. For such readers, a fuller, somewhat more technical explanation follows.

60

Background Connectionism for the somewhat more formally minded

The first thing we have to make clear is that there are many types of connectionists - and several intermediate points between formal modelers who clearly are connectionists and those who clearly are not, (The following discussion applies only to people doing artificial intelligence modeling; people like us who use it heuristically without doing any formal modeling could be called "connectionist inspired.") The prototypical connectionist constructs models of cognition in which: • the building blocks are "units," each of which is activated by the environment or other units and either passes activation on to other units or is potentially part of the output representation, or both; • units are connected by "weights," numbers which give the association (positive or negative, great or small) between units21 and which express most of the current knowledge of the system (i.e., its disposition to react one way rather than another in a particular context);22 • concepts to be learned are "distributed," i.e., represented as patterns of activity over a set of units rather than by symbols, and many different concepts can be represented by patterns of activation over the same set of units; • propositions are likewise represented by patterns of activation over many units, patterns that do not have a syntactic structure; • information processing occurs both serially (one step at a time) and "in parallel" (simultaneous multiple actions); • decisions are reached through a process offindingthe best fit to a number of soft constraints rather than following invariant rules; 9 the system builds up its knowledge by learning associations (positive or negative correlations) among the features of a number of specific cases, rather than by being taught any explicit rules; and, ® the system begins with weights of zero or randomly chosen small connection weights and the same general-purpose learning algorithm for all computations.

The now classic presentation of work of this sort, especially of the more effective versions of this approach sometimes called the "new connectionism" (Quinlan 1991), are the Parallel distributedprocessing volumes edited by David Rumelhart and James McClelland (1986).23

Schema theory and connectionism

61

The opposite pole (that inspired by the language metaphor), is typically called "symbolic processing" or "classical" or GOFAI (for Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence) or sometimes, misleadingly, "computational" theories of mind.24 In these models: • concepts are represented by symbols, which are the basic cognitive building blocks; • propositions are represented by strings of symbols that have a syntactic structure and information processing is highly sensitive to this syntactic structure; • information processing occurs serially; • the system learns by being programmed with explicit rules and these rules are then represented as such in the system and comprise its knowledge (i.e., its disposition to respond one way rather than another in a specific case). Allen Newell and Herbert Simon (e.g., Newell and Simon 1972) and Jerry Fodor (e.g., Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988,1995) are among many well-known proponents of this approach. These distinctions are not hard and fast: between these extremes, for example, are models that most people would call connectionist but that have much more than the usual amount of built-in knowledge (e.g., Regier 1996) or models that are basically symbolic but process information through spreading activation (e.g., Collins and Loftus 1975) or allow for "fuzzy" outcomes or parallel processing, for example.25 As is the case with any concept, the concept of "connectionist model" is somewhat messy. It does not have sharp boundaries and cannot be defined by a list of necessary and sufficient features. Instead, there are family resemblances among models usually considered to be connectionist, and whether any particular model is included in the family depends upon how many and which connectionist features it has. An example should help clarify the general difference between classical and connectionist approaches in their architectures, ways of processing information, and learning procedures. Architectures and representation Connectionist models have a very different architecture from classical models. Contrast, for example, the following two ways of depicting the schema US Americans rely on in deciding which term (e.g., "Ms. So-andso," "Aunt Rachel," "Rachel," and "Miss") to use in addressing another person. Figure 3.1 presents Susan Ervin-Tripp's (1969) classical model;26 figure 3,2 presents our connectionist model. Ervin-Tripp's model consists of boxes, diamonds, and arrows arranged

62

Background

Figure 3.1 A US American address system - classical model in the flow-chart fashion of traditional artificial intelligence programs. In figure 3.1 the diamonds indicate features to be considered in deciding on the correct term of address (e.g., Is the addressee an adult? Is this a statusmarked setting?); the arrows explain the subsequent features to be considered (if yes [+], then consider . . .; if no [-], then consider . . .); and the boxes on the right-hand side are possible decisions or outputs. (FN = first name; LN = last name; the slashed zero = avoid using any name.) 27 Figure 3.2 depicts a prototypical "feedforward" connectionist network. In this model, like most connectionist models, there is a row of circles on the bottom (it could also be the left) representing the input units, those activated by features of the event or object. There is another row of circles at the top (or it could be the right) of the picture, representing the output units, that is, the possible decisions of the model. In between is a row of circles labeled H r H vi . These are hidden units, which receive activations from the input units and pass them on to the output units. Before the program is trained, the hidden units do not represent anything. After training, the hidden units still do not represent any one namable thing, but each is activated more strongly by some recurring patterns of inputs than by others. Thus, unlike symbolic-processing models, there is no one-to-one correspondence between symbols in the program and concepts to be learned by the program. Instead, there are only learned, varying probabili-

Schema theory and connectionism kin term

pet name

ego's age

ego's local status

first name

alters age

63 title & last name

altar's local status

closeness

generic name

altar's context approach- enhances ability closeness & similarity

no name or ask

ego wants to stress closeness & similarity

Figure 3.2 A US American address system - connectionist model ties that one group of units, when activated, will excite another group of units beyond their thresholds and activate them. As Rumelhart and Norman (1981:3) put it, on such a model "information is better thought of as 'evoked' than 'found'" (quoted in van Gelder 1991:46).28 The lines between these circles indicate paths of activation from the input units to the hidden units and from the hidden units to the output units. For each line, there is a numerical weight that stands for the strength of the positive or negative connection between the two units. For example, a large positive weight between thefirstkin unit and Hj would indicate that if the first kin unit were activated, it would strongly excite Hi5 making it more likely to be activated past its threshold. A large negative weight between the first kin unit and Hj would indicate that if the first kin unit were activated, it would strongly inhibit Hi9 making it less likely to be activated past its threshold. Models with the feedforward design are generally used for problems in which the task is to figure out the appropriate response to some input. There could be and often is more than one layer of hidden units or there need not be any layer of hidden units. However, models with just two

64

Background

Figure 3.3 Interactive activation model

layers, one for input and the other for output, do not have as much computational power as multilayered models. (In fact the limited capabilities of two-layer models helped kill the whole approach for a while in the artificial intelligence community, Rumelhart 1989.) Many other designs are possible. Very often there are arrows between units in the same layer. There can also be connections from higher layers back to lower layers. Figure 3.3 is an example of one such, more complex model: McClelland and Rumelhart's interactive activation model of letter and word recognition (1981; see also McClelland, Rumelhart, and Hinton 1986). The triangular arrow heads indicate excitatory (positive) connections, the ball heads indicate inhibitory (negative) connections. Processing in a model of this design will take place over several stages, as some units gradually become more strongly excited and others inhibited when the activations received from higher and same-level units start kicking in. In this example, seeing the letter parts represented by the units in the input layer at the bottom activates the hidden units representing letters in

Schema theory and connectionism

65

Figure 3.4 Recurrent network the middle. Activation of those units, in turn, can be thought of as exciting the output units for words that contain those letters and inhibiting both the output units for words that do not contain those letters and the units for other letters. And so on. This is more typical of connectionist programs than simple feedforward models and probably more typical of actual brain processes as well. Some models use the outputs at one time as inputs for another phase of processing and look something likefigure3.4. This structure is useful for continuously monitoring the context and using that information to deter* mine thefinaloutput (Jordan 1986).29 However, as connectionist modelers sometimes complain, drawing models with circles and arrows is not enough to make you a connectionist. The way such models process information and learn is what makes them distinctively connectionist. Processing

Information processing in a good-old-fashioned artificial intelligence program of the sort modeled by Ervin-Tripp takes place serially (one step at a time) as we can see from Ervin-Tripp's example. Asfigure3.1 indicates, the program considersfirstif the addressee is an adult, then (if yes) is this a status-marked setting, where any hierarchical differences between speaker and addressee are highlighted or (if no) is the addressee's name known, and so on, one feature at a time. Under most circumstances this model works perfectly well. However, it does not perform very well if some of the information we gave it was wrong (it would take the wrong turn and probably end up at a different decision) or missing (it would stall at the

66

Background

node where no information was available). This, of course, is precisely what most computer programs do because they are constructed along conventional artificial intelligence lines, and it is one of the things that makes them so frustrating to use. Finally, although this is not so much a problem with Ervin-Tripp's model, some classical models do not handle novel situations very well. Connectionist models, on the other hand, are much more naturalistic in the way they deal with missing, incorrect, ambiguous, and novel information. In these cases, the model still proceeds to make a guess on the basis of the information it does have and, if it has been well trained, many times the guess will be right (a property called "graceful degradation"). This is due, in part, to the fact that in connectionist models all of the relevant features of the situation are processed at the same time (parallel processing) and in part to the way each feature affects the decision the model reaches. In our example, the relevant features are those described at the bottom of figure 3.2: whether there is a kinship relation between ego (the speaker) and alter (the addressee); ego's age and local social status; alter's age and local social status; alter's general approachability (Is alter typically friendly and informal or aloof and formal?); how close ego feels to alter; and two features of the particular context: whether the situation at hand is one in which status differences or lack of cordiality are enhanced or diminished and whether in this situation ego wants to emphasize or downplay any differences in status or closeness of the relationship (Brown and Levinson 1987).30 Also important here is whether ego is assertive or shy, but we will work that into the model in a different way, to be described a bit later. Each of these attributes is represented by its own set of input units, with different patterns of activation in each set corresponding to the possibilities to be represented. For example, with the two units representing alter's approachability, full activation of thefirstcould indicate someone who is extremely friendly, full activation of thefirstand partial activation of the second would indicate someone who is fairly friendly, and so on. In the output layer are single units whose activations correspond to possible ways one could address someone else: kin term; pet name (e.g., "Sweetie" or "Darling");firstname (or everyday nickname) alone; title and last name; or generic name used for strangers (e.g., "Sir," "Miss," or "Buddy"). If no other output unit is sufficiently activated, the model reaches the decision to either avoid using any term of address or to ask alter for their preference. Of course, once any of these choices is made, there is a further decision about which kin term, pet name, title, or generic term to use, but we can imagine that there are one or more other models that simulate how that further decision is reached. What happens when you present this model with an actual example of

Schema theory and connectionism

67

someone? Let us say alter is a relatively friendly female professor who appears to be in her mid thirties, ego is a twenty-year old male college student taking a large lecture course with the professor for thefirsttime, and they run into each other while at the college but outside of class. In this common situation should students address their professors with a title and last name (Professor So-and-so, Doctor So-and-so, or Mister or Ms. So-and-so) or by the professor's first name? There are probably some colleges where professors preferfirstnames and some colleges where all are addressed using last name and title, but at least at this point in the late twentieth century and at the US universities with which we are familiar, it varies from professor to professor (or sometimes department to department). The computations the model performs are pretty simple. First, the appropriate patterns of input units are activated. Just focusing on the status, closeness, and approachability units, these might be patterns such as full activation of thefirstego's status unit (ESj) and no activation of the second (ES^) to represent the student's fairly low status in the college pecking order; no activation of the first alter's status unit (ASj) and full activation of the second (AS^ to represent the professor's fairly high status in the local hierarchy; partial activation of thefirstand full activation of the second closeness units (Ct and C,1) to indicate that they know each other but are not especially close; and full activation of thefirstand partial activation of the second approachability units (AP{ and APi{) to indicate the student's perception that the professor is a reasonably friendly, informal person. At the same time other input units are being activated: those representing the context (one in which their normal relationship is emphasized and the student has no need to act more formal or less than usual); the student's young-adult age; the professor's early-middle age; and so on. Let us give each fully activated input unit a value of one, each partially activated input unit a value of 0.5, and each nonactivated unit a value of 0. For every activated unit, its activation value is then multiplied by the connection weight between that unit and each of the others with which it is connected. We have said that the connection of a unit with each unit it activates is represented by a numerical weight that stands for (roughly) the strength and positive or negative association between the two units. Although no two people's knowledge will be modeled with exactly the same weights (and a given person's weights will change while they are learning the system, as we will explain in the next section), we can make some plausible guesses about the weights a United States undergraduate at the time we are writing might have for the portion of the model representing ego and alter's status, their closeness, and alter's approachability. (We will

68

Background

Table 3.1 Weights in connectionist model of US terms of address -firs layer Activation level

Input unit

1 0 0 1 0.5 1 1 0.5

ESj ES„ AS, ASU Q

-0.1 -0.1 -Owl -0.3

C,i

AP, AP„

Hi

H„

HJH

Hlv

Hv

Hvl

0.1

-0.1

0.6

0.1

0.2 0.2

0.2 0.2 0.1

-0.4

-0.1

0.4 0.6

-0.4 -0.7

-0.1

-0.2

-0.2

0.7

0.8

0.4

0.1

-0.6 -0.2

-0.6

-Q.9

-0.9

-0.2

-0.2

0.5

0.6

G.t

0.7

0.8

0.7

-0.8

-0.9

-0.8

-0.2

-0.1

-0.2 -0.1

0.9

0.7

ignore connections to the possible choices of a kin term or pet name, which are highly unlikely in the present example.) Since it would be hard to fit all of these numerical weights into the appropriate places infigure3.2, we have presented them in a more convenient, easy-to-use matrix (table 3.1). The -0.1 in the top, left-hand corner stands for the connection weight between thefirstEgo's Status unit and the first hidden unit; the 0.1 to its right stands for the weight between the first Ego's Status unit and the second hidden unit; and so on. Activation levels for the particular example we gave of the young college student trying to decide how to greet his thirty-five-year-old professor are given to the left of the input unit's abbreviation.31 Now we can begin to see how the model will simulate what happens in this case of a student greeting a fairly friendly lecture-class professor. First we have to calculate the combined effects of the student's status, the professor's status, their closeness, and the professor's approachability on each of the hidden units,. This requires, for each input unit, multiplying its activation values (0, 0.3, or 1) by the weight connecting that unit to the relevant hidden unit and then summing all those products.32 So, for example, the effect of thefirstinput unit (ESi) on thefirsthidden unit is 1 (the activation level of ESj) times -0.1 (the weight of the connection between these units), which comes to -0.1. To put it another way, activating ESi slightly inhibits H{. ESH and ASi are not activated in the present example, so they do not affect the activation of Hs, but ASU is and contributes further inhibition (lx-0.3 = -0.3), which is offset by the excitatory contribution of C{ (0.5 x 0.7 = 0.35). And so on. Readers who are numerophobic should keep in mind what is theoretically interesting about this math. The weights in the body of the matrix represent knowledge the model has accrued over time - these are its general understandings or schemas at the moment. The activation levels of

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the input units represent the particularities of this encounter. By multiplying weights by activation levels the model is simulating the regulated improvisation of people who bring their learned schemas to bear on a new situation. In this case, the simulation goes as follows (multiplying activation levels by connection weights, in turn, down the columns)

Input to Hidden Unit l=(ix-0.1)+(0x-0.1) + (0x-0.1) + (lx-0.3) + (0.5x0.7) + (lx~0.9) + (lx0.1) + (0.5x-0.9) = -1.3 Input to Hidden Unit 2 = (1 x0.1) + (Ox-0.1) + (0x0.1) + (1 x -0.1) +(0.5 x 0.8) + (1 x -0.9) + (1 x 0.7) + (0.5 x -0,8) = -0.2 Input to Hidden Unit 3 = (1 x-0.1)+ (0x0.2)+ (0x0.2) + (1 x -0.2) +(0,5 x 0.4) + (1 x -0.2) + (1 x 0.8) + (0.5 x -0,2) = 0.4 Input to Hidden Unit 4 = (1 x 0.2)+ (0x0.2) +(Ox 0.1) + (1 x-0.2)+(0.5 x 0.1) + (1 x-0.2)+ (1x0.7) +(0.5 x-0.1) = 0.5 Input to Hidden Unit 5 = (1 x -0.4) + (0 x 0.4) + (0 x 0.6) + (lx-0.6)+(0.5x-0.2) + (lx0.5) + (lx-0.2) + (0.5x-0.1) = -0.85 Input to Hidden Unit 6 = (1 x 0.6) + (0 x-0.4) + (0 x-0.7) + (1x0.9) +(0.5x-0.6) + (1 x0.6)+ (lx-0.8)+ (0.5x0.7) = 1.35 Now we repeat this process tofigureout the combined effects of the hidden units on the output units, which are the units that simulate the model's decision about what to do in this case. For this next step, the knowledge of our simulated typical undergraduate - that is, the weights connecting hidden units to output units - is captured in table 3.2. If we say that activation values can range only from 0 to 1 (other choices are possible but this will be the way we do it here), then negative total inputs mean an activation of 0 and positive inputs higher than one are capped at 1. Activation levels between 0 and 1 are the ones computed in the last step.

Table 3.2. Weights in connectionist model of US terms of address - seco layer Activation level

Hidden unit

First name

Last name

Generic term

No name (or ask)

0 0 0.4 0.5 0 1

Hi

0.8 0.9 0.8 0.4 0.2 -0.4

-0.9 -0.9 -0.6 0.4 -0.2 0.9

-0.9 -0.9 -0.9 -0.6 0.2 0.2

-0.9 -0.9 -0.4 0.2 0.2 0.4

H, Hw Hlv Hv Hvj

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Based on these weights and activation levels, the computation would be as follows: Input to First Name = (0 x 0.8) + (0 x 0.9) + (0.4 x 0.8) + (0.5 x 0.4) + (0 x 0.2)+ (lx-0.4) = 0.12 Input to Last Name = (0 x -0,9) + (0 x -0.9) + (0.4 x -0.6) + (0.5 x -0.4) + (0 x -0.2) + (1 x 0.9) = 0.46 Input to Generic Name = (0 x -0.9) + (0 x -0.9) + (0.4 x -0.9) + (0.5 x -0.6) + (0 x 0.2) + (1 x 0.2) = -0.46 Input to No Name = (0 x -0.9) + (0 x -0.9) + (0.4 x -0.4) + (0.5 x 0.2) + (0 x 0.2) + (1 x 0.4) = 0.34 If the output units for terms of address had a threshold of 0, that is, they were turned on if they attained any positive value and turned off if they had any negative value, then the only decision the model would reach on this basis of this input would be to avoid a generic term of address, like "Ma'am." So we need two modifications of this simple model. First, we will stipulate some threshold values that activation levels have to reach for that interpretation or behavior to be chosen. This is where the student's general level of assertiveness can be modeled easily. Suppose, because he is a bit shy, his general preference in all these cases is to stick with the safer, more respectful title-plus-last-name choice rather than risk the rebuff that might result from addressing people by their first name. That general preference can be simulated by a higher threshold on First Name than on Last Name, perhaps 0.3 for Last Name and 0.5 for First Name. In other words, the combined inputs to the Last Name unit only have to be 0.3 or higher for that unit to be activated but they need to be 0.5 or higher for the First Name unit to be activated. If we add that the threshold for the Generic Name unit is 0.2 and the threshold for the No Name unit is 0 (which is realistic, because this is what you do if you do not know what else to do), now we have, in the case of our somewhat reticent student greeting the fairly friendly lecture-class professor, two units that are activated past their thresholds: the Last Name unit and the No Name unit. Since the Last Name unit is activated more strongly than the No Name unit, that one should prevail. To model that we need to add some inhibitory links among the output units, modifyingfigure3.2 (seefigure3.5). The effect of these links is that if the First Name or Last Name units are activated past their thresholds, they send large negative inputs to the other output units, effectively turning them off. The same goes if the Kin Term and Pet Name units are activated past their thresholds (remember - we left them out of this example only because they were extremely unlikely terms of address for a student greeting a teacher). There are weak negative

~» Inhibitory link

Figure 3.5 Modified connectionist US American address system

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weights among thefirstfour output units as well, so that in the end, the most strongly activated output unit will win out. These horizontal inhibitory links require more than a single processing cycle - just imagine that the computations performed in the last step are repeated, adding excitations or inhibitions from the other output units as many times as is necessary until one of the output units is pushed past its threshold. In our example, if we were to add an inhibitory link from Last Name to No Name, the effect would be to leave the Last Name unit the only one activated in the end, so that is the choice the student would make, at least on the basis of the his status, the professor's status, their (low) degree of closeness, and the professor's perceived approachability. Now the student only has to decide whether to use "Doctor," "Professor," "Ms.," "Miss," or "Mrs.," which could be simulated by another model! (A friend of Claudia Strauss's from India, conducting her graduate work in the United States, complained about the complexities of the American terms-of-address system, which required knowing such things as her female addressees* gender politics, hence whether they preferred Ms. to Mrs. or Miss.) Recall that to keep the math less cumbersome we did not take into account all the relevant factors. What if the student were an adult returning to college and about the same age as the professor? If the student and professor were doing volunteer work together in town? Or if the student wanted to ask the professor for a favor? Multiplying the activation of these inputs by their weights would change the activation of the hidden units, hence the answer the model would reach in the end. Or suppose that a year later the same student takes another course with that professor, say, a small upper-level class. By then he will probably feel much more at ease with the professor, which could make him much more inclined to greet the professor with herfirstname, and, in general, interpret their relationship as closer than it had seemed before. If you want, you can try playing with the model, changing activation levels or making up new weights, or changing threshold levels to see the effects on the outcome. We tried it in the case of the same student now taking a second, much smaller class with the same professor (everything was the same except the activation level of CH was 0.5 instead of 1) and found in this case our shy student was unsure and avoided using any term of address. Of course, if the professor simply announces at the beginning of the semester, "Please call me Jane," or if there is some well-established assumption shared by the students about whether to use first or last names, then this model is not needed to simulate the process. (Unless, as often happens, students take these factors into account as influential but not decisive constraints on their behavior.) Kin terms, for example, usually have well-defined conditions of use and so are not chosen

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through a process of this sort. (Fictive kin terms, on the other hand, might be more a matter of choice, especially in some groups.) From this example we hope it is clear that each of the factors detected by the input units acts as a "soft constraint," influencing but not decisively determining the outcome. These models can also reach a decision even if some of the information is missing or incorrect: if most of the information is close enough, the decision will be therightone for the occasion. Suppose, for example, the professor appears to be thirty-five years old but is really forty-five years old, or the student has no sense of the professor's approachability. The model might still reach an appropriate decision about which form of address to use. The model can handle novel situations: These situations simply activate the relevant input units - in this case, a combination not previously activated - and it proceeds in the usual way to reach the best answer it can. (On the other hand, just like human beings, these models sometimes falsely generalize as well, assuming that two things that are alike in respects that are known to it are also alike in respects it does not know, a process that helps explain what psychoanalysts call "transference," Andersen and Baum 1994.) We should also remember that automatic procedures like these do not always come up with an answer about what to do, and sometimes another part of our mind comes in at that point, deliberately ponders the matter (maybe creatively combining elements of most strongly activated output possibilities),33 and makes a decision. We have already discussed this limitation of connectionist models and will discuss it further in chapter 4. Learning

We have said that one limitation of a classical model of cultural knowledge, such as Ervin-Tripp's, is that it does not handle missing or incorrect information very well. An even more important limitation, if we want to understand where cultural models and meanings come from, is that it is difficult to imagine how a carefully constructed decision-tree of the sort pictured infigure3.3 would be learned in real life. In the communities with which we are familiar, nobody tells you things like, "If someone is fifteen years or more older than you, don't call them by theirfirstname." You might be told, "Address your elders by their last name" or "That's Grandma Hilda." You then have tofigureout from that instruction, along with what you see other people doing, how old someone has to be to count as an "elder" and when you really do use a last name versus when you use a kin term plusfirstname (as in "Grandma Hilda"). How do children go from not knowing what to call anyone to knowledge that can be simulated by a decision tree like Ervin-Tripp's but surely is not learned in such a

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logical form? Connectionist models are especially good at answering this question. In the last section we saw that the way connectionist models respond to input depends on the connection weights between the units. Almost everything the model knows is in those weights, which determine how it reacts in any given context. From our anthropological perspective one of the most attractive aspects of connectionist models is that these weights are not predetermined from the start by an omniscient programmer. Much as children gradually acquire some of their dispositions to react in a culturally appropriate way simply by observing and participating in daily routines, so connectionist models gradually acquire their knowledge through exposure to numerous examples. In our example (from the last section) of a twenty-year-old male US college student, some of his exposure came from people he learned to address as he was growing up: his friends; other children; relatives, some younger, some about his age, some adult; his friends' parents; his teachers; and assorted other adults. At the same time, he was learning terms of address by observing how it was done by other people he knew, as well as how it was done by the characters he saw on television, in movies, and so on. In these ways he had been exposed to hundreds of examples of people addressing each other. To simulate this learning, connectionist models are trained with a set of inputs that, ideally, corresponds to the sorts of inputs a human learner would encounter. In this example, we should divide these inputs by life stages, thinking about different sorts of examples encountered by this US college student when he was a preschooler; as he entered school and greater demands were placed on him to respond appropriately to people in authority and his media exposure increased; and as he entered his late teenage years and had participated in or been exposed, at least vicariously, to an even wider set of interpersonal encounters. Learning does not stop at that point, of course; but in the present example, we do not need to simulate the subsequent changes that the schema undergoes in adulthood. To begin with, the model starts with weights of zero on all connections, or with very small, randomly chosen positive and negative weights.34 Imagine table 3.1filledin with zeros or numbers like 0.02 and -0.01. It is then presented with its first example: say, mother. The appropriate input units are activated, responding to the fact that she is kin, ego is very young, she is an adult, and so on. These activation values are then multiplied by the initial weights and the products are summed, to compute the activation of the hidden units and that process is repeated to arrive at the activation of the output units. If we start with connection weights of zero, the end product will be zeros for all of the output units, which is the wrong answer:

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kin term should be activated past its threshold and more strongly than all the other possibilities. Even if we start with random, small weights, the model is very unlikely to reach the right answer. What happens next varies from model to model, but generally speaking, a small amount is then added or subtracted from each weight that was active.35 Weights are not fixed all at once to be the best ones for the example just presented, only adjusted a little to nudge them in that direction. Typically, this learning is "supervised." This means that the programmer stipulates the correct output pattern for each input pattern and adjusts weights to reduce the difference between a unit's actual output and its desired output. Then the process is repeated for the next example in the training set (e.g., father). Again, an output is computed on the basis of the current weights in the model - the ones that were the result of the last round of changes - and small changes, either additions or subtractions, are made to the weights that contributed to the output. This process is repeated for the whole training set and the training set itself is typically repeated for many "epochs" - sometimes hundreds of epochs. Although you might think that the model would get confused having its weights adjusted first for one situation, then for another, in fact for a surprising number of tasks that connectionists have considered, at the end of this process it has reached a set of weights that lets it produce not only the desired outputs for the examples it was trained on, but also for a new set of examples similar to, but not included in the training set.36 If the learning process is divided into stages, as would be realistic in our terms-of-address example, a new (much larger and more diverse) training set would then be introduced that contains examples of the sort a US school-aged child might encounter and the process would be repeated. The process might be repeated a third time with a further enlarged and still more varied training set appropriate to the experiences of this boy as he reaches his late teens and early adult years. We have said "a US school-aged child" but that can be made as culturally specific as we want: for example, "a Mexican-American boy growing up in Los Angeles at the end of the twentieth century." Note that there is no assumption of cultural stability built in to the model. The boy could move to a very different community or ideas about appropriateness could change as he is growing up: the learning procedure needs only to change the training sets to adjust accordingly. The end of the process is that, without the model ever having been given a rule such as, "Address people who arefifteenyears or more older than you by a title and their last name," it has a set of weights that will enable it to act as if it knew such a rule (or whatever is the appropriate term of address for elders in its experience). It should also have learned not to use the same form of address all the time for a given person, but to vary that

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form as appropriate for the context. As Bourdieu puts it, it has acquired "schemes enabling [it] to generate an infinity of practices adapted to endlessly changing situations, without those schemes ever being constituted as explicit principles" (1977:16). In his words again, it has acquired a "sense" of the situation. Anthropological critique That does not mean that we are completely satisfied with connectionist models of learning. While connectionists are starting to pay attention to studies documenting the distribution of inputs to which a learner might be exposed, they oversimplify the variety of ways in which cultural knowledge is transmitted. To our knowledge the only attention that is paid to this issue currently is in the form of discussion by connectionist modelers about the relative merits of "supervised" and "unsupervised" learning.37 In connectionist models that rely on supervised learning, as the model is being trained, the output the model reaches is compared to the desired output (i.e., what the programmer has decided in advance is the right answer) after each presentation of a case. Then all the relevant weights are adjusted up or down as needed to bring the model a little closer to the desired output the next time it is presented with that input. As many connectionists have noted, however, in many real-life situations there is no teacher to correct every wrong guess we make about the world and reward every right one and often it is difficult to specify in advance what the correct output should be. One alternative is an unsupervised model of learning, such as "competitive learning." In the version of this described by Rumelhart and David Zipser (1986) the basic idea is that at any layer from the first hidden layer on up, units are arranged in clusters. Within each cluster the unit that is activated most strongly by the input inhibits the activation of all the rest until it is the only unit on. Then all the weights connecting that one unit to units in the layer below are made a little greater and all the weights connecting to other units in the cluster are decreased a bit, making it more likely that the next time that stimulus is presented, that unit will be the one most strongly activated. The result is that after repeated exposure to different cases the units in a cluster get to be specialized, responding to different combinations of inputs, without needing a teacher to say what was the desired output (because changes are made solely on the basis of which unit in a cluster was most strongly activated). There are other unsupervised approaches as well that rely on different formulae for adjusting weights (Hinton 1989). In real life, however, just as most culture (and language) learning is not

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completely supervised, so most such learning is not completely unsupervised. As Roy D'Andrade and others have pointed out, learning is typically partially supervised. Very often "you try some of it by yourself, and other people help by giving occasional procedural advice and crucial instruction in classification when you get stuck" (D'Andrade 1981:186). D'Andrade calls this "learning by guided discovery" and claims it is the most typical form of learning: "Looking at cross-cultural studies of socialization, one is struck with both the small amount of explicit step by step instruction and the large amount of occasional correction that characterizes cultural learning all over the world" (D'Andrade 1981:185). Thus, adults and knowledgeable older children intervene occasionally, correcting errors as necessary to keep neophytes out of social, intellectual, moral, and physical danger; by their enthusiasms, classificatory terms, and topics of commentary they draw the learner's attention to some features of the world and away from others. The result is that for a great many tasks, completely supervised connectionist learning procedures unrealistically build in too much feedback while unsupervised connectionist learning procedures unrealistically have too little. Nor is the issue here one solely of quantity of feedback. D'Andrade's discussion of guided discovery contrasts not only constant feedback with occasional feedback but also explicit instruction with correction in specific cases. Here connectionists might point out that they are more anthropologically correct than symbolic processors because connectionist models learn not by being programmed with explicit rules but rather through a gradual process of trial-and-error in response to specific cases. Yet, sometimes culture learning does proceed through explicit statements, as is typical with rules of etiquette ("No elbows on the table"); maxims and proverbs ("Feed a cold and starve a fever," "The squeaky wheel gets the grease"); heuristics taught to a novice in somefield("Shift to second gear when the car is going 15 miles an hour"); and certainly, narratives, abstract theories, and sacred texts (D'Andrade 1995:144; Quinn and Holland 1987:22). The process is not always a simple one, however, that could easily be modeled in the old-fashioned way by spelling out the knowledge sententially. In part, the problem is one that connectionists have already noted: The shift from a novice's explicit rules of thumb to an expert's intuitions, for example, is not so much a process of learning more rules but rather of building up an entirely different sort of knowledge base, one that may not have any rules in it (Smolensky 1988b:5; see also Bourdieu 1977:19). But there is a further problem: explicit statements are sometimes helpful and sometimes misleading or ambiguous, so that learning is neither a process of blindly following explicit rules nor one of ignoring them in favor of implicit learning from multiple trials. For example, some teaching

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merely states explicitly what learners could observe for themselves but might not have noticed (or ignored, as a two-year old might with the rule, "No gargling at the table"), while others state what turn out to be "company manner" rules that apply in statistically rare but socially important occasions but not the rest of the time (for example, "No elbows on the table," in many US households). Often rules are ambiguous as stated (for example, "Address elders by their last name." Does that mean all elders? How much older do they have to be?) and need to be supplemented by observation.38 Another form of cultural learning- an extremely important one - proceeds by naming an abstract entity, e.g., honor or love, that learners then can learn to identify and acquire a fuller knowledge of experientially (D'Andrade 1984:91; Quinn and Holland 1987:3; Strauss and Quinn 1992). By the same token, even implicit learning through exposure to multiple examples is more complicated than depicted in connectionist models at present. For one thing, learners have to keep straight the difference between what is presented as normal in books and other media (e.g., households with one adult male, one adult female, and one or more children, the adults being parents of the children and married to each other) and what is statistically typical in the child's experience (e.g., blended or single-parent families or households that include other relatives, friends, or lovers, Strauss and Quinn 1992).39 For another, examples do not all have equal salience. Social learning theorists for example (Maccoby and Martin 1983),40 while stressing observational learning, note the importance of selective attention in this process. Sometimes attention is directed toward people who control desired resources (e.g., mothers, for young children), sometimes to the behavior of people like the learner (e.g., adults of the same sex as the learner), and sometimes to the behavior of people whom the learner aspires to be like or expects to be like someday (e.g., adults of a higher class or of a society to which one has emigrated) or the behavior of someone who is funny or otherwise attention-getting (as Claudia Strauss has observed with her four-year-old son's partial adoption of the speech of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), This process could be simulated by crafting sets of inputs that include only the most salient examples for a particular sort of learner, but it would be more interesting if connectionists were to try to model how learners learn to attend to some things and not others, paying particular attention to the role of emotional and motivational factors.41 Sometimes examples contrary to what one expected are not just one more example to learn from but are so surprising that they are especially memorable. As we will explain later, connectionist models are often insufficiently biological in not giving more weight to affect-laden learning, as learning something that is shocking or surprising may be. And

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it would help if connectionists would model social knowledge much more than they do, which would also force them to stop positing characterless generic learners. What all of this points to is the need for connectionists to work with field workers who will study the amount and kinds of explicit teaching that learners in different communities receive for a given task, as well as the particular examples learners are both exposed to and notice, especially for culture learning. Beyond the tabula rasa A more controversial issue at present is whether connectionists posit too little innate knowledge. For most cultural anthropologists this is not a problem. As cognitive anthropologist Lawrence Hirschfeld (1988) notes (citing Quinn and Holland 1987, among many others), a central dogma in cultural anthropology is that human behavior is predominantly learned.42 In response to this central dogma, Hirschfeld (1988; Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994) and some other cultural anthropologists (e.g., Atran 1990, Brown 1991) have joined a large and perhaps growing number of practitioners from otherfieldsin suggesting that much more human knowledge is innate than anthropologists had previously supposed. From their perspective, the fact that connectionist models start with little innate knowledge is a serious drawback, rather than the virtue we have made it out to be. This criticism of connectionist models misunderstands the extent to which they do contain what we could call innate knowledge. While the prototypical connectionist model does not include any explicitly programmed rules, it is not a blank slate before it is trained. As some commentators (e.g., Lachter and Bever 1988) have pointed out, all connectionist models start with a set of output units that represent whatever answers correspond to the task the model is supposed to learn, a set of input units representing those features of the stimulus that, the programmer decides, are most relevant for doing the task, and nonrandom connections among these units.43 These connections and the choice of indicators to be represented by the input units are extremely important constraints that are built into the program. Thus, in our terms-of-address example earlier, we decided in advance that the relevant inputs were ego and alter's age, ego and alter's local status, the closeness of their relationship, and so on. We ruled out such inputs as the weather at the moment or ego and alter's hair color (Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994:11). Less trivially, we also did not include features that might be relevant in another society. Among the Wolof of Senegal, for example, greeting routines are affected not only

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by the relative status of the two people interacting but also by whether their kin groups stand in a "joking relationship" (Irvine 1989). If a connectionist model has input units for the features relevant in no more than one society, it starts out more highly constrained than people do. At this point, if not a lot sooner, many anthropologists might say, "This is exactly why we do notfindartificial intelligence very useful. Why bother studying what computer programs can and cannot do, when they are so different from human beings?" But artificial intelligence modeling issues of this sort can actually lead in a fruitful direction for anthropologists because they could force us to consider whether learning cross-culturally variable social knowledge is facilitated by any universal propensities to pay attention to the correlations in one's own society among a limited, crossculturally recurring, set of possible features of the situation. Social status and interpersonal closeness might be two examples of such cross-culturally relevant features. Roger Brown and Albert Gilman argued many years ago, in "The pronouns of power and solidarity," (1960) that in Romance languages at least, choice between informal (e.g., tu) and formal (e.g., vous) second-person pronouns depends on the relative status and closeness of the speaker and addressee. More recently, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1987) argued that many features of speech in a wide variety of languages are affected by power/status differences and closeness (as well as a feature of the context they called "weightiness of the imposition" - a feature that is particularly relevant to situations in which the speaker has a favor to ask the addressee). The same features of closeness and relative status can also be found, according to Geoffrey White (1980), as underlying the similarity judgments of personality-trait descriptors made by speakers of three disparate languages (A'ara, spoken in the Solomon Islands of Melanesia; Oriya, spoken in Orissa, India; and US English), further evidence that we may be prewired to recognize these features of social relationships. It also strengthens the argument for innateness44 that many species of animals can recognize their place in the local "pecking order" and tell the difference between friends and strangers (e.g., Cheney and Seyfarth 1990). A similar recognition of probable universals helped Terry Regier with the problem of writing a connectionist program that could learn how to use spatial relation terms like the English words "above," "on," and "through," for any natural language.45 In English, relative position and path of a trajector (movable item of interest at the moment) in relation to a landmark (stable point of reference in the scene) are the only relevant features. We say, "He is on top of the hill" and "The kite was on the roof of the house," using "on" in both cases because both of the trajectors (he and the kite) are above, but in contact with and supported by, the landmarks

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(the hill and the roof). In other languages relative location is not all the learner needs to notice. For example, in Mixtec (spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico) spatial relations are described with bodily metaphors and the shape of the landmark is important. So He is on top of the hill is expressed in terms of being at the hilTs head, while / was on the roof of the house is expressed in terms of being at the house's back (Lakoff 1987:313-4, drawing on Brugman 1983, 1984). In other languages (e.g., German) still other features (e.g., orientation of the landmark's surface) are important (Regier 1995). So a program that simulates the ability of a young human to learn correctly how to use the spatial relation terms of their native language cannot be restricted to input units for features that are relevant in one language only. Regier's solution to the problem of learning these spatial relation terms, given all this potential variability, was to give the model a head start by building in some plausible universal feature detectors. His model has units sensitive to different orientations of the landmark and of the trajector in relation to landmark. That is reasonable: there is very solid neurobiological evidence for specialized cells that respond to a given orientation of a visual stimulus. Regier's model also has units that discriminate topographical relations (e.g., trajector is inside landmark versus outside landmark). Here, too, he can draw on evidence for brain cells that respond to center-surround and other topographic relations (cited in Regier 1995). And his model has special-purpose procedures for remembering these orientational and topographic relations at the beginning and end of a path if the trajector is in motion, as well as calculating average, largest, and smallest values of relevant states during the path (for using terms like "through"). With these specialized systems in place, Regier's model was able to learn spatial terms from English, German, Japanese, Russian, and Mixtec (not as exotic a collection as we anthropologists might like, but still impressive). The paradoxical moral of the story may be that we need to postulate some human cognitive universals in order to explain human learners' ability to acquire widely variable cultural knowledge. This is not such a novel suggestion: Noam Chomsky has argued the same point for many years with respect to language learning.46 But connectionist modeling like Regier's may show how it is possible to start with only a small core of evolutionarily plausible mechanisms47 and learn the rest. We probably do not need very detailed innate structures; just enough to give us a start in the right direction. Indeed, the remarkable ability of brain cells to respond to different features of the world, depending on the learner's history, suggests we should not go too far in assuming hardwiring (Merzenich and Sameshima 1993). It may be that we are born with propensities to attend to

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and represent certain features of the world, but these initial propensities are only neural first guesses that can be modified with experience. If that is the case, one problem with connectionist models as they stand now would be not that they are underconstrained but that they are overconstrained because their input units havefixedrepresentations. Final comments: symbols and meanings We hope it is clear now what it means to say that connectionist models are an alternative to "symbolic processing" models. Connectionist models certainly can learn to interpret culturally meaningful symbols. In these models, however, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the concepts to be learned and mental symbols that represent them;48 beliefs or ideas are not mentally represented as strings of such symbols (Strauss 1988); and our involuntary forms of thought are not simulated on the analogy of deliberately talking our way through a problem, one sentence at a time. Furthermore, modeling cognition connectionistically gives us a new way of thinking about meaning: one that is responsive to both postmodern critiques of static cultural meanings and old-guard warnings that cultural meanings do not change continuously or whimsically. We said in chapter 1 that meaning is "the interpretation evoked in a person by an object or event at a given time" and a "cultural meaning" is the typical interpretation of objects or events evoked in people who share life experiences. We can put those claims more precisely now, as follows: the meaning of an object or event for a person at a given time is the output of something like a connectionist network.49 The "cultural meaning" of an object or event is the typical output of the networks of people who have similar histories. There is no other meaning for that thing, no essential meaning floating in the ether somewhere. Nor does meaning rest in an abstract symbolic structure, although these structuralist claims about the importance of the whole do make sense if reanalyzed in connectionist terms, for the interpretation of any one thing depends on the weights in an entire cognitive network (see Hinton et al. 1986). Finally, while poststructuralists are right that meanings are never decided for all time, we are constantly producing meanings based on whatever schemas - however incomplete or partial - we have at the moment. Thinking of personal and cultural meanings that way has several advantages. A few can be outlined now. Thus, the contextually variable, changeable nature of meanings can be explained. To take a famous Geertzian (and before him, Rylian) example: what is the meaning of an eye blink? If this gesture were the input to a connectionist network, its output (the

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interpretation of one eye closing) would depend very much on all the features of the situation. If the gesture were accompanied by a sly smile, it might be interpreted as meaning "We're in this conspiracy together"; if it were followed by eye rubbing, it might instead evoke the interpretation "There is something in that person's eye." Interpretations also depend on the learner's history of experiences and can change over time. To return to our example of learning forms of address, a student could initially take a number of courses in a department where older professors like to be addressed formally and younger ones informally, but then take a number of courses from professors who expect to be addressed informally in seminars but formally by students in large lecture classes. These changing experiences will change the connection weights in the student's model for using terms of address, changing the interpretation, i.e., the effects, of an indicator such as age. At the same time the professor in this example is building up a network that interprets the terms being used to address her. Over time, this professor's interpretive model can change too. Perhaps once only advanced graduate studentsfirst-namedher but now she is routinelyfirst-namedby all students. Whereas before an undergraduate's calling her by herfirst-namewould evoke an unpleasant feeling of not receiving sufficient respect, she now interprets that informal mode of address differently. To the extent that the changes in her experience are shared by other professors, we can say that the cultural meaning of first-naming (in this situation) has changed. It is also easy to understand social variation in meanings when they are modeled this way. To the extent that different subcultural groups have different typical experiences, their cognitive networks will develop differently, and the interpretations evoked in them by a given object or event will diverge. There are also likely to be subcultural differences - some large, some subtle aspects of the context - in the objects and events being interpreted. To put it in terms of the model: There are likely to be subcultural differences, indeed, differences within any group, no matter how small, both in connection weights developed over time and input features at any one point in time. On the other hand, this model for meaning gives us new ways of picturing the possibility of somewhat stable and shared meanings. Thus, situations can change, activating different combinations of input units, without the underlying knowledge structure changing. That is why we have stressed the difference between meaning and schemes, where the former is one's interpretation of a particular situation and the latter are the learned patterns of connections among units, different parts of which will be activated in any given situation. Similarly, it is possible that networks of connections might overlap substantially across subcultural groups and

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that some of what we call intracultural variation could be due to differences not so much in schemas as in the combinations of inputs that are most typically activated. This model allows us to think about meanings that are rooted in experience without ever hardening beyond all possibility of change and are somewhat shared by different groups of people, but only to the extent that their experiences in the relevant domains are shared. The implications of our connectionist-inspired model for a theory of cultural meanings will be elaborated, with many more examples, in the next part of the book. Not that we will be restricted to a connectionist paradigm. As we have stated more than once, connectionism is useful as a way of showing that meanings can be mental while being learned from and sensitive to the public world. But it will take other psychological and social theories to explain fully how meanings become motivating (or not), persistent in people and communities (or not), spread thematically (or not), and widely shared (or not). In the chapters that follow we will show, for example, that cognition cannot be considered apart from emotion and motivation; that both implicit learning and explicit instruction are important for culture acquisition; and,finally,that just as an emphasis on public culture alone is inadequate, so is a consideration of cognition without discussion of its interactions with the world outside the mind. As we elaborate our arguments we will also indicate the limitations and indeterminacies of connectionist models. We will amend these models as necessary, suggesting, for example, how emotional arousal can strengthen neural connections and how control processes can override responses that otherwise might be activated by connectionist networks. It isfinallytime to start analyzing the centrifugal and centripetal properties of culture - the problem with which we started.

Part II

Implications for a theory of culture

Cultural understandings havefivecentripetal tendencies. First, they can be relatively durable in individuals. Secondly, cultural understandings can have emotional and motivational force, prompting those who hold them to act upon them. Thirdly, they can be relatively durable historically, being reproduced from generation to generation. Fourthly, they can be relatively thematic, in the sense that certain understandings may be repeatedly applied in a wide variety of contexts. Finally, they can be more or less widely shared; in fact, we do not call an understanding "cultural" unless it is shared, to some extent, in a social group. Various writers and traditions in cultural anthropology have been concerned with one or another of these properties or a subset of them; our account addresses all of them within a unified framework. Furthermore, these centripetal tendencies are reconciled within this framework with the equally evident centrifugal tendencies of culture, which have earned so much recent anthropological attention. That is, cultural understandings can be changeable in persons and across generations; they can be unmotivating; they can be contextually limited; and they can be shared by relatively few in a society. We should be clear that we are doing something more than acknowledging both tendencies. We want to begin accounting for a complex world in which some kinds of cultural beliefs, institutions and practices are enduring and others fleeting; a world in which some beliefs, institutions and practices are imbued with great psychological force and other kinds hold no particular emotional or motivational force for individuals; in which some recur over many contexts while others are quite context specific; and in which some are widely shared and others are shared by only a few people or even idiosyncratic. In other words, we are initiating an explanation of why the centripetal effects we have named occur when they do, and why the opposite, centrifugal effects occur when they do. As was noted in the opening pages of this book, if we think just about the centripetal effects of culture it is easy to imagine that these can be read from the public world itself, and that we do

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not need an anthropology of intrapersonal meaning at all. Public culture is, after all, the most tangible evidence of what endures in us, what motivates us, what lasts over time, what themes repeat themselves across the contexts of our lives, and what we share. But trying to account for why cultural practices are only sometimes durable and other times transitory in our lives and historically, only sometimes motivating for us and other times not, and so forth, forces us to examine the intrapersonal processes that explain these variable effects. Throughout this part of the book, our central point will be that cultural meanings are intrapersonal - that they arise in people. Connectionism makes two key contributions to an explanation of how this happens. First, a connectionist account preserves a theoretical balance between the flexibility of cultural meaning and its structure - what we are calling the centrifugal and the centripetal properties of culture. By this we mean, not just that connectionism gives centrifugal and centripetal tendencies each their due, but that it gives an account of how the two interact to produce highly complex results. The chapters in part II will give illustrations of this complexity and show how it can occur. Secondly, connectionism helps to explain how the meanings that arise in people do so in response to the outer world they encounter. The next two chapters address this aspect of cultural meanings as well. They will describe how people get their schemas from public objects (including other people) and public practices. They will also suggest - an issue to be taken up further in part III - that this is not a straightforward, simple process, so that we cannot form any expectations about what public objects and practices will become private meanings, or how enduring, widely shared, and so forth, these meanings will be, without studying the processes by which they are learned. The chapters in part II will also address what happens when schemas learned under earlier conditions then meet new conditions in the world. We want to make it very clear, however, that connectionism does not alone do the job of explaining how cultural meanings arise in individuals; it must be joined with other theoretical paradigms. Humans are multifaceted organisms living in a complex environment - from which it follows that many different processes contribute to any phenomenon of human life. Unlike connectionism, most of the other theoretical paradigms on which we will draw are not particularly new. Indeed, another of its virtues, we think, is that our account revives and reuses psychological theory of a sort that contributed to the anthropology of an earlier day, but that has been eclipsed by the more recent emphasis on the publicness of meaning. In stressing the importance of teaching, modeling, social evaluation, or psychodynamics we claim no originality, then; indeed, sometimes it may

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seem that we belabor the obvious. We do so for a reason, however: we aim to refocus anthropological attention on these various psychological processes underlying the kinds of social practice that shape cultural meaning for people. In what follows we will discuss each of the centripetal tendencies we have identified, noting also the centrifugal tendencies that parallel and counteract each. If we grant less space to these centrifugal properties of culture it is only because its centripetal properties are what require explaining. A centrifugal world in which everything "falls apart," making no lasting impression on individual lives or on future generations, failing to propel people to any concrete action, and never spreading beyond narrow contexts or few people, is what we could expect to happen without some impetus to the contrary. It may also be that in the contemporary sociopolitical mood a centrifugal world is more commonsensical - as evidenced by the readiness of contemporary anthropologists and other cultural theorists to imagine the world in this way. In any event, the centrifugal properties of culture follow unproblematically in the same terms we have developed for explaining the centripetal ones, we will show. Nevertheless, these centrifugal tendencies have an equally central place in the theory of culture we are proposing. We will take care to illustrate them too. To illustrate centripetal and centrifugal tendencies and further points we will be making in chapters 4 and 5, we introduce afictionalcharacter, Paula. Although entirely a product of our imaginations, she is a composite constructed in large part from the lives of women friends, acquaintances, and ourselves. Thus, while "Paula" is not the pseudonym for a real person, she is a realistic US American of a certain type (for example, the type depicted in the comic strip Sally Forth). Lest some readers conclude that we are trying to make thisfictiondo the work of actual evidence, we stress that we mean Paula's experiences to be purely illustrative. They are intended solely to remind readers of the properties of cultural understandings that we then attempt to explain. These properties themselves should not be controversial or require further proof; rather, what is needed is to account for them all. That explanation is the purpose of this part of the book. In part III we will describe research on actual people's understandings, conducted by each of us, that incorporates and exemplifies the approach we are delineating. Another purpose served by illustrating our points with the lives of a fictional character and her family, friends, coworkers and acquaintances is to emphasize that cultural understandings are not Platonic abstractions but always belong to people who are shaped by specific life circumstances in given places and times. Paula, for example, was born shortly after the

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end of World War II in the baby-boomer generation and grew up in a white middle-class family living in a suburb of a medium-size US city. Her father was an engineer and her mother stayed home and raised Paula and her younger brother, Daniel. Paula went to college, married rather later than her mother did, and unlike her mother has held a paid job continuously since she graduated from college. Now, in her early forties, with two young children, she holds a responsible managerial position in a large telecommunications company. Our focus on Paula's particularities does not mean our theory is limited to US Americans like her; we challenge the reader to think of any cultural setting in which the properties we describe do not hold. However, if we are to break through the current impasse in culture theory, we need to stop talking about "culture'* abstractly as a property of reified social groups, and look instead at how cultural understandings are shared and vary among particular people - in our society as well as others.

Two properties of culture

In this chapter we consider the two properties of culture that draw us most fully into a consideration of the individual who bears and acquires culture, properties that hence require the most complex psychological arguments about the way in which culture is internalized. Durability in the individual Some beliefs, values and other cultural understandings that people have stay with them a long time, sometimes their whole lives. Culture theories that focus on public forms of culture at the expense of the understandings people acquire from those public forms naturally have a hard time explaining the durability that schemas can have in individuals. If the world of messages surrounding us is rapidly changing and we are constructed by these discourses, why are our understandings not rapidly changing as well? On the other hand, how can a model that explains durability likewise account for people's obvious ability to adapt to change? Answering these questions will require the longest discussion in part II. This discussion entails a consideration of how the world is organized to ensure that the same associations will be made repeatedly. Explaining durability also leads to recognition of the role of emotional arousal in making some schemas durable, including some learned very early in life. And it invites us to discuss in some detail how teaching achieves its end of making learning durable. We go on to address the roles of other people's expectations and of institutional constraints on the durability of some cultural practices and the understandings attached to these. Turning next to centrifugal forces against durability, we explore how new situations sometimes present themselves in ways that ensure attention to new information, or demand new interpretations. Finally, we consider circumstances under which tendencies toward durability are overcome by deliberate effort to change cultural practices and understandings.

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Implications for a theory of culture Centripetal tendencies toward durability in the individual

Part of the reason why cultural understandings are durable in the individual is that they rest on neuronal connections that are not easily undone. Until now we have talked in terms of connectionist computer models; but these models are plausible, we have suggested, because they are inspired by certain properties of the brain. There is a neural basis for associative learning. When neurons are consistently activated by co-occurring features of experience, physical changes in the neurons strengthen the connections between and among them (Kandel, Schwartz and Jessell 1995:479,667ff.; Merzenich and Sameshima 1993:190).* Thereafter, if one of those neurons is activated, it will be more likely to activate another in that group. Remember that the environment determines which features of experience co-occur, and that a large part of that environment is culturally constructed. Growing up in an environment of a given cultured shape brings with it a distinctive pattern of experiences and corresponding neural changes. These neural changes determine the pathways through which activation spreads until a particular response is evoked. The synaptic changes that make this happen cannot be erased like sentences from a text (or even altered as quickly as the weights in a connectionist computer model). Change in the world can lead to new patterns of strong neural connections, but it does not completely destroy earlier learning.2 For example, in getting to know Paula, thefictionalcharacter whose life was summarized in the introduction to part II, one of thefirstthings you would realize is that she is a good feminist. She and her husband, Michael, are serious about sharing housework equally. Even so, Michael's ingrained disposition not to notice when something needs to be done around the house and Paula's unbreakable habit of being bothered by undone housework sometimes causes them to drift back into an old gendered division of household labor that they then realize seems unequal. Another part of the explanation for the stability of schemas is that they tend to be self-reinforcing. For the most part the schemas of infants are highly malleable. In the course of development, however, some schemas become increasingly well established, with the result that subsequent experiences are much more likely to be understood in their terms than the schemas are to be altered by these experiences.3 This process can be understood connectionistically as follows: once a network of strongly interconnected units has been created, it fills in ambiguous and missing information by activating all the units in an interconnected network, even those not directly stimulated by current experience. Subjectively, we may experience all the features of the typical event when only some of its features are present, reinforcing our original expectations (an effect psychologists, e.g., Loftus 1979, have demonstrated experimentally).

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This tendency of schemas to fill in for us can block disconfirming evidence. For example, thinking well of ourselves as most of us do, we may go through life blithely unaware of bad habits and other socially objectionable behaviors of ours that annoy, frustrate, or anger other people, because these negative traits do not accord with positive views that we hold of ourselves and getfilteredout. Equally, our dislike of someone can lead us to read everything they do as bad. Paula has a colleague at work with whom she is on bad terms. In the past he has demeaned her in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, and Paula has built up the expectation that he will continue to do so. As a result, many of his comments, even those innocently intended, trigger her "there-he-goes-demeaning-me-again" schema, with the result that she reads malevolent intentions into them. As far as she is concerned, her experience contains recurrent evidence that this colleague looks down on her, and each new interaction only strengthens the negative associations she has already constructed. Furthermore, negative social schemas can lead people to avoid interactions that might provide disconfirming evidence that would change their schemas. Brent Staples (1994:201-204), in his autobiography Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White, gives a striking description of suc patterns of interaction. As a black graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, he discovered that he could not walk the streets at night without having white people run from him, stare straight ahead to avoid his eyes, or freeze and still their conversations until he passed; women would clutch their purses, couples would lock arms or reach for each others' hands for security, and people in cars would hammer down their door locks. Atfirsthe tried to make himself more innocuous, turning out of his way to avoid people, whistling popular tunes as he passed them, and waiting for them to exit building lobbies before he entered so they would not feel trapped. Then, angered, he began deliberately to bear down on people or aim himself between them, laughing at their fright as he passed them. Paula is no different from the whites Staples encountered on Chicago streets. Given her middle-class suburban childhood and the fact that she is white, she has had littlefirst-handexperience with poor inner-city blacks. Her stereotype is that poor African-American men are likely to be violent criminals. Recently, alone in an unfamiliar large city on a business trip, she was approached by a shabbily dressed black man. Something about the way he looked triggered Paula's fear-laden associations, and she turned and ran. It didn't occur to her that she looked lost and he was approaching to offer directions. For Paula, the experience reinforced the connection in her mind between poor African-American men and violence, and she has since told others about the incident as evidence that it is not safe to walk the city streets anymore.4

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Stereotypes are good examples, as well, of other ways in which schemas can be self-reinforcing. Consider a possible problem with using an example like the last one. A reader who held the same stereotype as Paula, and who read this example quickly, might well miss our cautionary point about the way in which false stereotypes can persist and even strengthen in the absence of empirical support. The effect then would be to reinforce this stereotype, exactly the opposite of what we intend. A different and even more insidious way ingrained stereotypes can be self-reinforcing is that they become part of the experience of the stereotyped themselves. This is what Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson (1995) call "stereotype vulnerability." These psychologists show, for example, that blacks underperform in relation to whites on a difficult verbal test if they are led to believe the test is diagnostic of ability, although performing the same as whites (adjusted for SATs) on the same test if led to believe that it does not diagnose ability. In thefirstcondition the black participants are presumably under pressure of the stereotype of racially inferior intellectual ability, a stereotype made plausible by the difficulty of the test. This threat, in turn, can interfere with performance in a variety of ways, such as causing an arousal that reduces the range of cues participants are able to use, or diverting attention to task-irrelevant worries. Steele and Aronson (1995:798) point out that the stereotype need not even be internalized as a belief by the stereotyped person for that person to be vulnerable to these effects. The person may only need to know that his or her performance is in danger of confirming the stereotype, and being judged by it. Unfortunately, of course, it often is - thereby reinforcing the stereotype in the minds of whites in a position to judge and interpret such underperformance. Reinforcement of stereotypes in this way is a special instance of a more general case: by behaving in a way that confirms others' schemas about them, people often prompt responses from these others that reflect the others' interpretations and that re-elicit, and thus reinforce, the same behavior that confirmed the others' schemas in thefirstplace. Sensing as he does that Paula does not like him, her colleague at work tries to avoid her, behavior that she interprets as a lack of interest in her colleagueship, and that feeds her more general interpretation that he does not respect her. Psychologist Drew Westen (personal communication) provides the further example, from attachment research, of avoidant infants shutting off their needs for attachment, causing others to respond to them in ways that reinforce the infants' attachment avoidance. When a group of people has a stereotypical view of another group and that view is confirmed in this way, the resulting circle of reinforcement can be equally difficult to interrupt, and more consequential for society as a whole. A further reason why some cultural schemas are durable is that emo-

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tional arousal during or immediately after an experience (providing it is not excessive) strengthens the neural connections that result from that experience (Freeman 1991:81, 82; McGaugh 1989; Squire 1987:39-55). Thus, Paula's anger in interactions with her coworker, and her fear in the inner-city incident, altered the neurochemical environment in which relations among features of those experiences were internalized to render her schemas stronger than they would have been had she not cared so much about what she was observing. Each time she perceives her coworker to be demeaning her, for example, her anger kicks in to heighten the effect of the incident and the strength of the associations she brings away from it. The resulting schema becomes still stronger and even more likely to be activated in the future, at the expense of alternative understandings. Notably, the role of emotional arousal in making schemas durable can explain the indelibility of schemas learned in infancy, if we assume that early experiences tend to be linked to exceptionally strong feelings related to survival and security. To the degree that such early experience is widely shared, the durable schemas shaped by this infantile experience will be cultural schemas. We will have occasion to call upon this assumption about the indelibility of early schemas later in this chapter when we discuss the durability of feelings about being a good or a bad person. Teaching is almost always designed and conducted to the end of making learning durable. As obvious as it is, this truism about how teaching can work to establish enduring cultural schemas is altogether missing from Bourdieu's (1977) account and others (e.g., Ortner 1990) that draw on his.5 Common teaching techniques make perfect sense given connectionist theory (and associationist theories of learning more generally). At the heart of most teaching is the engineering of the learner's repeated exposure to and practice of what is being taught, so that networks of connections are gradually established and strengthened. Most of us, like Paula, can still recite multiplication tables that we learned this way in school decades ago. Since repeated exposure can have no strengthening effect on connections unless what is presented is actually perceived,6 effective teaching must also use devices designed to focus learners' attention on the relevant information. Also important are devices to create the emotional arousal that, as we described above, helps make learning "stick." Other teaching techniques make learning durable in ways that further complicate and extend connectionist frameworks as currently conceived. To summarize these complicated processes, parents and other socializers achieve durable results through meting out rewards and punishments for specific behaviors, conveying more general evaluations of the learner as a good or bad person, and giving or withholding love. Some rewards, such as (in American society) giving children ice cream

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for being well behaved or money in exchange for good grades, are effective only as long as they keep being provided by socializers. Other rewards and punishments, such as praising and frightening, can make learning durable because the feeling of being praised or frightened not only motivates learners when it is originally experienced, but is reproduced in them to motivate these learners when occasions for similar behavior arise in the future. Thus the praise one has learned to expect for doing as one has been taught may be self-administered, and the memories of fright, aroused by contemplation of doing something one is not supposed to do, can themselves be frightening enough to inhibit the forbidden behavior. Let us consider a somewhat fuller example from Paula's childhood, one to which we will have occasion to return later in this chapter and in the next. Paula no longer needs to be reminded to be self-reliant, as she was prompted to be by her parents when she was little; her pride in her own competence, or (at other times) her embarrassment and disappointment in herself at having to ask for help, are feelings automatically engendered in her by situations that call upon her to do something for herself. Moreover, just as with any skill in which she becomes expert, the more competent she becomes at a task that she associates with being self-reliant, the more she finds the task intrinsically rewarding. Her pleasurable feeling of competence becomes stronger and more consistent, and she may also come to enjoy a feeling of superiority to others less expert than she. These intrinsic rewards make the skills she has learned in order to be self-reliant, and her self-reliance more generally, even more durable. Notice that this description of learning already takes us well beyond any simple behaviorist mechanisms that might be implied by our references to rewards and punishments. Human learning depends on more than appropriate rewards and punishments. One class of cultural understandings can often play a general role in making learning durable. These are social evaluations. Ideas about goodness and badness inform social life everywhere, whatever the distinctive cultural shape of these understandings. Sometimes they are cast in terms of what is moral - e.g., being a good or bad Christian or a good or bad child; and sometimes in terms of what is natural - e.g., being psychologically normal or abnormal, or being a real man or not, or a feminine woman or not. These ideas are typically learned not as abstract intellectual possibilities, but as that which is approved and disapproved about other people, their behavior, and the groups they belong to, and/or about oneself, one's own behavior, and one's own group. When such approval and disapproval engender emotions such as admiration or love for others, hatred or fear of others, pride or satisfaction in oneself, shame or guilt over one's own behavior, then judgments of social approval or disapproval are

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learned in association with these emotions. Once learned in association with given ideas of good and bad behavior, the emotions themselves - even in the absence of real or fantasied social approval or disapproval or other rewards or punishments attendant on these - motivate the good behavior and inhibit the bad, just as other positive and negative emotions can motivate behavior with which they have become associated. Thus, one feels guilty for not having been Christian or ashamed of being a wimp. Social evaluations need not always have an emotional side to them, of course. But when they do - when learned through approval and disapproval and associated with the strong emotions that accompany those social evaluations of oneself and others can be very durable indeed. Ultimately, evaluative discourses directed at children by parents (and other primary socializers) draw force in all societies from the child's desire to insure the parent's love (Spiro 1987b). The early experiences of being loved for being good and having love withdrawn for being bad are durable lessons because, linked in the preverbal child's understanding with security and survival itself, these experiences are so highly emotionally arousing.7 While Melford Spiro (1987b:136-138) emphasizes the "moral anxiety" that love withdrawal arouses, we would expect that early experiences of being loved for being good would also be memorable. The early, global concern with being good and not being bad prefigures more culturally defined ideas about being this or that kind of good or bad person. It colors other important early experience, such as that of separation and individuation, to be discussed in the next section of this chapter in the context of learning self-reliance. The same emotions that, we will see, make such early learning highly motivating also make its lessons indelible. Still another aspect of early experience that similarly produces enduring as well as powerful effects is the infant-caretaker relationship as this shapes the adult experience of love. This will be considered in the context of Naomi Quinn's research described in chapter 7. In and out of schools, teachers capitalize on the durability of social evaluations of the self. Knowing that learners can almost always be counted on, over time and context, to want to feel like a good person rather than a bad one, teachers attach the behaviors they are teaching to evaluative discourses so that learners' ongoing desires to be good will activate the associated behavior in appropriate future contexts. "Don't be bad, now," we say to children habitually, or, "What a good girl!" By the time Paula had to learn the multiplication tables she had already learned to pride herself on being a top student, and she wanted to learn her tables so that she could demonstrate how good she was at reciting them. Desires such as those to feel like a good student or a good mother or a self-reliant person thus lend their considerable durability as well as (we will see in the

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next section) their force to the behaviors that have been linked to these ideals. Furthermore, to the extent that evaluations become aspects of self identity, they can act as very stable goals for which people strive throughout their lives in order to remain true to their self images. These goals are stable and powerful enough to prevent people from drifting into other patterns of behavior that would be easier accommodations to practical obstacles. Emphatically, such consistently rewarded, well-learned, highly stable self identities are not mere creations of shifting social discourses that individuals strategically adopt and perform, which is the constructionist view of them that we critiqued in chapter 2. This point holds for the gendered, ethnic, and national identities with which constructionists are concerned as well. We have already given an example of how durable understandings of oneself as a good mother, a feminine woman, or a real man can be. National and ethnic identities can be as enduring, we know, surviving emigration and the incorporation of immigrants into new nation states, or erupting again in ethnic wars after long periods of quiescence or state suppression. As Bourdieu (1991:52) puts the same point,

[t]he power of suggestion which is exerted through things and persons and which, instead of telling the child what he must do, tells him what he is, and thus leads him to become durably what he has to be, is the condition for the effectiveness of all kinds of symbolic power that will subsequently be able to operate on a habitus predisposed to respond to them. Bourdieu also reminds us that durable identities, once learned, exert an ongoing effect on behavior that need not always be self-conscious, but can (like any other learned behavior) be quite habitus-like. Paula, for example, sees herself as a good mother, and works at being one continually and consciously, making sure she attends PTA meetings regularly, spending sufficient quality time with her children, producing handmade Halloween costumes for them every year, and generally making accommodations in her busy schedule to do other things that she identifies with her ideal of motherhood. At the same time, she quite unconsciously emulates a style of interacting with children that she has learned to associate with being a good mother, almost always showing exceptional patience and adopting a cheery tone of voice with them, and becoming very nurturant when they are hurt or upset and very protective when they seem to be in trouble. Resistance to change rests on more than the properties of one's own schemas and the way they were learned. Sometimes others' well-learned dispositions require so much effort to overcome that change is very difficult. For example, we have observed that Paula and her husband Michael are committed to a more egalitarian division of household labor than they

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observed as they were growing up. They have been particularly successful in sharing responsibility for cooking and dishwashing. Even so, when they are busy entertaining, theyfindthat their guests* expectations force them back into gendered patterns they and the guests observed as they were growing up, Paula and the other women clearing the dishes at the end of the meal while Michael and the other men sit engrossed in the dinner-table conversation. Ordinarily Michael and Paula clear the table and wash the dishes together, but in front of company, when female guests are volunteering to help and male guests are not, the two feel awkward about insisting on their usual role violation. It is not simply changes in their behavior that are impeded by a resistant social world: her clearing and washing the dishes with the women and his sitting idly at the table with the men reinforces, in both of them, a whole array of unarticulated assumptions and feelings about men's and women's places. This is perhaps more so in the case of Michael, in whom the experience evokes no anger, frustration, or other conflicted feelings of the sort evoked in Paula, that might contradict his sense of ease with gender roles as they had always been. It is not only at the interpersonal level of others' habitus, but also at the level of institutional practices and policies, that the world can be uncooperative about changes such as those Paula and Michael have tried to make in the gendered division of labor. When they had a baby, for example, they discovered that Paula could take maternity leave from her job but Michael did not have the option of taking paternity leave, so they found themselves reproducing their parents' child-rearing roles during the baby'sfirstmonths. Paula's staying at home with the baby and Michael's continuing to work thus reinforced the associated ideas, motivations and feelings each of them had about mothers staying home and men pursuing their careers. Institutional arrangements such as this workplace policy can be especially diflicult to change, resting as they do not only on the beliefs and attitudes of those in charge of making them, but also on an intricate web of other institutional arrangements that would also have to be altered. When he inquired about it Michael found, for example, that administrators in the human resources office of his company considered paternity leave an unrealistic benefit option because, unlike maternity leave, it could not be folded into the existing short-term medical leave benefit offered in the company's medical insurance plan. This plan's subsumption of childbirth and hence maternity leave under short-term medical leave was standard in the medical insurance industry, Michael learned. Were paternity leave to be added to comprise a parenting-leave policy, leave could no longer be justified in terms of childbirth defined as a medical condition and funded in this way. The number of maternity-leave requests being substan-

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tial, the cost to Michael's company would be considerable. Of course, to the degree that local practices and policies like this one are governed by state-wide or even national organizations or laws, individual companies like Michael's may not even be free to devise their own solutions to the needs of their employees. Centrifugal tendencies against durability in the individual

Now we turn to centrifugal tendencies. In our account the tendency of schemas to durability does not require that they will always be so. First, it is important to stress that schemas do not act as perceptualfilters,keeping incongruent information out. It is typical of anthropologists to hold an extreme epistemological relativism according to which culture (or our "subject position") determines the very look, sound, feel, etc. of the world for us. This brand of relativism is infused with thinking that accepts unexamined a "strong" Whorfian hypothesis, according to which the labels for things, the syntax of a language, and other of its features screen the perceptions and hence completely determine the conceptual distinctions of its native speakers (see, e.g., Kondo 1990:26-33; Sahlins 1985). If this were true, it would be difficult for the knowledge structures of adults to change, because their well-learned schemas would prevent them from becoming aware of anything that contradicted these understandings. While it is true that our schemas may cause us to notice some things and overlook others and that schemas reproduce learned expectations when faced with missing or ambiguous information, there is no evidence that schemas, including cultural schemas, act as gatekeepers that bar perception of unexpected events (Alba and Hasher 1983). For example, if Paula had stayed long enough to listen to the man who approached her in the city, her stereotype would not have prevented her from hearing his offer of help. As Roy D'Andrade (1991) has pointed out, connectionist models can explain why schemas do not screen out new knowledge and hence why culture is not a perceptual "veil." During any new experience, missing information isfilledin by the weights of association learned earlier, but present information, if attended to, will ordinarily override the activation of those old associations.8 The result can be that new schemas are learned and older ones changed. Indeed, there is evidence that under some circumstances schema-inconsistent behavior will be especially noticeable and memorable, and especially likely to change a stereotype. One such circumstance is when schema-inconsistent behavior is exhibited by an otherwise good exemplar; another is when the behavior exhibited clearly contradicts the schema (Schneider 1991:534-537). It is possible, in addition, that novel experiences may - just because they upset one's commonsensical view of

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the world - arouse strong emotions, leading, for the reasons we explained earlier, to a large change in cognitive structures faster than normally occurs. Had she stayed to hear the oifer of help, then Paula's stereotype of inner-city African American men might have been forever altered. Of course, this does not always happen when people's stereotypes are contradicted, but it does happen. For reasons of cognitive ability to "break set" or of emotional responsiveness to inconsistency, some people may be more open than are others to altering their schemas in the face of schemacontradictory information. In addition, in connectionist models even well-learned schemas do not dictate an unchanging response, because the response that is suggested depends on all the features of any given situation and situations are rarely the same. As Paula's world changes, not only do some of her schemas change, but even her more resistant, durable associations adapt by combining in new ways with other associations to yield innovative responses. For example, as Paula was growing up, she observed countless examples of conversations. In each, the identity, roles, and aims of the participants were associated with different tones of voice (varying in loudness, tempo, and voice quality), gestures, postures, and facial expressions. According to our model, Paula did not learn a set of rules (for example, if you are a woman and if you want something, speak in a soft, hesitant, breathy voice) but rather a large number of connections of different strengths among units9 activated by features of the contexts for talk (identity of the actors, purpose of their actions, content of their talk) and those activated by the paralinguistic and kinaesthetic cues accompanying talk. These multiple connections allow her to respond flexibly to situations she may never have been in, been taught to handle, or observed. This is exactly what happened to Paula when she changed jobs and discovered that her new boss was a woman. The context of speaking to a woman activated one set of units for Paula, while the context of speaking to someone with power over her activated another, only partly overlapping set. As these units simultaneously activated still other units, their combined influence eventually settled into one response more than others, suggesting a way of reacting that felt right to Paula: a vocal, postural and gestural style and a corresponding sense of herself in this new situation that represented a compromise between the respectful manner she usually reserved for men in authority and the easy give-and-take that was her typical demeanor toward other women.10 This experience illustrates the "regulated improvisations" (Bourdieu 1977:11) that connectionist models explain well and shows how this property they have allows connectionist networks to adapt to changes in society. (Of course, with repeated experiences of dealing with her boss and other women in positions of authority,

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the new connections activated by Paula's improvisation would be strengthened as well as supplemented by connections to other features of such interactions, and Paula would eventually have a strong, stable schema for this new social phenomenon.) Paula'sfirstexperience with a woman boss also illustrates especially well the way in which schemas can be learned and activated independently of language. When she found herself adjusting to the unfamiliar interaction with her new supervisor, she had no ready way of describing how she was feeling and behaving, so it did not occur to her to talk to anybody about it. Paula's possibilities for innovation are not limited to passively reacting to changed situations, such as getting a woman boss. By making a deliberate effort, Paula can accustom herself to thinking and acting in ways different from those that come automatically to mind as natural, given the pattern of her past experiences. This conscious effort is an example of what some cognitive psychologists call a "controlled" process, in contradistinction to involuntary "automatic" ones (Schneider and Shiffrin 1977; Shiffrin and Schneider 1977). Well-learned, strong associations suggest automatic responses, but we have seen that these responses can be overridden through conscious control. As we pointed out in chapter 3, controlled processes are not readily explained within a connectionist framework. Of course it is also possible that once-novel responses, initially under conscious control, can themselves become habitual with practice, and henceforth activated like any other network of connections. For example, many of us at first found substituting "he or she" for "he" foreign to our tongues and remembering to do so a struggle; now most people think "he or she" effortlessly and use it automatically. We have already seen an example, in all the things that Paula undertakes in order to be what she considers a good mother, of deliberate effort to maintain a traditional social role. Conscious effort can be put to centrifugal as well as centripetal effect, depending on the circumstances, as a different example will show. While parts of Paula and Michael's feminist agenda may have been undermined by structural constraints in the world and social pressure from other people, they have been able to effect some of that agenda by retraining. In the beginning of their marriage, Paula and Michael fell into a pattern: Even though they took turns shopping, cooking, and cleaning up after meals, Paula was the one who planned the weekly menus, noticed what groceries they were running out of, and put them on the grocery list, and in other ways took primary responsibility for their meals. When Paula took her new higher-level and more responsible job, however, she told Michael that between home and work she simply had too much to worry about and he agreed. Michael volunteered to take over managing the kitchen. Atfirsthe had to be reminded to sit down on

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Sunday mornings and make up the menus for the week; and more than once Paula found herself in the middle of cooking dinner without a key ingredient for her recipe, which Michael then had to run out to pick up. But Michael soon mastered the job of kitchen manager and was exceedingly proud of himself for doing it well.11 After awhile it became unremarkable and nowadays, making up weekly menus and a shopping list, monitoring the supply of staples, and checking Paula's recipes for needed ingredients are as routine for him as doing the Sunday crossword puzzle. Now, only when a surprised guest comments on his role in running the house is Michael reminded that it is a bit unusual. The change is not just behavioral. Michael and Paula do not even realize it, but, for them, the meaning of "masculine" and "feminine" has shifted slightly, in line with their reassignment of kitchen responsibilities. In any case, deliberate cognitive effort of the sort that goes into a more equalized division of household labor is more likely to be fueled by well-learned schemas than by shallow,fleetingbeliefs. It is not sufficient to explain Paula's attempts to share kitchen work and child rearing more equally as a product of the feminist discourse and practices of the present time. That discourse and those practices are not imprinted on a tabula rasa they appeal to Paula as a result of the durable schemas she brings from her past, like her memories of her mother working in the kitchen. It is to these schemas that we next turn, to examine the affectively and motivationally charged associations that her early experiences of her mother working in the kitchen have for Paula. Motivational force Some of the same processes that make people's understandings and feelings more or less durable, as well as some other processes not yet considered, give these schemas more or less motivational force. Were cultural schemas to stay with the individuals who share them, but never have any discernible affect on how these people behaved, that would be inconsistent with what we know about culture. On the other hand, the observations that individuals enact the schemas they share selectively, some motivating a given individual more than others, and that different individuals can share the same schemas but not necessarily the same motivation to enact them, explain much of the behavioral variability that is evident among people. In this half of the chapter we address, first, the general process by which emotion and, through it, motivation, are incorporated into schemas as part of the experiences from which those schemas are formed. We go on to consider how teaching exploits some of the same techniques discussed in

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connection with the durability of learning, to impart motivation to what is being learned. Then we turn to the special role of social evaluations in motivating cultural understandings - whether these evaluations are explicitly taught, or are learned from the approval, disapproval or modeling of those who matter. These generalizations about how cultural schemas are motivated are next illustrated by the case of American self-reliance. This case also enables us to discuss how motivation is deliberately imparted to learning, not only by explicit teaching, but also by the design of the environment; and by the establishment of a foundation, in early learning, for further training. Pursuing the example of self-reliance, we next consider the psychodynamic basis, in infantile experience, for the powerful motivation attached to some cultural schemas. Thefinalsection of chapter 4 asks why cultural understandings do not always motivate people to act. One possibility we explore is that the goals of different schemas conflict. Another is that some schemas are learned with little or no motivation attached to them. Centripetal tendencies toward motivationalforce

As Paula was growing up in the 1950s, she observed that her own mother, her friends* mothers, mothers she read about in stories, and mothers she saw on television were more likely to be in the kitchen than were the men in those families. It is crucial to our account to emphasize that Paula's observations of her mother in the kitchen were not cool or detached. Certain feelings were part of that experience. As she grew older she became more aware that her mother did not like being so confined to the kitchen. Paula's unsympathetic reaction was to feel impatient with her mother for not insisting on a different division of labor in the household. As time went on, the mere sight of her mother in the kitchen was sometimes enough to annoy Paula, and also reminded her how important it would be for her to insist on a different domestic arrangement when she was married and in her own home. We have been assuming that feelings and motivations are incorporated into schemas, just as other experiences are,12 and in the last section this assumption contributed to our explanation of how schemas are durably learned. It is central, as well, to our explanation of their motivational force. Clearly, Paula learned more than associations between observable features of her childhood experiences; she also learned associations between what she observed and certain feelings she had. Those feelings, in turn, engendered certain motivations in her - in this case, the determination not to be "stuck," as she thinks of it, in the kitchen herself. Connectionist modelers, most of whom have been concerned exclusively

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with the problem of getting computers to think intelligently, have not been much interested in how to explain emotion and motivation. On the other hand, connectionist models can readily be extended to include them. 13 To make the extension we need to assume that inner subjective states of feeling and wanting, like observable behaviors, are activated through associative networks (Fiske and Pavelchak 1986). Granting this assumption, Paula could develop links between ideas about her mother in the kitchen, feelings of annoyance, and the aim of doing something different. Her memories of Thanksgiving at her grandparents, on the other hand, are suffused with the warmth of a happy occasion, free of the tension in her parents* house. So Paula associates Thanksgiving, not only with turkey, cranberries, and stuffing, but also with warm happy feelings, and now, with the intention of recreating that experience for her children. Her ideas about Thanksgiving, like those about her mother, have motivational force (D'Andrade and Strauss 1992). Implicit in this last example - as in some of the examples of durable learning in the previous section - is a further assumption about the relation between emotion and motivation: While feelings may be elicited by, and hence associated with, a wide range of experience, motivations are mediated by the inner experience of feeling. How this works precisely, and how it can be understood in connectionist terms, has been detailed by Drew Westen: [PJeople are motivated to seek pleasurable states and avoid painful ones. When they experience painful events, they attempt to alter the situation to alleviate the feeling. If this cannot be done behaviorally, they may use conscious coping mechanisms, such as praying or telling themselves things will be better soon, or unconscious defensive processes, such as denial or rationalization. To the extent that these procedures work, they will be associated with regulation of the aversive feeling and hence reinforced, that is, made more likely to be used again in analogous situations. And to the extent that they are repeatedly used under certain conditions, the weights connecting the units representing these procedures and those representing the circumstances in which they are elicited will increase. (Westen, in press)14 Conversely, of course, people also attempt to regulate pleasurable feelings in order to bring about or maintain them, and the behaviors that are successful at doing so are reinforced.15 As we have already seen in the last section, social evaluation is one kind of experience that is highly likely to be emotionally laden and, hence, to be motivating. Just as they can make learning very durable, social evaluations can often play a general role in adding motivational force to a wide spectrum of experiences with which they become associated. When social evaluations are part of an experience, any emotions associated with these

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ideas and the motivation to act on these emotions attach more force to that experience than it would otherwise have.16 Thus, Paula does not recreate Thanksgiving for her children only because she loves them and wants them to have the same kind of happy time she had at her grandparents* on Thanksgiving, although that is certainly the case. She also believes that children need happy childhoods, that an important ingredient of a happy childhood is happy memories of family holidays, that mothers are responsible for making these memories, and that good mothers fulfill this responsibility. And she not only thinks of herself as a good mother, as we saw in the previous section of this chapter, but has a considerable emotional investment in being such a mother. Paula's desire to be a good mother and other culturally shaped desires were learned in a variety of ways. Some such motivations are deliberately inculcated by socializers. The same techniques used to make learning durable work for making learners want to enact what they have learned, and much teaching is dedicated to this dual end. Thus, parents, teachers and other socializers engineer repeated occasions for the learner to observe, attend to, and practice the desired behavior. We have already pointed out, in the last section, how repetition strengthens the networks of connections being learned, increasing the durability of learning. Repetition also intensifies the learner's motivation to enact what has been learned, in two different ways. First, behaviors repeatedly observed and practiced become habitual; in the absence of any strong motivation to behave otherwise, they will always be the behaviors of choice because they are the only familiar and perhaps the only imagined possibility. Their very habituation may make them seem so natural that ways of acting differently become not just difficult to imagine but unlikely even to be noticed, let alone learned. Secondly, the more occasions learners have to attend to and enact behaviors, the more often they can be rewarded for attending to them well or doing them right, and punished for not paying attention to them or doing them wrong. For, another universal way in which socializers insure that their charges not only learn, but are motivated to do what they have learned to do, is by connecting the desired behaviors directly to rewards and punishments. About these processes behaviorists were certainly right. Learners are then motivated to experience the pleasure of a reward, such as an approving smile, praise, or food, or avoid the pain of a punishment, such as being shamed, frightened, hurt, isolated, or deprived. Socializers frequently fortify their teachings in still a third way, motivating learning with the same evaluative discourses they employ to make this learning durable, by attaching the behaviors they want enacted to ideas about learners' own goodness or badness. As we discussed in the last

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section on durability, these self-evaluations have already been learned, and charged with emotion and motivation, in other contexts. That is, wanting to be good and not bad not only makes learners learn well what it takes to be good and not bad, but also makes them want very much to do what they have learned it takes. Of course, learning social evaluations of these kinds, like other learning, can and does occur apart from the context of explicit teaching. One of the most important ways in which we come to want to perform certain behaviors, even apart from being explicitly taught to behave that way, is from the social evaluations of particular others who matter to us, whether our elders or our peers. Their approval and disapproval, with all the strong emotions engendered by these, make us want to be what those important to us care about being and want us to be, which accounts for much conformity to the dictates of our family, our peer group and the other groups to which we belong. Paula can not remember ever being explicitly taught that she would grow up and be a mother; it seems to her that she always wanted to be one. Her desire to be a mother grew, in part, out of a sense of what her own mother, her aunts and other older female relatives, and later in adolescence and early adulthood, her high school and college friends expected of her. If she could have analyzed the divergent sources of this motivation, she might have said that wanting to be a mother was partly something innate in her, and partly tied to feelings offinallybecoming an adult woman in the eyes of her relatives, and of being a whole person in the eyes of her woman friends. For Paula, as for most of us, both full adulthood and whole personhood are charged with positive evaluation. Another way in which we learn without explicit teaching is by modeling (although, of course, teachers can and do deliberately model behavior as one technique for teaching it). Modeling involves the tendency to imitate other individuals, such as parents, who are available, the focus of attention, and perceived to be powerful or prestigious, skillful, and nurturant; and the further tendency to pattern our behavior after the prototypical behavior of important, valued categories of others (Maccoby and Martin 1973). Of course, we do not automatically model our behavior after another's behavior just because the person is a parent or is otherwise important in our lives, as we have already seen in the case of Paula's determination not to be like her mother in certain ways. Her ideas about the good mother she wants to be are drawn from many representations and actual instances of mothering she has encountered, and include some things she admires about the way her own mother brought up her brother and her. Modeling is closely related to social evaluation, as Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin (ibid.:9) point out: While very young children often simply imitate what they see, older children begin to select persons

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and prototypes as models who exemplify the behaviors that the children have come to value and incorporate into their own self concepts. Let us return to the example of Paula's self-reliance. Paula is typically American in believing in the importance of being self-reliant (e.g., Bellah et al. 1985:55-65; Harkness, Super, and Keefer 1992; Hsu 1972:248-252; Wierzbicka 1993:223). It is no wonder that she is highly motivated to be so. Her parents found many opportunities to encourage her attempts at self-reliance. They rewarded her for these efforts by showing approval if she did something "all by yourself like a big girl!" and punished her for lack of self-reliance by chiding her disapprovingly if she asked for help too often. She was their oldest, and they expected her to be very grown up. Beginning when she was quite little, the pleasure she felt when she got approval for doing something on her own made her want to do other things on her own; her feeling of unhappiness when her parents were disapproving of her for being dependent made her want to be less dependent the next time. When she was a little older, too, playmates and schoolmates made fun of children who acted babyish, and she did not want to be the butt of such ridicule. When she was young the reward of approval and the punishment of disapproval motivated her directly to be self-reliant; as she got older, this approval and disapproval were gradually attached to ideas about herself as a person that she was learning in a multitude of other contexts. As a teenager, she wanted to grow up to be like her mother's extremely independent younger sister, who did not come to visit very often, but who maintained a special relationship with Paula, writing encouraging woman-to-woman letters to her from all the places she traveled as a foreign correspondent. As an adult herself, Paula has come to be proud of her achievements and of her competence when she accomplishes something on her own; disappointed in herself and ashamed to admit it when she needs help. We do not suppose that the force of the desire to be self-reliant, a preoccupation so striking that US Americans as a people are widely characterized in its terms, can be explained entirely as a product of shaping by approval and disapproval. For one thing, when values like self-reliance are especially significant to them, parents and other caretakers are likely to go further to inculcate them and begin doing so earlier in children's lives. They will deliberately design the environment and structure their own behavior in it, to give the child experiences that will motivate these values. This is a particularly useful teaching technique with infants, who would not be able to fully understand verbal instructions or admonishments about what they were expected to do, and might not be able to do it, in order to win approval and avoid disapproval. We can use a West German example supplied by Robert LeVine and Karin Norman (1994) to make

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this point about teaching infants self-reliance. As the example also testifies, US Americans are not the only ones who care about this value, nor even the most assiduous about teaching it.17 The German parents in this study, for example, not only put their babies to sleep in a separate bedroom, as Paula did hers, but follow other practices that Paula never would have considered: They may leave an infant alone in its room for an hour or more after it awakes, and alone in the house while they go shopping; they refrain from comforting it immediately when it is distressed, and worry more generally about "spoiling" it with excessive attention or too much accommodation to its demands (ibid.:5-7). These authors also observe that American childrearing between 1920 and 1950 resembled the German childrearing practices they report. "American mothers were told and often believed," they remind us, "that infant schedules were all-important, rapid response to crying could spoil a baby, it was necessary for babies to play alone and control themselves as early as possible" (ibid.:9). As LeVine and Norman (1994:8) point out, once engineered, such infant experience establishes motivation to be self-reliant and a baseline of habitual self-reliant behavior on which further self-reliance training can be built. This early motivation should be a particularly effective foundation for later learning because it will be not only particularly lasting, as we asserted in the last section, but also, as we will argue momentarily, particularly powerful. The example of self-reliance provides an opportunity to indicate still another source of motivational force that gains its intensity from its roots in earliest experience. The explanation for American self-reliance might end, for some theorists, with the description we have given so far of self-conscious socialization techniques. We are led to ask, however, why US Americans think it so important to teach their children self-reliance so early, and, correspondingly, why they have such a deep aversion to behaving in any way that feels to them like not being self-reliant - so that they sometimes cannot bring themselves, for examples, to ask good friends for help even in dire circumstances, or to apply for food stamps even when they qualify. A full explanation for the strength of Americans* need to be self-reliant, we are persuaded, requires attention to the psychodynamic processes that characterized the infantile experience of people like Paula. A product of this early experience, she would have already been strongly predisposed to selfreliance by the time her parents urged it upon her. It is a fundament of psychoanalytic theory,18 and one that we believe must be incorporated into any more general account of the motivational force of culture, that infantile experience has a powerful effect on motivation (and, as we pointed out in the previous section, a lasting effect on learning). The neoassociationist model we are developing here supports

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this assumption. As we observed in the last section, the feelings activated by very early experience will be strong ones, and to the degree that these early feelings are tied to emerging ideas about being good and being bad, these ideas, the emotions attached to them, and the motivations to be good and not to be bad that these emotions activate, will also be exceptionally powerful. Jessica Benjamin (1988) makes this case for self-reliance. She argues that US Americans' earliest evaluations regarding goodness and badness are gendered, being tied for both girls and boys to the idealization of freedom and its epitomization in the father and in men, and the devaluation of nurturance and its attribution to the mother and to women. In conclusion to a rich and compelling argument, Benjamin writes: the deep source of discontent in our culture is not repression or, in the new fashion, narcissism, but gender polarity. Many of the persistent symptoms of this discontent - contempt for the needy and dependent, emphasis on individual self-reliance, rejection of social forms of providing nurturance - are not visibly connected to gender. Yet in spite of the fact that these attitudes are almost as common among women as they are among men, they are nevertheless the result of gender polarity. They underlie the mentality of opposition which pits freedom against nurturance: either we differentiate or remain dependent; either we stand alone or are weak; either we relinquish autonomy or renounce the need for love. (Benjamin 1988:171-2) In Benjamin's (1988:169-171) fuller argument - to which we cannot possibly do justice here - pervasive gender polarity is in turn the complex result of a cultural configuration in which the liberating, exciting father is opposed to the holding, nurturing mother, the possibility of separation being split apart from that of connection and valued over it (ibid.: 169-170), and the issue of separation and individuation being recast as one of gender (ibid.: 104). One side of the resulting opposition between separation and oneness, the mother and femininity elicits helplessness and fear of engulfment, feelings that can only be countered by adherence to an idealized, masculinized self-sufficiency. In our terms, these strong feelings and the splitting that is the defense against them form the original core of US Americans' schema for self-reliance. Positing such a predisposition does not contradict the explanation of self-reliance we have already given in terms of parental approval and disapproval and parental engineering, but suggests that this conscious teaching has deeper roots. These deep, unconscious feelings may enhance people's determination to teach their children to be as self-reliant as possible, and their attraction to social institutions that reinforce this lesson. These feelings may also be what motivate enactment of public policies in the United States that ensure people have to learn to be self-reliant, even for such basics as food, shelter, and medical care.

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Centrifugal tendencies against motivationalforce

As deeply as Paula learned to want to be a self-reliant person and a good mother, like so many women her age she finds that the two goals not infrequently come into conflict in her adult life, and that, unhappily and uneasily, she must then choose between them. Her greatest sense of selfreliance comes from her job, requiring, as it does, much independent decision making and autonomous problem solving, and providing her with a source of income that she can call her own. But in order to maintain her involvement in ongoing projects, and be considered seriously by her bosses for new projects and for eventual promotions, she had to go back to work earlier than she wished to after each of her children was born. On the other hand, she is acutely conscious that the accommodations she had to make to her children's needs in the course of their childhoods have adversely affected advancement in her career; for example, she has had to pass up some prize assignments that would have taken her out of town too often, and it is always her colleagues, not she, who volunteer to put in overtime at crucial junctures in project completion. Such cruel if inevitable conflicts between culturally shared ideals mean that otherwise strong motivations to pursue these ideals cannot always be acted on by those who have learned them. In contrast to herfierceself-reliance and her determination to be a good mother, Paula has built up other complexes of associative links that are relatively unattached to feelings and desires in her. For example, Paula's parents grew up during the Depression and, as a result, often told stories about their near-poverty in those days and impressed upon Paula the need to "save for a rainy day." From these stories and exhortations Paula built up an associative network relating money to the importance of saving. Yet, though Paula's parents' concern about saving for a rainy day was linked closely to their traumatic Depression experience and their anxieties about ever going through that again, it did not hold more general importance for them as a value. If they had been as concerned to transmit the value of saving as they were to transmit the value of self-reliance to their children, they might have contrived ways for Paula to practice saving, and resorted to additional measures to make Paula feel good about herself when she saved money and bad about herself when she frittered it away. As it was, they did nothing more than exhort. Indeed, Paula tended to shut out these exhortations and the accompanying litany about how her parents had to sell soda bottles for grocery money and otherwise scrimp and save during the Depression, because she grew so tired of hearing it all. Moreover, because Paula herself grew up in the comfortable 1950s, she never learned through hard economic experiences of her own to associate strong emo-

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tions (for example, of shame or insecurity) and motivations to their homilies about saving. As Arlene Skolnick (1991:83) has observed about Paula's generation, "The comfortable way of life that seemed so miraculous and hard-won to the parents was simply taken for granted by the offspring"; Skolnick goes on to quote Todd Gitlin (1987:20) on this same phenomenon: "Parents could never quite convey how they were haunted by the Depression and relieved by the arrival of affluence; the young could never convey how tired they were of being reminded how bad things once had been, and therefore how graced and grateful they should feel to live normally in a normal America." Nor was there anything in Paula's earliest experience that made saving money a psychodynamic issue. Consequently, as an adult, she never has put much of her income into savings, although she thinks, in an abstract, detached way, that she ought to. Moreover, countering this weak impulse to save, and undermining any plan Paula might ever have to act on it, she confronts constant, persuasive public messages, explicit and implicit, that encourage unnecessary spending, and many actual examples of such spending that seem to her to have positive outcomes. Any number of further examples could be given of social evaluations to which Paula has been exposed but which never acquired motivational force for her (for example, her parents' double standard about premarital sexual behavior, and her mother's elaborate rules of etiquette and fastidious standards of housekeeping).19 More generally, not all cultural schemas acquire affective and motivational force for people; to understand which do and which do not, we need to learn the particularities of a person's experiences.

Three further properties of culture

The durability of culture in the individual and its motivational force are not the only properties of culture to be accounted for. The historical durability of culture, its thematicity, and its sharedness, as well as the circumstances under which these properties do not hold, are the topics of this chapter. Some of the arguments and assumptions developed in the detailed discussion of the previous chapter have paved the way for discussion in this one. Historical durability Something else we recognize about culture is its historical durability - that it can be, and often is, reproduced from one generation to another.i This is its third centripetal tendency. Yet, some cultural ideas stay around much, much longer than others, and some do not last even a generation. We next turn to this question of what gets reproduced in the next generation and how. We point out, in the next section, that historical durability results when the public world is recreated by enactment of the schemas each generation has learned; but also when one generation intentionally transmits its values to the next. We go on to describe how durability across generations is sometimes also promoted by people's deliberate efforts to preserve cherished practices; by the representation of heretofore private matters in public forms, which then preserve and propagate these understandings; or by the storage of cultural understandings in books and like repositories where they may lie dormant over long periods of time before being retrieved and accorded new life. The chapter then turns to circumstances under which, conversely, cultural understandings are unlikely to endure over time. We note the possibility that, just as existing behaviors recreate the public world from which the next generation learns, new patterns of behavior may alter this world. We explore how changing values about what is worth transmitting alter what one generation teaches the next. We consider, also, how historical change is helped when given social practices 111

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are labeled the objects of efforts at intentional social change. And we discuss how the same repositories that sometimes serve to perpetuate the ideas they preserve, can also foster change, when these ideas undergo reinterpretation (even as their historic sources lend them a sense of continuity with the past).

Centripetal tendencies toward historical durability The durability and motivational force of schemas for individuals have consequences for their historical durability. First of all, when people are motivated to enact and reenact the schemas they have learned from their own experience, they recreate the public world of objects and events that they knew, reproducing patterns of experience from which the next generation learns. For example, when Paula and Michael drift back into the gender roles they learned growing up, their behavior becomes part of the observable world that shapes their children's schemas. The children's schemas are also shaped by the behaviors they learn about in other homes they visit, at school, and in books, on television, in movies, and so on. To the degree that these other behaviors tend to the mode or idealize the past, their children's understandings surprise Paula and Michael by how traditional they often are (Weisner 1990). This point about the shape of the environment structuring successive generations' schemas is the essence of Bourdieu's account of cultural reproduction. At its most unproblematic, this process is akin to individuals acquiring habits from repeatedly observed and practiced patterns of behavior, described in the last chapter; that is, just as any given generation of individuals is predisposed to behaviors that are familiar to them and appear to be the only ones available, natural, or even imaginable, so the next generation is predisposed to those same familiar, available, natural behaviors being reenacted by the adults around them, (There is the old joke about the woman who always cut an end off her roast before putting it into the oven. When her daughter asked her why, she explained that was the way her mother had always done it. The girl pursued the matter with her maternal grandmother, who reported that that was the way her mother had always done it. The next time the girl was taken to visit the greatgrandmother in the old age home, she asked her why she had always cut off one end of her roast before cooking it. The old woman answered, "My pan was too short.") Furthermore, the world of objects, people and events from which children learn can have emotional resonances and motivational implications as well as informational content. Thus when Paula and Michael recreate the patterns of their own childhood experience in their childrearing practices - for example, putting their children to sleep in

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separate bedrooms from an early age - the patterns so replicated may carry and reproduce lasting emotional and motivational effects as well.2 Practices like this one often seem like such a natural way to do things that they go undiscussed; as long as they continue to go undiscussed, no language for talking about them develops. The absence of any such language to talk about an experience makes it less likely to come under sustained and widespread scrutiny; and, not being the object of such reflection, it is simply continued. Social problems, thus, can be especially persistent when they lack a language for articulating them. When they do not even have labels, as in the famous instance of the "problem that has no name," identified by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963), such problematic experiences are notoriously difficult to communicate and validate. Paula, who reached adulthood a decade after the publication of Friedan's book, is eloquent on the problem that once had no name but by then had been not only named but endlessly dissected: therightof women to find fulfillment outside the home. This is not to say that other of her experiences as a woman have been easy for Paula to formulate. Like many women of her cohort she can remember upsetting experiences in college that she never told anyone about and that she has only recently learned to identify and condemn as instances of sexual harassment. As long as each of these women's problems went unmentioned, it persisted unquestioned. Living in and experiencing a world shaped by the last generation's everyday practices is not the only determinant of cultural reproduction, as Bourdieu's account makes it seem to be. We have already argued that the process of teaching imparts durable cultural understandings to new learners. Here we need only add that there is a significant tendency for the content of what is taught to be reproduced over successive generations. This is because members of any society have, often among their most motivation-laden cultural understandings, certain ideas about what values must be transmitted to the young (see, e.g., Whiting and Whiting 1960:920; LeVine and Lun 1994:10-11 for this point made about parenting crossculturally) and what knowledge must be preserved for future generations. Thus, in addition to unintentionally recreating the world they know by the schemas they enact, people also act intentionally to pass on practices and beliefs that they value - to insure that certain of their own enduring schemas will become the enduring schemas of the next generation of individuals. Because Paula and Michael have learned to value self-reliance in themselves and others, they not only enact that value (thereby incidentally modeling self-reliant behavior for their children), but also transmit it quite deliberately to their children, often relying on child-rearing practices like the ones through which self-reliance was developed in them. Sometimes a changing world can prompt people to apply deliberate

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1 JUST THINK V/E SHOULb HAVE MORE FAMILY UNNEfcS V/HEfcE WE ALL S»T t>OWN AT THE S A M E / T T , c . K TIME Att> HAVE A ^^mT7tL-tEr ^ 2 ^ CHANCE TO T A U . J B ^ H ^ J ^ T T Y HECTIC AM I &EIN& ^ K ^ B / V X W V E S > SAL W&EAUSFlC?,

CALL ME OLfc-FASHlONEb, BUT I THINK ITS. IMPORTANT. A FAMILY THAT EATS T06ETHEA STAVS TOGETHER.

Figure 5.1 Sally Forth comic strip, originally published April 13,1994 effort not just to enact but to preserve valued practices learned growing up but felt to be slipping away. For example, Paula believes that a family should be close-knit, and attaches a great deal of importance to regular sit-down family dinners as a way of promoting this ideal. The hectic pace and unpredictable hours of her job and Michael's, and the difficulty of coordinating four people's dinnertime schedules as their children grow older and pursue independent after-school activities, make it all too easy to slip into a style of individualized pick-up eating. Now Paula wages a deliberate campaign to preserve sit-down meals at least a few evenings a week. To the extent that she and other mothers like her succeed, family sit-down dinners continue for another generation. To be sure, they survive, not as they once did as a matter of habitus, but now as a result of conscious effort. Private matters like mothers' personal crusades to save the sit-down dinner also have a good chance of attracting public notice, to be reproduced in public forms. The 1994 Sally Forth comic strip shown above captures just the tension Paula experiences between the value many US Americans put on sitting down together for dinner and the reality of their busy lives. As this chapter is beingfinishedin 1996, a more aggressive approach to the maintenance of sit-down dinners has appeared in US television ads for a new kind of take-out food, one being marketed as healthy and substantial enough to be the basis for a "real" family dinner. In each of these ads, a mother is pictured as using fantastical means to get the family to the dinner table at the scheduled hour. (In one, failing to get the band leader to change the time of band practice so it does not conflict with dinnertime, the mother dispatches him in a rocket. In another, she lays a deadly boobytrap that is tripped by an unsuspecting caller who has made the mistake of ringing the doorbell at dinnertime, and in still another, sherigsthe TV so that the children will have nothing good to watch at dinnertime and will come to the table.) In the last frame of each ad, the mother says ominously, "Don't mess with dinner." Like the comic strip, the ads illustrate how

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certain public products target just such widespread dilemmas - ones that, while experienced privately by many, have heretofore gone unshared and publicly unrecognized. Patterns like these are grist for public humor just because these individual efforts have had no established place in shared understanding or in public practice. They elicit "ahas!" of amused recognition that, without knowing it, we and others have been worrying about the same problem and improvising solutions to it (and, as in the case of Sally Forth, sometimes giving in to compromise solutions). Public representation of these heretofore private matters not only preserves them but lends them social reality, making it more likely that they will be thought, talked, and written about in future. These last examples should not obscure the point that historical durability rests as well on the fact that old ideas can be expressed and preserved outside of minds and in the absence of any sustained effort to reenact or recreate them - for example, in oral narratives (e.g., Ortner 1989), in books, drama, music, architecture, and in tools, routines and the organization of groups (e.g., Hutchins 1990b; Lave 1988). Thus it is that dormant idea systems like Nazism or romanticism have the ability to gain renewed force.3 However, as we point out in the next section, such external repositories of cultural understandings can also become effective vehicles of change. Centrifugal tendencies against historical durability Our account should have made clear that the understandings of Paula and Michael's children will also diverge from their parents* because the children have grown up observing different patterns of behavior; not only when their parents drift back into old gender roles, but also the times when Paula and Michael realize their new beliefs and share housework more equally; not only sit-down family dinners but also new compromise versions of these like the sit-down take-out dinner depicted in the Sally Forth strip. Moreover, behaviors, like sharing housework, that require a deliberate effort for Paula and Michael will shape what their children come to take for granted. When this new generation reaches their thirties, forties, and fifties, their assumptions about what is natural and desirable will further reshape the public symbols and institutions from which still another generation acquires their schemas. These new patterns of behavior and experience can also have profound psychic effects. For example, to the extent Paula and Michael alter traditional childrearing practice to divide childcare responsibility evenly between them, rather than letting the responsibility rest primarily on Paula - as it did on her mother and Michael's - they may unwittingly alter the psychological dynamic of gender identifi-

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cation and consequently the way their children think, feel about, and enact their genders (see Benjamin 1988:203-205; Chodorow 1978:217-218). In addition to modeling new behaviors for its children, the parental generation may have changed its explicit values about how these children should be reared. Paula and Michael may not be teaching their children to be as extreme in their self-reliance as they were taught to be (and, as we saw in the last chapter, as West German children are still taught to be), or to put quite the same construction on being self-reliant. This might happen because some of the techniques through which Paula and Michael were imbued with self-reliance as infants have come to seem too harsh to them, due to the spread of what LeVine and Norman (1994:9) characterize as "a new ideology of affectionate and emotionally responsive maternal care" in the United States after World War II and especially beginning in the 1950s. To make our point about the necessity of studying intrapersonal meaning again, we cannot divine from studying a given generation's public practices alone which of them will be continued in the next; we must discover which practices people believe merit being continued, and so teach the next generation, and which they do not. Deliberate instruction, too, can lead to generational change just as it can lead to cross-generational reproduction of values. Paula and Michael not only model more gender egalitarian behaviors than they observed growing up, they also deliberately impart such values. They refrain from imposing on their children traditional boys' and girls' clothes, toys, activities, household roles, and expectations about what they can do and should become. They also encourage their daughter to play sports and their son to express his feelings, read "liberated" versions of fairy tales to their children, and comment on sexist practices the children have observed. Whether such instruction results in significant changes in their children's practices and outlooks will depend in part on how cooperative the rest of the world is. Just as we discussed regarding Paula and Michael's efforts to change their own behavior, for their teachings to result in changes in their children's gender-typed behavior and identities, parallel widespread changes in many extradomestic social institutions would be necessary. Earlier in this section we observed how experience that goes unlabeled can persist over time. Labeling previously unarticulated experience is another way in which historical change can be initiated. Paradoxically, fixing in language experiences that are problematic but previously unarticulated - like the one to which Betty Friedan gave a name and other problems that have been labeled feminist issues - can be an important step in social change directed to the elimination or amelioration of those problems. This is because, as we said in chapter 2, naming can link disparate understandings in a new schema, lending the named experiences

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a social reality not unlike the way representation in public media like TV ads and comic strips does. (This is also the way in which putting psychic experience into words is said to facilitate individual therapeutic progress.) Having been distinguished and articulated, moreover, the problematic experience can be more easily shared. Shared, the new social reality can more easily become a legitimate social concern. When troublesome experiences disappear or alter, of course, so do the shared schemas that people derive from them. This can lead to another paradoxical effect, one that has been widely observed and discussed in both scholarly debate on contemporary feminism and its coverage in the popular press. Since many women in the current generation have not experienced many of the most trying frustrations suffered by Paula's generation and those before it, they are not inclined to see their situation as women as being terribly problematic. Thus, even though feminism was largely responsible for the more progressive social climate these women now enjoy, this very climate has made them more likely than the past few generations to dismiss feminism as irrelevant to their lives. Paula and the other woman manager her age at work, for example, have had a hard time getting their younger female colleagues to join them in protesting what she is sure is a slower rate of advancement for women managers. We observed that old ideas can be preserved outside of minds in books, architecture and the like. New ideas, as well, can be disseminated through the same vehicles, which can then contribute to historical change. Indeed, the sense of continuity conferred by the presence of the old can be deceptive, when interpretations of old texts take decidedly new twists - as, for example, have exegeses of the Bible over its several-thousand-year history. Moreover, these texts and other cultural products stay around for chance encounters with later people from anywhere in the world, which can lead to their incorporation into new and quite different contexts than originally intended. Thus, for example, many Christians read the Bible today and seek application of its messages, conceived and written in a distant time and place, to their contemporary lives. Other examples closer to Paula's life are the woman she knows who swears by homeopathic medical treatments translated into English from centuries-old Asian pharmaceutical texts, and another friend who was also born in the United States and grew up a Baptist, but is now a practicing Buddhist and follows a Buddhist regime of daily meditation. It is also important to bear in mind that the mere presence today of these artifacts from the past does not guarantee their continued force; unless the appropriate understandings and feelings about them and the appropriate motivations toward them are passed on (even if in altered form) across successive generations, the things themselves will be as lifeless and uncom-

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municative as the metal, stone, and ink of which they are composed. A mundane example is Paula's living room which, like those of many Americans, has lost its function as a separate and more formal space for hosting non-household members, and now sits empty a great deal of the time, while company tends to join the family in the TV room or on the patio, congregate in the kitchen before dinner, and sit around the dining room table long after dinner is finished. It is especially hard to predict what things will retain their meaningfutness and, if they do, what meanings they will have across time and complex historical shifts in the contexts of their use. These observations reinforce our point, once again, about the necessity of studying intrapersonal meaning. Thematicity The fourth property of culture, one amply illustrated in the ethnographic literature, is the tendency of some schemas to be evoked in a wide variety of contexts. Examples would include complexes of understandings about honor in the circum-Mediterranean area, as described by Bourdieu (1977) for Kabyle society, or about rivalry in Sherpa society, as described by Ortner (1989), about the Western discourse of normality that Michel Foucault (1972a) describes, or about self-reliance in the United States, which we will describe further below. As Foucault (e.g., 1979:23) makes clear, a theme or "discourse" can spread even across contexts separated by the boundaries of distinct subcultures, such as those that comprise the separate professional disciplines of social science and penal law. This thematicity that culture exhibits, again, depends upon a complex interplay between properties of the culturally constructed world and properties of the mind. As we will consider, conditions are only sometimes right for thematicity to result: Not all cultural schemas become cultural themes. A theme is most likely to spread across domains of experience, we note in the following section, when these experiences bear a family resemblance. Understandings gained from early learning and those gained from a wide variety of contexts are more likely to be generalized, we reason. We next give some attention to the process of "elective affinity" by which rhetoric and products embodying themes that appeal to people are elected, so that more such public discourse and commodities are produced, further disseminating the themes that they embody. On the other hand, we point out, there is no necessity for themes to spread across contexts, and often they do not. Both individual minds and the public world exhibit inconsistencies. Centripetal tendencies toward thematicity Paula and Michael generally say "please try to do it yourself when their children ask for help (unless the parents think the obstacle faced is some-

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thing that the children can not overcome by themselves). As a result their children have come to associate obstacles of many different sorts with the expectation that they will overcome them on their own. Nor will this expectation be triggered only by future situations that are exactly the same as those the children have encountered in the past. As conceptualized in connectionist models, we have said, schemas are not rigid structures with precisely stated rules of applicability. New experiences evoke an interpretation based on overall similarity of features of the current experience to repeated or particularly memorable combinations of features of previous experiences. So in the future, any new obstacle that Paula and Michael's children encounter will evoke their "do-it-on-your-own" expectation, provided that it has therightsort of family resemblance to previous occasions when they learned to handle a difficulty by themselves.4 As psychoanalytic thinkers since Freud have known, schemas learned very early are likely to be widely generalized to new experiences. This observation makes sense in connectionist terms, too. Since human infants start with a grossly undifferentiated understanding of the world, the very first associations they make serve them as models for much of their later experience. Furthermore, since, as we have pointed out, these earliest understandings are very durable, they are available to serve as models for later experience. As we have been illustrating, self-reliance is one such model available to people in our society. Another is a set of understandings around accomplishment and success, to be considered in chapter 6. The thematic effect of culturally patterned early experience was the focus of a well-known tradition of research in mid-century American cultural anthropology, under the rubric of national character studies (most notably, Benedict 1946; Gorer and Rickman 1950). Schemas are also more likely to be generalized if they are learned, initially, from a wide variety of contexts. Home and summer camp are only two of the contexts in which middle-class children in the United States learn self-reliance; other such contexts are day care, school, and extracurricular activities like Scouts and Little League. It is not only that these institutions reinforce self-reliance; they also broaden its definition. For example, overnight summer camps give middle-class children the experience of living away from their families, while US schools stress the importance of originality and independent work. Connectionist models would lead us to expect that the wider the range of contexts in which behaviors like self-reliance are learned, the greater the likelihood that any new context will resemble one of these earlier experiences, and thus the schema that has been built up from them, thereby evoking self-reliance as the appropriate response. A further dynamic contributes to the widespread recurrence and institutionalization of themes like this one. Paula, Michael and their children

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have an "elective affinity" (Weber 1946) for new rhetoric and products that appeal to their understandings about self-reliance. Because they find it natural to be self-reliant, they are unlikely to question the assertion, for example, that the United States must supply its own energy needs, or that welfare dependency is bad, and they are likely to support politicians who invoke these assumptions, and reject politicians foolhardy enough to try to alter the terms of debate and suggest that we live in an interdependent world or that we must help the poor. In addition, because they have come to attach positive feelings to being self-reliant, Paula and her family enjoy, and regularly participate in, pastimes such as backpacking that demand, and indeed test, this quality in them. Finally, because they find self-reliance desirable, they are attracted to stories such as the Nancy Drew books, television programs such as Little house on the prairie5 and the continuous stream of movies such as Home alone (and more recent ones sure to occur to the reader) that celebrate it and confirm the value they place on it. Because many people in our society share understandings about selfreliance, these kinds of public discourses, pastimes, and forms of entertainment "sell" well. This popular response, in turn, gives messages to the powers-that-be about future policies and products to develop and ways to market them, playing a role in the continual shaping and reshaping of the landscape of public objects and events from which further cognitive associations are learned.6We may surmise that it is largely through this cyclical process of production and election that the discourses and technologies of interest to Foucault are distributed widely across disciplinary subcultures - although it is not popular response, but the response of various professional elites, that is relevant to his case. Centrifugal tendencies against thematicity Having stressed the ways in which themes can spread across contexts, we must emphasize that they need not do so. There is no cultural dynamic ensuring that the members of a society will come to agree upon a wholly cohesive world view as earlier, functionalist anthropological accounts assumed would be the case, and no constraint against the possibility of multiple, even contradictory, cultural themes emerging. This possibility explains why attributions of personality types to individuals or - as were made in national character studies and other culture-and-personality studies - to cultures, have generally overstated the predictability and consistency of the individual or group of individuals so typed. (Lindesmith and Strauss 1950 and Wallace 1961:84-119 pointed out this problem with culture and personality studies at the time.) Thus Paula, like other Americans, is not always consistent in the

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schemas she enacts. Thought of in connectionistic terms her self-reliance schema, for example, is not an overarching rule that programs her to overcome all obstacles on her own in every situation. Instead, it is a network of links among units representing certain types of situations in which she was expected to be on her own, as a result of which shefindsit natural and desirable to be self-reliant in situations similar to those. She has built up this network from her experience of particular cases. New cases only activate the goal of self-reliance if they have enough features in common with previous situations in which it was expected of her. (Of course, we can be taught general rules that, applied to new situations, may weigh heavily in our experiencing them as similar to or different than earlier ones.) Thus, even if it might seem to an outside observer that given situations are alike, they may be experienced so differently that each is linked to different interpretations and responses. We know that when Paula was growing up she learned that self-reliance was generally rewarded. Yet she also learned that there were occasions when no one expected women to be self-reliant: on the contrary, when a car had a flat tire, for example, or a faucet was leaking, a feminine woman was expected to act helpless. Paula experienced the occasions for acting feminine and helpless very differently from the way she experienced those for acting self-reliant. As far as she could see from both fictional and real-life examples, things seemed to work out well for women who acted helpless in thoseflat-tire,leaky-faucet situations.7 Nowadays when Paula's car gets a flat tire or the faucet is leaking or there is some other problem that involve heavy or dirty, "male" activities, it seems natural to her to let Michael take care of it. To an observer Paula's behavior may seem inconsistent, but Paula is unaware of the inconsistency, because her self-reliance understandings and her feminine-helplessness understandings are represented in different parts of her neural network and are triggered in different sorts of contexts by very different features of experience, so they rarely come into conflict. The learning from specific experiences that is posited in connectionist models and the nonlinkage of some experiences that can result, make it easy to understand how this could be so. If knowledge is organized experientially rather than logically, there is no reason why all of Paula's contradictory understandings about self-reliance should be interlinked. The processes of such "compartmentalization" or "containment" of schemas as well as their limits - we are not completely fragmented selves are the topic of research by Claudia Strauss, described in chapter 8. (See also Strauss 1990 and Strauss and Quinn 1991.) It needs to be added that there is no requirement, either, that public culture will be consistent in the messages it conveys, as even the most casual flip of television channels from the Trinity Broadcasting Network to

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almost any daytime talk show makes vivid. This inconsistency in what is imparted by public institutions, rituals, and representations - even in so-called "simple" societies- combines with the human cognitive capacity for encapsulating information to help explain how contradictory schemas come to coexist in a person's head. Sharedness As observed at the beginning of part II, sharedness is for most of us the defining property of culture. As we have also indicated, cultural schemas differ not at all from other schemas learned from humanly mediated experiences, except in being shared. Schemas unique to individuals are built up from idiosyncratic experience, while those shared by individuals are built up from various kinds of common experience. Some schemas are undoubtedly held in common by millions of people, shared by everyone growing up and living his or her adult life in the same nation state, with its hegemonic influence and its capability for broadcasting popular events to the far limits of its boundaries. Other schemas are shared by only some individuals - subgroups forming self-conscious subcultures, or experts who have undergone the same esoteric training, or individuals who happen to share similar experiences (cf. Rosaldo 1989:28-30), for example. At what point in the continuum of sharedness we decide to call a given schema "cultural" is simply a matter of taste; we may, if we wish, speak of a family or workplace "culture," or "high culture," or a "subcultural theme." Cultural schemas are in people's heads, but a given cultural schema need not be in everyone's head.8 Since subgroups such as households, genders, regions, ethnicities and historical cohorts cross-cut one another, an individual may share schemas with as many different groups of other individuals as he or she shares a history of like experiences - at the same time sharing all of his or her schemas with no one else in any of these groups. In this final section of part II, we address the question of how patterns of relative sharedness and nonsharedness come about. Sharedness, we begin the next section by pointing out, requires not that people have the same experiences, but only that they experience the same general patterns. We observe that much of the social world is organized to ensure just this. We go on to consider, in addition, how historical events and trends can affect cohorts of people similarly, and how shared experience can also be enforced, through the exercise of power. Next we draw attention to three notable sources of modal patterning - common language; uniform child care and socialization practices; and shared task solutions. We devote some discussion to the third of these, noting how ubiquitous such task solutions are and delineating how they arise and

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spread. We consider the more general instance of cultural understandings that become widely shared because they have wide appeal. Turning, lastly, to the conditions that mitigate against sharedness, we discuss geographical distance and several different kinds of social impediment to interaction, and, hence, to like experience. Finally, we observe that individuals often experience similar circumstances differently, bringing to them different past experiences and, hence, different interpretations, feelings and motivations, and saliences. Centripetal tendencies toward sharedness Interplay between the public world and private psyches, once again, helps explain why certain schemas are so widely shared in a society. It is not necessary that two people have exactly the same experiences (and no two people ever will), for them to arrive at some of the same schemas. According to connectionist models, the most frequently encountered patterns of associations among features are internalized as strong connections, while random variations around the mode are represented by weaker connection weights that have much less effect on cognitive processing. (This leaves aside the effects of emotional modulation, which we will ignore for the moment.) Thus, to learn about the nature and value of self-reliance, it does not matter that Paula acquired this cultural model from parental homily A, personal experience B, observation of model C's behavior, and movie D; while Michael acquired it from a different assortment of experiences. Since both sets of inputs reveal the same general patterning of associated features, that pattern is represented by strongly interconnected units in each of their cognitive networks. Experiencing many of the same general patterns, people in a society will, to some extent, come to share the same understandings, have common emotional and motivational responses, and exhibit like behaviors. Not any public message is destined to become a widely shared understanding. Rather, the messages that become most widely shared will be those stored in widely distributed cultural products, so that most people will encounter them in some form or other. Much of the world is organized in exactly such a way as to ensure that people in the same social environment will indeed experience many of the same typical patterns. This modal patterning is broadly characteristic of human social life, a requirement of many of the practices by which people interact with each other, share knowledge, coordinate common activities, collaborate in common ventures, play the established roles expected of them, and otherwise conform to the laws of their government and the conventions and values of their fellows (see D'Andrade 1987b, 1989; Spiro 1987b: 112), as well as model and explicitly teach these common laws and

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values to others. To cite two mundane but not inconsequential examples: Paula and her friends who have children and millions of other suburban mothers allfindthemselves caught up in the common experience of incessant driving that is dictated by the organization of middle-class children's activities in combination with the pattern of suburban housing and reliance on automobiles that developed in the United States in the middle decades of the twentieth century.9 Another experience common to Paula and the other mothers she knows (and other networks of mothers all over America), throughout late winter and early spring, is the exchange of information they have located about summer camps and other summer activities, and the rush to sign up their children early for these programs, in order to keep the children busy and supervised during working hours. Theyfindit necessary to do so because of the cultural tradition of summer vacation from school, a vestige of long-ago days when most Americans lived on farms and children were needed for planting, harvesting and other intensive seasonal agricultural tasks. Historical events and trends affecting whole cohorts of individuals are another source of shared patterns. Paula's mother is hardly the only woman of her generation to have resented the gendered division of household labor, nor is Paula the only daughter of such a woman who determined she would organize her household differently.10 The modal patterning of experience is also, we must not forget, a by-product, not only of social movements like feminism but also of the exercise of power from above. Participation in certain institutions and allegiance to certain ideologies are enforced because this suits the interests of people in positions of power. In this way, cognitive and social forces interact to determine cultural dynamics. Deserving special note are three other sources of modal patterning. The first is the near constancy and minute detail of the shared experience that the structure of a common language or dialect provides for its speakers. While we have argued against a deterministic view of language as a screen for perception, we certainly recognize the degree to which language shapes what one notices and easily remembers, and hence the degree to which speakers of a common language tend to notice and remember the same features of experience (Lucy 1992). A second source of modal patterning are the subset of practices that are devoted to the care and socialization of the young, and that, to the degree that they are conducted collectively or based on shared knowledge and values, can result in an early experience that is uniform in ways consequential for the schemas children grow up sharing. (Whiting and Child 1953 can be considered an early formulation of this relationship between child socialization and the "characteristic habits" shared by adults; the research to be described in chapter 7 evolves

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from this tradition.) Anthropologists are still a long way from pinning down which aspects of this shared experience are consequential, however (Ingham 1996:83-85). Another important source of patterning that causes many individuals to experience the world similarly are shared task solutions. This subject demands a somewhat extended discussion of what such task solutions are and how they arise and come to be shared by many people. Among the common experiences with which human sociocultural life presents members of any community are, inevitably, recurrent tasks, problems, challenges, contradictions, and conflicts. As solutions to these are invented, the most useful, practical and appealing of these solutions tend to spread. Even complex tasks are met by creating and widely sharing the correspondingly complex solutions, such as human language, that they engender. Such cultural solutions are what Edwin Hutchins (1995:290) calls mediating structures11 and, as he has observed, they are ubiquitous in everyday life: Many tasks in our culture are mediated by written procedures or procedure-like artifacts, but even considering all of them would not begin to approach the full range of mediated performances. Language, cultural knowledge, mental models, arithmetic procedures, and rules of logic are all mediating structures too. So are traffic lights, supermarket layouts, and the contexts we arrange for one another's behavior. Mediating structure can be embodied in artifacts, in ideas, in systems of social interaction, or in all of these at once. (Hutchins 1995.: 290-291) Paula is familiar with and uses many, many such cultural artifacts and procedures. Like the rest of us, and thanks to the introduction of the low-cost hand calculator, she has forgotten through disuse a great deal of the arithmetic she learned in school. In another everyday example, Paula, like many shoppers, likes to go to one particular supermarket, largely because she knows where in the store to find the items she typically needs. 12 Taxiing the children, driving to work, and driving around town on her various household errands, she not only obeys the traffic lights but anticipates where they are on all the routes she knows by heart to all the major stores, restaurants, cinemas, civic buildings, and neighborhoods the physical structure of her community and her well-learned knowledge of it together guiding her through these daily tasks. Other people all over the country, balancing their checkbooks or doing their taxes, repeat the same set of procedures on their calculators to keep their finances in order. Other shoppers and other drivers in Paula's city memorize the same grocery displays and the same routes around town, the structure of their public world and their shared mental models of these structures mediating shared solutions to their everyday tasks of buying food and doing errands.

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Such examples bear out the point about the dependency of cognitive task performance on the material and human environment that is made by Hutchins and other of the cognitive anthropologists we discussed in chapter 2, under the rubric of "cognition in practice" or "situated cognition/' Hutchins himself insists that some task solutions are wholly or partially internalized, as is clear in his reference, in the quote above, to cultural knowledge and mental models, procedures, and rules. Indeed, as we noted in chapter 2, a thrust of his argument has been that human beings opportunistically and in combination employ both in the solution of cognitive tasks (ibid.:288-3i6,1996:64-65). Nevertheless, much of his work, like the work of other anthropologists in this tradition, focuses on the role played in cognitive task performance by the external world - including not just the material world but also other people, especially groups of people across whom cognitive tasks and the knowledge needed to perform them are "distributed." This is an important mission. However, as we also discussed in chapter 2, itrisksneglecting the intrapersonal resources people bring to task performance in favor of extrapersonal ones available to them. Concerned as we are in this book with intrapersonal culture, we would like to balance the picture by emphasizing the mediating structures that are wholly internalized - those that operate without the help of artifacts or other people's knowledge. Many of these internal mediating structures, like many artifacts and other public embodiments of mediating structures, are widely shared. Shared schemas of this kind are as ubiquitous as the mediating structures embedded in widely used artifacts or widely observed social practices, and are every bit as important in performing everyday cognitive tasks. Before calculators, the mental procedures taught in schools to do multiplication, long division, and so forth, would have been one example of a shared internalized mediating structure. For a trivial example still in wide use, Paula regularly has occasion, in calculating the days on which future events will fall, and in writing checks near the end of the month, to recite to herself the familiar rhyme that begins, "Thirty days hath September..." until the month in question is encountered, reminding her whether this is a "thirty-" or a "thirty-one-day" month. The point that these routines are internalized is not contradicted by the fact that heuristics for doing arithmetic are written and taught from books, or that the rhyme for the number of days in the month is orally transmitted from person to person; these are some of the ways, after all, in which such mediating structures become shared. Once learned, however that learning is accomplished, such mental procedures are stored mentally, and used to perform each new task independently of external context. For a less trivial example of such a shared internal task solution, Paula

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does not experience each conflict and dissatisfaction in her marriage as a new, unfamiliar problem. Rather, she brings to these events a widely shared mental model of how such marital difficulties are to be interpreted and how they can be resolved. In this model, difficulties are understood to arise from incompatibilities and are resolved through effort. For instance, Michael, who grew up in a family of limited income, tends to worry incessantly about debt, while Paula feels comfortable living a little beyond their means. For another instance, Paula imagines that if Michael really loved her he would anticipate her needs, but he typically has to be told what they are. It is these incompatibilities, Paula understands, that have kept their marriage from always being as happy as it could have been. They pose difficulties that must be overcome in order for the couple to achieve a mutually fulfilling marriage. Wanting to succeed at marriage, Paula and Michael both exert the effort to make it more compatible: they have worked out a compromise household budget, for example. Paula has consciously relinquished her cherished fantasy that the man who loves her will anticipate and meet all her needs, while Michael has slowly learned to gauge some of them. The issues that have arisen in Paula's marriage, and the ways she and Michael have dealt with them, differ in their particularities and emphases from the problems that their married friends have faced and the solutions that these other couples have devised. Yet, shared by Paula, Michael, other couples they know, and most other couples in the United States, is the ready-made set of understandings with which they address their marital conflicts and dissatisfactions, casting these as difficulties to be overcome by effort in order to achieve compatibility and enjoy a fulfilling, successful marriage. This cultural mediating structure for reasoning about marriage has been the topic of research by Naomi Quinn; in chapter 6, where this research is described, the structure will be further elucidated, and evidence for its sharing presented. Memory devices like that widely used for recalling how many days are in each month of the Gregorian calendar, and structures for reasoning, like that Americans apply to marriage, evolve, we may suppose, in response to recurring cognitive needs. Thus an irregular date system that is not easy to remember creates a need for a memory trick that frees people from having to consult a published calendar constantly. Important close interpersonal relationships like marriage inevitably contain recurrent interpersonal tensions. The possible causes, repercussions and resolutions of such interpersonal differences can be varied and complex, and, as we will consider more fully in the context of shared understandings of marriage in the next chapter, parties to such relationships are relieved of a great deal of mental effort by cultural accounts that aid them in identifying, explaining and knowing how to deal with these situations - tasks that are so frequent in,

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and so necessary for, everyday life. In each case the mediating structure allows a recurrent cognitive task to be performed with considerable cognitive efficiency. It may occur to some readers that, in invoking such structures for mediating thought, we have strayed quite some way from the connectionist approach to cognition with which we began in chapter 3. But connectionist processing alone cannot perform, or at least perform efficiently, all of the cognitive tasks that humans confront. We subscribe to the view of some cognitive scientists, so eloquently put by philosopher Andy Clark (1997: 194-200 especially), that brains perform many tasks by first transforming the problem space to augment performance. It stands to reason that such augmentations, when successful, would be shared. Clark's examples are ones mediated by language, among which he would number the calendar rhyme, which we are likely to externalize by saying it aloud to help us recall the whole serial list of months and keep track of where we are in it. In chapter 6, Naomi Quinn is concerned with "augmentations" like that for reasoning about marriage, that appear to be more wholly internal and less tied to language. We know little about how such mediating structures actually evolve. Talking of our ability to imagine internal representations of syllogisms and multiplication problems and then solve these mentally, connectionist modeler David Rumelhart and his colleagues consider the difficulty of inventing such task solutions: [W]e think that the idea that we reason with mental models is a powerful one precisely because it is about this process of imagining an external representation and operating on that. It is interesting that it is apparently difficult to invent new external representations for problems we might wish to solve. The invention of a new representation would seem to involve some basic insight into the nature of the problem to be solved. It may be that the process of inventing such representations is the highest human intellectual ability . .. [I]t seems to us that such representational systems are not very easy to develop. (Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClelland and Hinton 1986:47) Solutions for reasoning of this sort, and of the sort Quinn describes in chapter 6 - in the terms Rumelhart et al. use, imagined representational systems on which reasoners operate - are invented once and thereafter culturally shared, rather than having to be invented anew each time they are needed. Such systems are simply much easier to borrow than to invent. Further, the "basic insight" that Rumelhart et al. deem necessary to the invention of new task solutions defies explanation in the connectionist terms they are developing, as does deliberate conscious thought more generally, as we have seen in chapter 4. However such solutions are invented, once in existence as cultural

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schemas they are spread -just as they are durably learned, endowed with motivation, transmitted across generations, and imported into new contexts - in some of the same ways that we have described for other cultural understandings. Task solutions of obvious utility like the rule for stopping at red lights or the rhyme for recalling the number of days in the months are especially likely to be widely taught, of course. Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClelland and Hinton (1986:47) note, in the discussion, just cited, of representations for problem solutions, that "one of the critical aspects of our school system would seem to be teaching such representational schemes." On the other hand, knowledge indispensable to everyday task performance may simply be picked up without formal teaching. For example, as will also emerge in the next chapter, this is the way we learn the metaphors for marriage that are vital to communicating about it in everyday speech on the subject. The cognitive utility of a task solution can often be sufficient motivation for learning it. Cultural task solutions may become widespread, however, due to more than their sheer utility. As will be considered more fully in the next chapter, much of the broad appeal of the structure on which Paula and other US Americans rely to reason about their marriages comes from its incorporation, and evocation, of their understandings, feelings, and motives connected to that natural American inclination, trying hard to succeed at whatever you do. Widely appealing, this way of thinking has not only spread to marriage and many other domains of life to become a cultural theme, by the process we described in the last section; it has also spread to many people. Indeed, this observation regarding the appeal and consequent dissemination of the schema Paula uses to reason about her marriage extends beyond the case of such cultural mediating structures for cognitive task performance, bringing us to another way in which cultural understandings of all kinds become widely shared. It stands to reason that whatever has broad appeal or incorporates material of broad appeal will be widely adopted. We noted, to give one example, that some of the understandings underlying Paula's and Michael's marital difficulties might represent more widely shared ones. It is easy to imagine, for instance, that Paula's expectation that the person who loves you will anticipate all your needs might not be idiosyncratic to Paula, but might be a more common idea among women. Assuming this to be so, we might ask what is the broad appeal to American women of such an understanding. The example, which was borrowed from a real-life interview with a woman about her marriage, makes sense within the framework in which Janice Radway (1984:140-151) analyzes the appeal of popular romances published in the United States for women readers. These women, she argues, find in the

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romances a working out of their wish to be nurtured by their husbands as a child is by its mother. Certainly one of the desiderata of the mother-child relationship is the mother's ability to anticipate and meet the child's needs.13 The subsequent failure of a patriarchal and homophobic society to grant their wish for nurturance, says Radway, leaves this desire unfulfilled in many women (ibid.). Not only the longing for a husband who will be a mother, but also the practice of reading romance novels becomes widespread, and hence, also, the purchase and circulation of these books that confirm the validity of such a wish and fulfill it through fantasy (ibid.: 150—151). Earlier in this chapter we described the dynamic by which themes with widespread appeal recur across different products and discourses, as consumers "elect" these and producers rush to supply what "sells." Here the closely related point is that products and discourses that, like romance novels, embody these appealing themes, and hence themselves have wide appeal, will be widely adopted and used. In this way many people, sharing the same needs, come to share the same kinds of things and practices that fulfill these needs. Of course, not any policy or product has a chance to be "elected" or "bought,"14 we must remember. Just as those in power can dictate many of people's practices and coerce them into public expressions of allegiance, so the powerful can control what is available for people to consume. We should note that other kinds of products do not so much answer shared needs, as capture and reflect them, perhaps for the purpose of social commentary or humor. Good examples are the comic strip and the TV ads about sit-down dinners that we considered in the context of historical durability. These public representations of a widely shared concern not only give social reality to it, as we have already pointed out, but expose it to a still wider audience of people who might not have been aware of it previously or truly understood what it was about - for example in the case of the sit-down-dinner crusade, new immigrants from places where sitdown dinners have never been heard of; or some husbands and children who never before understood why their wife or mother was making such a fuss about it. Centrifugal tendencies against sharedness Our account makes sense of the substantial sharing of understandings that is observable in any society, while recognizing the wide degree of individual and subgroup variation that is equally obvious empirically. Just as connectionist modeling, with its emphasis on learning from particular experiences, is able to explain how understandings of different experiences sometimes, but not always, incorporate the same cultural themes, it is also

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able to explain how the experiences of different individuals do not always result in shared understandings, and how these do not always become widely shared across individuals. Thefirstand most obvious explanation is that in any society, different people live comparatively separate and divergent lives. When their resulting experiences diverge, so do the schemas they build up from these experiences. The larger and more complex a society, the more opportunities for experiences to diverge and the more radically they may do so within its borders. Some such variation in experience comes from the sheer distance between regions of a large country; just in the way that dialects come to diverge geographically, so do many other cultural practices (a tendency countered, in the United States, by that of middle-class Americans like Paula to migrate in search of college education or job). Much other variation in experience results from multiple social impediments to the uniform mixing of people, even those who live in the same region or city notably, in our own society, people of different racial and ethnic identity, religious affiliation, income, and occupation. Divergent cultural practices may simply grow up in different groups or in different settings due to noninteraction across these groups or settings, just as regional differences do. Zoning codes, lack of local jobs, and lack of low-cost housing or mass transit keep lower-income residents out of some neighborhoods. Among other sources of segregation are the division of the educational system into public and private schools, the growth and promotion of a youth culture, and plain social unease between people from different groups. Any and all of these circumstances can create barriers to interaction as effective as the distance between New York and California. Thus, as Paula remembers it, the exclusive neighborhood in which she grew up and the curriculum tracking system at her school kept her from mixing with children from poor families long enough to make friends with them. The segregation of groups is heightened considerably by group identities that stress the incommensurability of one's own group's practices and understandings with those of other groups. Among those separated in this way by their identities are some social classes, some racial, ethnic, and religious groups, and some groups of men and groups of women in the United States. Acting on such segregationist beliefs - for example, that intermarriage with someone from a different group would not work, or that they could never understand us - increases the likelihood that the separate experiences of "them" and "us" will continue to diverge. This effect is enhanced still further when coupled with beliefs in the superiority of one's own group over others, with negative stereotypes of members of other groups,15 and with explicitly exclusionary practices. Even people whose lives are necessarily intertwined in important con-

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texts (employees working in the same company, students attending the same school, or men and women in the same family) may be segregated in other contexts. They may then bring such different, and differentiating, experiences from these other contexts that they learn to be and to understand themselves as quite distinct, fostering a lack of interaction and consequent lack of shared experience even when they come together. On occasion, Paula has wanted to get to know a colleague at work better, but has been at a loss to know how to overcome the social reserve between herself and the other person, or how to interpret whether that person was interested in knowing her, when the other was from a different class or ethnic "background" (as she thought of it) from herself. Less obviously, people may grow up and live in circumstances similar to others, in proximity to these others, or even interacting with them, but still have different experiences. Both Paula and Michael learned the virtues of self-reliance as children, but there are differences in the specifics of the schemas they acquired. Michael, like many men of his generation, did not learn to associate self-reliance with washing or mending his own clothes, as Paula did; Paula, like a lot of other women her age, did not learn to associate self-reliance with doing her own home repairs, as Michael did. Likewise, both Paula and her childhood friend, Yvonne, learned an association between mothers and kitchens as they were growing up, but in other respects their experiences were different. Unlike Paula's mother, Yvonne's mother enjoyed baking and cooking, and her self-confidence and pleasure as she did that became part of Yvonne's network of associations with mother and kitchen. So - while Paula and Michael share a general understanding about the importance of self-reliance, and Paula and Yvonne share a general expectation that mothers will be found in kitchens, there are many specific respects in which their schemas diverge. The singlefamily houses so common in the United States and our ideas about nuclear-family autonomy and privacy make it possible for many such differences to exist without people being aware of them. In any society, too, shared ways of talking - labels for things, formulaic expressions - can cover up subtle differences in practice, as can the discreet silence or the token assent that often comes of wanting to conform or not wanting to cause argument. Among the differences that can exist between people, it should be clear from these last examples that there can be differences in the feelings and motivations that attach to the schemas they hold. Thus Michael gets a genuine feeling of pride when Paula asks him to attend to a home repair, and a rewarding sense of self-sufficiency when he completes it. Paula, on the other hand, is displeased or even panicked when shefindsit necessary to undertake such a repair herself. Likewise, Paula's memory of her

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mother "trapped" in the kitchen is tinged with annoyance at her mother's acquiescence to this arrangement and it makes her determined not to fall into a traditional division of household labor herself; and Yvonne's memory of her mother in the kitchen is suffused with admiration for her mother and makes her want to be an equally good cook. Another, more subtle, source of individual variation comes from variability in the salience of information. Spiro (1987a: 163-164) some time ago pointed to the differential "cognitive salience" a cultural doctrine might have, characterizing this as a difference between cultural belief'and cultura cliche.16 We think we can explain, in general terms quite consonant with the 'surface' and 'deep' meanings that Spiro identifies as motivating religious belief, why this difference would arise. People's schemas do not merely copy the most frequently presented associations in their environment (see Strauss and Quinn 1991 for examples). Due to the neurochemical process we described earlier, the learner's emotions and consequent motivations can affect how strongly the features of those events become associated in memory. It is possible, of course, for different individuals to surround a given experience with similarly strong emotions and motivations, and hence be equally likely to develop strong and readily activated schemas for interpreting that type of experience. It is just as possible, however, for emotions and motivations to lead to nonsharing, because two individuals could be exposed to the same information but care differently about that information and so not internalize it in the same way. For example, Paula's brother, Daniel, had the same opportunities as his sister to observe their mother while they were growing up. Since the happiness of mothers in kitchens was not of especial interest to him, however, the mental associations he formed of her in this context were not as strong as Paula's and have since been overlaid with other memories of their mother, more emotionally salient for him.17 Thus the same processes we have described, by which Paula was shaped as a cultural and historical personality, have also shaped her in all of her unique Paula-ness.18 We know that children who grow up in the same household do not emerge with identical schemas. On the other hand, a great deal of formative experience is shared in this environment. Consider the opposite case of the person who immigrates to the United States as a young adult. No matter how "assimilated" such an immigrant becomes into US society, he or she will always be different with regard to interpretive sensibilities, emotional tonalities and motivational pulls that were the product of a childhood quite different from that typical of someone growing up in the United States (although, as LeVine 1982:21 points out, and as we might expect, the children of immigrants are much more thoroughly Americanized). The indelibility of these differences may be

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likened to that of the accent that lingers in the immigrant's speech, however well he or she learns the language of the adopted country. Unlike a foreign accent, however, differences in early cultural experience may leave traces so subtle and inexpressible as to remain largely hidden from other people.

Part III

Practice and possibilities

Paula's life supplies convenient illustrations of our points, but empirically minded readers may be impatient withfictionand eager for us to tie our approach to real applications. While we could not possibly give full accounts of our own research within the confines of this book, much of that work is published elsewhere and will either be excerpted or cited as appropriate in what follows. Naomi Quinn's current research revolves around US Americans* shared understandings of marriage, while that of Claudia Strauss centers on the beliefs of diverse US Americans about welfare and success. Both bodies of research lean heavily on the close analysis of discourse from interviews, though the interviews themselves and the methods by which the resulting discourse was analyzed were designed for somewhat different ends. By and large, Naomi Quinn's research is designed to uncover centripetal properties of culture, particularly the sharedness and motivating force of understandings; Claudia Strauss' research is designed to reveal centrifugal properties of culture, particularly, different ways people can internalize the cultural understandings they learn, and the effect of these differences for cognitive consistency, motivation, and conformity to or divergence from dominant ideologies. Thus, while the two bodies of research in no sense confute each other (Quinn 1988), each lends itself to somewhat different observations. In addition, the two of us have collaborated on a small pilot project investigating what children in our society understand about marriage (work that we hope soon to extend to other domains and larger samples of child interviewees), and that study (Strauss and Quinn 1992) will provide a few of our examples. The chapters in this part carry a general import. The research they report shows why we need to rethink culture instead of throwing out the concept, as (we noted at the beginning of part I) some anthropologists are advising us all to do. Our examples have been chosen to make two further points bearing on our central argument about the need to study the intrapersonal realm of culture. First, we will show through these examples

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that studies of the intrapersonal side of culture can yield results that are nonobvious - indeed, even surprising - when set against studies of the extrapersonal side of culture. These research results have to do with unexpected differences between public culture and the shared understandings held by ordinary people; the relatively greater or lesser sharedness of people's cultural understandings than might be expected from the pattern of dissemination in public culture; the relatively greater or lesser motivation cultural understandings have for people than might be guessed from public enactments and material artifacts; and,finally,the relatively greater or lesser degree of integration of cultural understandings in people's minds than might be supposed from the cohesiveness or fragmentariness of public culture. Secondly, we will show that research on the intrapersonal side of culture allows us to pursue questions about the nature of culture that cannot be answered, and indeed often are not asked, by research on the extrapersonal side of culture (which is suited to asking and answering other questions). The questions we are thinking of have to do with the way cultural understandings are learned; the way motivational force is or is not imparted to these understandings; and the way diverse or conflicting cultural messages are cognitively structured. We decided to include these chapters, not only for the empirically minded reader, but because we ourselves are empirically minded. At the same time, we are acutely conscious of the disparity between the sweep of our theory and the relative modesty of our research agendas. If some readers welcome the change of pace from theory to application, others may be frustrated by the inevitable shift in scope from theoretical questions that vex a whole field to research questions that can reasonably be addressed by individuals in their lifetimes. We invite anyone who is made impatient by detailed investigations andfindingsto skip to chapter 9.

Research on shared task solutions Naomi Quinn

Cultural sharing has been the focus of my work over the past fifteen years. When I began this work, I was agnostic about the existence of such sharing. It is true that in my more recent collaboration with Claudia Strauss, leading up to this book, it is typically I who remind her to consider evidence for and examples of sharing and the other "centripetal" properties of culture, while she has always reminded me to include instances of nonshanng and the other "centrifugal" properties of culture in our discussion. She and I jokingly interpret this predilection as a generational one: in my training in the sixties I was primed to think about how culture was shared; trained some fifteen years later, she was primed to think about how culture was not. But by the time I began the research program to be described in these two chapters, my own early researches and perhaps the beginnings of a new climate in cultural anthropology had made me pessimistic about how shared culture might really be. I am certain of this because of one incident in my career that I have never forgotten. When I came to Duke, in the spring of 1972, to be interviewed for the faculty position I hold today, one of my interviewers was the late Weston LaBarre, the distinguished culture-and-personality theorist then on the faculty. Since I thought of myself and presented myself as a psychological anthropologist, a more contemporary label that was clearly differentiated in my mind from that of personality and culture, I was dismayed when he prefaced our interview by saying, "I see by your vita that you work in the area of personality and culture." Ever foolhardy, I reacted instantly, "Oh, no, that can't be. Because I don't believe in personality," and added, "And I'm not sure I believe in culture." While this story illustrates that I might have been skeptical about finding it (or maybe, says my co-author, it just exhibits my contrary streak), I cared enough about the question of cultural sharing to spend the next many years pursuing it. That fact, certainly, reflects my membership in an earlier generation of cultural anthropologists. I began the work reported in this chapter and the next by collecting and 137

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examining extensive interviews from a small but varied group of US Americans on an everyday topic about which they had much to say. (Because of the awkwardness of repeating the whole phrase "US Americans" each of the many times I refer to them in this chapter and the next, I often take the liberty of dropping the "US" and simply talk about Americans and American cultural understandings. Readers should remember that I am referring to the United States.*) The topic was marriage. Results of this research on Americans' understandings about marriage appear in a series of published articles (Quinn 1982,1987,1991,1992, and 1996). I will begin by briefly describing the methods I used to select interviewees and conduct interviews with them; several analyses to which the transcribed interviews have been submitted so far are described in the pages to follow. Student research assistants and I conducted interviews in 1979 and 1980 with twenty-two individuals, the husband and wife in each of eleven marriages. Beyond some commonalities of cultural and marital experience,2 interviewees were selected to maximize diversity with regard to such obvious differences as their places of geographic origin, religious affiliations, ethnic and racial identities, their occupations and educational backgrounds, their neighborhoods and social networks, and the lengths of their marriages. Husband and wife in each marriage were interviewed separately, for an average of between fifteen and sixteen hours.3 These "intensive interviews" (for lack of a better term in social science parlance) were structured as closely as possible after ordinary conversations that one might have about one's marriage with a friend or relative, one's spouse, or oneself.4 Undoubtedly the resulting interviews are exactly like none of those, but they are enough related, and the task of being interviewed was natural enough in and of itself, so that what resulted was extensive naturalseeming discourse5 - indeed, an extraordinarilyrichbody of it. Initially focussed on the cautious question of whether and to what extent Americans might share a cultural model of marriage, this research revealed an unexpectedly large degree of shared understanding on this topic. The obvious next question was, how did this sharing arise? Explaining the circumstances under which sharing arises should also illuminate the obverse circumstances under which understandings do not become widely shared and individual difference has more play. As will become apparent in the course of this chapter and the next, this concern with the sources and limits of sharing touches upon still other issues addressed in the last part of this book - the circumstances under which shared understandings gain motivational force and durability for individuals, and draw on preexisting thematic understandings. Another issue raised in previous chapters, that will emerge again in this one, is a methodological one: the need to study cultural sharing at the level of individual understandings in order to

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describe what is shared (and what is not) and to find clues to how this sharing happens, when it happens. Following the course of a multilayered analysis of the corpus of discourse that I collected, I will describe three different kinds of sharing that, taken together, produce substantial commonalities - though, as we will see, certainly nothing like uniformity - in the way most contemporary US Americans understand marriage. The first kind is the sharing of cultural exemplars that provide speakers with the abundant metaphors in which they cast marriage in their talk about it, as they perform the routine linguistic task of clarifying, for their listeners, the points they want to make about it. Being a matter of sheer efficiency of communication, this kind of sharing is motivated largely, if not wholly, by its utility for performance of this clarification task. The second is another kind of shared task solution in the form of an internalized template people use to reason about marriage indeed, without which they could not readily so reason. Incorporating, as it does, a cultural schema for successful realization of difficult enterprises in general that is itself widely appealing to Americans, the schema for reasoning about marriage is motivating not only by dint of its intrinsic utility for this reasoning task but also (as was already briefly noted in a discussion of Paula's reasoning about her marital incompatibilities in chapter 5) by the force of the more general schema on which it relies. This chapter will be devoted to a consideration of these two different kinds of shared task solution. The third kind of sharing, taken up in chapter 7, is a shared constellation of powerful hopes and expectations about marriage. While my research convinced me - and in these chapters I hope to convince readers - that culture is indeed substantially shared, it also changed my idea of what it is that is shared - about the nature of culture itself. In what was perhaps an all too monolithic view of culture, I long spoke and thought of what I was uncovering in my analysis as the cultural model (set especially, Quinn 1987 and Quinn and Holland 1987) of American marriage - as if it were the one and only such model. I now think of it as a cultural model Xhai has arisen from specific experiences US American have had in common - although it is certainly one that, due to these common experiences, most of these Americans share. Even further, I have come to see the shared understanding implied in the term "cultural model" as a product of variable tendencies toward different degrees of sharedness, differentially endowed with motivating force. My imagining of the sharedness, the motivational force, and the other properties of this cultural model I owe to developing theory from cognitive science about schemas, and a recasting of these shared schemas in connectionist terms. I should make clear at the outset what I mean by a cultural model, expanding on our brief definition, at the beginning of chapter 3, of cultural

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models as complex cultural schemas. Cultural schemas may organize domains of experience of all kinds, perceptual or purely conceptual, from simple concepts of single objects or events to elaborate knowledge systems (Langacker 1986:4). Schemas like the one to be described in this chapter and the next are conceptually complex; they connect and organize an interrelated set of elements and hence not only delineate but serve as working models for entire domains of activity in the world, and for this reason have been called "cultural models" (D'Andrade 1995:151-152; Holland and Quinn 1987), a terminology I will interchange freely with "cultural schema," as called for by the context. Rethinking cultural models in a connectionist framework not only makes clear the experiential basis of these, but also makes it possible to get closer to the processes by which such complex shared understandings are built up from shared experience. Only through studying these processes of internalization can we discover what kinds of shared experience are selected to become shared understanding. Although my research on American marriage certainly does not encompass all the kinds of shared experience from which shared understanding might arise, it does point to two major, if disparate, kinds: the shared experience of having to perform a recurrent cognitive task (the topic of this chapter), and shared experience of the emotionally intense kind exemplified par excellence by that undergone in infancy (the topic of the next chapter). My future research will continue to explore the different kinds of shared experience leading to shared cultural models. This research question simply does not arise within a paradigm confined to study of the externalities of experience - of public culture alone. In most of my research so far, as exemplified in this chapter and the next, the strategy has been to exploit clues in ordinary discourse for what they tell about shared cognition - to glean what people must have in mind in order to say the things they do. This strategy depends at once on extensive analysis of patterns in certain linguistic usages that recur in discourse, and close analysis of the details of this use. Metaphor use, reasoning, and the use of key words, as exemplified in these two chapters, have proven to be especially fruitful linguistic features of discourse because they occur relatively frequently in ordinary talk, and because each, for a different reason that will become apparent, bears a heavy load of cultural knowledge. Analysis 1. Metaphors for marriage and what they do An analysis of the metaphors people used in their talk about marriage, prompted by the influential and provocative work of George Lakoff and

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Mark Johnson (1980), provided me with some of myfirstclues to Americans* understandings of marriage. This examination of metaphors for marriage also led me, ultimately, to rethink the role that linguists have granted to culturally shared metaphor (Quinn 1991, n.d.). I have arrived at a wholly different interpretation from that of Lakoffand his colleagues, for the phenomenon to which they must be credited with drawing our attention - that is, the ubiquity of metaphors in ordinary human speech. My explanation rests on the repeated necessity of clarifying the point we are trying to make to others as we convey our ideas to them in speech. As will emerge later in this part of the chapter, speakers' deliberate use of metaphor to clarify their points is not the only source of metaphor in ordinary speech. It is, however, a very productive source, and the metaphors so chosen are not only common but, just because they have a point to make, especially noticeable. The metaphors speakers use to talk about marriage are of this type. Here I will present evidence for my view that speakers employ these and other metaphors to clarify their points. Using a connectionist framework, I will then indicate how metaphors do this clarification work and describe how cultural knowledge of apt metaphors for doing so becomes shared. Finally, I will offer a critique of the prevailing theoretical and methodological approach, derived from linguistics, to the study of metaphor. This is an approach, I will argue, that understates the variability in the use of metaphors while overstating their role in constructing understanding. My critique parallels our earlier one, in this book, of the pursuit of cultural meaning through the exclusive study of public culture. By taking culture seriously as an integral part of cognition, and applying the theory of culture developed in this book to myfindingsregarding metaphors for marriage, I arrive at a fresh account of a phenomenon - metaphor use that has been the topic of long investigation and continued controversy in several cognitive sciences. A great advantage of my view of metaphor is that it suggests an answer to the question of how metaphors like those Americans use for marriage come to be so widely shared. It will emerge that metaphors like these derive their sharedness from two sources. First, they draw upon cultural exemplars of those aspects of experience that the speaker wishes to clarify for the listener. Secondly, these metaphors fall into classes reflecting a shared set of underlying concepts that the metaphors have been chosen to represent and highlight. Why this set of concepts should, in turn, be shared will be addressed in the second half of this chapter. Here I will direct my attention to the metaphors themselves, presenting evidence, first, of the classes into which metaphors fall and the underlying concepts that these classes reflect.

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Strikingly, the hundreds of metaphors for marriage found in my corpus of discourse fall into just eight classes. These are: (1) metaphors oflastingness, such as, '"It was stuck together pretty good" or "It's that feeling of confidence about each other that's going to keep us going"; (2) metaphors of sharedness, such as, "I felt like a marriage was just a partnership" or "We're together in this"; (3) metaphors of mutual benefit, such as, "That was really something that we got out of marriage" or "Our marriage is a very good thing for both of us"; (4) metaphors of compatibilityy such as, "The best thing about Bill is that he fits me so well" or "Both of our weaknesses were such that the other person could fill in"; (5) metaphors of difficulty, such as, "That was one of the hard barriers to get over" or "The first year we were married was really a trial"; (6) metaphors of effort, such as, "She works harder at our marriage than I do" or "We had to fight our way back almost to the beginning"; (7) metaphors of success or failure, such as, "We knew that it was working" or, conversely, "The marriage was doomed"; and (8) metaphors of risk, such as, "There're so many odds against marriage" or "The marriage was in trouble."6 This discovery, of the recurrent use of a small number of metaphor classes to describe a domain of American life, across discourse on this topic by a diverse group of Americans, was my first evidence of widely shared understandings about marriage. This regularity had to be discerned beneath a great deal of diversity in the way in which couples and individuals within these dyads represented, spoke about, and thought of their marriages. Some interviewees obviously relished their metaphors and produced novel and elaborate ones, while others were minimalists in this regard. Most liked to talk about their marriages; a few did not, or shied away from disclosure on certain marital topics. Different interviewees made something a little different of the interview itself, one couple seeing it as an opportunity to present their visionary model of marriage to the world, another treating it as a chance to explore their own role as pioneers in what they saw as a different kind of marriage, another to reaffirm what they found good about their marriage, one man to relate the history of his, and other individuals to therapize about their marriages or tell their side of things to a neutral person. Different couples and individuals dwelt on different aspects of their marriages, providing more discussion of and metaphors for some concepts than for others. One wife, for example, spoke long and eloquently, in a variety of extended metaphors, about the difficulties that had been overcome in her marriage. Some - for example, the man who maintained a running metaphor for the benefits of marriage as liquid in a container, the level of which could rise or fall and be measured by a

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mechanical gauge - returned repeatedly to one or another pet metaphor (to use a metaphor). They had different theories about marriage, and different marital issues, and different styles of married life, of which they were also in different stages. Some were in happier, others in distinctly less happy marriages at the time they were interviewed, and some subsequently divorced. For all of these reasons, and others, interviewees had diverse stories to tell about their marriages. The common set of concepts lastingness, sharedness, mutual benefit, and so forth - that all these stories embellish is therefore all the more arresting. Having given just two examples to illustrate each class of metaphor, I will reinforce my point about the variety of these metaphors for marriage within the classes to which they belong with a single more extended example - that of marital lastingness. Speakers frequently cast its lastingness in the metaphor of marriage as a manufactured product: one that is well-made in the senses of being not only well put together - "stuck together pretty good," in my earlier example - but also structurally sound - for instance, "They had a basic solid foundation in their marriages that could be shaped into something good"; one that is made out of strong materials - e.g., "We forged a lifetime proposition"; and good parts - e.g., "We have looked into the other person and found their best parts and used those parts to make the relationship gel"; and one that is made with the necessary care - e.g., "When the marriage was strong, it was very strong because it was made as we went along; it was sort of a do-it-yourself project"; and effort - e.g., "Maybe that had something to do with what was good about it. The fact that we really had to work at it." However, this is far from the only metaphor that these speakers used to convey the expectation of marital lastingness. Another very common metaphor for a lasting marriage is that of an ongoing journey that married people undertake together - "That's going to keep us going," in the other earlier example of marital lastingness. Somewhat less frequently but no less predictably, speakers use other metaphors of marriage as two inseparable objects - "We knew we were going to stay together"; as a durable attachment between spouses - "That just kind of cements the bond"; as a permanent location - "I was able to stay in the marriage"; as a secure possession - "We got it"; and as an indestructible natural object - "the everlasting Gibraltar nature of the whole thing" - among other metaphors - to convey the expectation of its lastingness. At the same time that the small number of metaphor classes suggests widespread sharing, the finding of such variability among the metaphors within these classes suggests that the metaphors themselves cannot be the basis of this shared understanding. This conclusion runs counter to arguments made by Lakoff and his colleagues (Johnson 1987; Lakoff and

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Johnson 1980; Lakoff and Kovecses 1987) to which I have already alluded. These researchers imagine that the metaphors they encounter in spoken and written language reflect deeper conceptual metaphors that "allow'* or "constitute" conceptualization, comprehension, and understanding.7 However, the many different metaphors that speakers readily call upon to recast the same underlying concept is evidence against a constitutive role for metaphor. Instead, as I have elsewhere argued (Quinn 1991), in their pattern of usage these metaphors for marriage reflect an underlying schema that people share for thinking about marriage, and that guides their selection of metaphors for it. This schema will be the focus of the second half of this chapter, on reasoning about marriage. In assuming that what is in mind is so directly manifest in language, students of metaphor like Lakoff are reminiscent of anthropologists such as Geertz, discussed in chapter 2 (on this point about Geertz in particular, see Wikan 1987) and literary critics such as Fredric Jameson, to be discussed by Claudia Strauss in chapter 8, who assume that what is in people's minds can be read directly from public culture. Perhaps it should not surprise us that a theory placing such inferential weight on linguistic forms should have originated with linguists. And perhaps it is only because anthropologists lack any more developed theory of cultural meaning of their own, that they have so quickly and uncritically incorporated into their own formulations Lakoff s assumption that metaphor "structures" or provides the "model for" the understanding that it captures.8 Although language holds the clues to the cultural schema I will describe, the schema is far from isomorphic with the language, or obvious from it; certainly, it is not retrievable from any given metaphor speakers use. As I will return to at the end of my analysis of metaphor, reconstruction of such cultural schemas from the indirect clues provided by language requires a suitably sensitive method. Cultural exemplars as sources of metaphors This conclusion, that our knowledge of the domains about which people are speaking guides their selection of metaphors to describe these domains and reason about them, points to an explanation for what metaphors are used to do. Metaphors, I have already suggested, clarify. One important reason they are used, and used so very frequently in everyday speech, is that they do a good job of clarifying for listeners the nonmetaphorical points speakers are trying to get across. And for this same reason - along with their high rate of use for this purpose in ordinary discourse - they are excellent clues to the cultural schemas that underlie them. This brings us to the second source of sharing that gives metaphor use its

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regularity. Not only are metaphors selected to exemplify shared concepts; as I will next explain, they are drawn from shared exemplars of these concepts. In this way they introduce an outstanding and unambiguous instance of the point being made. The degree to which these cultural exemplars are shared by speakers is no less striking than the sharing of the underlying concepts that guide metaphor selection and account for the classes of metaphor speakers use. Indeed, metaphors clarify precisely because they are drawn from domains that are widely acknowledged exemplars, with regard to whatever aspects of experience they are being made to stand for. Because speaker and listener intersubjectively share an exemplar, both knowing what it exemplifies, the chosen metaphor does the job of clarifying the point for the listener. Members of a speech community must share these exemplars in order to be able to use them to communicate in this way. To see how metaphors drawn from exemplars work, consider an illustration I culled from the sports page of USA Today (May 5, 1993). Third baseman George Brett, interviewed on the occasion of his retirement from baseball, comments on his unusually long-term relationship with the Kansas City Royals: "I compare it to a marriage. We've had our problems, but overall, we have had a good relationship. I never, ever want to put on another uniform." Marriage is famous among Americans for being something that is meant to endure and that does so (when it does so) in spite of its difficulties. That is why George Brett's metaphor gives us all a surer sense of what he wants to convey about his relationship with the Royals.9 As with Brett's choice of the marriage metaphor, speakers' selection of a metaphorical source domain often seems motivated precisely by the point they have in mind. The case of the husband who speaks of his marriage in terms of "the everlasting Gibraltar nature of the whole thing," is illuminating in this respect. The context for this metaphor is his remembering the moment in his marriage when he realized "that my confidence in the everlasting Gibraltar nature of the whole thing was rather naive" [5H-4].10 To underscore how, in his naivete, he overestimated the lastingness of marriage, this speaker employs a metaphor of something truly lasting indeed, an icon of the everlasting for many US Americans, appropriated, reproduced, and widely disseminated as the logo of a national insurance company. A parallel example comes from another interviewee: expressing his surprise about a marriage of acquaintances that "suddenly broke up," he says, "We had no warning; if ever a marriage was nailed in cement, that was the one" [8H-2]. Both these men draw metaphorically on things known for being exceptionally lasting to emphasize how unquestioning, indeed unrealistically so, were their initial expectations about the lastingness of given marriages. On the other hand, for the points about actual

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marriages that speakers ordinarily want to make, the Rock of Gibraltar and cement may be entirely too durable. Handier metaphorical source domains are manufactured products that, while they might be made to last, can indeed "break," and that are known to break as frequently as they last; other kinds of things that, even though of a type that usually lasts, can conceivably be flawed or - like the marriage described by one interviewee that "just blew apart like someone put dynamite under it" [6W-6] destroyed by external forces; possessions that can be "up for grabs," or "slide right down the tubes," as well as being securely held or safely kept; or travels that sometimes end in mid-journey, rather than reaching their planned destinations. All these are supposed to last, even though people recognize that they do not always do so: Americans believe that manufactured things should be well made; possessions are often treated as inalienable in their society; like people everywhere, they expect hard materials to resist erosion and rough treatment; and they set out on their travels fully intending to reach their destinations - even though these outcomes, like a lasting marriage, do not always eventuate. Manufactured products, durable things, possessions and journeys are drawn upon over and over again as sources of metaphors for lasting marriages, not because they constitute our understanding of marriage, but simply because they are the major cultural exemplars, in our world, of things that typically last. By contrast, there are metaphors that seem distinctly wrong when we try them out as characterizations of marriage. Here is one case. At a Catholic wedding ceremony described to me, the officiating priest counseled the couple about to be wed that they should think of marriage as an ice cream cone. You can eat it up fast, the priest explained, or you can lick it slowly and make it last a long time. The wedding guest who told me this story11 reported that members of the wedding party squirmed during that part of the ceremony, and complained vociferously among themselves afterwards about the priest's disconcerting comparison. This metaphor has an obvious sexual connotation that might explain some of the guests* discomfort. But I think any reader would also agree, the metaphor simply does not fit. It is experienced as inappropriate, I would argue, because food is nondurable, and ice cream is a particularly perishable food: no matter how slowly you eat an ice cream cone, you can only make it last so long. Among all the hundreds of metaphors for marriage that occurred in the discourse of my interviewees, not one likened it to any kind of food. Sometimes speakers wish a metaphor to exemplify, more than a feature of marriage in isolation, a relation between its features - as Brett uses the analogy to marriage to capture the relation between the lastingness, the difficulty, and the satisfaction of his association with the Royals. Some metaphors are favored, and hence recur with frequency, because they do

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such a good job of capturing these complexities of experience. Thus one reason well-made products are such popular metaphors for marriage is because they are intended not only to last but to work (and can not only break, as I have noted, but can also break down). The prototypical manufactured product is one made to perform some function. When Americans speak about a machine or other manufactured product that "works'* they mean that it does what it was made to do, performs this job successfully, and doesn't break down in the process. Indeed, a fixture on the American scene is Consumer Reports, a nationally distributed, widely subscribed magazine devoted to testing and rating products for their performance and durability. Marriages should also last and "work" in the sense of succeeding. Thus, one woman describes herself and her husband at the wedding of friends, looking at each other and shaking their heads, saying," It'll never work. It'll never work'" [1W-5]. (They turned out to be right.) Conversely, a man says, "[W]e wanted the marriage to keep working." [3H-1]. In a much more elaborate and much more specific metaphor of something that performs its function well because it was made well, another husband explains "[t]he self-righting concept that the marriage has enough soundness and equilibrium that it will take steps torightitself in any kind of stormy situation" [7H-6]. For Americans, manufactured products stand as the prime exemplars of things that not only last and work, but are built to do so in part because of the effort put into them. Chief among the ingredients that go into a well-made, properly-working product, most people understand that effort is also central to a lasting, successful marriage. Thus, the man who says, "[W]e wanted the marriage to keep working," continues, "so we made the effort to communicate and talk things out, to change our routines." This effort may be that of manufacturing something durable, like a seaworthy vessel. It may also be conceptualized as the effort of keeping something well maintained, as another interviewee conveys, with the example of a different kind of manufactured product: "If you get a new house and just let it sit for year after year without doing anything to it, it's going to deteriorate and I feel that a marriage is something that you have to continue to work at it" [11W-16]. Favored, too, is a metaphor in which effort is the work that goes into making something function as it should, because it captures the relation between the effort put into marriage and marital success - and perhaps also because it conveys the kind of effort of adjustment that, as will be seen in the next section, ordinarily goes into achieving marital compatibility. In the words of still another interviewee, "This is more permanent, this is something that you should make work, you know. And not anything that you should give up on. You know, you should always keep trying no matter what" [2W-1].

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Journeys, as already noted, are another popular metaphor for marriage. They can be of long duration, continuing until arriving at some desired destination, "a place" that stands for a happy marriage. They typically also involve encounters with obstacles - like the "stormy weather" of the metaphor already cited, that the ship has been built to ride out on its voyage. These obstacles often require effort to surmount. Thus, as a metaphor for marriage, the journey can be made to express the need to overcome marital difficulties with effort, to attain benefit, and to last, as in "It was worthwhile enough to struggle through those periods and move on" [5W-1], or, "However long and stony a road it was we had agreed to set out on it and meet each small situation as it came" [4H-7]. Journeys are often also undertaken with travelling companions. Thus they work as a metaphor for the relation between sharedness and lastingness, as in such comments as this one, in which the companions go their separate ways in mid-journey: "If it gets static in our relationship then that's when we split I guess, or start going a different direction" [3 W-5]. Of course, the same points can readily be made in different metaphors, or nonmetaphorically, as speakers elsewhere illustrate. The journey is a favored one, I argue, because it is a cultural exemplar of a protracted activity having an ultimate objective, predictably beset with difficulties that require effort to overcome, and that can be undertaken with another person - a cluster of features that also characterize marriage. How metaphors become shared Connectionism offers a straightforward associationist account of how given metaphors come so readily to mind that we can produce the ones we need without hesitation in the course of talk. Whether familiar or unfamiliar, richly or sparsely detailed, a metaphorical source domain that has come to exemplify a given feature of the world - like the Rock of Gibraltar, well-made products and secure possession have come to exemplify lastingness for many Americans - will have become strongly linked to that aspect of a person's experience. In future encounters with that feature of the world - say, in discussions of the lastingness of marriage - rocks, manufactured products, and possessions, among other exemplars, will be activated in that person's mind. Likewise, talk of marital sharedness will call to most people's minds partnerships, travelling companions, things wrapped up together in packages, and love birds, among other exemplars. (Notice that whether the exemplar that comes to mind is specific or general depends on the strength of the linkages that someone has made. It is conceivable, for instance, that some individuals have come to associate durability more strongly to rock in general than to the Rock of Gibraltar, or to BMWs or

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other products famous for solid construction, more strongly than to well-made products in general.) In just the same way, efforts to clarify more complex points about the relations among elements of a cultural model will bring to mind the narrower set of just those exemplars of such relations. Thus the possible future dissolution of her marriage, we saw, brought to one speaker's mind the idea of travelling companions who come to a parting of the ways. The activation of such cultural exemplars insures that an appropriate metaphor will almost always be identified and selected with the speed of speech. As they gain popularity, given metaphors for marriage become more and more strongly linked through repeated encounter and use, not only to the particular aspects of marriage they exemplify, but to marriage in general. Too, we might expect metaphors like those of the journey, and the manufactured product, that capture multiple features of marriage and complex relations among them, to appeal to speakers and come into widespread use in talking about marriage simply because they have become so strongly associated with the marital experience. Once in currency, moreover, these metaphors often continue to be used just because they come to mind so readily in any context having to do with marriage. Speakers thus tend to favor such metaphors as "rocky" for a marriage in the throes of difficulties, or a long, successful marriage as one "made to last," even when leaving unexploited other of the features that made the journey and manufactured product metaphors apt ones in thefirstplace. In this way metaphors become conventional. Of course, many of the metaphors that can be and are used to talk about marriage are also applied more broadly to numerous contexts - think, for example, of "It works for me," or, "It was rough going," both in wide use. I have used the connectionist framework put forward in chapter 3 to describe how cultural exemplars of various aspects of experience are drawn upon in the deliberate production of metaphors in speech. It remains to suggest how these shared exemplars might be learned in thefirstplace. Over the course of experience each of us acquires a sizable bank of culturally agreed-upon exemplars, each exemplary for given features of the world. Some of these exemplars are culturally distinctive; others, to the degree that they occur widely in nature or bodily or psychic experience, recur crossculturally.12 We learn them partly fromfirst-and second-hand experience with the nonlinguistic world - our own experiences with, and stories we have heard about, difficult activities, things that don't work as they should, durable things, and so forth. Significantly, also, we learn these exemplars from the linguistic experience of hearing (and using) metaphors in talk. This linguistic experience serves to expunge from our bank of exemplars, candidates based on personal experiences that are too idiosyncratic. The

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requirements of spoken communication foster such selectivity, forcing us to use just those metaphors that have cultural currency, so that their meaning- what they stand for - will be intersubjectively shared with those to whom we talk, and hence useful in clarifying our point. Thus it is that linguistic exchange plays an especially large role in the learning of exemplars - as it does in the learning of so much else - greatly enhancing the effect of shared nonlinguistic experience to ensure that the separate storehouses of exemplars each of us possesses well overlap extensively. In its role in the learning of cultural exemplars and other kinds of cultural knowledge, linguistic communication is perhaps the paradigm case of the process, discussed in the section on cultural snaring in chapter 5, by which the modal patterning characteristic of human social life fosters shared understanding. At the same time that linguistic experience culls some potential metaphors, it vastly enlarges our fund of such metaphors, adding many more exemplars than we could ever collect in the course of our nonlinguistic experience, including conventional metaphors like "forging" a proposition and others based on obsolete practices like being "on tenterhooks" that may not speak to any nonlinguistic experience we have had, but the points of which we have gleaned perfectly well from hearing (and reading) them used. Conventional metaphors like this last one are good illustrations of the point we made, in chapter 5, about the possibility of either historical continuity or historical change in the meanings evoked by public forms that remain fixed. Some of the meaning of these metaphors is preserved through their continued use as exemplars; the rest of their meaning, attached to practices that are in disuse or are not widely known, has been lost. Of course, the fact that the original practice from which a metaphor was derived is no longer in use may hasten disappearance of the metaphor itself, and this may be the case with being "on tenterhooks." In a recent lecture to an audience of undergraduate anthropology majors,13 I gave it as an example of a metaphor still in use even though most of us do not know to what it referred. Several students came up afterward to tell me that they had never heard the metaphor and had no idea what it meant.14 It should be clear that this explanation of how metaphors become shared does not assume that the stock of them that speakers share is fixed and unchangeable. Indeed, because they are typically not very tightly connected to emotion and motivation, metaphors may be especially prone to erasure from historical memory, as the "tenterhooks" example illustrates. Older readers should be able to think of other metaphors that have disappeared or altered during their lifetimes. An example that I have noticed is that, during my life, Mother Teresa has supplanted Albert Schweitzer as an exemplar of the saintly helper of the poor, in remarks on the order of "He's a regular Mother Teresa." When cultural exemplars like these that serve as

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sources of metaphors do change, they do so in the same way in which any schema alters. A new connection is made. This might be between an already known aspect of experience and a new exemplar for it, adding that exemplar to those already linked to that experience. In this way, presumably, we came to adopt Mother Teresa as a cultural exemplar of the selfless benefactor. Similarly, we learned to think of the computer as a cultural exemplar of complex computational processes and hence as a potential metaphor for mind, so that English speakers now readily talk about, and can understand each other's references to, our brains having "crashed" or our being unable to "access that file" in our memories. At the same time, connections to earlier exemplars that have now largely disappeared, like Dr. Schweitzer and tenterhooks, cease being learned. Or, the new connection might be between a novel or newly attended-to aspect of an experience and an already well-known cultural exemplar. Thus the historian E. P. Thompson (1967) tells of the way in which time, reconceptualized in terms of the amount of work employees did for their industrialist employers, came to be represented as money in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When new metaphors like these catch on, it must be because they both capture features of experience that have already become important to many, and draw on what many have already come to consider good exemplars of those features. In the course of their use in ordinary talk, then, metaphors typically do not give rise to new understandings; rather, they reinforce existing understandings by clarifying them. This is not to say that the kind of thinking involved in metaphor usage can never lead to new understandings. Indeed, the cultural exemplars that provide the metaphors we employ have another use: This same fund of exemplars also supplies us with analogies with which we can try to reach understandings of new experiences. Dedre and Donald Gentner (Gentner and Gentner 1983) address one kind of situation in which thinkers actively seek such analogies. These researchers gave nonexpert subjects the unfamiliar task of explaining how electricity works, and found them reasoning about it in terms of the flow of fluid through channels and the rush of crowds through narrow corridors exemplary, for them, of how they imagined electricity running through wires. Claudia Strauss and I (Strauss and Quinn 1992) show, similarly, that children asked to explain something beyond their ken, namely, marriage, do so by analogy to playmate relationships (in the case of a six-year-old girl) and friendships (in the case of a fourteen-year-old girl), which exemplify dyadic relationships for them at their ages. It is likely that we characteristically try to understand unfamiliar experience by analogy to familiar in this way, using exemplars for this purpose. Thus the flow offluid(for some subjects) or the rush of crowds (for others) is already strongly linked

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to movement through constricted passageways for the naive physicist approaching the problem of how electricity travels through wires; playmates (in the case of the younger girl) or girlfriends (in the case of the older), are already strongly linked to dyadic relations for the child asked to tell about marriage. As both these cases illustrate, thinkers are able to reason analogically about the new domain in terms of the old. As they also show, some of the conclusions at which these thinkers arrive are likely to be faulty; if married adults, in the one case, and trained physicists and electricians, in the other, do not rely on these naive metaphors it is because they have learned more useful ways to conceive of the experience at issue. At the same time, these are unusual encounters with experimentally contrived tasks; children do not ordinarily think very hard or talk very much about marriage, nor nonspecialists about electricalflow.Hence, while the examination of such analogic thinking opens a window into one process by which potential new metaphors might originate, especially telling for my argument about metaphor is that these particular analogies invented for thinking about new situations do not survive to serve as metaphors in speech. Were the analogies more suitable and useful, they might have gained currency as metaphors. More generally, it is important to distinguish the use of analogy to the known to help us in understanding the unknown, from the use of metaphor to make a point to listeners. While both tasks draw on cultural exemplars, only the former task typically leads to new understanding. Indeed, speaker and listener both need to appreciate why a metaphor - even a newly minted one - fits, if the communication is to succeed. At the other extreme from newly invented metaphors, occasionally something has become so famous for a given aspect of the world, that its use as a metaphor is overdetermined. It is in such special cases of highly popular metaphors, such as that encapsulated in the saying, "Time is money," that Lakoffand Johnson (e.g., 1980:8)findtheir favorite illustrations for their view of metaphor as underlying conceptualization more generally. That metaphors are widely shared, however, does not establish that they are any more fundamental to conceptualization than any other widespread cultural understanding. (That money does not, in fact, constrain the way Americans conceptualize time is suggested by the many other metaphors for talking about it other than as being "saved," "wasted," "spent," and so forth - time is also said to "stand still," for example, or "slip away," or "fly," or "flow," or be "ripe," or "right" - and our ability to alternate readily among these metaphors.) Thompson's (1967) aforementioned history shows, to the contrary, that metaphorical talk of time as money followed and reflected rather than underlying and instigating change. Originating as it did with the industrial revolution this

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phrase captured the new work habits industrialists were imposing on their workers, and then was used by these employers to inculcate this new order, in the face of considerable resistance from their employees. Thus the metaphor manifested a much more extensive and multiplex shift in EuroAmerican understanding of the use of time, due to a profound change in economic life. In other words, time conceptualized as money is part of a larger theme concerning work discipline under industrial capitalism that, like other themes characterized in chapter 5, has spread into other domains kindred to that of industrial labor. The metaphor encapsulating this theme has spread with it. Like other themes this one has not spread to domains that are experientially unlike, or differentiated from, that of wage labor. The temporal rhythm of family life, for example, is largely immune to being thought about in these monetary terms. (Witness the feminist complaint that economists' analyses have traditionally overlooked the monetary value of housework.) Even occupational work time does not always readily convert into monetary terms: there is great resistance on the part of patients to doctors charging for time spent on the telephone with them, for example, and artists are not expected to charge for their work according to the time put into it. A more challenging situation is presented by the classic case of the conduit metaphor (Reddy 1979) for talking about meanings as transmitted in words - as in, "I gave you that idea" or "Ifindit impossible to put my thoughts into words." Here is a conventional metaphor argued to have infiltrated such a large proportion of our available language and to have become such an automatic way of speaking about linguistic communication (ibid,:297-299) that it goes beyond clarifying our understanding of such communication to constrain it. According to Reddy, the conduit metaphor has made it difficult to think about the transmission of meaning in any other way. But by accepting the predominance of the metaphor in linguistic expressions and everyday speech as evidence for its control over our thinking, Reddy, like LakofT and others, makes this metaphorical language itself seem coercive - "falling] victim," Linger (1994:290) has pointed out, "to the very model he renounces." More reasonable, from my position, is that the language reflects an underlying cultural model for linguistic communication. The conduit metaphor may be said to comprise a cultural model in that it encompasses an interrelated set of elements - the speaker, the listener, the speaker's meaning, the words that convey that meaning, and the relevant actions and intentional states on the part of speaker and listener that model how communication works. To be sure, in this cultural model the linguistic communication of meaning is conceptualized by analogy to

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the transmission of physical things. This analogy is the source of the many metaphors for communication as transmission that Reddy reports. It is hardly unusual, however, for cultural models or parts of these models to be cast in analogic terms in this way - although many cultural models are not. For example, as has already been indicated, and as will be the subject of further discussion in the next section of this chapter, the cultural model of marriage we are considering is partially (though only partially) delineated by analogy to success, with the result that some of the metaphors for marriage are drawn from the domain of successful enterprise. Such conceptualization of one domain of the world in terms of another can be considered an instance of thematic spread, discussed in chapter 5. That domains like that of physical transmission lend themselves as analogies to other domains, such as meaning, is of interest, of course, and worthy of empirical study. However, it is not the analogies on which some cultural models or parts of these models are built, nor the resulting metaphors provided by these analogies, that make it hard to think in any other way than in the terms of the cultural model. A hallmark of cultural models of all kinds is their "referential transparency" (Hutchins 1980:12); once learned, they become "what one sees with, but seldom what one sees" (ibid.). It is the typical transparency of cultural models that gives them the ability to constitute our reality - including our language. Thus, for example, the mostly nonmetaphorical language given to Americans by their model of the mind is as automatic of use and as difficult to think without as are the metaphors owed to the conduit model of communication (D'Andrade 1995:167).15 Why cultural models should have this quality of transparency can be understood within the connectionist framework we are employing in this book. If the elements of a cultural model are like the units of a connectionist network, they need not be in consciousness. Indeed, given the limitation on what can be held in short-term memory, the many parts of such large schemas could not all be in consciousness at the same time. Instead, it appears, only outputs of cognitive processes, or parts of these processes involved in cognitive "glitches," come into consciousness. (For example, when we produce a given word, we are conscious of the word but not of how we arrived at it. Only if - as happens to me more and more frequently - we cannot think of the right word, are we likely to become conscious of our search through a relevant part of our network of related words to find it.) It is just this characteristic of structuring our understanding while being largely out of our consciousness that Hutchins captures when he says that we see with cultural models, but do not ordinarily see them. It is a characteristic no less true of cultural models reliant on analogy to other domains of experience, than of those not so based.

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This argument against metaphor as controlling thought is not meant to deny that the language in which it is cast may have some role in perpetuating and spreading a given cultural model. Again, however, this would true of any language attached to a cultural model, metaphorical or not. Moreover, in the framework we set out in chapter 5 to deal with the historical durability and sharedness of cultural schemas in general, language is only one of many repositories of cultural meaning external to the individual and one of many sources of patterning of the external world that the individual inhabits. In the context of the present analysis of metaphor, the most important point to follow from a consideration of the conduit metaphor is the need to differentiate it analytically - just as, I argued, individual analogizing must be differentiated - from what I have been describing. The conceptualization of one domain of experience by analogy to another, exemplary one, in a cultural model, has a significant relation to the use of analogy by an individual thinker to explain the unknown in terms of the known. We may imagine that cultural models incorporate just those cultural exemplars that prove natural and helpful to many people in thinking analogically about a given domain of experience. Unlike the notion of electricity as afluidflowingthrough channels or that of marriage partners as playmates, these are analogies that have caught on. In the same way as do cultural exemplars that provide individuals with analogies between the known and the unknown, those incorporated into cultural models facilitate comprehension of the domain so modeled (as they inhibit alternative understandings of it, Reddy illustrates persuasively with the case of the conduit metaphor). These analogies perform a different task altogether than do the metaphors used in speech to clarify points that speakers wish to make. The metaphorical and other language that grows up around the culturally shared analogies on which some cultural models are wholly or partially based - e.g., "I gave you that idea" - becomes the only or the handiest language available to a speaker; it has no point to make. On the other hand, the use of metaphor to clarify the speaker's point - e.g., "It was stuck together pretty good" - is intentional. Instances of thefirstsort might helpfully be designated obligatory use of metaphors, in the sense that they are so embedded in the language that speakers can find no alternative to their use. Those of the second type, the focus of my analysis here, might be distinguished as selective use of metaphors, in the sense that speakers intentionally select them. Actual usage may reflect mixed cases. (This is not the same as distinction between conventional and novel metaphors. Metaphors intentionally selected to make a point may or may not be conventional ones. Metaphors that have become so embedded in language that they are the

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only ones, or virtually the only ones, available to speakers, are conventional in the broad sense that all language is.) The most general point is this: Metaphors sometimes occur because they have been intentionally selected and produced to communicate a point, but not always. Sometimes metaphors stem from an analogy creative people have invoked to explain an unknown phenomenon; sometimes they reflect a tacit cultural model speakers share, one that is based on an analogy between one domain and another. Failing to distinguish among these cases, investigators have failed to recognize the actual functions that metaphors serve, used in each of these different ways. My analysis of the use of metaphors for marriage suggests that the task of clarifying what we mean to say provides one circumstance - a universally human, experientially common one - under which understandings will become shared, or cultural. Of course, the circulation of cultural exemplars in metaphor is only one way in which these metaphors themselves can become widely shared. I have suggested, for example, that metaphors like that of marriage as a manufactured product, encapsulating, as it does, complex relations among elements of the cultural model for marriage, may gain particularly widespread usage in the context of marriage because they conjure up the experience of marriage in its near entirety. We should now be able to see that metaphors like this one are prone to popularity for another reason as well. The manufactured-product metaphor, for one, reflects and encapsulates a prominent cultural theme, a theme that colors Americans' understanding, not only of marriage, but of the many domains of life to which they apply the values of hard work, pride in one's work, Yankee ingenuity, and other American virtues associated with making things that last and work well. This metaphor, like that of time as money, has spread to new domains like that of marriage for the same reason that, as we argued in chapter 5, any understanding becomes thematic - because of the multiplicity of similar-but-not-identical experiences through which it is learned. Having colonized not only marriage but many domains in this way, the manufactured-product metaphor now finds itself used and reused in many contexts, and through its repeated and varied use, ever more widely shared. Retrieving cultural understandings from metaphors There are good and bad methods for reconstructing the shared understandings people must have in mind from the metaphors they use. I have suggested that metaphors are good clues to the cultural understandings that lie behind them because of what they do: In drawing on cultural exemplars and using these exemplars metaphorically to clarify the

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speaker's meaning for the ordinary listener, they also spell out this meaning, and the cultural understanding behind it, for the analyst. But in order to exploit this analytic potential of metaphors it was necessary for me to attend to their usage in actual discourse. I could not have discovered that the metaphors for marriage fall into a small number of classes had I not systematically examined extensive discourse on the subject. Nor could I have gained insight into the way in which these varied metaphors are used to highlight the shared conceptualizations of marriage reflected in these classes, had I not looked closely at metaphor use in this discourse, which provided me with a window into this process. Close analyses of discourse in which metaphors are used gives evidence that, indeed, speakers do select their metaphors to match the points they are developing or have already made, as we would expect if they were using these metaphors to clarify these points - rather than the points arising de novo from the metaphors. For one piece of this evidence, consider the way in which the speakers quoted in the last section selected just the metaphors of marriage as "nailed in cement" and "everlasting Gibraltar" in nature, that would do a good job of conveying the point of the story they were intent on telling: not just their expectation that marriage was lasting, but their having overestimated its durability. For example, the husband who uses the "Gibraltar" metaphor starts out the passage in which it occurs by observing that his marriage had changed, due to an extramarital relationship his wife had. That relationship had caused him, he continues, to question his own lack of understanding of his marriage, who his wife was in it, and how they interrelated. Finally, he says, "And I think also it raised for me kind of the whole idea that I really didn't know who she was very much. And that my confidence in the everlasting Gibraltar nature of the whole thing was rather naive." It is difficult to imagine that the point extracted from the metaphor governed the topic of this story from its onset through its development. To summarize quickly other such evidence that I have elsewhere (Quinn 1991) provided in detail: in this discourse about marriage speakers also sometimes articulate, in nonmetaphorical language, the point they are trying to make with a metaphor. Usually this explication of the metaphor comes immediately after its use. Speakers' ability to amend such nonmetaphorical interpretations with the speed of speech suggests that they had the point in mind already, rather than being led to it by a previously unrealized entailment of the metaphor. Often this nonmetaphorical restatement seems to be made in order to disambiguate the point made by the metaphor, especially in the case of metaphors that highlight marital sharing - a concept susceptible to multiple interpretations. A nice example of such disambiguation occurs in the following brief passage: "We present a

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front of sorts together. Not a couple front, but a united front. A common value system that we share and things that we want to show to other people. Where we're at." [3H-4] Occasionally, also, these speakers make their point nonmetaphoricallyfirst,and only then restate this point metaphorically. If speakers* ability to restate immediately a metaphorical point nonmetaphorically is suggestive, cases in which they do the reverse demonstrate quite unequivocally that the metaphor did not give rise to the point. Just as tellingly, speakers may string together two or even three different metaphors, seemingly for emphasis as well as clarity, to bring home a given point. A single example containing both these kinds of evidence will have to suffice by way of illustration here: "But my feelings are, our relationship is permanent. It's no - we know too much about each other. There's no getting away from each other, you know. 'Cause I feel like she got me, and I feel like I got her." [2H-8] In this passage, the lastingness of marriage is first described nonmetaphorically - "our relationship is permanent." Then, this point is restated in a metaphor of spouses who are unable to escape from one another, and that metaphor expanded upon in another one, of spouses as each other's possessions. Another kind of evidence comes from metaphor use in reasoning. For both Lakoff(Lakoff and Kovecses 1987:219) and Johnson (1987:130), a key sense in which metaphors constitute understanding is that they govern reasoning, allowing us to draw just those inferences that follow from metaphorical entailments. But in my close analysis of reasoning about marriage in actual discourse, I have elsewhere (Quinn 1991:84-87) shown that far from consistently adhering to metaphorical entailments, reasoners are just as likely to switch metaphors in the middle of a piece of reasoning in order to reach a desired conclusion, discarding the metaphor that does not carry them to this conclusion for one that does. Indeed, a scrap of reasoning introduced in an earlier section of this chapter, "If it gets static in our relationship then that's when we split I guess, or start going in a different direction," exemplifies such a shift from one metaphor to another in mid-argument. Here a metaphor of stasis stands for lack of marital benefit while a second metaphor, of traveling companions, characterizes the separation of the married couple that signifies the end of marriage, resulting from the lack of benefit. I have shown, furthermore (ibid.:87-88), that other speakers conduct identical reasoning about marriage without relying on metaphors at all to do so. For, as will be taken up in the next section, not only are the concepts underlying metaphor use shared, but the causal relations linking these concepts and underlying the reasoning people do about marriage are shared as well. Again, it would appear that speakers have this shared causal schema for reasoning about marriage already in mind, and

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that they select just those metaphors having entailments that roughly match the reasoning they aim to do. Previous analyses of metaphors by LakofT, Johnson and others have not been based on systematically collected discourse. In none of their writings do they tell us exactly where and how they have collected their examples. It seems likely that their assemblage of metaphors relies, in some combination, on their own and other peopled memories, on the perusal of written texts, and on cases unsystematically drawn from overheard speech or accidentally encountered in text. They take and analyze even the metaphors they collect in this way out of the context of their use. This method has several serious consequences. First, the corpus of metaphors used within a given domain that is collected by this method is bound to be not just incomplete, but biased as well. The metaphors most likely to be remembered or encountered are the most common ones. Linguists who study only the most popular metaphors in this way are reminiscent of anthropologists of public culture who focus on the most standardized features of the public world. In both cases, the resulting analyses are likely to be misdirected. In the case of metaphor, the consequence is misidentification of these most popular metaphors as comprising the unique system of basic-level metaphors in that domain. In a rhetorical strategy these students of metaphor favor, moreover, their accumulation of examples thatfitthis assumption about unique systems of basic-level metaphors, distracts readers' attention from all the metaphors that do notfitand that might otherwise occur to us - as I have indicated in the case of metaphors for time. Another example in which the uniformity of metaphorical usage is similarly overestimated is LakorT and Zoltan K.dvecses' (1987) claim that heated fluid in a container is the "central metaphor" for anger. I would argue from their own material that this appears to be one of a class of equivalent metaphors - anger as insanity, as a wild animal, and so forth - that capture an underlying cultural conceptualization of anger as dangerous and unpredictable because uncontrollable. Lakoff and Johnson make the same error when they claim that an ongoing journey is the central, and hence defining, metaphor for love relationships (LakorT 1990:49) and for marriage in particular (Johnson 1993:53-57, drawing selectively on my own material, no less). As I illustrated earlier in this chapter, the journey metaphor is only one of a number of metaphors, certainly not the one, used to talk about marriage. To recognize that there is not one central metaphor, but a number of metaphors that draw on different cultural exemplars to call attention to different features of a given domain, requires the more systematic analysis I have conducted. Secondly, considering metaphors out of the context of their actual use in

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discourse, as these researchers do, means they are not in a position to verify their analyses against the actual details of this use. Again, this approach is reminiscent of the work of anthropologists who believe they can analyze public symbols out of the context of their use and apart from their meanings to the people who use them. Neither group of researchers gets close enough to the processes by which metaphors, in the one case, or symbols, in the other, are internalized and used, to reveal how they work. Thus the method linguists have used to study metaphor is blind to subtleties of usage that, as I have demonstrated, show how metaphors are being used to clarify the points being made in speech, rather than constituting or entailing these points. Such an analytic approach disallows any cognitively-informed investigation of the cultural understandings reflected in the metaphors, how shared they are, or how they have come to be shared. Analysis 2. A shared schema for reasoning about marriage Up to now we have taken as givens the features of marriage that account for the eight classes of metaphor I have identified, focussing on the way metaphors are selected from these classes to exemplify these features and the relations among them, and thus clarify the points speakers wish to make about marriage. The classes of metaphor for marriage and the points they exemplify, I will next show, make overall sense in terms of a more encompassing schema for marriage. This is a schema for performing a conceptual task of a different (though just as commonplace) sort from that of finding apt metaphors to communicate one's point. This other task is the reasoning about marriage Americans are called upon to do in the course of daily life. Reasoning is not limited to the problems with which teachers vex their students in formal logic classes.16 Thus, people use the schema I am about to describe to reason about their own marriages, the marriages of others they know, and marriage in general. There is much about marriage to consider. People may feel that their marriage is not as successful as it should be, for example, and wonder what to do about it. A person may want to know, more specifically, how to respond to a spoused unhappiness and dissatisfaction. Sometimes these questions are hypothetical, sometimes, as we can tell from some interviewees' observations, critical to immediate action. Or, like the husband who thought his friends' marriage was "nailed in cement" if ever a marriage was, a person may be trying to make sense of the unexpected and unsettling divorce of a relative, friend, acquaintance, or colleague. Contrariwise, people sometimes wonder why some couple they know, their own parents perhaps, never divorced, given the kind of marriage they had. People may be concerned or curious about what they read in

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newspapers and magazines about the rising divorce rate, for instance, or the increasing number of cohabiting couples who never marry. In this half of the chapter, I will delineate the schema used to perform these reasoning tasks, show how it works, and bring evidence for its widespread use. Then I will turn to a consideration of why such a schema should have become widely shared. I will end by considering the advantage of my close analysis of the understandings that inform people's reasoning about marriage over an approach that pays less close attention to these intrapersonal understandings, for characterizing developments in contemporary American marriage. Two concise examples will serve the immediate purpose of conveying how commonplace is the reasoning that we do about everyday concerns such as marriage, and how readily and automatically we perform such reasoning tasks as they arise. An interviewee, talking about the observable conflict and evident dissatisfaction in her sister-in-law's marriage, concludes, "I'm sure they must have something good in their marriage or they wouldn't still be together" [1W-3]. This entirely ordinary piece of reasoning rests on this woman's general understanding that if a marriage is mutually beneficial, it will last; it's having lasted she treats as proof that it has been beneficial. The analysis to come in this chapter will show that this snippet of natural reasoning is not singular. Rather, it follows a predictable path, defined by a schema this reasoner shares with other interviewees. Indeed, the alert reader will have recognized that the interviewee who said, "If it gets static in our relationship then that's when we split," was reasoning to the negative variant of this same conclusion. The ease with which they arrive at conclusions like these about marriage depends upon reasoners' use of this culturally shared solution to this reasoning task, as we may suppose that other recurrent reasoning tasks rely on other such cultural solutions. Thus everyday reasoning is another context in which cultural sharing arises. The shared schema Before showing how reasoning about marriage depends on a shared schema, I will outline the schema itself, and suggest the problem to which it is the solution. The classes of metaphors for marriage are linked in the following way. Americans expect marriages to be lasting, shared and mutually beneficial. I will return in the next chapter to these three expectations and their common basis in experience. Taking them as given for the moment, the three together set in motion a well-understood sequence of events. Marriages must be shared in order to be mutually beneficial. This is

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because the benefit of marriage, in contemporary US Americans' understanding of it, is psychological need fulfillment - an equation made evident in interviewees' statements like the following one (to be quoted more fully later): "[I]t's not worth sticking together because life's too precious to waste your time, with another person. Unless they're really fulfilling you on an emotional level." A physically absent or socially separate or emotionally disengaged spouse cannot fill one's needs; all of these states of affairs are thus violations of Americans' expectation of the shared life that marriage entails.17 Marriages must be beneficial, in turn, in order to last. This is because, Americans understand, parties to any utilitarian exchange will agree to it only if and when it benefits them, feeling free to terminate it if and when it fails to do so. And marriage, in the United States in the latter part of the twentieth century, has become very much a contractual relationship.18 Lack of fulfillment, then, leads to the lack of expected marital benefit that results, in turn, in divorce. This lack of fulfillment is interpreted by interviewees as a matter of incompatibility, defined as one spouse's inability to fulfill the needs of the other. Given the way in which Americans marry - that is, for love (as will come under scrutiny in the next chapter) - they often do not know enough about each other to gauge how well-matched the two will be in terms of their ability to meet each others' needs. More than one husband spoke of the moment, early in his marriage, when he realized that he did not even know what his wife's needs were, never mind how tofillthem. As should be clear, this cluster of understandings about marital benefit, the fulfillment that constitutes it, and the shared life and compatibility it requires are distinctively American; in other societies marriage may be understood quite differently (as it was understood in American society in other times). There is an inherent contradiction between the expectation, on the one hand, that a marriage should last and the expectation, on the other, that an unfulfilling and hence nonbeneficial marriage should be ended. The incompatibilities between spouses that initiate the chain of events exposing this contradiction are hence viewed as difficulties for the marriage. These incompatibilities that are the stuff of marital difficulty being virtually inevitable, this difficulty, in turn, is understood to be the marital norm rather than the exception. As one interviewee put it, "I guess I really don't deep down in my heart think that probably most people's marriages are any easier than mine is. That everybody has enormous difficulties" [4W-3]. Some social commentators have argued that the conflict between these two expectations of marital lastingness and marital fulfillment represents an historical shift from one view of marriage, family, and relationships more generally, to another. Robert Bellah and his coauthors (1985:101), for one notable example, have called this a shift from "the traditional view

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of love and marriage" as an obligation to sustain committed, enduring relationships to the newer "therapeutic attitude" toward it that privileges individual self-actualization. What these authors do not note, but what my interviewees demonstrate abundantly, is that they and other Americans living at this historical juncture share a cultural solution to the cultural contradiction they face between an older and a newer construction of marriage. The solution is quintessentially American. Difficulties are to be overcome by effort. In the case of marital difficulty what is called for is largely the effort to achieve spousal compatibility so that the marriage will be more beneficial. This requires learning what the other person's needs are and learning how to fill them; sacrificing some of one's own desires, if necessary, to accomplish that; figuring out one's own needs and communicating those to one's spouse; and coaching the spouse in their fulfillment. The early part of marriage is often described as being dominated by these difficulties, which eventually taper off as spouses learn to fill each others' needs (and, usually also, to accept that some of these will remain unfulfilled within the marriage). However, these married people are cognizant of the difficulty of responding to new needs that may arise as each spouse grows and changes in the course of a marriage - as they and other Americans assume all people do over time. A marriage in which the major foreseeable difficulties have been successfully overcome is spoken of not only as a lasting, but also as a successful one. Therisk,of course, is that difficulties will not be overcome and the marriage will fail. This set of shared understandings, in its entirety, comprises a cultural model of marriage. How the schema works and why it is efficient

Why should wefindpeople reasoning according to a common schema? In the last chapter it was suggested that schemas like this one for reasoning about marriage become shared in large part because of their efficiency for performing the cognitive tasks they address. In order to evaluate this claim in this case, I mustfirstdemonstrate how the schema works as an efficient solution to this reasoning task. In reconstructing how the schema works, I have found it particularly helpful to think in the terms, discussed in chapter 5, of Edwin Hutchins' (1986, 1995) characterization of culturally snared mediating structures which, coordinated with the world in which a task takes place, allow actors to perform given tasks. A simple, clear example is a written procedure such as a checklist (Hutchins 1995:290-312), which controls the order in which components of a task are to be executed. A difference between the equally

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commonplace lists, scales, dials, charts and landmarks - the cultural artifacts - that mediate performance of the navigation tasks Hutchins analyzes, and mediating structures of the sort I will describe for reasoning about marriage, is that the latter are not externally mediated at all. (The words in which reasoning is expressed in the course of speech are a partial record of that reasoning, but do not mediate it.) As was noted in chapter 5, Hutchins emphatically intends that the notion of mediating structures encompass internalized cultural models for task solution; and others (e.g., D'Andrade 1989a:822; Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClelland and Hinton 1986:46-47) have speculated that the task of reasoning, in particular, must be mediated by culturally provided mental models invented for this purpose. But until now we have not had good descriptions of such internalized cultural models in actual use, of the sort I provide here, so that we can see how they actually work as mediating structures for performing reasoning tasks.19 Viewed as such a mediating structure, the cultural schema for reasoning about marriage takes the form of a prototypical or idealized sequence of marital events.20 In this structure, one event is linked to the next by a relation of causality, the concatenation of such relations forming a causal chain. The resulting structure is used to reason about a common marital quandary. It is idealized in two ways important for the performance of this reasoning task. Reflecting as it does these two forms of idealization, natural reasoning such as that interviewees do about marriage - like the metaphors they use - provides the analyst with excellent clues to the cultural assumptions they share. First, the events that can occur are highly circumscribed, being of a limited number and following one another in an invariant order. These events, as we have seen, are: lastingness, sharedness, mutual benefit, fulfillment, compatibility, difficulty, effort, success, and risk of failure. The sequence is: marriages are ideally lasting, shared and mutually beneficial. Marriages that are not shared will not be mutually beneficial and those not mutually beneficial will not last. Benefit is a matter of fulfillment. Spouses must be compatible in order to be able to fill each others* needs so that their marriages will be fulfilling and hence beneficial. Fulfillment and, more specifically, the compatibility it requires, are difficult to realize but this difficulty can be overcome, and compatibility and fulfillment achieved, with effort. Lasting marriages in which difficulty has been overcome by effort are regarded as successful ones. Incompatibility, lack of benefit, and the resulting marital difficulty, if not overcome, put a marriage atriskof failure. A second idealization is that the causal relations between pairs of events in the sequence are themselves highly simplified (see Quinn 1987). A

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successful marriage is a lasting one and a lasting marriage successful, always. If a marriage is beneficial it will last, and if it has lasted it is beneficial, categorically. The benefit of marriage is fulfillment, pure and simple. If two people are compatible, their marriage will be beneficial, and if they are incompatible, it will not be, period. Incompatibility causes difficulty, without qualification, just as a compatible couple will have no difficulty. Effort overcomes difficulty, absolutely. And so on. Of course, the logical relations involved here are not that simple, as shown by some examples taken from an impromptu analysis of my material by Roy D'Andrade (personal communication).21 Lastingness is a property of a successful marriage, so that all successful marriages are lasting ones but not all lasting marriages are successful ones; in fact, there are plenty of unsuccessful old marriages around. Mutual benefit is a sufficient cause with respect to a lasting marriage. That is, while mutual benefit always makes a marriage last, a lasting marriage need not always be a mutually beneficial one, and we all know such cases; we call them "unhappy" marriages. Mutual benefit is actually a property of psychological need fulfillment; as such, it can also be a property of other marital benefits, such as money or social status, and sometimes people marry for them. Effort is a requirement, but only one requirement, for overcoming difficulty - a necessary but not a sufficient cause; we all know that the best efforts cannot always save a marriage. What I am asserting is that in the course of ordinary reasoning these complexities drop away. People do not follow strict inference. Rather, they appear to substitute something like plausible inference (see Hutchins 1980:56), that is, treating likely events as if they were always true. Next we will consider why this should be so. A telling example of plausible inference is the previously quoted comment, "I'm sure they must have something good in their marriage or they wouldn't still be together." The speaker can cite the marriage having lasted as proof that it has been beneficial only because she is treating benefit as both a necessary and a sufficient cause of lastingness. Even as she makes this assumption for the purpose of this piece of reasoning, she immediately amends the statement, continuing, "Who knows? They might be staying together for their little boy's sake but they - she doesn't seem to be as happy as she could be." What this fuller passage illustrates is that at the same time they reason by means of the prototypical event sequence I have described, interviewees can also recognize, and incorporate into their reasoning when called upon to do so, marital events and complex causality not contained in this prototypical sequence of events.22 Still it was unusual for this woman to go back, havingfinishedher brief piece of reasoning and arrived at the conclusion she intended to draw - and fill in some of the complexity of the situation that suggested an alternative interpretation of

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events. In the course of ordinary discourse, reasoners do not typically do this; they seem bent solely on reaching their desired conclusions. This reduction of all causality to plausible inference allows the event sequence I have described to work like a template in producing chains of actual reasoning about marriage. As D'Andrade (1989a:822-823) explains, such an imaginary model of the world must be brought into coordination with the real world, the reasoner deciding that some state of the world aligns with a given point on the model - in this case, an event in the prototypical event sequence. Once such an alignment is achieved, the reasoner can reach conclusions about the world by reading them from the model. Thus, if a person observes that a real-world marriage is fulfilling and hence beneficial, he or she can use the model marriage to predict outcomes of that state of affairs - for instance, that it will last and succeed. If a person determines that a marriage is lacking in benefit, he or she can infer that it will be difficult or that it will not last. Like the wife concluding that her sister-in-law's marriage is beneficial because it has lasted, they can reason as readily in the other direction, from effect to cause. And, like the wife who imagines leaving her marriage if it gets "static" - that the marriage will not last if it is no longer mutually beneficial - they reason just as readily to negative conclusions. Speakers reason in this way from any event to any other event in this causal chain, concluding, for instance, that compatible marriages will last, that unfulfilling marriages will be difficult ones, that unsuccessful marriages were not sufficiently shared, and so forth. In sum, people can reason across causal links from any event or its negation to any other event or its negation, and they can reason either forward or backward across these events. They do so readily and rapidly. People could not accomplish the reasoning they do about marriage without some such mediating structure as I have described. In the first place, a limited sequence of events in a fixed order makes it possible to reason to conclusions about marriage without confronting an unmanageable number of potential outcomes. In the second place, a simplified causality makes it possible to reach these conclusions without getting tangled up in endless complications and limitless shades of probability. Imagine, for example, what would happen if a reasoner wanting to infer whether a marriage was ending because it had been unbeneficial hadfirstto examine the causal relation between lastingness and benefit to decide whether there were any extenuating circumstances and whether this relation was transitive and could bear the inference, and further had to subject the linking relations between benefit and compatibility, compatibility and difficulty, difficulty and effort, and effort and lastingness to the same scrutiny.23 That is precisely the kind of cognitive morass that the mediating structure I have described is designed to circumvent.

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The connectionist framework developed in this book suggests one other important way in which the schema, once well learned, makes reasoning about marital events more efficient. Within this framework we can explain why the relations between events distant from each other in the causal chain - say, effort and lastingness - appear to be no harder, and take no more time, for reasoners to process than the relations between events that are directly causally linked - say, effort and difficulty. While the causal relations among these marital events are serial, the schema itself eventually becomes a network of strong links connecting each event with every other event in the sequence. This is because the more occasions a reasoner has to reason between any pair of these events (or observe the pair linked in another context than reasoning about it), the stronger the association between the two events will become. The same is true, of course, of the associations between these events and the causal relations that pertain to them. Eventually, all the events and relations in the sequence become strongly linked to one another in a densely connected schema. Parenthetically, once overlearned in this way the schema is largely out of consciousness most of the time, and thus has gained referential transparency in our thinking. Evidence for use of the schema I next present interviewees* reasoning about a subset of everyday marital dilemmas, as evidence that they do indeed share the schema for doing so that I have delineated. Early in this chapter I demonstrated a striking regularity in the classes of metaphors speakers draw upon in their talk about marriage. I attributed this regularity to a small number of shared underlying concepts, understandings of marriage that speakers select these metaphors to exemplify. Now I will show an equally striking regularity in the way these underlying concepts are related to one another in the reasoning people do in ordinary talk about marriage. Finding this structure was a methodological challenge. Underlying, as it does, the varied language of different speakers* reasoning about diverse marital experiences, the pattern is not immediately discernible. Structure must be recovered from verbal reasoning by the rather painstaking analytic technique I next apply. Because they are internal and not readily observable, and can be reconstructed only with difficulty, shared mediating structures, such as the one for reasoning about marriage, have been overlooked. The identification of such widely shared, yet wholly internal and heretofore-unsuspected structures for the performance of cognitive tasks, such as this schema for reasoning and the store of cultural exemplars described in the first part of this chapter, attests to the need for what

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might be called "the ethnography of inner life," along the lines I have begun. 24 At the same time, somewhat paradoxically, US American readers (but not readers from elsewhere who bring with them distinctly different understandings of marriage) may find the excerpts of talk on which this analysis is based so mundane as not to merit analysis, and the assumptions about marriage extracted from them so commonsensical as not to have deserved retrieval. How distinctive Americans' cultural model of marriage actually is, from a comparative cultural and historical perspective, should be kept in mind; I will touch on what is distinctive about this model further at the end of this chapter and in the next. If, in this section of the chapter, I provide more than a single excerpt to prove each point I adduce about this schema, I hope readers will not view these as illustrations belaboring the obvious. The multiple excerpts are evidence (of which I have documented much more than I publish here) confirming that the schema I am describing is not just the singular invention of one or another interviewee, but is used by all of them to reason about marriage. Readers who do not need to be convinced of this should feel free to skip over the detailed analyses of successive passages. For reasons of brevity, I will provide evidence for the subset of assumptions about the relations between the effort required of marriage, the benefits expected of it, the fulfillment into which marital benefits translate, marital lastingness, and the success that a lasting marriage is considered to be. I begin with a set of eight more passages in which speakers invoke the causal link between benefit and lastingness or success, just as they do in the two short excerpts already considered, about the relationship that could become static and the sister-in-law with "something good" in her marriage. These examples should both familiarize readers with my mode of analysis and convince them of the pattern exemplified by all ten cases. I then turn to briefer evidence: four passages in which speakers make the link between effort and benefit, and finally, six other excerpts that rest on the link speakers assume between effort and lastingness or success. I will end with a single instance of a somewhat rarer type, in which a speaker spells out almost the entire causal sequence between effort and lastingness. A considerably longer, more fully documented piece of reasoning than "I'm sure they must have something good in their marriage or they wouldn't still be together," but one exhibiting the very same form, is the following: And there isn't any signs right now that it's not going to be a very s—that our marriage isn't going to be a successful marriage in terms of lasting. Not only just lasting but our wanting it to last and enjoying each other. I think Rich is very

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happy. I think Rich is getting affection, and having affection expressed, probably the first time in his life, really. Really feeling accepted just for being Rich, you know. And he acts it. I mean he says things - he'll say, you know, how happy he is, and I really believe so. And, I know that - 1 think I might have said this - and some people have said to me that it's really obvious that he feels for me, in the way he acts, sort of thing. And certainly back on my part, I mean it's very nice knowing that I'm loved that much. That is just a tremendous feeling. I - and he spoils me rotten, at times, like when I was sick and on the couch, you know, he always changed the channel on the TV, or turned it up or down, and he still does. I mean like he - after the seven o'clock news - at seven o'clock the news are over - he'll get up, wrap my - the afghans around me, turn down the game shows, turn off the light and kiss me good night for an hour. I mean, he really does spoil me, and I really like it. So I don't see any reason at this point that anything is going to happen. And I can't imagine it happening. So, maybe we'll be a success. [9W-10] If this woman offers extended testimony to her conclusion,25 perhaps it is because at some level she is uncertain of it. There is the cautious "there isn't any sign right now" and the telltale "maybe we'll be a success" at the close, both suggesting the speaker's awareness that success is only a likelihood. (In the event, she was right to reserve judgment; her marriage ended in divorce several years after this interview.) Yet the structure of the argument itself is just as clear in this passage as in the earlier ones: a fulfilling marriage is a lasting marriage is a successful marriage. As in the case of the not-so-happy sister-in-law and other examples to follow, another's fulfillment is inferred from the evidence that that person acts happy and says they are happy ~ happiness being the emotion that one ordinarily feels when one is fulfilled. Rich is very happy, we understand, because he is getting affection for the first time. The context in which speakers most often invoke the assumption that mutual benefit causes a marriage to last is one in which, like Rich's wife and the following interviewees from my study, they have occasion to assess the status of their own marriages:

You know, it's like I know everything that she need. That - you know, and the things that I don't know are things that will come up in the future, I feel like she wil tell me, you know, maybe perhaps our relationship will allow her to get it, you know, and vice versa. So I feel like, you know, we're here to stay, you know. I think we got it - you know, I feel like - well I really feel it's, you know, concrete, you know. [2H-8]

But I feel pretty mutual about, we both have as much at stake in the relationship as the other person does. We both express to each other the same desire to keep things going. [4W-7] This last woman relies on a chain of only partially stated assumptions that we all share about the role motivation plays in marriage and other human affairs. The mutual benefits that she and her husband are deriving from

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their marriage are cast here as some unspecified assets which each has "at stake" (and hence risks losing); marital lastingness is a matter of "keep[ing] things going" on some, again unspecified, kind of path. Because she and her husband are both benefiting from the marriage, we understand from the order of the two sentences, they want it to last. What is left unstated, and what we fill in for ourselves, is that wanting it to last, they will make the effort to make it last (and because they make the effort it will do so). So, we all understand, what they have at stake will, in fact, keep things going. Similarly, since they are enjoying each other and feeling loved, Rich and his wife not only expect but want their marriage to last. Rich's wife and these last two speakers are offering assessments of the chance their marriages have of lastingness and success. Such running assessments can certainly be an important guide to the status of marriage as to other realms of life, telling us when we need to take corrective action or reassuring us that we do not. (Of course, these assessments can also be mistaken.) The next woman, however, describes a somewhat more critical situation in which she has been trying to convince her husband that she is not going to leave him for another man - a case in which the relation between mutual benefit and marital lastingness is far from academic: Like what I tried to explain to Dan was that one person can't be expected to fulfill everything because they're not exactly the same. You know, fulfill everything that one person needs. And that Ron fulfilled something for me that Dan couldn't, you know. And, it wasn't as much - like Dan fulfills so much for me that I would never want to leave him for Ron, you know. Because Ron just fulfills this one added little block that Dan doesn't. I'm not going to leave thirty for one, you know, that's just - 1 mean, you know - 1 mean, I can't put a number on what he fulfills for me, but you know, that kind of ratio. [3 W-4] As does this same interviewee when she says elsewhere, "If it gets static in our relationship then that's when we'll split," other speakers just as readily reason to the complementary conclusion - that lack of mutual benefit or fulfillment will cause a marriage to end: When a marriage gets to the point where you're really holding down the other person, you're really restricting them, it's not worth sticking together because life's too precious to waste your time, with another person. Unless they're really fulfilling you on an emotional level [3H-1]

I'm afirmbeliever in divorce if things are not going well. Life is too short to spend it with someone you're not happy with. [7W-6] If I wasn't happy. If there came a day-to-day thing and neither one of us were progressing in any way or getting anywhere in the marriage I wouldn't see any reason for going on with it. But I don't have any particular cause of what would bring on divorce immediately. [1H-13]

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I think it costs me a lot and I don't think he's measuring that cost. And I'm scared it's going to cost too much and leave me without being able to stay in the relationship. [4W-12J Again, this reasoning ranges from the purely hypothetical to the all-tooreal; while the speaker before her seems complacent about the current status of his marriage, the last woman presents herself as being in the throes of internal debate about when and whether to end hers. Next I turn to a set of examples that illustrate the assumption that effort makes a marriage mutually beneficial: I think it's a whole lot easier to ride along, each person taking their position and not moving very much but being - you know, "It's good enough to stay in it." You've got your kids, you've got your house and that kind of thing. And I think that the emotional - an emotional relationship that is really meaningful and a relationship that is sustaining that affirms both people as individuals and allows those people to be individuals and yet, you actually like being together, I think that's terribly hard to achieve, that kind of relationship. And I feel like Dave and I have consciously worked toward doing that, achieving that kind of relationship and maintaining - 1 think there are periods in our life and in our marriage when it was very questionable, when I don't think either of us was certain that we wanted to do that, that we wanted to put the energy and emotional effort into making that happen. And yet I think it has, so somewhere, some part of each of us must have felt it was worthwhile enough to struggle through those periods and move on. [5W-1] This is an interesting passage because it begins with an argument about how much and what kind of benefits make a marriage last. Some people stay in a marriage that is just barely good enough, but the true benefits of marriage go beyond kids and a house, to a meaningful emotional relationship. That kind of real benefit takes effort, as do the benefits described by the next speakers:

In a sense I think we do work at it. I mean Reynold has to meet some of my needs and I have to meet some of his needs. And, you know we both get tired of the kinds of things that we don't like in the other person and yet we work at it, I think. [8W-14]

Because you have the man, I don't think you can stop there and say, "Well, this is it," you know, "I can just let everything go." Because you ca - you'd be surprised at the little things that really bug men, I mean that you wouldn't think about it. He say, "Well you're a lousy housekeeper," you know, and this type of thing. So you keep working on the things that you think would, you know, enhance - well not enhance him, but, that would make him happier, you know, as much as possible without making yourself miserable. [11W-16] It's not something that comes natural either. It's something that we both work at. I: Oh, really? Yeah, that - you know, it's just that our relationship is extremely important to each

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of us and, you know, we want to work hard at making it so and making it better. And so, you know, the sharing and giving to each other is part of - you know, a major part of that. So, you know, we go out of our way to do things for each other. [9H-3] This last example makes explicit a key motivational assumption that is more often left implicit, as it is in passages quoted earlier. Wanting a beneficial marriage motivates people to make an effort to achieve such a marriage; therefore, they do so. 2 6 If mutual benefit makes a marriage last, and it takes effort to achieve mutual benefit, it follows that effort is required to make a marriage last. All of the next six passages show speakers making this last connection. Not surprisingly, given the more general understanding Americans carry into their model of marriage - of human enterprise as requiring effort in overcoming difficulty to be successful - lasting marriage is rephrased in terms of marital success more often in the context of the effort required of it, we will notice, than in the context of the benefits expected of it. The assumption that a lasting, successful marriage takes effort informs the global expectations people bring with them into marriage, as in the following quotes:

I felt like it [marriage] should be about the same as any other relationship. Any other good relationship but that you were - you know, this is more permanent, this is something that you should make work, you know. And not anything that you should give up on. You know you should always keep trying no matter what. [2W-1]

If you have arguments and if there are problems, you have to say to yourself, "I came into this with my eyes wide open. It's my responsibility to try to help make it work." [7W-5] Contrariwise, the next young husband quarrels with the idea that a lasting and successful marriage requires more than casual effort:

I guess you can say I really don't think about it, as far as it breaking up or whatever you know it just - 1 think it's a waste of time to think about it. I mean why look for problems? But I think she's always kind of got it like she's got to work harder to make it work. And I don't really look at it that way. Ifigureif it's going to work it's going to work, you know, there's no need going out of your way to do it. I mean if there's no problems there there's no need to try to make it any better or knock yourself out trying to do a little more when there's no problem to start with. I just kind of do it day to day. If a problem or whatever comes up that's when I worry about it. [1H-S] Taken at his word, this man is an interesting exception, someone who rejects the unqualified cultural assumption about the effortfulness of a successful marriage that is shared by the two interviewees quoted before

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him and most other Americans. Yet he not only demonstrates by his remarks his familiarity with this piece of the cultural model of marriage, with which he has had to reckon in his own marriage, he also reveals his awareness that his rejection of it is a minority view and therefore requires defending to the interviewer. His case provides a glimpse, as well, into the causes and consequences of such nonsharing. Wed only a year, this man made clear in his interviews his feeling that he had not been ready for marriage. His otherwise odd-seeming rejection of the expectation that marriage takes effort can be understood in terms of his overall resistance to it, also evidenced in his behaviors.27 Not surprisingly, of those I interviewed who later divorced, this couple was the first to do so, suggesting that rejection of the cultural model of marriage is one certain way to get it wrong. Like the expectations that benefit makes a marriage last and benefit takes effort, the expectation most people have that effort makes marriages last and succeed has clear implications for action. Not surprisingly, then, this understanding plays a part in the conscious decisions people report making, as well as the less-consciously planned1 actions they report taking, in the course of married life:

[We talked about] Do we want to make this thing stay? You know, living together for a long time. Because it took some work to do it. [3H-6] What in the world chance would I have offindinganybody else who would be any easier to be married to and I wouldn't know that person any better when I got married him than I knew Tom. I: Right,rightand that would be the whole thing all over again. Exactly and never having learned or worked through what actually you need to learn and work through to make thefirstmarriage stick. [4W-1]

I think all the work and effort we went through in thefirst,I'd say three years or so of that marriage making it work was completely subconscious, you know. I don't think I had any idea - that's why I say I had no idea what I was getting into. I don' think I had any idea at the time we got into it that it was necessary to work at it. [6H-1] I should mention that part of the difficulty of finding the pattern underneath linguistic variation is the necessity, in interpreting passages like these, of decoding the metaphors speakers use to talk about benefit, effort, lastingness, success, and so forth, as well as the causal constructions they use to link these terms. Notice, for instance, the varied metaphors for lastingness in sentences such as "Do we want to make this thing stay?" and " . . . the same desire to keep things going"; and "Never having learned or worked through what actually you need to learn and work through to

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make the first marriage stick"; and the common metaphor for marital success, discussed in the first half of the chapter and repeated here by several speakers, as "making it work." Notice also the differing causal constructions in these passages, ranging from the mere juxtaposition of clauses - X, Y - to indicate a causal relation between the two in "this is more permanent, this is something that you should make work"; to a simple because in the comment, "Do we want to make this thing stay? Because it took some work to do it"; through such constructions as ifX, not- Y and the more amplified must do X to make Y happen and need X to make Yhappen in other statements.28 Some readers may enjoy identifying and deciphering other metaphors and other causal constructions in the passages that have been presented. Let me now add the one final passage in which the speaker fills in almost all the causal links in the entire sequence connecting effort to marital lastingness:

I guess what I was saying is that since that's [our age difference and my weak sel image and lack of confidence at the time we married\ the way we started out, wh has happened since then in some ways seems to me quite miraculous. That there that I have changed so much and that we have changed so much and that we have been able to work through so many basic struggles in our marriage and be at a place now where we trust each other, we love each other, we like each other. We appreciate each other. And feel pretty confident about being able to continue that way and continue working out any other stuff that comes up. Just seems pretty amazing to me. It could have gone in so many different directions and that it didn't is incredible. But I think both of us take a whole lot of credit for the direction it went in, that we worked ex - really hard. [5W-1] This passage incorporates further steps in the causal chain linking effort to a lasting marriage, steps specifying that effort overcomes the difficulty required to achieve the compatibility necessary for a marriage to last. How much this woman and her husband have changed can be interpreted as a reference to their becoming more compatible, as reflected in their now trusting, loving, liking, and appreciating each other. Just as happiness is the feeling we expect of those in a fulfilling, beneficial relationship, feelings of trust, love, liking, and appreciation are ones that arise from, and signal, a compatible relationship that is working smoothly. The change in the marriage that brought all this about came only at the cost of substantial difficulty and effort, put metaphorically as "so many basic struggles" that had to be "worked through," and were surmounted because, in a variation on the last metaphor for effort, they "worked at this really hard." Overcoming this difficulty with this effort enabled the couple to "feel confident about being able to continue that way," an ongoing journey metaphor for a lasting marriage.29 While these links between compatibility, difficulty,

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effort, and lastingness are made explicit in this passage, mutual benefit and its relation to compatibility and to effort are here left implicit; we are expected to understand, although the speaker does not say so outright, that people who have worked hard to overcome their difficulties so that they trust, love, like and appreciate each other are not only positioned to fulfill each other's needs, but are doing so. These critical links in the argument are made explicit in other passages from these interviews. We have already seen the relation between benefit and effort explicitly stated, as in the excerpt quoted earlier, in which this same speaker rejects a good-enough relationship, one "it's a whole lot easier toridealong" in, in favor of one that is emotionally meaningful and sustaining because of the work and struggle put into it. Given space, I could provide examples of speakers arguing not only that what makes a marriage mutually beneficial is compatibility, but also that incompatibility causes difficulty, that a marriage must be shared to be mutually beneficial, and linking the various other pairs of events that enter into the story of how to make a marriage both lasting and fulfilling. It is noteworthy that minimal causal chains of the sort I have illustrated most extensively, in which the reasoner establishes just one causal link between a pair of events, occur much more commonly in discourse I have examined than do longer chains of reasoning, like the one with which I ended. This is probably because speakers ordinarily assume listeners to share knowledge of the idealized event sequence that surrounds the point they want to make, comprehending how compatibility is linked to marital success, effort to marital difficulty, and so forth, without being told. Their audience shares with speakers the densely-connected schema in which every marital event and relation is strongly associated with every other. On the other hand, when speakers do take the trouble tofillin intermediate links in the causal chain they are tracing, it may be because they judge the real-world state of affairs to be unusually complex and hard for listeners to follow, or, as seems to be the case for the last speaker, because they wish to be especially forceful and persuasive. How this schema becomes shared

Now we can turn to the question of how this cultural schema for reasoning about marriage has come to be shared. I have already argued that the sheer usefulness of some such schema for reasoning, in terms of the cognitive efficiency I have demonstrated, recommends it for adoption, in the way any useful idea or artifact would be likely to be adopted. This argument leaves unsettled how people encounter and learn this schema, however, and why this particular schema rather than some other is an appealing

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solution. I will address thefirstof these questions in this section and the second in the section to follow. We encounter this schema, first of all, in other people's talk about marriage, and learn it from their use of it in such talk. Just as we employ metaphors to clarify the points we wish to convey, so we reason, not only to reach our own conclusions, but also to persuade others of our arguments. In the reasoning we do in ordinary talk about marriage and other subjects we may have more or less of a stake in our ability to persuade, but even interviewees have some stake in persuading interviewers, if just to demonstrate that they know what they are talking about.30 Just as we draw upon intersubjectively shared exemplars to do the metaphorical job of clarifying what we wish to convey, so we must rely on an intersubjectively shared schema for reasoning about marriage if we are to persuade others of the pertinent conclusions we reach. The cultural schema I have described provides such a set of shared assumptions. Just as the repeated use of appropriate metaphors increasingly familiarizes us with them until they become wholly conventional, so the repeated use of this schema makes it seem wholly natural. Violating it, on the other hand, is likely to earn disbelief, if not outright challenge or simple incomprehension. Consider the young husband's comment on how to "do" marriage: "Ifigureif it's going to work it's going to work, you know, there's no need going out of your way to do it." As with usages of inappropriate metaphor like the ice cream metaphor used by the priest, such an argument appears anomalous. It is no surprise that the interviewee felt he had to go on to defend it, and no wonder that I (the interviewer) responded to it with incredulity (and, given the neutrality demanded of my role, a strictly mental eye-rolling). The idealized story about marriage I have described also has a cultural life beyond its application to reasoning in ordinary everyday talk about marriage. Some of the very properties we have been discussing - the overlearning and the simplification of this schema for marriage - as well as another property we will next consider - the motivational force it gains from being about success and failure and efficacy - that give it its appeal for deciding what to do about one's own marriages and making inferences about the marriages of people one knows, make it equally appealing to those who create more public images of marriage. No one should be surprised, then, if the cultural schema for reasoning about marriage finds its way into the marriages of TV sit-com couples or those of storybook princes and princesses, or legal decisions bearing on marriage and domestic partnership, for a few examples. This is one important way a cultural model "for" becomes a cultural model "of* (Geertz 1973g:93; Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952:357). And, of course, these public forms then, through people's experience of them, play their own role in spreading this

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same idealized event sequence and reinforcing it in people's minds, making it more widely known and more often internalized. Naturally, these public forms can also distort the original schema in various ways and to different degrees, as is evident from the ideas about marriage children glean from the storybook marriages of princes and princesses. And these public representations can and do change over time. Each in its different way has an independent opportunity to change, to elaborate, and to distort people's understandings of marriage, with the possible effect that Americans will then come to reason somewhat differently about it. If, however useful this reasoning device for solution of a given task, the task itself were infrequently encountered and solving it were of concern to few, then talk utilizing the schema would be limited to narrow contexts and would be rare, as would be public forms incorporating it. But this task, like much other reasoning that people have to do about the perceived dilemmas of daily life, is recurrent and widespread: The particular contradiction we are considering between lastingness and fulfillment is confronted by many people, over and over again. And, caring deeply about the success of their marriages, people care about resolving this contradiction. So caring, they also have a lively intellectual interest in marital dilemmas, even when these affect marriages other than their own, or when they are posed as general problems concerning marriage. The recurrence of this issue in people's lives and its real import to them ensure that a satisfactory cultural resolution of it will be widely used, hence widely talked about in public as in private, widely overheard, and widely learned. No matter how many encounter a cultural contradiction or how frequently, and how much they all care about and talk about resolving it think, for example, of the contradiction between women's wholesale entry into the workplace and women's traditional place in the home - it may not have found a culturally agreed-upon resolution. Such contradictions can become widespread over very short periods of time, and they may be so novel and unanticipated that their cultural solution continues to elude those who experience them. Or, as may be the case with ideas about femininity, motherhood, and "woman's place" that women working outside the home summon up for many, these contradictions may evoke profound inner conflict that, for a time, stands in the way of their resolution. Cultural contradictions do not have automatic cultural solutions; however, barring some truly unresolvable psychic conflict, a serious, widespread, longstanding dilemma like the marital one we have been considering will be solved. And this dilemma has been around. We can trace the decades-old history of this contradiction between the lastingness and the fulfillment of marriage. The older expectation of lasting marriage, predating the import-

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ation of European marriage practices to America, collided with newer expectations of marital satisfaction as, in the course of the nineteenth century, the authority of husbands and the deference of wives declined in favor of a companionate ideal for marriage. Robert Griswold concludes an analysis of California divorce cases from 1850 to 1890, saying: [TJhe trail from the early stirrings of the companionate family in the mid-eighteenth century to "no-fault" divorce today is faint, but it can be traced. As marital expectations and demands steadily rose, so, too, did possibilities for failure; as men and women expected each other to act in more complex ways, more people fell short of such expectations. By the late nineteenth century, wives complained to the courts about cold, aloof husbands, of husbands who did not spend enough time at home, who failed to check their sexual desires, or who ignored women's emotional needs. Men countered with complaints of unloving, peevish, quarrelsome wives, of wives who were poor housekeepers or insensitive mothers. Tensions like these arose as a logical, even necessary consequence of the companionate family: marriages predicated on emotion required a safety valve when affection wanted, hence the emergence of the "divorce crisis" that began in the 1880s. (Griswold 1982:174) By the early part of the twentieth century, says another historian of divorce (May 1980:156), the pursuit of happiness had taken on a new urgency and a new definition in terms of personal fulfillment within marriage. "[DJivorce" in 1920, she observes (ibid.: 162), "did not indicate a rejection of marriage; rather it reflected the increased personal desires that matrimony was expected to satisfy, especially for women." In the course of the late twentieth century, the Victorian-derived understanding of marriage as an obligation to perform complementary roles has been largely superseded in legal discourse (Regan 1993:34-67) - even if it has never disappeared entirely from American understanding - by a new idea of marriage as a voluntary contract between two individuals. This new contractual understanding of the marital relationship better accommodated, and became intertwined with, a recasting of marital happiness as complementary need fulfillment (see n. 12), This particular formulation has been with us since the 1960s. But the contradiction in public discourse between lastingness and fulfillment, cast in older terms of marital happiness, goes back to the previous century. Why these two expectations about marriage, along with the expectation that it involve a shared life together, have been and continue to be so enduring is the topic of the following chapter. Why the schema has appeal What makes this particular schema such an appealing choice for task solution? In chapter 5 we made the obvious observation that cultural task

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solutions and cultural schemas more generally that have broad appeal will become more widely shared. We suggested that this particular solution to the task of reasoning about marriage has such broad appeal, and hence is widely adopted, because it incorporates a cultural theme - success - itself having enormous appeal to many Americans. What makes this theme, in turn, appealing? It should not surprise us that this familiar American theme has been incorporated into the solution to this widely shared task. When David Rumelhart and his coauthors, quoted in the last chapter, consider the way new solutions to reasoning tasks are invented and conclude "that such representational systems are not very easy to develop," they then continue: "Usually they are provided by our culture. Usually they have evolved out of other simpler such systems and over long periods of time. Newer ones, when they are developed, usually involve taking an older system and modifying it to suit new needs** (Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClelland and Hinton 1986:47). The discussion of thematicity in chapter 5 suggests where older cultural contributions to such new task solutions are most likely to originate. We said there that schemas recommend themselves to new contexts with a family resemblance to the old, and that schemas learned early and from a wide variety of contexts will be more general and hence resemble a wider range of new contexts. Success is just such a schema. Having learned it early and in a variety of different contexts, Americans regard success as a general way to think about many situations. Thus the contradiction between attaining a lasting marriage and having a fulfilling one can be readily reconceptualized as a matter of marital difficulties to be overcome in order to achieve marital success. Connectionism may have little to say about how new inventions evolve, but the connectionist explanation given in chapter 5 for the spread of cultural themes has something to say about the shape they will take when they do. Further, general schemas such as this one for success carry the strength of their appeal with them, lending this appeal to each new schema in which they become incorporated. Once it has been invented, the subsequent spread of a schema for reasoning about marriage will owe much to this broad appeal. That is, the lesson about succeeding is neither an unfamiliar nor an unwelcome one to newlyweds, who bring with them into marriage a more general orientation to succeeding from the many earlier contexts in which they have learned it. Most Americans thus want success, andfindit natural to seek success, in marriage as in so many other endeavors.31 It is so natural for Americans to think of marriage in terms of success and failure, indeed, that some of them experience divorce as the most acute of personal failures. Having said this, it is important to add that not all Americans are

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equally motivated by economic success. In chapter 8 Claudia Strauss points out that the working-class Rhode Island men she interviewed pay lip service to the value of monetary success, and know that others judge them by it, but do not act on it. Yet, it is interesting that these men not only use the word "success" but employ the concept, extending their use of it beyond the domain of strictiy economic success. Thus, in one of the passages Strauss analyzes (one key to her analysis elsewhere; Strauss 1992) the interviewee remarks, "I feel so, that with my education, which was only to the ninth grade, Fve been fairly successful, u r n . . . raising my family." Strauss (1992:203) interprets the especially long pause in this sentence as reflecting the interviewee's realization "that others might judge him to have been a failure by the goals of the success model" (ibid.:203). Therefore he goes on to finish the sentence differently than he originally meant to, citing his success at something else about which he is secure and in which he is invested. In chapter 8 Strauss shows that the interests of the family (the "breadwinner" model) come ahead of the interests of the individual (the "success" model) in this man's life and those of other working-class interviewees. My point would be different. However weak this interviewee's urge to act on his model of monetary success, he knows the model well enough to transport it into the realm of family, conceptualizing that domain in its terms. And he finds it entirely natural to do so. Furthermore, he cares about being a success, if not in monetary terms, then in his. It may well be that the theme of success - the ability of the success schema to define many domains conceptually and also motivationally - is more widely shared than the motivation to be successful economically. What, then, makes success itself so natural a way of thinking about many domains to so many Americans? That this should be so is, in fact, overdetermined. To begin with, the early learning of it that makes success a durable and motivating schema for many Americans also makes it available as an American cultural theme. In part II, we illustrated our arguments about how schemas gain thematicity and motivational force with the instance of self-reliance. Success is closely related to self-reliance in that the two co-occur in many of the same contexts, including contexts for their early learning. When small children are encouraged to tie their own shoes, they are rewarded for trying to do so on their own, and doubly rewarded for succeeding in the attempt. The same could be said for schoolwork, team sports, Scouting, camping, and numerous other activities for children and young adults.32 Self-reliance and success do not always or automatically come together in experience, of course.33 However, whether or not success is being learned in the same contexts that teach self-reliance, both are learned early.

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How very early both are learned, and how assiduously taught, by Americans was brought home to me on a climb up Hanging Rock, North Carolina, with my two daughters and my then three-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter. Of three trails up the rock, we chose the one intermediate in difficulty, but we would hardly have taken my granddaughter up that way had we realized, before setting out, how precipitous it was. Near the top, where the grade became almost vertical, we were assisted by a helpful stranger who stood above and directed my granddaughter where to put her feet, while her mother and I climbed behind her in case she slipped. The gentleman refrained from lending my granddaughter his hand, explaining to us, "I'm not helping her up because I don't want to take away her sense of accomplishment." Like this man, many American parents and other socializes instill a sense of accomplishment in even very young children because they consider it necessary to success in life, and because they value success so greatly. Not only do they want to succeed themselves, they want their children to do so. For this reason, Americans find many and varied contexts in which to bring home the importance of accomplishment and the value of success to children and young adults - even on occasions that might objectively be deemed unsuitable, like a rock-climb potentially dangerous to a three-year-old. The many differing contexts in which it has been learned and is daily reinforced, make it not just a ready interpretive theme but the most obvious available way to think about new difficulties encountered. The same early socialization makes success motivating. Trying to succeed becomes a valued way to behave in the face of difficulties when socializes and, later, peers reinforce successful achievements with praise and meet failures with derision or disappointment or, perhaps more subtly, by withholding their esteem. The motivation to succeed is enhanced when the rewards we receive from others for succeeding and the penalties for failing are internalized, in the way described in chapter 4 in the discussion of motivational force. In this way, many (though not all) Americans come to take pride in their successes and feel shame for their failures, making each new success enjoyable in and of itself, and every failure painful. And they come, by the processes also considered in chapter 4, to associate success and failure with the kind of people they are - "a success," as a person might consider him- or herself, or "a loser." Thus, what can make a major "failure" such as divorce so very painful is the meaning it has for the way people think about themselves. As theyfindfailure upsetting and try to avoid it, so do they enjoy success and, as adults seek opportunities to succeed. Indeed, US Americans especially, perhaps, middle-class ones - turn many experiences into new

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chances to succeed. Not only does this interpretation of these experiences seem to them an entirely natural way to confront difficulty, but, to the extent that in the course of experience they accumulate a record of success, it comes more and more to seem an efficacious way to overcome difficulty. American consumers also like to experience success and triumph over failure vicariously, in theirfictionand their fantasy. Purveyors of public culture respond to the appeal of success by marketing opportunities for it in games, sports, stories, advertisements, and popular psychologizing. Thus it does not surprise Americans at all - once again drawing on the topic of the research described in this chapter as an illustration - when they encounter articles in women's magazines with titles such as "Why some marriages fail" (Kavaler 1969), or, in bookstores, what are sometimes called "marriage success manuals" with titles such as Guide to successful marriage (Ellis and Harper 1977) or Making marriage work (Campbell 1987; Bishops' Committee for Pastoral Research Staff and Practices 1990); or textbooks called Making marriage successful (White 1983). These publi forms in which marriage is cast in terms of success or failure are additional opportunities for more people to learn that it is natural to think of experience that way. More than seeming natural, engendering a keen sense of pride and selfesteem, and warding off an equally unpleasant experience of failure and sense of self-condemnation, success may be particularly compelling to many Americans because rewarding in a different way: as a culturally available reaction formation.34 That is, taught not just to value independence but to demand it of themselves, Americans can be said to dread helplessness. In place of this upsetting feeling, they substitute its opposite, a sense of efficacy. By this interpretation, the anxiety about not being able to do things that these Americans feel when faced with demanding situations of all kinds, is refigured into its opposite, the idea that they can indeed overcome any difficulties in their way by their own efforts. This is not just a local response to marital difficulty, then, but a broadly characteristic American approach to life. Steven Marcus (1984:257), remarking on US Americans' willingness to accord uncommon social esteem, economic rewards, and authority to medicine and its subdiscipline, psychoanalysis, refers suggestively to "the poignant and apparently incorrigible American sentiment that there is nothingfinallythat cannot be 'fixed up' - including, it sometimes seems, life and death themselves."35 To the list of that which can befixedwe can add marriage. Its generality raises the possibility that this reaction formation in response to feelings of helplessness precedes and infuses the rewards for achievement and accomplishment that come, say, with learning to dress oneself or doing well in school, being implicated in the very early psychodynamic events that Jessica Benjamin (1988) de-

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scribes, and that we summarized in the context of the motivational force of self-reliance in chapter 4. Of course, the generalizability of success to marriage and the consequent naturalness and motivational force this theme lends marriage are not unalterable. For example, changed socialization practices, perhaps a lessening of the assiduousness with which US American parents and schools teach their children the value of hard work and accomplishment, could also change, more or less profoundly, the way successive generations think and reason about marriage and many other matters. Or, more likely, long enough experience of high divorce rates, while not making successive generations any less desirous of lasting marriages, might make divorce seem more unavoidable and acceptable to them, and less appropriately understood in terms of individual striving and individual success or failure. Changes such as these may already have begun to happen to marrying Americans and to American marriage since the husbands and wives I interviewed spoke about their marriages almost two decades ago. (The atemporal language of the last paragraphs should be understood as a rhetorical simplification.) Reasoning versus theorizing about marriage It is important to appreciate that scrutiny of public renderings of marriage alone can yield quite a distorted view of how people think about marriage and enact it in their everyday lives. The need to complement the study of extrapersonal cultural forms with the investigation of evidence for intrapersonal cultural understandings like those I have analyzed here is a point that we have emphasized in this book. The point can be illustrated for marriage by returning to the case of Habits of the heart. It is noteworthy that two of the very few actual quotes from their interviewees that Bellah et al. provide in their chapter on "Love and marriage" reveal these Californians (from the San Jose area, and interviewed in the same time period as my Durham, North Carolina-area residents) to be reasoning about the same relation between effort and marital lastingness that I have illustrated above in the discourse of six of my interviewees. Here are Bellah et al.'s interviewees:

Melinda Da Silva: When I married him, I said that he was the person, not that I have to spend forever and ever with, but at least I'm going to try to work things out with this person, have a family with him, and be a family with him. If we hadn't been married, I don't know that I would have gone through counseling, marriage counseling, or couple counseling. (Bellah et al. 1985:102) Ted Oster: You can't have something as good as a love relationship without putting a lot of effort into it. It's a wonderful thing, but it's not going to keep going

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by itself just because it's wonderful. That person is not forever just because you found that special person. (Bellah et al. 1985:104)

These quotes suggest the generalizability, beyond my own material, of the model of marriage I have reconstructed from it.36 Yet, although it is there to be found, the effort marriage requires to be successful is not a theme that the authors of Habits of the heart recover from their own interview material.37 If these authors do not recognize elements of the success schema in their interviewees' talk about their marriages, it is probably because their analysis ignores the reasoning about marriage that these speakers do in favor of passages in which the interviewees deliver more abstract, philosophizing, discourse on the subject. Bellah et al. describe what D'Andrade (1995:150-181) has called people's cultural theories, which he distinguishes from their cultural models. In D'Andrade's (ibid.: 151) terms, parallel to m own usage in this chapter, a model "consists of an interrelated set of elements whichfittogether to represent something." "Typically," he goes on to say, "one uses a model to reason with or calculate from by mentally manipulating the parts of the model in order to solve some problem." To the degree that the problem that it is used to solve does not require or otherwise involve language, a cultural model will remain unstated. A cultural theory, on the other hand, "consists of an interrelated set of propositions which describe the nature of some general phenomena" (D'Andrade ibid.: 172; see also D'Andrade 1987:114), propositions that can be stated by those who hold this theory. Claudia Strauss (1990: 314) explains this difference between "explicit theory" and "implicit knowledge of what goes with what" in terms of the different kinds of experience from which schemas are learned - from explicit propositions, in thefirstcase, or, habitus-like, from less-theorized experiences, in the second. Even further, however one has learned a schema like this one for reasoning about marriage, once overlearned, it will remain largely out of consciousness, I speculated. Hence it will be difficult for speakers to articulate as a whole.38 As Strauss (ibid.:314-315) goes on to observe, the less theorized knowledge typical of a cultural model is therefore much more difficult to identify in speech, being "presented more sketchily, with greater difficulty, and with more context variability," She rightly cautions that this difference between what is explicit and what is implicit is only a matter of degree: "For socialized human beings, of course, experience is always somewhat theorized, just by virtue of being linked to labels" (ibid. :314). Nevertheless, the distinction has been useful to me in pointing to the fact that I have singled out discourse in which my interviewees are using a cultural model, while Bellah et al. appear to have singled out discourse in which their inter-

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viewees are theorizing. Perhaps they did so because of the difficulty of identifying less theorized knowledge to which Strauss calls attention. Here, for example, Bellah et al. summarize the cultural theory that they call "the therapeutic attitude," and which they find dominates the thinking of the mainstream US Americans they interviewed: The therapeutic attitude reinforces the traditional individualism of American culture, including the concept of utilitarian individuals maximizing their own interests, but stresses the concept of expressive individuals maximizing their experience of inner psychic goods. (Bellah et al. ibid.: 104) For the classic utilitarian individualist, the only valid contract is one based on negotiation between individuals acting in their own self-interest. For the expressive individualist, a relationship is created by full sharing of authentic feelings. But both in hard bargaining over a contract and in the spontaneous sharing of therapeutically sophisticated lovers, the principle is in basic ways the same. No binding obligations and no wider social understanding justify a relationship. It exists only as an expression of the choices of the free selves who make it up. And should it no longer meet their needs, it must end. (ibid.: 107) Therapeutic understandings fit many aspects of traditional American individualism, particularly the assumption that social bonds can befirmonly if they rest on the free, self-interested choices of individuals. Thus even Americans who do not share the quest for self-actualizationfindthe idea of loving in spite of, not because of, social constraints very appealing, (ibid.: 109) Here the relatively more "public" - in the sense of being explicitly stated in propositional form - thoughts of the interviewees are distilled in the really "public," in the sense of published, discourse of the authors. Indeed, since the authors' summary of this credo is far more extensive than any statements by their interviewees that they supply, it is never clear how much of the therapeutic attitude they are said to espouse has actually been articulated by the interviewees themselves, and how much is the authors' theory, inferred from fragmentary evidence in interviewees' discourse.39 In any event, Bellah et al. go on to claim, by contrast to interviewees' language for talking about the therapeutic attitude toward relationships they are "without a widely shared language of obligation and commitment" (ibid.: 106) in these relationships. The authors take this to be evidence for the historical decline of the latter view and its contemporary defeat by the former. Because their interviewees cannot enunciate a theory of marriage as an enduring relationship equivalent to that Bellah et al. summarize for the therapeutic attitude toward this relationship, they mistakenly conclude that these Americans have no good model for thinking about marriage as enduring.401 hope to have shown, using my interviewees' reasoning about marriage as a window into their intrapersonal cultural understandings, that these people (and, the two excerpts suggest, those interviewed in

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Bellah et al/s study as well) do have such a model. Their hope and concern for lasting marriage, far from losing ground to their expectation of marital fulfillment, is as significant, in this model, as the latter. That marriages should last is a belief more resilient than Bellah et al. credit it with being. This expectation that marriage should last, moreover, appears to be resistant to evidence that increasing numbers of marriages do not. Certainly the demand for marital happiness, heightening at the beginning of this century, has meant a greater willingness of Americansfindingthemselves in unhappy marriages, to divorce. Certainly, too, new strategies for hedging against the likelihood of divorce grew apace with its increase (Weitzman 1988:240-246) in the seventies and thefirsthalf of the eighties. But the rising rate of divorce also occasioned, according to a 1987 Newsweek cover story ('How to Stay Married: The Divorce Rate Drops as Couples Try Harder to Stay Together'), a renewed seriousness about marriage and commitment to working out marital problems - accompanied by a rash of new advice books about staying together, formal courses for newlyweds, and therapistdevised exercises to help couples identify and work through their problems. Indeed, it is to these developments that the magazine attributes the levelingoffand slight drop in the divorce rate beginning in the mid-eighties. Despite prognostications to the contrary by Bellah et al. and more conservative social commentators, the expectation that marriage should be lasting - as reflected in the effort Americans are willing to put into making it so (especially in the face of any trend to the contrary) - is itself an enduring one. Equally, despite the proselytizing of the New Right against what is deemed to be Americans' selfish preoccupation with self-realization, the expectation that marriage be fulfilling is no more likely to disappear. Not only do Bellah et al. see the traditional obligation to sustain enduring relationships as giving way, historically, to the therapeutic attitude privileging individual self-actualization; they see the two as "countervailing aspirations" (ibid.: 102) in contemporary relationships. Individuals are portrayed as being "caught" (ibid.) in the contradiction between the two aspirations, as "oscillating" (ibid.: 109) between them, as being led to "paradox" (ibid.: 107), and as being in a situation in which the therapeutic language "undermines" (ibid.: 106) one of commitment, and in which "being without a widely shared language of obligation and commitment" causes "confusions" (ibid.:109) and "difficulty" (ibid.:106, 109), In interviews that otherwise bear striking resemblance to the interview excerpts provided in Habits of the heart, I find no evidence that the married Americans I heard from experienced any such conflict in the course of their daily lives.411 maintain, instead, that they share a cultural solution to the historical contradiction Bellah et al. identify.42 These writers' tendency to counterpose the two themes of lastingness and fulfillment as conflictful,

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like their perception that the former is giving ground to the latter, may have more to do with their own anxiety about what is happening to their society, including marital and other family relations in it, than it has to do with their interviewees' understandings of marriage. Parenthetically, Bellah et al.'s book has itself become an object of public culture par excellence - a national bestseller - its discourse on American marriage and other alleged sites of a growing American individualism reshaping the understandings of all of us who read it, and who read the work of other social scientists through whom it is refracted. Arlene Skolnick observes: Speaking to widely shared anxieties about social and cultural change, the book has played a surprisingly large role in the newly pessimistic discourse about the family on the part of social scientists. It is not uncommon tofindworks presenting hard statistical data on family trends that cite Habits of the Heart as evidence for a corrosive new individualism that can explain the trends. (Skolnick 1991:203) Skolnick goes on to remind readers that the analyses in this book are variations on themes in an ongoing social critique of modernity that "contrasts a romantic version of the past with a jaundiced view of the present" (ibid.).43 She calls attention to the conservative use to which the book's argument has been put by at least one scholar, David Popenoe, in relation to marriage in particular.44If, as Skolnick (ibid.: 202) comments, "Habits of the Heart presents a far gentler and more complex picture of Americans" than had best-selling social commentary before it, then Popenoe's Disturbing the nest (1989) redraws a simpler, harsher picture. It implicates self-realization in the rising divorce rate and the more general decline of the traditional family with its well-defined gender roles. Family decline, of course, in a view promulgated by much other conservative critique, is responsible for a further slew of contemporary social woes. Thus, two views of what is happening to American marriage compete in the public arena. One is founded the assumption that individual selfrealization is necessarily destructive of marital commitment. The other is the more pragmatically and less ideologically motivated understanding of marital fulfillment and lastingness as reconcilable through hard work. While for most Americans the second view resonates with the everyday reasoning about marriage from which it has been taken and exported, the first view resonates with the deeply felt moral anxieties of some. Conclusion We began our section on cultural sharing in chapter 5 by noting that much of the world is organized in exactly such a way as to ensure that people will

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have the same experiences. Certainly language in general, and speech in particular, are prime instances of practices that organize experience in this way. Language learning and linguistic communication demand virtually all of the activities that we named in chapter 5 as sources of the modal patterning of social life: social interaction, knowledge sharing, coordination, collaboration, role taking, conformity to rules, modeling, and explicit teaching. My goal in the first half of this chapter was to show how the shared metaphors that pepper everyday speech arise from a mundane requirement of knowledge exchange, the need to clarify what we mean for those to whom we speak. This requirement is met by use of a widely accepted fund of cultural exemplars that stand for various agreed-upon features of the world and index those features for the speaker's audience. In the second half of the chapter, I introduced a different example, one just as ubiquitous in human experience. Among the shared patterns people encounter in the world are contradictory ones, raising the potential for inner conflict among the contradictory expectations (with their attendant intentions, desires, and goals) that have been learned. If such a learned contradiction should be significant in people's lives, and one they frequently encounter and have to reason and talk about, and if it has been longstanding historically, a mediating structure for its solution - one that thereby resolves the inner conflict it might otherwise have generated - is likely to evolve and spread. Borrowing, as task solutions are inclined to do, from existing cultural themes that recommend themselves just because these themes are so widely available and so natural seeming, the resulting mediating structure gains the broad appeal as well as the motivational force of the theme it borrows. In this way solutions to cultural contradictions become shared solutions and ones motivating to individuals; are valued and hence transmitted across generations; and in turn, play their own role in perpetuating and spreading the general cultural themes that they incorporate.

7

Research on the psychodynamics of shared understandings Naomi Quinn

The two cases of sharing examined in chapter 6,1 have argued, came about as solutions to everyday tasks that all of us find it necessary to perform repeatedly. The kind of shared understanding I turn to next results from a different order of shared experience. This experience is not one repeated daily but one experienced early - that is, infantile experience of the sort we pointed to in chapter 4 as being indelible and unusually motivating because learned so very early and in the context of the exceptionally strong feelings, related to their survival and security, aroused in infants. In the case to be presented in this chapter, as in the cases of becoming self-reliant and being a good person that were developed in chapter 4, understanding appears to have become shared because crucial elements of the early experience that formed it are shared. Of the three kinds of shared understanding about marriage I am describing, then, this is the most highly motivating. It should be clear from the last paragraph that in arriving at a reasonably full account of how this cluster of understandings about marriage has come to be shared and motivating, I found myself drawing on psychodynamic as well as cognitive theory. Some readers may find the resulting juxtaposition of two such distinct theoretical traditions jarring. My combining them, however, is a considered move. It is an actualization of the research stance Claudia Strauss and I set out at the beginning of part II: our assumption that in order to adequately explain the complexities of cultural understanding and meaning we will have to draw on multiple theoretical paradigms. I hope to foster a spirit of inquiry (see also Hutchins 1987; Nuckolls 1996; Paul 1990), in psychological anthropology, in which the mutual usefulness of two such paradigms, from cognitive anthropology and psychoanalytic anthropology, can be explored. Analysis 3. The psychodynamic basis of marital love To introduce the next level of analysis, I must pick up the thread of the story about marriage that weaves this chapter together with the last. There 189

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I detailed an event sequence that follows from a contradiction between the expectations that marriage be lasting and that it be mutually beneficial in the sense of fulfilling. I treated these two expectations, along with a third that marriage be shared, as givens. A clue to the genesis of this triad of as yet unexamined ideas about marriage is their distinctive expectational status, which sets them apart from the other expectations about marriage that follow from them. Like the woman who commented, "I guess I really don't deep down in my heart think that probably most people's marriages are any easier than mine is," realistic people expect their marriages to be difficult. Difficulty, with theriskof failure that it entails, is an inevitability that, like this last speaker, they accept with resignation. Other expectations about marriage - that it will require compatibility, and effort to attain that compatibility - are means to the ends of overcoming marital difficulties that stand in the way of marital fulfillment and lastingness. In contrast to these more realistic and pragmatic ones, the expectations that marriage be lasting, shared, and fulfilling are desired ideals. I will argue that the ideals of marital sharedness, lastingness, and fulfillment form a complex schema rooted in the early experience of contemporary US Americans. To anticipate, my argument will be that married love, and hence marriage as Americans know it, is a "refinding" in just the sense that Freud (1962:88) viewed adult love as a refinding of the early love relationship. The expectations Americans have that marriage is to be shared, lasting, and fulfilling match their understandings that people who love each other should be together, stay with each other always, and fill each other's needs. These ideas about love, in turn, revert to the infant's earliest anxieties about being one with the caretaker, not being abandoned, and being cared for. It is from this psychodynamic complex that these expectations gain their motivational force as well as their durability for individuals. And it is because the early experience resulting in this psychodynamic complex has been substantially shared, as are later experiences further shaping their ideas about adult love and linking it to marriage, that Americans share an understanding of marriage in terms of love. I will begin by showing how, and how closely, Americans' ideas of marriage are structured by their ideas of love. This evidence will be crucial to the argument to follow about American marriage as a realization of adult love and that love itself as a refinding, supporting my claim that this extension of love to marriage has an intrapsychic reality. The demonstration of how love structures marriage will also lay the groundwork for a fuller consideration of how this schema for marital love might have become shared. In addition, the evidence to be presented counters an opposing interpretation that has been given for the association of love with marriage in US

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Americans' way of thinking about it, an interpretation which argues that marriage structures love. In this latter explanation, causality is the reverse of that I posit. Offered by Steve Derne (1994), who attributes it to an unpublished manuscript by Ann Swidler, it says that the American ideal of love as exclusive, all-or-nothing, and enduring, "is compelling because the institution of marriage requires that Americans choose only one person to be married to" (ibid.:285) at a time, that they do so decisively, and that they expect the resulting marriage to last. That is, these ideas about love are plausible to Americans and they "continually return to this view because it fits with the strategies that they build around the structural reality of marriage" (ibid.:284). The psychodynamic explanation I will offer recommends itself over this structural one on two grounds. First, the structural interpretation Derne gives hinges on three isolated features of love, in Americans' ideal picture of it: its lastingness, its exclusivity, and its all-or-nothing quality. The psychodynamic explanation draws upon the fuller array of features - individually quite striking and taken together very distinctive - of the love experience, making sense of all these features of love and, in turn, marriage, in terms of infantile experience. For example, although Derne (1994) calls attention to the American idea of love as a feeling for a unique, special person who is the single "right" person, that monogamous marriage requires exclusive love does not really explain these ideas about the specialness or lightness of the one who is loved. That this person is experienced as a refinding of an idealized infant caretaker, as psychoanalytic thinkers have proposed, does make sense of this experience. Nor is the structural explanation able to account for another experience, "falling in love," which can be understood psychodynamically as a reentry into the dependent infant's felt state of extreme helplessness. On the other hand, the extremity of this dependency and this helplessness, conveyed in the precipitousness of "falling" in love, might be thought to contribute to the all-or-none quality of love to which Derne points. Below I will interpret other key features of marriage and marital love in terms of the infant-caretaker relationship. The structural interpretation, which accords beliefs about love the status of strategic responses to persistent structural dilemmas (Derne, 1994:285), fails to explain why these "strategies" should be so emotionally laden and motivationally compelling - as are, for example, falling in love and idealization of the loved one. In the psychodynamic explanation, love and hence marriage are permeated by the motivation for "refinding" a lost state of blissful infantile dependency and by the heightened emotions surrounding survival and security that also attend that early experience. I would not want to argue, of course, that US marriage practices play no role in reinforcing ideas, motivations, and emotions Americans have concerning

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love. These practices, after all, are just such public forms as, we have argued in this book, reinforce our inner understandings. More, to the degree that such practices are institutionalized, these institutions help to prolong the historical life of such understandings. But public practices and institutions alone can hardly account for either the particular shape or the emotional and motivational intensity of culturally shared ideas about marital love. The analysis undertaken in this chapter subjects the same corpus of discourse to the same search for pattern as the analyses of metaphor and reasoning described in the last chapter. The focus of this analysis, however, is the word "love" which, it goes without saying to US American readers,1 labels a significant aspect of the marriage experience, surfacing in interviewees' talk about marriage over and over again.2 Hence, like the metaphors for marriage that draw on cultural exemplars for their meaning and the culturally idealized schema for marriage that facilitates reasoning about it, this culturally agreed-upon label for a salient emotion in the context of marriage suggests itself as an obvious analytic clue to shared understandings about marriage. I will demonstrate two kinds of detailed correspondences between love and marriage, in Americans' understandings of these. The evidence from which I recovered these correspondences comes, once again, from reams of talk by interviewees, this time about marital love. Again, I can reproduce here just a portion of this evidence and use these examples to provide only a broad outline of these speakers* understandings of marital love. The details omitted, which elaborate that story in interesting ways, do not change it. Even my sample evidence may be too extensive for some readers who, once again, are invited to skip quoted interview passages when they have read enough of them. Thefirstkind of correspondence is an alignment in Americans' understanding between the emotional state of love and the social status of marriage. In the second set of correspondences, these ideas about love fill in the motivational structure we attribute to marriage. These ideas themselves will not surprise American readers and may seem all too obvious to them: love, after all, has been defined by countless scholars in various academic literatures, and rendered repeatedly in popular culture. Nevertheless, the analysis of my interview material has the advantage of showing that these are the ideas of ordinary, contemporary US Americans. Furthermore, a systematic analysis like this one avoids focusing on one or a few features of love to which undue theoretical emphasis is then attached, while overlooking others, equally integral to Americans' understanding of it. Finally, and key, this description of how people see love as motivating the way they feel, think, and act will enable us to appreciate the close

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correspondence of this motivational structure to the triad of ideals these same people hold for marriage, independently recovered from their metaphors for it and presented at the beginning of the last chapter. I will then be in a position to return to the issues of how a cluster of motivations deriving ultimately from infantile experience comes to be embodied as it is in Americans' shared understandings of adult love, and through the latter, in their cultural expectations of marriage. Love and marriage To US Americans, love and marriage go together. The object of this section is to show how systematically and with what precision these two conditions are aligned in American thinking. This demonstration should denaturalize and make remarkable American readers' normally taken-forgranted assumption that love and marriage go together, calling for its explanation. When I say that marriage is aligned with love, I mean that being in this social status is contingent on and temporally coterminous with this emotional state in Americans' expectations of how things go: that is, falling in love marks the beginning of marriage, being married means being in love, and falling out of love signals the end of marriage. In my interpretation, this contingency of marriage on love and the boundary shared by the two are crucial evidence that marriage, for Americans, has historically taken shape as the institutional realization of love. 3 Let us look at the evidence for this alignment one point at a time. 1. If things go the way they are supposed to, Americans believe, two people fall in love and get married. Most of the time, the assumption that people marry for love is taken so for granted that it usually only emerges in the course of narratives having other points, like the following: "Though the Catholic church says you can't marry a divorced man in the church, I really hadn't reconciled that, I wasn't going to be worried about it. That if I found a man that was divorced and I loved him I would say, 'God understood,' and marry him." [9W-4] This assumption may emerge, as well, on the rare occasions on which it is explicitly contested:

I'd certainly hate to see people - everybody in the world jumping into marriage immature. But maybe there's really something to the idea that it is not so much how you feel - exactly how you feel before you get into a marriage but what you can make of life, you know, in the marriage that really counts. Having thought it out in other words having thought it out beforehand and coming to the conclusion that you really are in love, might not be as good for a marriage as having gotten married, looked into what was worthy of being in love about, found it, identified it after awhile - because it does - it takes awhile - and then made that the cornerstone. [6H-4]

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While arguing that love should follow marriage, this husband reveals (by arguing against it) the assumption he attributes to most people, that love should precede marriage. Discrepant stories, too, in which people marry people they do not love, or, as in the next case, people who love each other do not &nd up marrying, warrant telling, and in this telling also expose the expectation that has been violated:4

I had a friend - this is when we were in college - and she was very much in love wit a guy she had been going with in high school and they were both good friends of mine and she dropped out of college to go live with him and they loved each other very much but were absolutely incompatible. And they didn't know that before and it was a wonderful thing that they found out and they're still good friends and now she's married and he has another girlfriend but it was something that came as a shock to them particularly and to me as a very interested onlooker that you can love someone and yet still be incompatible with them and that love doesn't conquer all. [7W-6] Like this woman, people recognize, and often caution, that love alone cannot hold a bad relationship or a troubled marriage together. In so cautioning they reveal their otherwise implicit assumption that love, while not sufficient, is a necessary condition of marriage. 2. Once married, two people will or should continue to love each other (though that love can certainly grow and change in quality). Again, this expectation that spouses are supposed to be in love with each other is nowhere revealed more sharply (and, in the next case, painfully) than when it fails:

But in a sense I always feel like I'm cheating Tom, you know. That he has arightto have a wife who has the sort of emotional commitment to him that many couples seem to have, and one part of me says, "Well you probably do have at least as much emotional commitment to him as m - almost anybody would have but you don't have the mindless 'I'm in love' kind of losing yourself, pu - surrendering your judgment and perspective and stuff like that." And some part of me must keep saying to me, "That's the way you're supposed to be, in love, that's why you're supposed to be married, that's the ideal," you know, "That's what you owe to your husband." I know some part of me is saying that and another part of me is saying, "Well," you know, "that's not what I've got and I just - 1 am what I am." [4W-12] If they do continue to love each other, people want and try to stay married. Thus, this normally implicit assumption that married people love each other surfaces again in difficult or insecure times when the continuation of a marriage is in question. This can be seen in one husband's affirmation that, even though he and his wife took some time apart at one difficult juncture in their marriage, "I loved her, I never stopped loving her, and I don't think she ever stopped loving me" [3H-1]. Therefore, he concludes, they resolved to come back together and work at their relationship. Similarly, other interviewees report, "I knew I didn't want to leave her [my

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wife], you know. I knew that I still loved her" [2H-8] or "And I always say to him [my husband], 'I would never leave you/ Because I really love him too much" [6W-6]. Under this assumption that people who love each other stay married, a case like the next one, in which people divorce, even though one does continue to love the other, becomes anomalous - and hence worthy of narration: "My brother and his wife were divorced in August. He's still not real sure. He's thinking about remarrying someone else but he can't decide because he really still loves his ex-wife" [1W-5]. 3. Conversely, interviewees make clear their assumption that when two people don't love each other anymore, the two do not stay married: If you ever split up it's not going to be done because you like each other and you're still in love and you're still happy, you know, with the thing. If the split would ever come it'd be at a time when you really didn't like each other. [9W-1]

But she could say that, if we were going to stay together and that's what she wanted - that she wasn't sure she loved me anymore - the only way would be to stay and work it out, because to get apart would not answer anything, I: She did say she wasn't sure she loved you anymore? Yeah, yeah. At one point. Which was very painful. I mean that was about when I just wanted to forget the whole thing. I: So what she was saying was... . . . contradictory. [4H-7] Note that the structural explanation Derne (1994:285) offers, that Americans believe love should endure because marriage is supposed to be lasting, does not account very well for the widespread expectation, expressed by these interviewees, of marriage ending because love has. My interviewees worried perennially whether their spouses still loved them. This worry is understandable, once again, given the assumption that falling out of love spells the end of marriage, and it provides another window onto that ordinarily tacit assumption. One woman whose husband tried to tell her about his existential crisis reacted this way: He said, "I don't even know what happy is anymore." He said, "I'm just here. I'm just living day to day." And it kind of made me feel bad because I felt like, "God, does that mean that he doesn't love me anymore? Does that mean he doesn't want to be married or what?" [1W-7] And another woman, during a long illness, queried her husband:

"Would you still - are you going to love me forever?" And I think it was really a surprise to him that I was worried so much more about what he was going to think about it [than about my deteriorating health itself]. [9W-1] Other interviewees describe finding themselves especially unable to take their spouses' love for granted, as they find it necessary to interrogate and

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affirm their own love, during periods of marital discord. Because of this anxiety, these married Americans put emphasis on whether partners show their love, to reassure them that it still exists. Purely symbolic expressions of love, such as gifts or words, are not deemed to be enough, or may even be distrusted - while small undramatic acts of caring are especially valued, as is mutually fulfilling sex, as authentic and hence believable expressions of love. While there may be different reasons why one spouse stops loving the other and seeks divorce, one scenario is described repeatedly by my interviewees: falling in love with another person. Though one may love many people, one can only be in love with one person at a time (see also Dern£ 1994). Therefore marriage, too, is necessarily exclusive. As one interviewee spells out:

Well I guess it goes to what I believe in marriage. I just feel like when you're ready to marry somebody then you're ready to give up everybody else as far as ever going out with anybody else - any other men. I mean you're ready to just dedicate your life to loving one man, you know. I mean I can love somebody else as a friend but not romantically, you know, physically, romantically. [1W-2] Because of the exclusivity of "romantic" love, falling in love with someone new means that one stops loving the person one has loved up until that time. Since people marry the one they love, this means, as well, divorcing the old love and marrying the new one - marriage, once again, aligning with love:

As far as divorce would go yeah, you know, if she came and told me she was in love with another man and wanted to marry him, sure fine. [1H-13]

Certainly [if he started having an affair and\ if he developed, you know, emotiona attachment or if he loved the other party then I would think that he should leave and go with the other party. [9W-8] Predictably, this assumption about divorce and remarriage becomes especially problematic for couples like the next one who are attempting open marriages. The wife, the woman quoted in the previous chapter as saying she would never want to leave her husband for another man she was seeing because she would never leave "thirty for one/' has trouble explaining this to her husband:

It [my husband's attitude) was almost like, "Well if you love him it's got to be the kind of thing where you're going to want to leave me and be with him." But it wasn't that at all, you know. And I still have a hard time explaining in terms - in words how I felt. [3W-4] Beside the determined optimism that most interviewees express about working out all kinds of difficulties in their marriages to make them last, the fatalism they express and the obsessive anxiety some of them verbalize

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about the possibility of being left for another person is noticeable. Because these Americans believe that sex is thought to lead to the kind of emotional involvement that, in turn, can develop into love, the two are linked in their minds - sex, as we have seen, being regarded as a sign of love. Concern about losing one's spouse to another person - or about facing a decision to leave one's spouse for another person - centers therefore on the question of extramarital sex. Some interviewees think that a person who loves his or her spouse very much may be less susceptible to falling in love with someone else even in the face of sexual temptation or actual involvement:

I didn't have any emotion for the people that I was dealing with because I was still in love with my woman - my baby. And so it didn't prove anything to me. I didn't I mean I felt I got a chance to feel like I was a desirable person. And then in time, the thing weren't very successful because I really didn't - 1 was more or less doing something. I wasn't - it wasn't like I really wanted these people, 'cause I didn't want them. But I wanted to feel like somebody wanted me. [2H-8] This man's adventures notwithstanding, the people interviewed in my study are in broad strategic agreement that the surest way to prevent falling in love with someone else is to forego extramarital affairs. They differ only on tactics: Some, like the woman who said "when you're ready to marry somebody then you're ready to give up everybody else," hold that any extramarital sexual liaison violates the marriage vows, while others like the next woman distinguish, whether as a matter of pragmatism or of denial, between casual affairs and those that are likely to end a marriage because they are emotionally involving:

There may be things that are reasons for other people splitting that I just don't even think about. That I - 1 wouldn't want them to happen so I don't think about them. I: You don't think about...? Well the biggie that comes to mind is other relationships. I don't think that would really devastate me. Knowing that Tim and I both, before we were married - before we were dating each other, we both had numerous other people that we cared a lot about, I think that I'm more liberal in that. If he were really in love with someone else then it would be - 1 think I would - it would be different. But if it were just physical and if he were just having an affair with someone and it was - that would not really - that wouldn't do it. No. I wouldn't [inaudible]. I: You say you think you're more liberal. Do you mean in general o r . . . Than - than I think - Well, perhaps I'm more - well not liberal, but perhaps more tolerant of physical affairs than other people. Perhaps who have not had them. And it's something that I - 1 don't know, I just - it would hurt but it wouldn't kill me and I think that it wouldn't really permanently affect our marriage. Unless Tim fell in love with someone else, [beginning to laugh and adopting an ironic tone] and might affect our marriage somewhat. I: An outside party that was really serious. Yeah. If there were emotional attachments it would be harder for me to go on. [7W-6]

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To summarize: not only the expectations that people fall in love and get married, that married people love each other, and that people divorce when they fall out of love, but various further details in which these expectations are spelled out, evidence the alignment of marriage with love. Circumstances that violate this alignment, such as people falling in love but not getting married, staying married when they are not in love, or continuing to love someone they have divorced, earn reportability. That people are supposed to love the person they marry is an assumption that interviewees reveal even as they caution that love may not be enough. That people are supposed to stay married as long as they remain in love explains why interviewees are prone to consult their own feelings to verify whether they still love a spouse, in making decisions whether or not to leave them. Equally, this expectation explains why these interviewees look to authentic acts of love on the spouse's part as proof that the spouse still loves them and hence will not leave them; and why they view a spouse's extramarital entanglements as potential evidence to the contrary, that, having fallen in love with another person, the spouse will necessarily fall out of love with them, and will leave them. The motivational structure of love

Love is a feeling, as reflected in the remarks already quoted, "It is not so much exactly how you feel before you get into a marriage," and "I didn't have any emotion for the people that I was dealing with because I was still in love with my woman," and countless other statements interviewees make about it.5 In the American cultural model of the mind that D'Andrade (1987:120-124) has outlined, no less than in psychologists' theories, like that of Westen, described in chapter 4, feelings give rise to desires - which, in turn, engender intentions, which lead to actions. We have seen, for example, interviewers assuming that if people are happily married they will want their marriages to last and that, wanting them to do so, they will try to make them last. Love is no exception to this relation, in American understanding, between feeling and motivation. The motivations engendered by love are clearly identified and well articulated by interviewees: in the following passages and others, they say that they do not wish to leave, or lose, the person they love; that they want to be with that person; and,finally,that they want to fulfill that person's needs. It is this constellation of motivations that matches so strikingly a triad of core expectations about marriage - evidence for which was brought in the last chapter. What follows is evidence for the parallel motivational structure of love. 1. If you love someone you don't want to lose them. As with the two interviewees quoted as saying, "And I always say to him, *I would never

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leave you.' Because I really love him too much," and "I knew I didn't want to leave her, you know. I knew that I still loved her," this means that you are strongly disinclined to leave the one you love. More anxiety-provoking is the possibility that the one you love may decide to leave you, as in the case of the husband who reported, "Because I love Beth, and I was a little bit torn up and I was worried the relationship was in trouble, the marriage maybe was in trouble," and the next woman who, like him, was negotiating an open marriage:

And I felt terribly anxious about Bob, terribly anxious about losing him. And he still persisted pretty much in the same thing that, in his feelings about Terry, which was loving her and caring for her but not romantically loving her and not being able to respond to the hopes and dreams or wishes that she had. And yet I didn't trust that. I was real afraid that wasn't true and that any time it would click and then I would be, you know, out. [5W-2] It is not surprising that open marriage arrangements, which violate the expectation that love be exclusive, should provoke anxiety about losing the person you love. When that person experiences love toward another, their spouse is left to worry whether, as we have already seen it is prone to do, that other love will eclipse the love for the spouse. In the first of these two open marriages, the wife (quoted earlier) found no amount of explaining likely to dissuade her spouse of the belief that "If you love him it's got to be the kind of thing where you're going to want to leave me and be with him." Extra-marital relationships, even those that have the prior sanction of both spouses, thus become occasions on which not only the expectation of losing, but also the desire not to lose the person you love becomes explicit. 2. You want to be with the person you love, as still other interview excerpts make clear:

And I've even slept with people since I have slept with Bobby when wefirststarted dating. When I was at school and again I would think the whole time, "I wish I was with Bobby, I wish I was with Bobby." So that's some of what convinced me I really must love him if I kept wishing I was with him instead of somebody else. That was physically attractive but yet... [1W-6] You're not in love all the time but there's some times when you really get into the feeling of it. And it happens sometimes singularly and individually and sometimes both of us at the same time. When we really feel good about each other and we spend a lot of time talking and we just want to be with each other. [6H-4] I: What is falling in love like? It's hard to say - 1 would - 1 can't... I: Put it into words? No. There's an emotional feeling to really care for a person and you do things for them and help them and make life easier for them. Wanting to spend time with them even if you're not talking or interacting, you know - reading, studying, computer work, whatever. [9H-2]

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3. Finally, as this last excerpt and the next ones illustrate, if you love someone, you care about them, and therefore you want to do things for them - make them happy, help them, give to them, share with them, fulfill their needs, and if necessary, sacrifice for them: Mostly if I want something very much or if I just even express it, Rich will do it. I mean, people have said, "It's obvious that he loves you very much." I mean Rich really loves me very much. And he's very good to me. [9W-5]

I like to do things for him that please him or - 1 don't know, again, how do you explain love? Except that you just - you care for somebody and that you want to do things for them. You know that you want to make them happy. I just enjoy his being, his person. [1W-3] I: And what do you mean by love? Ah. Essentially the - well I think the sharing, the togetherness, the giving. Ah - and emotional attachment, caring, that kind of thing. [2H-1] But now I'd say that love is - to me, is the desire to give more to the other person than you're giving to yourself, at times. You know it's the - not only willingness to accept the part of marriage where you have to change and adjust, but a strong desire to do so. Not only the willingness to accept that there are times when the other part - person - partner might need some help. But the desire to give help. To that person. The sort of love of the fulfilling the other person's needs. [6H-2] These and other interviewees go on to explain that this desire to help extends to a willingness to see the other person through difficulties: "If you love a person you stick by them, for better or worse" [3H-16], one man says. It includes various kinds of emotional support. This can mean not harming the other person psychologically, particularly when they are vulnerable: explains another man, the love of a spouse is "never used against you" [6H-2]. And it can mean accepting the other person: "If you love someone enough," a woman asserts, "you should accept them as they are" [2W-1], The desire to fill the other person's needs is reciprocal: each person in a love relationship cares for and wants to help the other,6 and, as at least one interviewee describes it, the idea that someone loves you can enhance your desire to behave lovingly toward that person, making love mutually reinforcing: "Love," he says, is like "a little extra sparkle of energy" that "makes you want to do things" [2H-2] to please the other. If the alignment of marriage with love, described in the last section, is one kind of evidence that the latter has its institutional realization in the former, then the second kind of evidence that love is realized in marriage is the match between the motivational structure of love, described in this section, and the expectational structure of marriage, described in chapter 6. The three desires that the loved one not leave the person who loves them, be with that person, and fulfill the person's needs, illustrated above, match

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the expectations that marriage be lasting, shared and fulfilling, respectively, and, I argue, are the derivation of these expectations. Love and early experience Following psychoanalytic theory, I have suggested that the motivational structure of love, in turn, relates to matching infantile concerns about not being abandoned by the caretaker, being one with the caretaker, and being cared for by that person. It is from infantile experience, then, that love acquires its motivational force, including its power to shape our understanding of marriage. This being so, the case of love exemplifies, not only the incorporation of emotion and motivation into a cultural schema, as addressed in chapter 4, but the primary role that may be played by these emotions and motivations in the formation of such a schema. Supporting this interpretation of marriage and married love in terms of infantile love are the reports of some interviewees, corroborated by general knowledge, that husbands and wives not uncommonly talk baby talk to each other, and look to each other for "mothering" or "fathering." Individuals did not seem to be particularly self-conscious about these practices. This is probably because they were unaware of the infantile look of these practices, as obvious as it seemed to me. If they do not experience babytalk and being "mothered" as infant-like, one reason is that the infantile complex at the root of adult love has been overlaid and elaborated with a great deal of subsequent experience and resulting understandings, including those about marital love and other adult love relationships. Another reason is that coming to see oneself as a competent adult - a valued and rewarded status in all societies - requires one to defend against infantile wishes and behaviors of all kinds. Further evidence that early experience is reinvoked in adult love relationships and marriage in particular comes from clinical observations. Walter Gadlin (1988), for example, describes how marital relationships can become the sites for the expression of certain transference themes such as feelings of oneness and, conversely, fear of being overwhelmed; of neediness and the desire for unconditional caring; and of demands for exclusive attention and anxiety about being abandoned. While Sigmund Freud was thefirstto argue the relation between infantile experience and the form of adult love, subsequent theorists in various psychoanalytic traditions, who place its origin in the pre-oedipal experience of the infant, have enriched Freud's original description of this experience substantially. Not wanting to get sidetracked here by predictable theoretical disagreements of emphasis and detail, I offer instead the following composite version of these writers' accounts of the origins and

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development of adult love, a version on which I think most could agree, although each might want to embellish it differently: in earliest experience, infant and mother are one. The mother cares for the infant exclusively and meets all of the infant's needs. However blissful is this stage for the infant, the course of normal development requires it to end, for, in order to become individuated, the infant must separate from the mother. This separation is experienced as loss. As one psychoanalyst concludes this story, "Depending on the solidity of this achievement, the search for love more or less seeks to undo this state of separateness. It also seeks to restore to the self the sense of perfection believed to have been enjoyed in the original mother-infant unit" (Ireland 1988:25). By their nature the issues of separation, loss, and care that are central to this preoedipal experience impinge upon the infant's psychological wellbeing and its very sense of safety and anxiety about survival. If we are to accept the psychoanalytic description of it, this infantile experience is of a kind that is certainly early enough and arouses feelings strong enough to result, in turn (as may be seen in our discussions of durability and motivation in chapter 4) in an indelible, motivationally charged schema. Moreover, the connectionist account we have put forward in this book provides an explanation for how this durable, motivating schema comes to be reinstantiated, in its entirety, in adulthood. In this schema-theoretic account, adult intimate relations that activate one component of the early schema, whether feelings of closeness, or fears of separation, or neediness, say, or particular memories of the caretaker - will activate the entire complex of ideas, feelings, and motivations (although, as we have seen, they are overlaid with the results of subsequent experience that is now part of this schema, and that disguises its infantile basis). To summarize andfillin my argument: an interpretation of interviewees' expectations regarding marriage and their understandings of love in terms of early infantile experience, as psychoanalytic theory characterizes it, fits the details of these interviewees' descriptions exceptionally well. Specifically, in adulthood, infantile closeness with the caretaker is expressed as wanting to be with the person one loves and, correspondingly, expecting to share one's life with the person one marries. The issue of individuation is echoed in adult concerns about not being submerged by love and preserving one's autonomy in the marital relationship (about which my interviewees talked extensively), and it is telling that psychoanalytic thinkers generally regard this balancing of dependency with autonomy to mark the attainment of mature love. Infantile anxiety about separation and loss of the caretaker is expressed as wanting to be loved forever and, in turn, expecting marriage to be permanent. Infantile concern about the enduringness of maternal love resurfaces in adulthood, when everlasting love

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and the permanence of marriage are threatened by the possibility that the adult loved one may leave, with divorce as a consequence. Particularly preoccupying, due to the infantile fear of being replaced and the wish for the exclusive love of the caretaker, is adult anxiety about losing the person one loves to another. The infant's desire for the caretaker to fulfill all of its needs is expressed as the desire for the person one loves in adulthood to fill these needs, and the corollary expectation that marriage be fulfilling. These needs now include sensuality and sex, which, in the psychoanalytic picture of mature adult love, are joined with caring. There is also the proviso that, now, one must reciprocate, simultaneously being dependent and caretaker. Psychoanalytic theorists regard this ability to take both needful and need fulfilling roles in a relationship as a hallmark of mature love, and indeed, it is for them perhaps the very measure of adulthood in our society. Although psychoanalysts are broadly agreed on the relation between the two, these and other students of the subject are not agreed upon a theoretical account of how the infantile experience of Americans like these interviewees translates into their adult understandings of love (cf. Gaylin and Person 1988:x-xii; Ireland 1988:28; Jankowiak 1995a: 13; Lasky and Silverman 1988:12). Again, although they have now assembled compelling evidence that something such as we experience as adult love is widespread in human societies, anthropologists have not yet produced a theoretical account, on which all can agree, of what about this experience and the understandings that it engenders might be culturally distinctive and what might be cross-culturally shared.7 It is possible, on the one hand, that the experiential gestalt I have described is universal in human societies, in which case the explanation I have given, of an early and powerfully motivating schema reactivated by adult experience, stands on its own. That is, when children everywhere grow up and become capable of adult intimate relationships, these trigger the experience of the infant-caretaker relationship; everywhere, too, the unavoidable loss of thatfirstsignificant relationship lends the later one a quality of "refinding." It is possible, on the other hand, that the psychodynamics underlying adult love, while universal in their occurrence, are quite variable, crossculturally, in the way they unfold, and hence in the version of adult love that they engender. Specifically, the emphasis on refinding the lost infantcaretaker relationship in adult love, assumed by Freud to be a human universal, might end differently elsewhere:8 this early relationship might, for example, be dampened or altogether repressed, or split into components reexperienced separately in separate contexts. It might be renounced - as Stanley Kurtz (1992) has proposed that Hindu Indian children are led to renounce the original mother-infant relationship in favor of connection to the larger kin group. It might be retained as an unrealizable ideal, as

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Holly Mathews (personal communication) suggests Oaxacan Mexican men do, or sublimated in the role of caretaker to one's own children, as Mathews believes Oaxacan women do.9 Or - as Anne Allison (1994:111-112 and personal communication) suggests for the case of middle class Japanese boys tied to "education mothers" who prepare them for their school examinations - it might never be given up in thefirstplace. This second possibility - that the story of refinding is indeed culturally distinctive in its shape - would require an explanation of the circumstances under which this story has emerged. In the terms set out in chapter 5, this is a question about the shared learning (at least partially shared, as well, with Freud's Viennese patients and other Europeans, past and present, as well as earlier US Americans) that has accompanied and followed on the infant's earliest experience with its caretaker, to shape a distinctive understanding of adult love. I will offer one such possible explanation - even though I regard it as premature speculation. Explanations of the distinctive character of love in the United States have tended to focus on the idealization of the loved one and the love relationship, sometimes tracing this idealization to European origins. One suggestion (Endelman 1989:112) has been that US Americans put an exceptionally high value on providing untraumatic parenting (even though they do not always succeed at doing so).10 Another idea has been that American mothers create an attachment between themselves and their infants of exceptional affective intensity (Chodorow 1978:86; Kurtz 1992:264), fostered, in turn, by the isolation of nuclear households and an emphasis, by contemporary American childrearing experts, on maternal responsibility (Chodorow 1978:212). While either of these conditions might lead to idealization of the infant-caretaker experience and the caretaker herself, it is unclear to me how such childrearing and the idealization that it ostensibly produces can alone account for the idea of refinding an ideal that had been lost. In addition, there is mounting evidence that idealization of the loved one is hardly distinctive of American or Western understandings of love (see Jankowiak 1995).n The admittedly speculative account to follow builds on these observations that US American infant care is especially nurturant - at least ideally so - and the relationship between infant and mother especially intense. My account draws attention to an additional widespread characteristic of infantile experience, a feature that may be somewhat more distinctive of US American childrearing. Even as they are being loved, American infants begin to learn that they will lose that perfect love. For examples, many Americans wean their infants from breast or bottle early, by world standards, and, even more unusual cross-culturally, require them to sleep in separate bedrooms. US American parents interviewed in a recent study of cultural variation in

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their infants* sleeping arrangements (Morelli et al. 1992) explain this practice, as we might expect them to (and as the West German parents described chapter 5 also do), in terms of the value of teaching infants independence. (The researchers [ibid.:611] suggest that the practice may have the paradoxical effect of making it more difficult, rather than less so, for these children to separate from their parents during the day.) Training in self-reliance is not only early for American children, but also unrelenting. If an overriding goal of American infant care is to provide the infant with a sense of being loved, a secondary theme that emerges as the paramount goal after infancy is to teach the child to be self-reliant. In other words, US Americans are extremely nurturant to babies (even as they are requiring them to sleep apart and beginning to pressure them to become self-sufficient in other ways) but they are not very indulgent of older children acting "babyish." What I propose is that the extreme demand for self-reliance is experienced as a sharp departure from the earlier experience of total nurturance. I further surmise that to the degree that independence is adult-imposed before children come to it themselves, the child may be more likely to experience the earlier unconditionally nurturant relationship with the mother as something they have been deprived of, and hence as something lost, rather than something voluntarily relinquished. This is one possible explanation. In placing such explanatory weight on the psychodynamics of the earliest relationship and its unfolding in subsequent experience, I do not wish to unduly neglect or underplay the role of public culture in fashioning, refashioning, and then reiterating a distinctive cultural story out of these psychodynamic materials. It should be clear that I do not think that this curious, yet powerful, set of beliefs about love is a fabrication of public culture alone. Nevertheless, the role of popular song and like media in shaping adolescent ideas, in particular, about love and marriage should not be underestimated (Schlachet and Waxenberg 1988:53). Not only does such public culture shape these beliefs and expectations, but it also plays an important role in broadcasting them. If southern French love poetry enshrined the story of courtly love and troubadours spread it throughout twelfth-century Europe, the twentiethcentury version of this story is encoded in popular song and circulated, not just in live concerts but by electronic means, throughout the world. And we have seen, public culture such as this preserves, even as it may reconfigure, these beliefs and expectations over relatively long periods of time (as Schlachet and Waxenberg 1988 document, love has been reconfigured in popular song even since the 1920s). Left unaddressed in my discussion so far is why adult love, whatever its source, should come to be realized, in Americans* understanding of it,

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within marriage. I think this is much the easier part of the US American pattern to explain. As the most intimate of institutionalized adult relationships, and hence most likely to trigger infantile experience, monogamous marriage is a predictable site, perhaps even a magnet, for the realization of that experience (and herein lies the grain of truth in Derne's [1994] argument, which I disputed at the beginning of this chapter). Social practices that allow or promote such emotional intimacy between husband and wife can be expected to encourage "love matches" and the expectation of love in marriage. Social developments in US history would seem to have favored marital love. Karen Lystra (1989:28) tells us that American middle-class youth were selecting their own partners by at least 1800, with little interference from parents, and that "'the heart' played an increasingly larger role in mating as the century progressed, so that "by 1830, romantic love was fast becoming the necessary condition for marriage in the American middle class." Once married, spouses were also expected to continue loving each other until death - divorce not being a legitimate alternative (Lystra, 1978:194,221). Lystra attributes this shift to love matches to theriseof the ideal of companionate marriage, which challenged parental control over mate choice; she argues (ibid.: 158) that "parents bowed out, not just because the family became less of an economically productive unit in an industrializing economy, but because acceptance of the ideas and values of love and the self gave them no basis to act upon - except as advisers and manipulators of the pool of eligibles." But I would give more weight to the weakening of parental authority over children, because of the increasing importance to these children's economic fortunes of education and other intrinsic assets, over property and other inherited wealth. Though the rise of the "romantic self* may have been responsible for the swiftness and breadth of their acceptance among the American middle class in the nineteenth century, love matches themselves were not new, and so cannot be satisfactorily explained as the product of new ideas alone. John Gillis (1985), for example, examining British marriage from 1600 to the mid1980s, has argued that at different periods throughout these centuries, love matches existed among the propertyless, side by side with arranged marriages among the propertied, and that the two exhibited quite distinct patterns of fluctuation in popularity over time. As Gillis' observation suggests, social practices that mitigate against spousal intimacy - say, arranged marriages between strangers12 for the transmission of property or other economic or political ends, or markedly hierarchical gender relations that distance husband and wife - make marriage a less likely site for love. Then adult love must take some other route of expression, or remain unexpressed.13

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Whatever the experiences that lead us to want to refind the infantcaretaker relationship in adulthood and realize this adult love in marriage, and however these experiences may be the same or different historically or cross-culturally, it is important to remember that given experiences must have been shared in broad outline by substantial numbers of people in order to have resulted in a cultural schema for married love such as that Americans share. The framework developed in chapter 4 to think more generally about how cultural schemas are learned has been helpful in thinking about how this one might have come to be shared. This overly brief consideration of how infantile love may relate to adult experience should suggest some of the cross-cultural, subcultural and/or historical differences in infantile and later experience on which future research needs to focus. This discussion should also underscore the value, and indeed the necessity, of a working relationship between cognitive and psychoanalytic anthropology. The languages of love Finally, whatever history of love and marriage we favor, we should not underestimate the historical continuity, with older ideas, of the complex of understandings about these matters that I have described - understandings that certainly predate Freud's Vienna. The tendency to regard our own version of love and marriage as wholly contemporary is abetted by the strikingly different idioms in which past understandings of them may have been couched. Such idioms can disguise equally striking similarity, however, as the example of the nineteenth century suffices to illustrate. Nineteenth-century American love was cast in terms of religious experience, true selfhood, and gender complementarity (Lystra 1989; Seidman 1991). Falling in love was a desexualized spiritual longing. True love, the foundation of a lasting relationship, necessitated each person's knowledge of the other's spiritual and moral qualities. In order to assure this exchange of knowledge, courtship became a period of intense disclosure of the spiritual and moral strengths and failures of each; it is then, rather than after marriage, that the relationship was "tested" (Lystra ibid.:157-191) for commitment and compatibility, in successive rounds of anxious selfcriticism and reassurance. Disclosure also promoted an intense experience of union, expressed in metaphors of a holy union joined by God, of being united, one being or oneflesh,of being blended into one another, mingled, or merged, and of being halves of a more perfect whole or, when apart, "the absent half of our own very identity" (Seidman ibid.:45). Union was underlain by powerfully felt spiritual attraction, and shared spiritual-religious aspirations - rather than shared social interests or activities, which

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would have been implausible in the context of separate men's and women's "spheres" (Seidman ibid.:50). Again, the mutual benefit of marriage was reciprocal emotional support in attaining these religious aspirations by overcoming spiritual anxieties and filling spiritual lacks - rather than reciprocal fulfillment of psychological needs. That mutual support required spiritual complementarity, which was much helped by the prevailing theory of gender difference: each sex was understood to be governed by its own masculine or feminine principle and drawn to the opposite sex because each was incomplete and complementary to the other (Seidman ibid.:53). Lastingness was inherent in the expectation that marriage was for life, and was supported by the widespread idea of marriage as a religious sacrament, with a transcendent moral purpose (Regan 1993:31); by the doctrine of true love - which, unlike mere romantic love, was enduring because based in knowledge of intimate motives and the true self; by the bonding that came of mutual self-disclosure; and by the attraction and meshing of opposites. On the surface quite different from contemporary ideas and even odd by comparison, nineteenth-century American understandings of love prove compellingly parallel. Underneath the unfamiliar metaphorical and other language thatfirstdraws our attention, the Victorians expressed the same expectations that marriage be shared, mutually beneficial, and lasting. It would be easy to miss this similarity if we attended exclusively or overly to the linguistic conventions in which love was wrapped in these two different eras. Of all the extrapersonal renderings of cultural meaning, language offers the fullest clues to this meaning. Like other such public expressions of cultural meaning, however, it is indirect. As I tried to demonstrate as well in the cases of metaphor and reasoning in the previous chapter, discourse of all kinds must be carefully and systematically mined to recover as much as possible of the interpersonal meanings the speaker has in mind. These include not only its more obvious social meanings, but its deeper psychodynamic meanings as well. Conclusion The theoretical framework developed in this book to explain the emergence of culturally shared beliefs and expectations accommodates widely different empirical cases. This is because the processes by which sharing arises are various. Sharing, we have said, requires only that different people encounter essentially the same pattern of associations in the world. In this chapter, I considered yet a different case - one in which the impact of a constellation of early infantile experiences endures to recur in adult life and powerfully motivate adult behavior. While the match between infant

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experience and adult understandings is persuasive, far from settled is what learning takes place in between infancy and adulthood to augment earliest experience in giving these adult understandings their particular shape. The conditions of infant life and later experience under which this configuration is learned must be widely shared to engender the culturally shared understandings that result. To the degree that the early experience on which this schema depends (as, in my hypothesis, unsparing nurturance followed by early and extreme demands for the child's independence) is provided by consecutive generations of caregivers, the schema will have historical resilience as well. Once established, too, this understanding is made even more indelible - even as it may be being reshaped - by public forms, from popular song to psychotherapy, that may celebrate, elaborate, and refigure the story. The three different kinds of cultural sharing illustrated by my research certainly do not exhaust all the ways in which such sharing arises. They do, however, exemplify three significant ways. An important lesson to be derived from this string of three analyses of Americans' shared understanding of marriage, is that the shared experiences that contribute to cultural understandings may be of very different kinds. Hence these experiences can have very different motivational resonances and durational prospects. While conventional metaphors that have become habituated and have the advantage of being widely understood may live for a long time, they can also drop away unnoticed, as new ones can catch on readily. Very little emotion or motivation attaches to our use of metaphor. By contrast, expectations about love and marriage are freighted with emotion and motivation. Therefore, the cultural story about love and marriage appears to have enormous resilience in the individual life course. Core elements of this story - those tied to a powerful set of motivations that has been stable over time - also appear to exhibit considerable historical durability. It is through the ethnography of the inner life, as advocated here, that we can begin to identify and explain such differences in the motivational force and the durability of cultural understandings.

8

Research on cultural discontinuities Claudia Strauss

When I was an undergraduate, I wanted to understand where people's beliefs come from, and I devised an interdisciplinary major with the awkward1 title, "World Views and Forces Which Shape Them," to study this. As a graduate student in anthropology I was taught that beliefs are culturally constructed. The phrase "culturally constructed," however, glosses over a complex process in which beliefs of very different sorts are learned from practices and discourses of very different sorts. Some of these practices and discourses are mutually reinforcing in their messages, others contradictory. Some leave us with fully formulated ideas, while others leave us something much vaguer (Sperber 1985b). Some are explicitly pedagogical, others inform only implicitly, and still others are deliberately obfuscating (Kluckhohn 1941,1943; LeVine 1984). Some are emotionally fraught, others inform but do not engage us (Spiro 1984, 1987a). Finally, some present unrealizable ideals, others illustrate what really happens, still others suggest bygone or emerging possibilities (Williams 1977). Metaphors of culture as "structure," "text," or "discourse" did not do justice to this complexity. Eventually I became suspicious of theories that flattened culture and reduced it to a single kind of thing and was attracted instead to discussions of culture acquisition that took the perspective of learners exposed to a variety of practices and discourses. Such challenges to notions of culture as a tidy system were around before the current poststructuralist and postmodern critique of the culture concept; among anthropologists, for example, there was the insightful work of Barth (1975,1983), Sperber (1975, 1985a, 1985b), and Wallace (1970). There were also sociologies of knowledge that analyzed the contradictions between consciousness as a product of a dominant ideology versus consciousness as a product of lived experience (Bourdieu 1977; Bloch 1985; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Gramsci 1971; Marx and Engels 1970). This chapter illustrates three aspects of cultural complexity that affect the learning of beliefs and that I have explored in my research: conflicting messages, disparate forms and processes of internalization, and different dynamics at the social and psychological levels. In thefirstsection, I will 210

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discuss the ways in which people internalize inconsistent messages and relate this to my growing realization that any discussion of fragmentariness and inconsistency has to be balanced by discussion of competing forces for integration, which operate at both the social and psychological levels, although in different ways at each. In the second section, I show the dissimilar motivational effects of schemas that are learned and internalized in different ways. Cultural representations vary not only in content, but also in form, and these variations in form seem to have distinct consequences for the way people act on their beliefs. In that section I also spell out some methodological consequences of these disparate forms of internalization. The way understandings are acquired and cognitively represented has consequences for the way they come to be expressed - not only in one-on-one talk of the sort I have analyzed, but also in mass media and other sorts of public texts. In the last section, I spend more time on differences between extrapersonal and intrapersonal culture. Public culture goes through a more complicated process of production than does people's spontaneous talk. The result is the need to be very careful when drawing conclusions about cultural meanings from public culture, as I show in the case of a public policy change that is generally thought to have widespread support in the United States but is in fact only a partial realization of public sentiment. These topics are illustrated with examples from my past and current research on Americans' ideas about economic individualism. As a social description, economic individualism posits a society of free individuals (persons or corporations) interacting to maximize their economic gain. Normatively, it is the idea that a person's economic standing should depend on their own efforts. It is thus opposed (in theory) both to systems in which economic standing is given by birth and those in which this is determined by governmental intervention, although government intervention to assure greater equality of opportunity is consistent with economic individualism (McClosky and Zaller 1984:94-5). In the case of corporations, economic individualism is usually taken to be the same as laissezfaire capitalism (the fewer the restrictions on the economic decisions of corporations, the better), with the possible exception, again, of intervention to break up monopolies in order to ensure opportunities for smaller businesses. Economic individualism is probably the dominant economic ideology in the United States and helps account for the odd fact (from a cross-national perspective) that average US Americans tend not to band together tofighteconomic and political policies that favor richer people at their expense. (The relative quiescience of US American workers, compared to those in other industrialized countries, was labeled "American exceptionalism" at one time; see Mackenzie 1973. This tendency may not

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be so exceptional any more; see Halle 1984.) When I was planning my dissertation research, I noticed that most discussions of US Americans' ideas on this subject had been based on survey research, which is helpful for impressions of large groups but unable to delve into attitudes in any depth or with nuance. Even researchers who had conducted open-ended interviews (e.g., Halle 1984; Hochschild 1981; Lane 1962; Sennett and Cobb 1972, to name works that I read during that period) did not analyze their interviews in the careful way I had admired in Quinn (1982). So in my dissertation research (1984-5) I used the controversy surrounding a large chemical plant located on the edges of the neighborhood where I then lived in Cranston, Rhode Island, as a way of exploring how economic individualist ideologies were internalized by neighbors and employees of the plant. That factory, owned by the US subsidiary of the Swiss chemical company, Ciba-Geigy Ltd, had been the subject of protests because of its smelly and possibly health-threatening emissions into the air and water. Just before I settled on my research topic, the company announced plans to close its Rhode Island plant and shift operations elsewhere in the United States, forcing several hundred employees to look for new jobs. Earlier in its history, I discovered, the plant had been the site of serious labor-management conflict. After a year of background research into the history of the Ciba-Geigy controversy, I conducted in-depth interviews with its neighbors and employees to learn what they thought about the "free enterprise system" in light of their experience with this company. Over the course of in-depth interviews (six open-ended interviews per person, each approximately an hour-and-a-half long) with fifteen men and women who were employees or neighbors of the chemical plant,2 I asked about the conflicting rights of the neighbors, employees, government (local, state, and federal), and the corporation owning the chemical plant. Over the course of repeated visits we branched out to many other topics, including interviewees' life histories and ideas about who does and does not get ahead in this society. In 19901 conducted follow-up interviews with each person, asking some of the same questions about getting ahead to see if their ideas had changed. This research is the major source for my discussion, in the first section below, of how inconsistency is managed socially and psychologically, and in the second section below, of how diverse social inputs giveriseto differing forms of motivation. In 19941 began a research project on attitudes about the welfare system. This topic interested me both because it was the focus of major debates in public policy and because it is linked to so many other sensitive topics in this country, including ideas about individual achievement, federal government programs, class, race, gender, and immigration. The welfare study has combined a variety of methods. In 1994 my students and I led several

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focus-group discussions on the topic. Early in 1995 I conducted a phone survey with randomly chosen samples in the greater Providence, Rhode Island, area and the Research Triangle area of North Carolina to assess how attitudes about welfare are influenced by other questions in the interview context (an experiment I will describe further below). Since mid-19951 have been interviewing or supervising interviews with some of these survey respondents.3 Each interviewee has participated in two lengthy (approximately hour-and-a-half) sessions, discussing a variety of topics related to welfare, other current events, and their own lives. All along I have also been collecting examples of public discourse on welfare including on-line discussions, talk-radio commentary, newspaper articles, and political party platforms. This research is the basis for my discussion in the third section of an example of only partial congruence between public policy and popular sentiments. Analysis 1. How are conflicting discourses internalized? There are several social and cognitive mechanisms for handling discrepant ideas. At the social level, authorities can marginalize some ideas (as has happened to pagan ideas in Judeo-Christian societies, for example) persecuting their holders, labeling them wacky, or simply ignoring them while validating and disseminating competing ideas. Another possibility is that a compromise might take hold, a socially approved way of selectively synthesizing the conflicting ideas. Naomi Quinn gives an example of this in chapter 6: traditional views of marriage as a sacred vow, competing with modern views of marriage as a voluntary contract, are resolved through a typically US American emphasis on making an effort to overcome difficulties. (To a certain extent, too, compromises have been worked out with pagan practices and Christianity, as we all know from the examples of Easter eggs and Christmas trees.) If either of these (marginalization or socially approved synthesis) happens, the presence of conflicting idea systems should not lead to psychological inconsistency because (in the first case) the marginal ideas are either ruled out or can only be chosen while rejecting the dominant view or (in the second case) a way of resolving the potential conflict is readily available. Marginalization and socially approved synthesis are not always present, however, leaving people in every society to internalize some conflicting ideas. (See, for a good example from another society, Abu-Lughod 1986 on the sentiments propounded in public, daily discourse versus those expressed in the poetry shared with intimates among North African Bedouins.) When that happens, there are several ways these conflicting discourses might be internalized. First, a person could choose one and reject

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the rest. Or they could (unconsciously) select parts of the competing public discourses and integrate them in a single schema. Another possibility is an unconscious compromise. In this case the competing ideas are internalized in separate but dynamically linked schemas so that acting on one creates some anxiety or need to compensate by later acting on the other, but the person is not explicitly aware of this psychic conflict most of the time. Still another possibility is ambivalence, which is like unconscious compromise except that no workable compromise has emerged and the person feels torn.4 A final possibility is compartmentalization (Singer 1972; Weiss 1990). In this case the competing ideas are internalized in separate, unconnected schemas, so that expressions of one are unrelated to expressions of the other. These schemas are activated in different contexts and the person feels neither conscious nor unconscious conflict between them in the ordinary course of events.5 Under the heading of compartmentalization, there are two further possibilities: horizontal compartmentalization, in which the schemas are equally accessible to consciousness and verbal expression, and vertical compartmentalization, in which one schema is more accessible and easily verbalized than the other. (The metaphor of verticality is not meant to imply that the less accessible schema is repressed by the more accessible one; in both horizontal and vertical compartmentalization the two schemas are unconnected in the person's neural network.) In a previous publication (Strauss 1990) I described and gave examples of three of these possibilities: horizontal compartmentalization, vertical compartmentalization, and integration. (I called thefirsttwo "horizontal containment" and "vertical containment.") The point I was trying to make was that just because people have internalized conflicting discourses, it does not follow that their beliefs are a confused jumble; instead, they could be highly organized (in one of those three ways, the only ones that had occurred to me at the time). Since I illustrated each with the discourse of a different interviewee, however, a reader could draw the conclusion that some people have completely compartmentalized beliefs. Furthermore, since I gave two examples of compartmentalization (one horizontal, one vertical) and only one of integration, a reader might also draw the conclusion that integration is less common than compartmentalization. The picture I presented there could thus be taken to support some poststructuralists' theories that selves are shifting and plural (see Flax 1990 and Kondo 1990 for summaries) as well as other theorists' claims that postmodern selves are fragmented (e.g., Jameson 1984,1991a, b). (The difference - to use the distinction formulated by Jameson 1984:63 - is that the poststructuralists are likely to agree that selves have never been unified while the theorists of postmodernism see psychological fragmentation as a new phenomenon.) I do not agree with either of these positions, however,

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if by lack of a unified self or fragmentation of self we mean discordant beliefs.61 think that everyone's belief system is partly compartmentalized and partly integrated and that this has probably always and everywhere been the case. Furthermore, the forces responsible for social inconsistency and integration are different from the forces responsible for psychological inconsistency and integration, so we cannot infer the latter from the former. First I will illustrate compartmentalization, then partial integration, from my research. I will end this section with a discussion of the respects in which I believe Jameson's discussion of postmodern psychological fragmentation is wrong and what might explain the sort of fragmentation and partial integration I found. The following is adapted from the longer discussions in Strauss (1997). Since cognitive schemas are not readily observable, what do I take as evidence for their compartmentalization or integration? I have paid attention to three clues: the content of people's talk, the voices they use to express those contents, and temporal continuity or discontinuity in the expression of those contents (Strauss 1992b). By "content" I mean simply the ideas expressed. By looking at content we can discern that someone is expressing inconsistent ideas, but this alone does not tell us whether the speaker has integrated or compartmentalized the inconsistent ideas or is ambivalent about them. By "voice" I mean characteristic mode of expression, including repeated key words, metaphorical imagery, and emotional valence (cf. Bakhtin 1981). Ideas that seem inconsistent to the observer but are expressed by the speaker in a single voice are probably integrated in the speaker's cognitive networks. The reverse does not necessarily hold, however: Inconsistent ideas that are expressed in different voices are not necessarily cognitively compartmentalized. For example sometimes people copy their metaphorical imagery, key terms, and so on from distinct public discourses while internalizing the ideas expressed in closely connected schemas. To discern this I have paid particular attention to the third clue: whether the ideas are expressed in connected or disconnected discourse contexts. If someone typically expresses discrepant ideas both in distinct voices and separate discourse contexts, I feel confident that their ideas are compartmentalized. If different voices are intermingled in a single discourse context, it suggests at least partial integration of the underlying schemas. Evidence for compartmentalization In my 1990 paper the person whose discourse I chose to illustrate horizontal compartmentalization was Jim Lovett, a neighbor of the Ciba-Geigy factory and former welder forced out of work by an occupational disabil-

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ity. He was in his late fifties when I interviewed him. Over the course of many hours of conversation, Lovett expressed three schemas that seemed inconsistent with one another.7 These schemas I have labeled C A N ' T FIGHT THE SYSTEM, ACHIEVING

ANYTHING

YOU WANT, and

FEELING RESPONSIBLE FOR OTHERS. Lovett's C A N ' T FIGHT THE SYSTEM schema was shaped by populist social discourses and focuses on

the exploitation of working people like him by large corporations, big government, the rich, and the poor. In this schema, rich people are bad. His A C H I E V I N G ANYTHING YOU W A N T schema derives from individualist social discourses; in it, anyone can become rich in the United States and becoming a millionaire is a worthy goal. Finally, his FBELING RESPONSIBLE FOR OTHERS schema is a version of communitarian discourses, that value caring for other people, in one's own family or in a larger community. Becoming rich, in this discourse, is a lower priority. C A N ' T FIGHT THE SYSTEM. When I asked Lovett to talk about CibaGeigy, his former employers, and current events, he typically replied with his version of a populist outlook that takes the perspective of the '"little person" or "'average person" who is oppressed by the rich, big business, and politicians and taken advantage of by the poor (Kazin 1994). (Note: "left populists" criticize big business and the rich and "right populists" criticize big government and the poor, Boyte and Riessman 1986, Reich 1987. Many US Americans are probably like Lovett in being critical of all of these.) His version of this populist discourse can be called C A N ' T FIGHT THE SYSTEM because in these contexts he repeatedly expressed his feelings of powerlessness to effect change. Here are some examples:

[fjt's just that the system, it's just so hard on the little guy, that's all. It's been the workingman, it's been the workingman that has supported the country, the workingman that has supported the world. The poor guy, he's on welfare; he doesn't pa no taxes. And the rich man, right up until today, he's got some money he hides it; he don't even pay taxes either. So who's it leave? The working guy, that is strugglin to support a family, to keep a home, to have enough groceries on the table, to send his kids to school. He just don't have enough. He's struggling all the time. And he's carrying the whole world. [85,1:17-18]

Corporations do not care about people. They - all they care about is satisfying their stockholders, making money. They don't care about the little person, that's just another pebble in the road, if it gets in your way, you kick it aside, [del. 1 line] Somebody starts complaining about it, then they go on someplace else and they start all over again. The same thing, [del. 4 lines] In this world they could go round and round,fifty,a hundred years from now, they could come right back to Rhode Island and start all over again. It's just an endless thing to - they don't care. [del. 4 lines] You can'tfightthat. You can'tfightthat. [85,1:11] Politicians. They get away with murder. And they, you - everybody could be up in arms about it, but until you can get a group, no one's listening. [85,1:9]

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[speaking of high utility costs] Why should the little homeowner have to subsidize the big corporations? It's not right, it's not fair. Again, what're you going to do about it? I'm only one person. So what? They'll say, "Yes, sir, you'reright.Yup. You'reright.We'll look into it, we're going to take care of it." Click, the phone off. [85,1:10] The numbers after the quotes refer to the year the interviews were conducted (1985 for each of the preceding quotes); which interview in the series of six (the first, for each of these quotes); and the page number where the section quoted appeared in my transcripts.8 As the page numbers show, all of these quotes came during the first interview, three of them close together. Not only were these ideas typically connected in discourse, but they were also expressed in the same voice. Notice that in all of them society is imagined in terms of opposing classes or forces or interest groups (the "little guy" or "workingman" or "little homeowner" versus "the poor guy," the "rich man," "corporations," and "politicians"), with the agency of people of the first sort constrained by a "system" that favors people of the second sort. Lovett's temporal horizon and sense of change over time is consistent with this focus on structural constraint: as he describes in the second quote, in the long run the larger forces will prevail: "It's just an endless thing." At another point he took an even longer perspective, suggesting that over the course of millennia there is improvement until an eventual "burnout point." Civilization starts over, "Until a burnout point again. I, I think that it's endless" [85,3:17-18]. The emotional tone dominating this talk is one of anger, resentment, and despair. Much of Lovett's content and tone in such passages is typical of populist language that I heard from other interviewees as well. But the voice in which Lovett expressed these ideas differed a bit from that used by other interviewees. For example, Lovett typically used images of trying to speak and not being heard to express powerlessness. Note that in third and fourth passages quoted earlier he said, "until you can get a group, no one's listening"; and "They'll say, 'Yes, sir, you're right. Yup. You're right. We'll look into it, we're going to take care of it.' Click, the phone off." The lengthy discussion excerpted in the first passage closed with the comment, "I think that it may relate to a lot of things that people are thinking, but never have the opportunity to say"; and his discussion of repeated civilizational burnouts began, "I don't think that we listen enough to people of knowledge." By contrast, another working-class interviewee, Carol Russo, typically used violent imagery ("crush," "step on," "keep us back and down," "climbing all over everybody") to describe the way little people (whom she usually imagined as women and children) are oppressed by people in power. That is why I stress that

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Lovett's C A N ' T FIGHT THE SYSTEM schema was his version of populism. A C H I E V I N G ANYTHING YOU WANT. Surprisingly, given Lovett's C A N ' T FIGHT THE SYSTEM discourse, when I asked him in the fourth interview what he thought of the "free enterprise system," he responded enthusiastically with his version of an economic individualist discourse in which society is composed not of classes but of individuals, there are no structural limits on economic mobility, and making big money is good: I think it's terrific. I, myself, Irene [his wife] and I have been for a number of years Amway distributors, [del. 3 lines] And we could build this business as much or to any height that we'd want to, even to what they call direct distributorship, [del. 21 lines] Now this was free enterprise. We were given the opportunity to take something from the beginning and grow and go with it as far as we wanted to go. [85,4:18] [Continuing discussion of Amway] So it's quite a, they are quite a business today. They started with a single product in a garage and [laughs] I've already lost track of what they've grown to. You know. It's tremendous, [del. 6 lines] They're all over the world now. They're all over the world. They're in Japan and China and England and Germany, France, Canada. Just about every country. Australia, [del, II lines] [gives the example of another Rhode Island Amway distributor who won a new car as a bonus] This is available to anyone in the business. You know. There's no, there's no restriction, there's no line about, well, I belong to the - you can't reach this level. No, there's nothing like that. You can go from zero to the top. [del. 13 lines] Them men [the ones who started Amway] are, I don't know how much they're worth, [del. 5 lines] So . . . it's just a, just proves that with an idea, that there's no limit to any level that anyone in this country couldn't achieve. [85,4:20-21] There's a, we used to have a little saying that if your mind can conceive it, then you can achieve it. It's like, you know, whatever your mind can conceive, you can achieve. But you only get out of anything what you're willing to put into it. And if you're going to lazy around, then you're going to lazy, that's what you're going to earn, is lazying around. But if you're going to work, you're going to earn something. [85,4:21] These ideas were repeated in the sixth interview, when I asked him several questions about "getting ahead": CS: If people can't get ahead in the world, who is to blame for that? JL: I don't know that you could blame anyone. You, you are the one to blame. It's you. Because... you can achieve anything your mind can conceive, [del. 4 lines] So we all have the potential of being a millionaire, if that is your goal. You've got to have a goal. And if you're willing to work at it, hard enough, then you can achieve it. [85,6:17] CS: Is the system fair? Does everyone have an equal chance to get ahead? JL: If you take it as a single person. Over everybody else. One person as - if he. Or

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she. Wants that bad enough, then he and she will achieve it, because everything is, everything is out there. [85,6:18] Notice that in these passages his temporal horizon has narrowed to a person's lifetime and within that time period, he sees progress. Society is imagined as collections of atomistic individuals ("... a single person. Over everybody else. One person . . .") and each person is free to "achieve" whatever his or her "mind can conceive." The affective tone of these passages is buoyant and optimistic, expressed in expansive spatial metaphors ("go with it as far as we wanted to go"; "no restriction"; "You can go from zero to the top"; "everything is out there"). FEELING RESPONSIBLE FOR OTHERS. Appearing at various points throughout the interviews was still a third, more communitarian (Bellah et al. 1991)9 voice. This voice posited a different version of "success," one in which raising "responsible" children and caring for others were worthier goals than becoming rich. As I will show, if we look at the contexts of their expression as well as their contents and the voice in which they are expressed, Lovett's C A N ' T FIGHT THE SYSTEM and A C H I E V I N G A N Y THING YOU WANT schemas appear to be compartmentalized, but his FEELING RESPONSIBLE FOR OTHERS schema is partly integrated with each of these. For the time being, however, let us just look at voice and contents: In these respects, Lovett's FEELING RESPONSIBLE FOR OTHERS discourse was quite distinct. First, notice in the next passage that, unlike the ideas of structural constraint and lack of progress over a long time span that he expressed in his C A N ' T FIGHT THE SYSTEM voice and the competing ideas of unbounded agency and linear progress in an individual's life that he expressed in his A C H I E V I N G ANYTHING YOU W A N T voice, when Lovett talked about raising children he described both continuity and potential change over a period of three generations. For example, when I asked Lovett to tell me a little about himself at the beginning of the first interview, he told the story of how he incurred his disability, then went on to the following:

I'm happily married. And I've got three terrific kids and wonderful grandchildren. I feel so, that with my education, which was only to the 9th grade, I've been fairly successful, u m . . . raising my family.10 And you can judge that by the way they raise their children. My mother and father always said that they would always wait to see how I handled my children, brought them up, tofindout whether or not they did a good job and I feel so that my brother and I never had any problems. His and my children seem to be doing well. [85,1:2-3] Over the course of subsequent interviews Lovett told a duTerent story about his brother but consistently stressed intergenerational continuity,

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for example, in a discussion about the importance of teaching children good habits:

And you can see it and I see it within my own children, compared to my brother's children, where h e . . . did things a little bit in reverse or opposite from me, so my children, in my eyes, have developed in my way, which is correct, if you will, where my brother may've taught his children, or may not've taught his children, the good habits, so therefore they learned bad ones and they've continued with bad ones and grown bad ones. Where I taught my kids, my children, good habits, and they've improved on their good habits and I see it within their children. So, it is a direction that you give them that they follow. And, and it's progressive. Everything is progressive, I guess, if you will. You start something off in a good line and it's going to grow in a good line, like a tree, if you've got a good seed, it's going to grow a good tree, but if something contaminates that seed, then you're going to have a bad [tree]. [85,3:17] Notice also that unlike Lovett's self description as a member of the class of working people (opposed to other classes and interest groups) in C A N ' T FIGHT THE SYSTEM and as a single individual in A C H I E V I N G A N Y THING YOU WANT, his emphasis here is on his membership in a family. Belonging to a group of people who should care about one another (and certainly not hate one another) is stressed in the following passages as well, when the topic is not his own private household, but how he would have run Ciba-Geigy's Cranston plant if he had been in charge:

I would not've done what, what they did, because I care about people and I care about myself. I care about the environment. I'm - I care about - if you want, patriotic - 1 care about people. I like people. I don't - I've worked with men, that fact, my direct foreman, where I worked last, did not. He admitted, "I do not like people.** And he did not associate with anyone within the building, [del. 5 lines] [B]eingjust the opposite of that, I would, I am the one in the shop, if there had been afire,an accident, I was thefirstone on the spot whether I was the furthest away or not, so I was that type of person. I would jump in and do something, even - 1 have done several things, where it not - regardless of what it may harm, it may be harmful to me. [85,2:2]

And it upsets me to no end to think that there are groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the German organizations and things like that. [del. I line] I can't understand I believe that, I believe in free speech and all that but these people will get right up and - in an audience - and say, I hate the Jews and I hate the Black and I hate. [de 21 lines] [I]t just seems so sad that what we, the average person believes in this country and then have these same people say, I'm an American, but I hate this or I hate that one. Or we should kill all of these and all of them. That isn't what the American way is, that isn't what our ancestors fought for. [85,4:25] Finally, unlike the resentment and despair that permeated Lovett's

CAN'T

FIGHT THE SYSTEM talk and the enthusiastic optimism A C H I E V I N G ANYTHING YOU W A N T talk, the dominant affective

of his tone of

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Table 8.1 Lovett's Multiple Voices

CAN'T FIGHT THE SYSTEM

ACHIEVING ANYTHING YOU WANT

FEELING RESPONSIBLE FOR OTHERS

Time

Cyclical

Linear progress

Linear, continuity & progress

Temporal horizon

Millennia

Person's lifetime

2 or 3 generations

Agency

Structural constraint

Unbounded agency

Childhood influences decisive

Society

Opposing classes

Atomistic individuals

Family groups

Affective tone

Anger, resentment, despair

Optimism

Contentment

his FEELING RESPONSIBLE FOR OTHERS talk was contentment, a word he used when I asked him to describe himself:

I feel so that I'm content. And Fm satisfied. If I was to die tonight I'd have no regrets. I really don't. I feel so that I have lived a good life. And fortunately for me I've had [inaudible] an exceptionally good wife. [Irene is present.] And Fm ver pleased with my children. Fm very pleased with my grandchildren. I may've missed out on something but because I don't know what Fve missed out on then I don't really - 1 really haven't missed it. Until you have something and then lose it you don't know so - Fm very content. And I don't know how my wife here - 1 can't speak for her, but be - , my own personal feelings, I feel so that I have done perhaps my thing that I was designated to do. [85,5:27] It seems clear that Lovett has internalized conflicting social discourses, which he expresses in distinct voices (see Table 8.1). Other evidence for compartmentalization. A completely different sort of evidence for compartmentalization comes from the survey on welfare reform I conducted in January 1995. The survey was designed as an experiment to see whether the priming provided by the initial survey question would activate different schemas, producing divergent responses to a set of three questions about possible directions for welfare reform. (There is considerable research on such context effects in surveys, e.g., Clark and Schober 1992.) All respondents were told that this would be a survey about welfare reform. Then some respondents were told that before we got to welfare reform we wanted to know if they agreed or disagreed

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with the following statement. For some the statement was, "One of the biggest problems in American today is that too many people avoid taking responsibility for their lives." I anticipated that this statement, with its focus on personal responsibility, would activate individualistic ways of thinking, which put the blame for people's poverty on their own behaviors. Others heard the statement, "One of the biggest problems in America today is that we have forgotten that all of us, rich and poor, are in the same boat. Giving help to some people now will eventually help other people later." The reference to everyone being in the same boat was supposed to activate communitarian ways of thinking, which focus on the mutual responsibilities of members of a community. Still others heard the statement, "One of the biggest problems in America today is that the average person pays too much in taxes and doesn't get enough in return from the government." I thought this statement would activate populist schemas, which focus on the way the average person is disadvantaged in relation to powerful persons and institutions. Finally, a quarter of the respondents (randomly chosen in each case) heard none of these statements. Next, all respondents were asked their opinions of three possible ways of changing the welfare system: eliminating benefits for children born out of wedlock to teenage mothers; providing welfare for two years only; or replacing welfare with government-subsidized child care, health insurance and jobs for everyone who needs them.11 My hypothesis was that most Americans have internalized all these ideologies (individualist, communitarian, and populist) but they are compartmentalized. The way someone thinks about various options for welfare reform at a given time will depend on which of these schemas is most strongly activated. I found that the priming provided by the initial question did seem to affect the majority of the respondents* expressed attitudes about the three proposals for welfare reform. Those who were asked to think about the statement "too many people avoid taking responsibility for their lives" were more likely than the rest to approve of eliminating benefits for teenage single mothers. The populist-primed respondents were significantly more likely than the communitarian-primed respondents to give their strongest support to more extensive government benefits for all, while the communitarianprimed respondents were significantly more likely than the populist-primed respondents to favor a two-year limit on welfare benefits. Although I had not predicted that pattern of results, they make sense. Asking people to be more giving might provoke the resentful reaction: I'll give, but I don't want to do it forever. Asking people whether the average person gets enough in return from the government in relation to the taxes they pay, can easily suggest the response that more government services would help balance the scales. Not that the answer people gave is determined by the question, for the

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populist-primed respondents could also have decided lower taxes would be the better way to balance the ratio of taxes to government services. (Full results and analysis are presented in Strauss 1995). In sum, both my survey results and Lovett's talk suggest a large degree of horizontal compartmentalization of discordant schemas. These schemas are equally accessible; which is expressed depends on the context. Evidence for partial integration Both of these studies had results, however, that show exceptions to this picture of compartmentalization. Thus, my experimental manipulation did not work for all of my survey respondents. For each of the three questions about reforming welfare, respondents had the option of agreeing or disagreeing "strongly" or "not so strongly." Respondents who answered "strongly" to all three questions were much less affected by the wording of the initial statement than the majority (84 out of the total of 143 respondents) who answered "not so strongly" to at least one. 12 This suggests that when people care about a topic, they are less likely to compartmentalize. I found this to be true as well for Jim Lovett and other interviewees whose discourse I have analyzed closely. Each of them had one schema that appeared across a variety of discourse contexts, partly integrating their separate schemas, and this schema seemed to be related to emotionally salient experiences earlier in their lives. 13 As I hinted earlier for Lovett, his partly integrating schema was FEELING RESPONSIBLE FOR OTHBRS. Notice, in the following quote, how the responsible, caring family man appears in the midst of what is otherwise a typical C A N ' T FIGHT THE SYSTEM passage:

[CS had asked Lovett to respond to thefollowing statement: "People often talk ab there being different classes. Do you agree?" After clarifying that I meant eco classes, Lovett agreed] Fm sure there's classes of people. Because - yes, Pm sure that there are. So, there are, there are poor people. That are dependent upon income from an outside source. There are the working class of people that are working for someone else that are responsible people to see that their family is cared for and maybe not a freedom of choice of- but they are responsible for other people. Through taxes or welfare - it's all through taxes or deductions from their wages. And then you have the upper class or the wealthy people that have people working for them. That are in a class of their own. They, again, are looking for someone to work for them to earn them money to make them wealthy or make them successful. And not necessarily concerned with that person because there are so many of the working class that if that one person is not doing his job, then he is replaceable, expendable. Where he is in a, in a class of his own. And he only cares for his class. The poor person does not - maybe, for some reason, he has no control over - is

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stagnant in his line. The workingman, it seems so that he is responsible to help the poor man and he is also responsible to make the rich man richer. So he is a middle class. He is not poor and he is not rich. And it seems so the middle class person is carrying the whole country or the whole world. [85,6:24-5; boldfaced emphasis mine] This passage is almost identical to the very first ( C A N ' T FIGHT THE SYSTEM) passage I quoted from the interviews with Lovett. Note the highlighted phrases, however: here the working man (who is "middle class" because he is caught between the rich and the poor) is described as "responsible people to see that their family is cared for" and "responsible for other people," while the rich person is condemned because "he only cares for his class." A more subtle indication of partial integration is Lovett's use of "stagnant" to describe the poor person. I suspect he was thinking especially of his poverty-stricken brother because earlier in the same interview Lovett had said the following about his brother: "I was able to pick and grasp onto things where he was, kind of got stagnated. And he stayed in this jewelry shop just doing small nothing jobs for years and years and years and years" [85,6:10]. Throughout the interviews mention of his brother was highly correlated with Lovett's FEELING RESPONSIBLE FOR OTHERS talk; recall that earlier I quoted Lovett as saying that his brother "did things a little bit in the reverse or opposite from me," in bringing up his children. Lovett also frequently criticized his brother for drinking heavily, and agonized over whether to help him financially, given that experience had shown that the money would probably be wasted. The guilt he felt about his brother seemed to be reflected more generally in his discussion of poor people. Thus, Lovett's statement, "The poor person does not - maybe, for some reason, he has no control over - is stagnant in his line," suggests to me that his FEELING RESPONSIBLE FOR OTHERS schema is partially integrated with his C A N ' T FIGHT THE SYSTEM schema. Similarly, Lovett's FEELING RESPONSIBLE FOR OTHERS voice also occasionally intruded into his discussion of getting ahead in Amway:

[W]ith the business that we were in, as far as high as you wanted to go with this then, even if you dropped out, there's always someone that's going to pick up so no one is left stranded, [del. 3 lines] The Amway corporation code of ethic's been copied by a lot of big corporations. [85,4:19] In sum, if we look at the context of Lovett's talk as well as its content and voice, then he appears to have some schemas ( C A N ' T FIGHT THE SYSTEM and A C H I E V I N G A N Y T H I N G YOU W A N T ) that are compartmentalized and another one (FEELING RESPONSIBLE FOR OTHERS) that is partly

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integrated with each of the first two. Simply looking at the parts of my transcripts in which these different schemas are expressed helps demonstrate this. All of the C A N ' T FIGHT THE SYSTEM passages I quoted appeared in either the first or third interviews, when I was asking Lovett questions about the work conditions that left him with chronic bronchitis, the air pollutants from Ciba-Geigy that aggravated his breathing problems, the way company officials and state bureaucrats failed to deal with these situations, and other topics that occurred to him in the midst of these discussions. (Other, similar, passages appeared as well in the portions of the second interview that returned to these topics, and in response to related questions in the sixth interview.) Lovett's A C H I E V I N G ANYTHING YOU WANT talk was limited to the fourth and sixth interviews, when I asked questions about "the free enterprise system" and "getting ahead." FEELING RESPONSIBLE FOR OTHERS talk, on the other hand, came from all six interviews. Not only was it scattered throughout the course of the interviews but, as I have just shown, these ideas were tightly linked to his other schemas, so they were expressed jointly with these other ideas. Partial integration can be further illustrated by contrast with a very different form of temporal contiguity that appeared in the last interview. In that interview, I had a standardized list of questions and asked interviewers to give shorter answers than they had previously. The faster pace of questions activated in quick succession his C A N ' T FIGHT THE SYSTEM and A C H I E V I N G ANYTHING YOU W A N T schemas, forcing both into awareness simultaneously and temporarily at least moving him from compartmentalization to ambivalent flip-flopping. When I asked Lovett, "Is the system fair? Does everyone have an equal chance to get ahead?," first he responded with clear A C H I E V I N G ANYTHING YOU W A N T language, "If you take it as a single person. Over everybody else. One person as - ifhe. Or she. Wants that bad enough, then he and she will achieve it, because everything is, everything is out there." But just minutes earlier, in response to my question, "What things keep people from getting ahead in the world?," he had replied, "in order to succeed, it seems so you have to have some kind of financial backing and most people don't have it, therefore they're afraid to risk. What they have. Because it took them, they had to work so hard to accumulate it" [85,6:16]. With that C A N ' T FIGHT THE SYSTEM answer fresh in mind he continued his answer to "Is the system fair?" Right after he said, "Everything is out there," he continued

You just have to be willing to - 1 realize that - . [sigh] All right. You have to, I'll have to back that up [i.e., back up]. Because, again, there are certain obstacles tha are depending uponfinancialaid. And everyone does not have enough time or energy to have enough money to achieve everything, so that - it would be a main obstacle whether he -

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Again, Lovett struggles, and immediately switches back to his A C H I E V I N G ANYTHING YOU W A N T voice:

[A]nd then I, you hear of cases where people start with zero pennies and, and do get these college degrees. Because they are willing to work two jobs and study every waking moment. So. It, it goes back to the personal person - his own drive I guess. [85,6:18-19] Unlike the tight integration of "There are the working class of people that are working for someone else that are responsible people to see that their family is cared for," where the narrative of class opposition converges with the narrative of the responsible family man, here there is only a switching back and forth between contained, contradictory narrative lines. Other examples of integration. Lovett was not the only interviewee who demonstrated examples of partial integration of cognitive schemas. Carol Russo, a middle-aged school secretary whose violent metaphors I presented earlier, integrated populist, feminist, Pro-Life, and other discourses in her BEING HURT BY PEOPLE ON TOP schema. Throughout the interviews she applied the same schema, dividing the world into the weak but good (depending on the context, fetuses, most women, law-abiding citizens, or the United States) versus the strong, violent, and bad (aborting mothers, most men, criminals, and the Soviet Union - recall that the Cold War was still on when these interviews were conducted). Michael Fields, a fortyish labor relations consultant and former Vietnam veteran and antiwar protester, partly integrated his current establishment and former anti-establishment views with his K N O W I N G HOW THE GAME WORKS schema. When he was younger, he said, he wanted to "blow the system up"; now, as a successful professional, he works very well within the system, but his discussion throughout was dominated by an assessment of "life as some sort of a game" that he applied in cynical assessment both of the Vietnam War and his work now. Anna Monteiro, a college graduate in her late twenties working as a clerk in a social service agency, had a different philosophy: Life is a learning experience. You have to learn, from everything you do, you have to learn something from it, whether it be good or bad. [95,2:3] This self-confident LIFE IS A LEARNING EXPERIENCE voice partly integrated the ideas she had acquired from her college social science courses, feminism, individualist discourses, an immigrant perspective (she is a second-generation Cape Verdean-American), and her consciousness of color (she is dark-skinned).14 Matthew Healey, a sales representative in his mid twenties, partly integrated religious, animal rights, and Star Trek-inspired discourse in a schema

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I described, using his own words, as LISTENING FROM THE MARGINS.

Here are some examples: I do feel more comfortable dealing with people on this, I don't know, in the sense of, I see their position and I will, sort of, be on a radius there around. You know, I don't necessarily put myself in a power position and say, "Okay, this is what it's going to be." I say, "All right, well, what do you think?" [95,2:8] This way of thinking affected Healey's career planning. Even though he did not have a girlfriend when I interviewed him, let alone a wife and family, he was planning his career around the compromises he assumed he would have to make to accommodate to these: MH: Let's say if I have the option to take a job overseas and get a higher salary or stay here and do something that perhaps wasn't as much something as what I would like to do but I would have the benefit of having a family, I would definitely choose the family. CS: Huh. Why couldn't you bring your family with you, overseas? MH: I could, I could, and that's certainly a possibility, [del. 1 line] I mean no one's ever really put it to me that way, and if my family and my wife would be willing to go with me, so -1 just assumed it would be a case where it would be a hard decision, I wouldn't end up getting the easy decision, "Oh sure, let's go," but I'm prepared to at least deal with a compromise, not saying, "Too bad, that's what we're going to do." [95,2:14] This sort of decentering could also be traced in Healey's thinking on other topics. Just as he rarely places himself in a power position, in each of the following examples, he shifts established structures of dominance. In the first of the following two quotes he is discussing illegal immigration; in the second, vegetarian dog food: fTJhere was an episode [of Star Trek] where they talked about these computer components that were made in Dakar, Senegal? I think it's Senegal. Dakar, Senegal. And here's a country that doesn't necessarily have as much technology right now but look it, okay, we made this world a unit, we are all together, invest where everyone is given an opportunity. That just says to me, as an aside, look it, okay, let's make Mexico or let's make Central America a technology center. Then the people, perhaps the Americans will be going there to work. You know, it is entirely possible. [95,1:14] You're looking at an animal who is supposed to have meat, you're putting human values on a dog. You know, you're imposing it, your ideas on it. [95,2:7] In the first passage Healey envisions a time when the United States, currently dominant in the Americas, is "on the radius" of economic production; in the second, he suggests that human values should not dictate how "lower" animals should be treated.15 The integrating effect of emotionally significant experiences. For each

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interviewee, these partly integrating schemas can be traced to emotionally significant experiences earlier in their lives. Lovett said that because his father never spent much time or showed much affection with him, he had made a point to be a caring, involved parent. During a second set of interviews I conducted with Russo in 1990 it emerged that she had good reason to expect to be hurt by people on top: her father had physically abused her. Michael Fields's cynicism about "the game" seems to have been heightened considerably by his experience as a Vietnam war draftee. Anna Monteiro's self-confidence seems to stem from her close family, her father's encouragement to do things differently from the crowd, and her sense of being attractive to men. Matthew Healey's tendency to look at the world from a lower or marginal position he attributed to having been very heavy when he was younger:

CS: Can you tell me a little more about what kind of kid you were growing up and.. MH: Well, you know, I think one of the biggest things, in third grade, I had pneumonia. For three months. And, well, when I was home I had a tutor here but I ate and ate and ate and ate and ate. So I mean, I was an average weight kid before and when I went back to school I was overweight. And from there on in, for the rest of my life, that was it. It was a battle from there. And it's hard for people to understand, but if you're a kid growing up heavy, there's - 1 mean, little kids are cruel. Kids are cruel. And that was a very, sort of, I think it helped formed my personality. I do feel more comfortable dealing with people on this, I don't know, in the sense of, I see their position and I will, sort of, be on a radius there around. [continues with passage presented earlier] [95,2:8] It is also important to stress here that such emotionally salient experiences and distinctive personal outlooks inflected the way each interviewee internalized and expressed even a single discourse, as we saw in the contrast I provided earlier between Russo's violent populist imagery, which doubtless derived from the abuse she suffered as a child, and Lovett's images of trying to speak and not being heard, which might be related to the marginalization he had suffered by being illiterate until very late in life. Emotionally significant experiences can shape the way people appropriate a given social discourse and lead to some discourses becoming all-purpose interpretive models for individuals, repeatedly activated by them to make sense of the world. Explaining compartmentalization and partial integration on the extrapersonal and intrapersonal levels Elsewhere (Strauss, 1997) I have used these examples (and others) to critique the literary theorist Fredric Jameson's account of postmodern psychological fragmentation. Jameson's argument for psychological fragmentation rests almost entirely on public culture (and mostly elite, high

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culture at that). He points to the music of John Cage, "in which a cluster of material sounds... is followed by a silence so intolerable that you cannot imagine another sonorous chord coming into existence and cannot imagine remembering the previous one well enough to make any connection with it if it does" (Jameson 1991a:28). Another example he gives is a poem, China, by Bob Perelman, a San Francisco poet of the "New Sentence" school, in which there are only tenuous connections among the lines of poem because, unbeknownst to the reader, each sentence is Perelman's caption to a photograph in an album he found in a Chinatown market. Postmodern art of this sort, Jameson notes, fits very well Lacan's description of schizophrenia: "when the links of the signifying chain snap, then we have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers" (Jameson 1991a:26). While Jameson does not believe postmodern artists like Cage or Perelman are schizophrenic in the clinical sense, he does think that such art is symptomatic of a cognitive problem: loss of a genuine sense of historicity and resulting psychic fragmentation: If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience, it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in anything but "heaps of fragments" and in a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary (1991a:25) Jameson's argument is that late capitalism - with its obliteration of all traces of the premodern, its media saturation, its information overload, and the undependability of work - has created a form of consciousness in which we "channel switch" among different "compartments of reality" (199lb:373, 372), unable to integrate these compartments into a larger "map" of our world. Fragmented minds, in turn, create fragmented works of art. Sometimes he focuses not so much on forms of consciousness as on the world reflected in consciousness: if our world is fragmented, how can our cognitive and cultural representations of that world avoid being fragmented as well? In any case, he treats fragmented postmodern art as good evidence for fragmented outlooks. If I am right, however, that people's schemas are more integrated than Perelman's poetry, Cage's music, and so on, then we cannot use these art works to gauge forms of consciousness (not even the artists' forms of consciousness). Nor can we say, as Jameson does at one point, "'We' thus turn out to be whatever we are in, confront, inhabit, or habitually move through" (Jameson 199lb:373); this oversimplifies the processes of social and cultural construction we discussed in chapter 4. Once we recognize that we cannot make this assumption, we can go on to consider some interesting questions. How are diverse ideas managed at the social and cognitive levels? Are there historical and cultural differences in the social

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management of diverse public ideas, and, if so, what are the cognitive consequences of these? At the beginning of this section I listed several ways that competing discourses might be managed, socially and cognitively. Each of the social possibilities I mentioned has a formally similar cognitive counterpart. Thus, socially approved synthesis of public discourses is like cognitive integration ofthem; social marginalization ofone discourse in favor of another is similar to the cognitive operation of vertical compartmentalization, where one schema is easily expressed and accessible to consciousness while the other remains more implicit (see Strauss 1990); and letting "a hundred flowers bloom" on the social level is comparable to the cognitive operation of horizontal compartmentalization, which I illustrated with Lovett. Stressing these parallels, however, overlooks the fact that distinct factors come into play in the regulation of diverse ideas at the social and psychological levels. First, consider the psychology of compartmentalization. The connectionist learning model we outlined in chapter 3 suggests that ideas will be cognitively linked only if they are associated in our experience. If we hear populist ideas at the bar and communitarian ideas at houses of worship, they will probably be stored in separate, unconnected neural networks. For the most part we are only as consistent as we need to be to get things done. Practical tasks do not always require complete consistency, as we pointed out in chapter 5 with the example of the contradiction between Paula's typically US American belief in self-reliance and her desire to turn over the job of changing aflattire or fixing a leaky faucet to the nearest man. On the other hand, if two contradictory schemas should repeatedly be activated in the same context and if we need to decide between them in order to act, we might go through the sort of ambivalentflipfloppingI demonstrated from my sixth interview with Lovett, but then come to a resolution - either selecting one or reaching a compromise that enables us to feel we have satisfied both. The need to do something sometimes promotes integration. Furthermore, it seems that when a schema is linked to strong emotions, it is frequently activated and used to interpret new experiences - including disparate experiences - creating links among them. For example, Healey's experience of being on the social margins when he was younger seems to have given him a way of thinking that he now extends to many other contexts, just as the abuse Russo suffered as a child now leads her to expect to be hurt by anyone in power. It appears that emotionally laden memories help create partial integration. If we move to the social level, then we are asking why in some domains diversity is tolerated or encouraged and in other instances one set of ideas is dominant - a very different question. For example, under current

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conditions of capitalist production and distribution, it works out well for entertainment to be marketed to small market segments (e.g., multiple cable stations) while at the same time news delivery is becoming increasingly expensive and centralized - except on the Internet, which is highly "compartmentalized" for technical reasons that are unrelated to the neurobiologies grounding of cognitive compartmentalization. Historical changes in the regulation of diversity at the social level are not necessarily mirrored at the psychological level. Jameson's argument could be put as follows: false consciousness (vertical compartmentalization) has been replaced by postmodern multiplicity (horizontal compartmentalization), both in public discourse and in people's consciousness. I think that it is premature to discount the extent to which, hidden by multiple lifestyle possibilities, old-fashioned hegemony remains, with some ideologies much more widely disseminated and validated than others. Even if hegemonic control were a thing of the past, however, it would not follow that people's outlooks are as divided as the messages swirling around them because it is precisely when confusion threatens that we are most likely to attempt tofindunifying discourses to restore an inner sense of order and predictability to help us know what to think and do. (See Giddens 1991 for a related discussion.) That is not to say that new media make no difference. On the one hand, one effect of the new abundance of conflicting information could be passivity and loss of interest (Ewen and Ewen 1992) that might promote horizontal cognitive compartmentalization. On the other hand, new technologies that make it possible for citizens to gain access to official information might have a countervailing, empowering effect, making the average person feel more involved and interested, hence more likely to selectively integrate information from diverse sources. I should not overstate these divergences of the social from the psychological. As we discussed in chapter 5 and Naomi Quinn illustrated in chapter 6, effective individual resolutions of widely shared and longstanding conflicts are likely to be frequently repeated in people's everyday talk, leading over time to widespread social diffusion. The organization of people's schemas does not automatically replicate the organization of social discourses, but they are part of the same larger conversation.

Analysis 2. The disparate motivational effects of different forms of culture learning As I have already suggested, disparate ideas are not just a matter of analytic interest; they can raise practical issues for the belief holder. If you

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hold discrepant beliefs, on which ones do you act? Or, to put it in standard psychological terms, which ideas are motivating? In chapter 4 we discussed, using ourfictionalPaula example, some of the factors that have to be present for social messages to have motivational force for individuals. Paula, as we described her, is self-reliant (in many realms) but does not set aside much of her money in savings, even though she believes that she should save more of her money just as she believes it is good to be selfreliant. What accounts for the difference? We pinpointed seven conditions that seem to be important. On the extrapersonal side, these are (1) positive social discourses about the action; (2) teaching that attempts to link the ideas being taught to strong emotions in the learner; (3) repeated presentations of the action; (4) social institutions, practices, and people that facilitate or demand the behavior more than opposing behaviors (on this point see Holland 1992a). Correspondingly, on the intrapersonal side, the relevant conditions are (5) attention directed toward repeated presentations of the action, so a schema for how to do the action can develop; (6) association of positive feelings with the action (or of negative feelings with nonfulfillment of the action) that are stronger than the feelings associated with opposing behaviors; and (7) a cognitive connection between the schema for this action and a person's self image or identity. (Note, with respect to the last point, that thefirstsection of this chapter suggests that someone could have several self images or identities - for example, Lovett could be said to have one view of himself as a working man, another of himself as a potentially rich person, and another of himself as a responsible father and caring member of a community. I will discuss the situation of multiple self identities shortly, stressing the importance of those identities that are partly integrating, i.e., activated in a variety of contexts.) We did not discuss very much in chapter 4, however, the fact that these conditions for motivation refer to different forms of learning. If all of these conditions are satisfied, they reinforce each other and no problem arises about the differing effects of each. In the case of self-reliant behaviors, all or most of these conditions are satisfied for most US Americans. That is, most US Americans will frequently hear it said that you should be selfreliant, be rewarded as children for being self-reliant, see other people being self-reliant (at least in some domains), and be faced with situations where they have to be self-reliant to a greater extent than in societies where kin, community, or the state play a more supportive role. The result is that most US Americans learn to feel good when they are self-reliant, may come to include self-reliance in their image of themselves, and have schemas for how to do many sorts of things for themselves. Of course, there is intracultural variation in these conditions. For example, many married middle-class US women are not self-reliant infinancialmatters.

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There are also sharp limitations on the domains within which self-reliance is expected (no one is expected to provide their food, clothing, and shelter from raw materials).16 But within the expected domains of self-reliance for a given group in this society, the motivational conditions listed earlier typically overlap and reinforce each other. What, however, if all seven conditions are not satisfied? As Spiro (1984, 1987a) and Holland (1992a) have observed, sometimes people only pay lip service to cultural values.17 In the example we gave in chapter 4, this was the case forfictionalPaula's poor saving habits. Only thefirstcondition was satisfied - her parents often said that she should save for a rainy day. Moreover, contradicting her parents' messages are many other implicit social messages encouraging unnecessary spending, on which she acts in the absence of any emotional investment in the less enjoyable goal of putting money aside. (While the Paula example is fictional, we suspect most US readers can think of someone to whom it applies.) These examples suggest, then, that there are at least two kinds of motivation. Thefirstcould be called lip-service motivation: we endorse the value but do not act on it. The second is a motivation to enact routine behaviors. These are the ones that follow from what Bourdieu (1977) calls habitus or Geertz (1983a) calls common sense:18 a kind of automatic, unreflected-upon tendency to act as everyone else (like you) does. As we explained in chapter 4, this sort of motivation is inertial: unless drastic events force you to do something different, you continue to do what you have done in the past or what nearly everyone like you (as far as you can see) does. For many upper-middle-class adolescents, an example might be going to college. In addition to these two kinds of motivation, a third sort is the motivation to perform nonroutine actions. An example might be going to college if most of your friends are not college bound, the school guidance counselors do not expect you to, you do not know how to obtain financial aid, and so on. These actions may not be physically harder than the routine ones, but they require conquering the anxiety that comes from doing something different, as well as taking the trouble tofindout what to do. A mundane example is driving over unfamiliar roads. Some people (I am one of them) would rather take a longer, familiar route than a shorter, unfamiliar route that would require paying more attention to where they are going. A less mundane example is expressing unpopular opinions (e.g., religious belief among nonbelievers or atheism among believers). Drawing on the list of motivating conditions presented earlier, let us say that someone has only lip-service motivation if they have internalized positive social discourses about the action but not connected these values to a partly integrating self image, or to other strong feelings, or to schemas for how to enact these social values. These values can be explicitly stated

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(otherwise you cannot pay them lip service). Someone is motivated to enact routine behaviors, on the other hand, if they can observe or participate in repeated examples of the action, they pay attention to these examples, and there are facilitating people and institutional structures. Sometimes these routine behaviors are linked to positive social discourses and a conscious self image, sometimes not. Finally, someone is motivated to perform nonroutine behaviors in cases where there are few opportunities (normally, for someone like them) to build up a schema for the action and little social support for the action but performing the action has become associated with strong feelings and a partly integrating self image. In the rest of this section, I will give examples of each.

Lip-service motivation When he was talking about the opportunities to make money through Amway sales, Jim Lovett enthusiastically endorsed the value of monetary success:

JL: I used to get so excited telling somebody about it [Amway] I could hardly talk, you know? But it's the type of business where you can start with a dime and end up a millionaire. If you want to. If you want, it's there. Really there. [85,4:21] Later in the interviews Lovett generalized to the opportunities available to anyone in the United States: CS: If people can't get ahead in the world, who is to blame for that? JL: I don't know that you could blame anyone. You, you are the one to blame. It's you. Because... you can achieve anything your mind can conceive, [del. 4 lines] So we all have the potential of being a millionaire, if that is your goal. [85,6:17] Several of the Ciba-Geigy employees made similar statements, at least on occasion. Anthony Gallucci talked about "trying to bring your kids up properly" to show them "the advantages of having a good job - or disadvantages of digging a ditch." When I asked Daniel Collins if he admired successful businessmen, he said, "Anybody who succeeds, I admire him." (See Strauss 1990,1992b for more extended examples.) Yet Lovett had decided not to move to Connecticut, where he said he could have made more money as a welder, and he had never worked his way up very high in the Amway sales ladder. Gallucci and Collins had turned down opportunities to be promoted to a foreman's position. A study of blue-collar workers at a New Jersey chemical factory found, similarly, that out of fifty workers who had the seniority to become leaders or chiefs, twenty-six declined (Halle 1984:154). This does not mean that

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they do not care at all about getting ahead; the decision to work in a chemical factory in thefirstplace involves a knowing assumption of risk in return for a higher salary than what is typically available to someone of similar education working in a saferfield.Lovett had learned the trade of welding and thus had had better paying jobs than his brother, whom he described as having "stagnated" as an unskilled laborer. Still, given that Lovett knew about ways to make more money than he did and did not pursue them, it is appropriate to say that economic success was a goal to which he, Gallucci, and Collins paid lip service but which was not very motivating for them. Why? Part of the reason why Collins and Gallucci turned down opportunities to go into management is that it had some negative associations for them. At Ciba-Geigy, someone who joined management had to be prepared to cut off social ties with his friends in the union. Friendships that crossed the management-worker divide were discouraged from both sides: by managers who thought friendships with the workers would undercut a foreman's authority and by workers who worried that their secret practices would be communicated to management. Gallucci joked that he did not want to see expletives linked to his name on bathroom walls; Collins said he did not want to betray the workers who had elected him to a position in the union's local. It is also important to note that since it is difficult to become very rich if one starts out not so rich, economic success stories probably circulate less among workingmen like these than they do among the upper-middle classes, making it less likely they will have developed the schemas that give a concrete set of actions they could take to get rich. Still, it is not enough to say that Collins's and Gallucci's decisions were the predictable result of a subcultural social message having greater force than a message present in the larger cultural milieu, or of absence of group support for the action. That does not explain why another man I interviewed (Frank Hollingworth) began in the union at Ciba-Geigy but did accept a promotion into management. Another interviewee (Al Choquette) grew up in a working-class household, just like Collins, Gallucci, and Lovett, but sought education and training so he could move into white-collar jobs. Subcultural social messages do not necessarily motivate people any more than dominant cultural social messages do, and people are sometimes mightily motivated in the absence of group support. Other ingredients are necessary. The other crucial ingredient in this case was each man's self image. For Collins and Gallucci, it seemed, it was important to provide a steady, comfortable income for their families but it was not important to advance as high as one could up the job ladders at work. The reliability and adequacy of their incomes was sufficient for feelings of success in their

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breadwinner roles. Beyond that, self-esteem depended on other factors. For Collins, advancement in the union was more important; for Gallucci, having free time and being independent. (Unlike workers in some factories, the chemical operators at Ciba-Geigy had considerable free time and a fair amount of freedom from supervision, depending on where in the factory they worked.) Lovett said he did not move to another state, even neighboring Connecticut, because he and his wife wanted to be near their parents when they got older, a value that fits well with the importance he places on taking care of others. Becoming well off was not part of a frequently activated self image for any of them, and countering the value of a higher salary were the negatives of lost friendships with other workers as well as loss of personal time (management employees worked much longer hours, typically) and higher stress. Simply put, other things were more important for them than constantly trying to make more money. To put it in the terms I presented in the last section, their getting-ahead schemas were not connected to other, more emotionally salient and integrating, schemas that determined the life choices they made. Why do I speak of any motivation existing at all, in cases like these, where someone accords value to a goal but feels only a weak urge to act on it? Why not speak instead of a divide between cognition and motivation (they know it, but are not motivated to do it) or label it more simply a case of "weak motivation?" The difference between lip-service motivation and other kinds of weak or absent motivation is that in lip-service motivation there is social pressure to strive for the goal - pressure that the person knows about and may have internalized. This is suggested by the defensiveness Lovett, Gallucci, and Collins showed in talking about their work and incomes with me, given that they seemed to judge me to be better off than they were. Lovett, for example, said,

So I was always able to provide a decent living for my family. We never had a lot o - my own, my own family - a lot of elaborate things perhaps. We always were the last one in the, in my group that I grew up with or went to school with, to have a new car. But. We - our children never went without clothing. They never went hungry. And Irene and I would probably not get to go to the movies or go out to dinner as often as the others did, but our children never went without. So we were a sense good parents or providers or whatever. And we look back on it now with the others that did afford, could afford themselves night clubs and, and restaurants and new cars. That their children, because of it, have to've been left with a babysitter a lot more than my children because we did stay with them. We were involved with them and they weren't. So . . . their children have grown up and gotten married and divorced where - and fallen away a little bit because maybe they weren't attended to by their family, or, or afforded their parents as they grew up as much as my children were. [85,5:18]

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Collins recounted a conversation with the plant manager who had offered him that promotion:

He said, "You stupe," he said, "you could have been a boss there." I said, "Well, I chose to do what I'm doing." I said, "Maybe in later life," I said, "it might haunt me." [laughs] [del.] I look back and I'm not mad at myself. Fm happy that I, you know, didn't take that type of job instead of what I had to contribute to my fellow workers and the union and international, [del.] I don't kick myself in the fanny as some people would say for not taking it. [85,2:12] When I asked Gallucci, "Is there anything about your life that you would do over, if you could?," he replied,

[del.] I had a good time at Ciba-Geigy. I mean, I wouldn't, if I couldfindsomething better, naturally, I would do something better, but if I - for a poor working man, I had a good time there, over the years, for the most part. [85,5:20] Interpreting statements like these is tricky. On the one hand, Lovett, Collins, and Gallucci have acted on the alternative values they discuss here (being an attentive parent for Lovett, dedicated to the union for Collins, and having fun for Gallucci), so I know these statements were not being made only for the sake of impression management. Still, it is clear that they are aware that others might judge them to have made bad decisions from an economic perspective and they accord enough value to that model of success to explain themselves. Gallucci's attitude is hardest to pin down, because he seemed to have a highly reflexive awareness of the impression he conveyed, which he liked to play with. He said that at home, "I put on my Archie Bunker act," meaning that he acts out the stereotype of an uneducated "hardhat," even though he was very intelligent and well-read (the magazines to which he subscribed included Harpers^ World Press Review, and Wilsons Quarterly). Possibly he really thought of himself as a "poor working man"; it is also possible that he anticipated that I would look down on him and so talked about himself and his fellow workers from what he imagined was my point of view, which he did not share. Either way, he showed an awareness that the dominant social judgment is that one should strive to be more than a "poor working man." 19 Motivation to enact routine behaviors In an earlier publication (Strauss 1992b) I proposed that lip-service motivation is always learned from explicit verbal messages and seen as an optional value, while routine motivation is typically learned from unverbalized actions and not usually seen as optional. I think now that the contrast I drew between explicit and implicit learning was overstated: I suspect I was too much under the influence of the stark opposition Bourdieu

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(1977) sets forth between the realm of explicitly stated, contestable values (dogma) and unsaid routines that are not contestable because they are not accessible to awareness (doxa). As we indicated in chapter 2, Bourdieu's own examples do not bear out the hard-and-fast lines he draws between these forms of learning, and Naomi Quinn has pointed out to me that motivation to perform routine behaviors (like being a good mother [for women] or being a reliable breadwinner [for men]) can certainly be acquired from explicit social discourses, highly valued, linked to an image of self and to emotionally salient experiences, and rejected by some people.20 So my earlier discussion needs to be modified. In some cases the motivation to enact routine behaviors is learned in the gradual, largely implicit way Bourdieu describes for the development of a habitus, which we explained using connectionist models in chapter 3. These are aspects of our behavior most of us take for granted, hence are not linked to either validatory social messages or a conscious self image. In these cases, no special push seems necessary to perform the behavior; indeed, it would feel odd to do anything else. In the case of other routine behaviors, however, our motivation to perform them rests not only on repeated observation of routine practice but also on internalized social discourses and emotionally laden experiences that shape a person's self image. In these cases, people can probably imagine doing something else and take pride, instead, in fulfilling their expected roles. Still, what unites these different cases of routine motivation and distinguishes them from lip-service motivation is that routine motivation is acquired through exposure to many examples of the action, that is, by learning the (statistically) normal way to behave. Of course, mere exposure is not sufficient: you also need to be paying attention. As we discussed in chapter 3, social learning theorists have shown that there are many reasons for emulating another's behavior (Maccoby and Martin 1983); therefore, it can be difficult to predict whose behavior we will attend to and emulate, if there is a choice. Once that largely unconscious choice is made, however, then a lot of behaviors - posture, dress, speech patterns, food, and so on may be adopted without much thought. This is the whole realm of what Malinowski called the "imponderabilia of actual life" (1961 [1922]: 18) and is an aspect of "identity" that is overlooked by theorists who see identities as only conscious self-representations and presentations. As Bourdieu emphasized, people do not usually talk about these takenfor-granted aspects of everyday life. Notice, for example, what Anna Monteiro says and does not say about the way she dresses:

CS: What are some of things your father21 told you or parents told you that you have adhered to and have influenced you, do you think?

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AM: [del 1 line] The main thing was, "The crowd goes one way, you go the other." That nonconformist thing, you know. CS: Can you give me a for-instance? AM: Oh, fashion. Platform heels and hip huggers. [inaudible] Just because everyon else is wearing them. Any kind of fashion, it's not necessarily that. Any fashion that all of a sudden everybody's wearing, I'm not going to wear it just because everybody's wearing it. I like to wear what's comfortable for me. [95,2:4] Monteiro is proud to be a fashion nonconformist and indeed, she did not dress in a trendy way. However, in addition to the fashion choices that she makes deliberately as statements about her identity, there are the many more respects in which she dresses the same way as other US women do now, but differently than women did earlier or in other places. For example, in India where I did a little research many years ago, respectable women always covered their legs but often bared their midriff. In the United States, it is the reverse. Nowadays, women unselfconsciously wear pants to the office, but my mother can remember the day in the early 1970s when the women in her office decided they would come in wearing pants for the first time. As my mother's story suggests, even routine behaviors can be noticed, discussed, and challenged, but this is unusual. Routine behaviors of this taken-for-granted sort are typically left unmentioned; they are what discourse analysts call, in the context of speech, presuppositions of discourse (Brown and Yule 1983). My male interviewees' actions of being the major breadwinners for their families provide an example of routine motivation that is less taken for granted. Like the routine aspects of dress that Anna Monteiro left unspecified, male breadwinning is the statistical norm in the United States.22 Still, the struggles that have made it easier for women to earn a family wage make it more conceivable for men to give up the burden of being the sole or even major breadwinner. At the same time, the scarcity of jobs that pay a family wage for people at lower education levels and in some parts of the country can make breadwinning very difficult and look less routine for many men. Furthermore, men have always had the option of desertion, as well as a great range of possible ways of interpreting and fulfilling the breadwinner role. They have probably heard some talk about what is expected in this role. My interviewees occasionally generated such talk themselves. Tony D'Abrosca said, *Tm not rich, I'm not poor. I'm happy with what I have. I've got a home and the kids have grown up pretty good." Earlier I quoted Lovett's statement that he was usually the last in his group to get a new car, "but our children never went without. So we were in a sense good parents or providers or whatever." In any case, beyond the pride they took in doing a good job at being a breadwinner (however they defined this), there seemed to be the more

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taken-for-granted assumption on the part of the middle-aged married men in the Ciba-Geigy study that of course they had to work. D'Abrosca, for example, said about Ciba-Geigy,

Lot of people getting cancer there. So - over the years. And... it's a risk. We know it. And - but the money's good. This state doesn't have too many good-paying jobs. So. We're sort of trapped. So. I wouldn't want my kid going there. If he had a choice. [85,1:5] Of course, he would have a choice; nobody can force you to work in a chemical factory. But by saying "if he had a choice," D'Abrosca implicitly alludes to the situation he was in: If you want to be able to buy a house, support a family, and pay all of your bills, you want to live in the same state as your siblings and parents, you did not go to college (like most people of your class at the time), and you assume your income alone (or nearly alone) will be supporting the household, then you may leave yourself no option (given the current state of occupational health and safety regulation and enforcement, wage structures in the area, etc.) but to take a dangerous job. Nonroutine motivation Still a third kind of learning comes into play when people acquire the motivation to act in nonroutine ways. D'Abrosca, for example, began competing in ultramarathons (races fifty miles or longer) when he was in his fifties, making up for his asthmatic, unathletic childhood. He is also a frequent contributor to the letters pages of the local newspapers, a photographer, and a collector of old books. His motivation to do these things was not acquired by observing many examples of working men like him doing those or similar things, nor was it the course of least resistance, given current institutional structures and social practices. Instead, some of these behaviors seem to have been driven by an image of himself as different from other people ("TD: I'm different. CS: Yea. TD: I'm one of a kind maybe. I don't know" [85,6:6]). This image was cognitively integrated with many other schemas of his: it came up in many different contexts over the course of the interviews, from discussions of politics to sports to his family (Strauss 1992b). Also, it was linked to strong feelings associated with not being able to perform athletically when he was a boy, which meant both that he had come to value being "bookish" but perhaps also had always wanted to distinguish himself athletically:

I had asthma as a boy. I still have it and I wanted to see what I could do. Wanted to prove to myself I could do something because as a young boy I'd dream about Boston [Marathon]. Impossible dream then, you know? 'Cause of the asthma. Now I've done it three times. [85,2:12]

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Other interviewees provided remarkable examples of nonroutine behaviors. For example, Linda Petty, a working-class woman who had two children with severe disabilities, overcame a nervous collapse that hospitalized her after the birth of the second child and went on to battle the state, winning assistance for her children's home care and a voice in state policies on this subject. Marianne Roberts wrote a workbook setting out a program of Biblical economics and helped start a soup kitchen. The category of nonroutine behaviors includes, as well, smaller-scale, less heroic actions (for example, Gallucci's reading habits) as well as actions that are not necessarily admirable (for example, Gallucci's pranks that could have hurt other people at work). Deiinitionally, all that matters is that they are linked to a partly integrating self image, strong feelings, and are not the course of least resistance or readily observed given structures and practices in place. To summarize this section, cultural messages are of different sorts, with different psychological effects, and different consequences for people's actions. Methodological implications Anthropologists have known for a long time that what people say cannot always be taken at face value (see, for example, Malinowski 1961 [1922]). More recently, there has been renewed attention to the way discourses are constructed through interactions between researchers and interviewees (e.g., Briggs 1986). Sometimes this awareness is taken to extremes and it is implied that everything an interviewee says is deliberately fashioned for a strategic end such as making a momentarily useful claim of group identification. This approach to discourse analysis overlooks the extent to which people's talk (as well as less spontaneous cultural texts) is shaped by a variety of considerations: not only the momentary conscious ones but also less conscious intuitions about what is interesting, funny, normal, and right. As I suggested with the distinctions I have made between lip-service motivation, routine motivation (taken-for-granted and not-taken-forgranted), and nonroutine motivation, some goals or understandings are assumed to be widely shared as ideals, others are assumed to be widely shared as norms, others are in fact norms and are so deeply sedimented that they are not thought about at all, and still others are recognized as outside the norm or contrary to widely shared ideals. These differing sorts of beliefs take on different guises in people's talk. (See also chapter 6 for examples from Naomi Quinn's research of the way some aspects of speech, such as metaphors and reasoning, are culturally revealing regardless of the ways interviewees and interviewers interact, because they are automatically produced rather than deliberately thought out.)

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To begin with, it is true that at least some of the form and content of discourse in any context will be oriented (as Bakhtin 1981 pointed out) to answering, anticipating, identifying oneself with or distancing oneself from one's interlocutor. Two of the quotes used earlier in this chapter could be expanded and examined more carefully from this perspective: CS: What things keep people from getting ahead in the world? D'Abrosca: [del. 2 lines] Like me, I'm not cut out for business. I couldn't charge a guy ten bucks for something I paidfivefor. You know. And . . . There's a certain makeup there you have to be, to be a businessman. I did the best I could with my education and knowledge and skills. I'm not rich, I'm not poor. I'm happy with what I have. I've got a home and the kids have grown up pretty good. [85,6:15]

Collins [recollecting a conversation with a plant manager at Ciba-Geigy] He "You stupe," he said, "You could have been a boss there." I said, "Well, I chose to do what I'm doing." I said, "Maybe in later life," I said, "It might haunt me." [laughs] [del. 2 lines] I look back and I'm not mad at myself. I'm happy that I, you know, didn't take that type of job instead of what I had to contribute to my fellow workers and the union and international. [85,2:12] As I noted earlier, in these passages Collins and D'Abrosca seem to be trying to justify their life choices. Both sound defensive, seemingly aware that I and perhaps others might be critical of their choices. (In Collins's case, clearly the plant manager was.) It could well be that neither man is quite as satisfied with the choices he made as he says he is, and each is constructing post facto rationalizations. This may have been particularly true if they saw me not as a student (which I was at the time) but as the professional I was aspiring to be or as the wife of a university professor, which some interviewees knew me to be despite my efforts to downplay this role. Another Ciba-Geigy worker apologized at one point, after repeating criticisms of "the rich" that he had made frequently throughout the course of the six interviews, "You probably got big money, I shouldn't talk like that." Yet, as I have already noted, even their deliberate justifications carry cultural information: they indicate that D'Abrosca and Collins both know that the dominant opinion is that they should have tried to get ahead more than they did. In fact, I suspect they were more concerned about other people's opinions than mine; both men had made other statements during the course of the interviews similar to the ones I quoted here, suggesting these thoughts had been expressed before in other contexts and had become what I have called "verbal molecules" (oft-heard or oft-expressed ideas that become internalized as relatively frozen verbal formulae, Strauss 1992b). More interesting still is the way they conducted their defense. Note that D'Abrosca said, "I did the best I could with my education and knowledge

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and skills" and Collins explained, "I chose to do what I'm doing." These are individualistic explanations: each of us is different (has different knowledge, education, and skills). All we can be expected to do is choose thoughtfully, try hard to realize the goals we have chosen, and take responsibility for our own decisions in the end. In another society they might have said, "It's not my fate to be a boss" or "My family did not want me to go into business." Those would not be appropriate ways to explain one's actions in the United States, however; here individualistic explanations are the taken-for-granted norm (even if people's actions in the United States are often in fact motivated by concerns for others, which they seem to have been, at least in part, in D'Abrosca and Collins's cases). From the structure of Collins's and D'Abrosca's discourse, moreover, it appears that making one's own decisions and doing one's best are less contested, more taken-for-granted, values than getting ahead. As a general rule, if someone defends action A on the authority of principle P, it follows that they assume P is less controversial (or at least no more controversial) than A. The same, then, can be concluded for the remainder of each man's defense. In D'Abrosca's case that was, 'Tvegot a home and the kids have grown up pretty good." For Collins it was, "I'm happy that I, you know, didn't take that type ofjob instead of what I had to contribute to my fellow workers and the union and international." This suggests that they assumed that anyone (or, at least, I) would agree that success as a breadwinner and a father or contribution to others and a larger cause are good values better ones than constantly trying to get ahead on the job more than is necessary to support one's family. As I noted earlier, what is left largely unsaid is also culturally revealing (Hutchins 1980; Quinn and Holland 1987). Consider, for example, D'Abrosca's statement, "I've got a home." Nowadays, for someone who is very poor, that could mean, "I'm not homeless." In the context of the conversation with D'Abrosca, however, it did not need to be said that he meant, "I own a home instead of renting." At D'Abrosca's income level it is assumed that one can afford some dwelling place; the question is whether one can afford to own a house. And the value of owning a house is so well understood that it needs no elaboration. Thus analysis of discourse elicited in interviews or any other context can tell us what values speakers believe to be widely shared, what they take for granted, and the degree of sedimentation of cultural understandings, that is, the degree to which they are taken for granted. Although Bourdieu (1977:168) contrasts cultural understandings that are so taken-for-granted as to be unrecognized (doxa) with those that are subjects of debate (dogma), there is really a range here from the highly controversial through the somewhat controversial (ideas about which it is recognized well-mean-

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ing people can disagree), widely shared (but still seen as values), and so taken-for-granted as to be invisible. Similar analyses could be conducted of the unstated assumptions behind mass media and other public cultural productions. For example, when the Disney children's film, Pocahontas, was released, it garnered praise for being "the first Disney feature to crusade for the environment and for racial harmony" (The Providence Journal-Bulletin 6/23/95:E3). Perhap reacting to criticisms of the stereotyped portrayal of Middle Easterners in Aladdin, released just two-and-a-half years earlier,23 Disney Studios very deliberately made a movie in which the Native Americans are almost all good and the English settlers almost all bad. (They also hired Native American actors, Russell Means and Irene Bedard, to speak the parts of Powhatan and Pocahontas.) At present, attitudes about cultural differences are highly contestable in the United States,24 which is obvious if Pocahontas is analyzed alongside contemporary commentary on it. Undiscussed in any public commentary I have seen, however, was that Disney had changed a story in which one adult has close friendships or erotic relationships with two other people to a single (heterosexual) relationship. Commentators on Pocahontas pointed out that the Disney version is not historically accurate because the real Indian princess would have been only about twelve when she met John Smith, not a voluptuous young woman. Some noted, too, that Pocahontas later married a different Englishman, John Rolfe; there is no historical information about a love affair between her and John Smith (who may, in fact, have invented the story that Pocahontas placed her head upon his to save him from being killed by her father, the chief, Powhatan). The facts of the matter are less important than the legend, which at the time the film was made linked Pocahontas to two English men: John Smith and John Rolfe. The Disney film simplified this, making John Smith both the rescuee and the love interest for Pocahontas. The 1989 Disney film, The little mermaid, reworked the original Hans Christian Andersen tale in a similar fashion. In Andersen's story the mermaid kills herself, letting the prince marry another beautiful, sweet young woman. In return the mermaid is given the chance to win an immortal soul. In the Disney version the rival love interest is an evil witch disguised as a beautiful maiden, and the mermaid gets her man in the end (life in the hereafter not coming up as a possible alternative at all). Commentators on the The little mermaid mentioned, approvingly, that Disney was starting to give us movies with strong female characters (probably a deliberate gesture toward feminism by the studio). I am not aware of any discussion of the omission of the religious theme or the simplifying assumption that each of us has only one true love, rendering all

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other potentially erotic relationships suspect. This seems to be, at present, a deeply sedimented understanding in the United States. In the previous chapter Naomi Quinn discussed this assumption and suggested that it derives its motivating force from an unconscious desire to recreate exclusive mother-child bonds.25 Insightful cultural analyses can be made of either public culture or of texts collected in person-centered research. In both cases, there is some pandering to the audience and deliberate attempts to make a point which may not be the producer's deepest or only understanding. Still, with either sort of production, it is of interest to note what controversial points the producers make, what sedimented assumptions they express, and everything in between. Analysis 3. Disjunctives between shared understandings and public culture After having discussed some of the parallels between public culture and culture in persons in the last section, it is necessary to return to the point that in other respects there are disjunctures between these realms - not only in technologically complex and socially differentiated societies like the United States, but even in the technologically simpler societies anthropologists often study. Barth (1987), for example, studied variations in religious practices and meanings among several neighboring Ok communities. These variations were surprising, given great similarities in their technologies, economies (based on raising taro and pigs), and languages. A key factor complicating the production of "public" rituals in this region is that many rituals are not open to everyone in the public: men's initiation rites at each level are open only to males who have passed through the previous levels, Barth gives the example of a ninth-step initiation rite, performed about once a decade in a particular community. Among the Mountain Ok communities where Barth did his fieldwork, there was no practice of memorizing a list of procedures nor were the procedures obvious from other rituals. Instead, the senior man in charge of the ritual has to recreate it on the basis of a hazy memory of his own initiation, attendance at the rare performance of it in his own and neighboring communities, and discussion with the handful of other senior men at his level. The result is that the initiator gives salience to imagery (e.g., gender and sexual imagery) that is particularly meaningful from associations learned in his own life. Not that the initiator has free rein: he is aware that his performance will be observed by other senior men and needs to be approved by them. Others in his audience are the novices, and Barth notes that the initiator is "sensitive to their moods

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and reactions" (1987:44). Within these constraints (including, above all, his cultural intuitions about what is appropriate), he can introduce innovations that are more reflective of his psyche than the "collective consciousness."26 This example demonstrates that a mirror metaphor (mental structures reflect social practice, which reflects mental structures, which reflects prior practice, and so on) oversimplifies the relation between public culture and culture in persons. (Aside from being bi-directional it is no improvement on the "fax" model of the relation between public culture and culture in persons I have criticized in the past, Strauss 1992a, and that we discussed in chapter 2.)27 As I suggested at the end of the first section, a better analogy is a conversation. As people express themselves they add to the pool of public voices to which they and others respond and from which they learn. A US example of cultural production: "welfare reform" Every public cultural production, whether a television show, home appliance, or political speech, is the product of multiple subjectivities: it has to be meaningful to the producers, acceptable to their backers, and judged by the producers and backers as likely to be appealing to the potential audience (whom they may know only superficially, or via the interpretation of another group of intermediaries, such as market researchers or pollsters). "Popular" approval (which may, in fact, be the approval of only a narrow segment of the potential public) then influences the formulae culture producers use in future productions. Meanwhile, those cultural productions available to a wide audience partially (but not completely) shape the attentive public's understandings. For example, while Hollywood movies like the DisneyfilmsI discussed in the last section do reflect, in part, widely shared US cultural understandings, their content is also shaped by idiosyncrasies of their director's personality as well as by what financial backers think will sell, based on what has sold in the past to the largest movie-going segments of the domestic andfinanciallyimportant overseas markets. Catering to these markets, for example, may inflate the number of "action"filmsproduced in the United States, since the largest share of US moviegoers are young people (Klady 1995) and low-dialogue actionfilmsdo well overseas (Medved 1992, cited in Wasser 1995). (See also Slotkin 1984, summmarized in chapter 5, n. 6, for a discussion of the ways Hollywood movies do not just respond to audience tastes.) Another example of this complicated process is the changes that were made to state and federal welfare policies during the 1990s in the United States, culminating in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity

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Reconciliation Act, signed into law in August 1996. This change in the federal law ended the policy, in place since the Depression, that every qualifying family with dependent children would receivefinancialassistance (welfare) if they fell into poverty, no matter how many other families had applied for help before them. In the year before the bill was signed, welfare reform was one of the most talked about public policy concerns in the United States, with Democratic and Republican governors alike rushing to change their state welfare systems. What accounts for all of this interest in reducing assistance that (in 1993) consumed only 1.1 per cent of the federal budget and on the average only 2 per cent of state money (New York Times, 6/19/94, Sec.4:4; Karger and Stoesz 1994:256-7)? A simplistic analysis of these policy changes would be that the public wanted them. Indeed, historians (Katz 1989) and pollsters (Smith 1987) have found long-standing negative responses to "welfare" and "people on welfare," and the welfare system had very few defenders among the twenty people I have interviewed so far.28 This is not surprising, given beliefs in equality of opportunity, hard work, economic independence, small government, low taxes, and the injustice of targeted rather than universal government programs, beliefs that are widely shared (although with different emphases among different social groups, Strauss 1993) in the United States. (For some US Americans, opposition to welfare is also fueled by concerns about out-of-wedlock births, suspicion of independent women, opposition to immigration, or racism - along with the incorrect belief that most welfare recipients are immigrants and people of color.) Part of the reason, then, politicians in the 1990s called for restructuring welfare is that they knew the public would approve of this: it was a guaranteed way to attract or keep votes. This explanation is too simple, however. It misses the fact that while welfare reform in the abstract is popular, the version of welfare reform enacted in the federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which establishes time limits for receiving financial aid but does not guarantee child care, medical insurance, or a job for recipients who are trying to leave welfare, captures only a part of popular American sentiment on this issue. The survey I conducted in January 1995, discussed earlier in this chapter, shows this. Among my North Carolina and Rhode Island respondents, while imposing a two-year time limit was the most popular proposal, there was almost as much support for replacing welfare with "a system of government-subsidized child care, health insurance, and jobs for all Americans who need them." Government-provided jobs, health care, and child care met the approval of majorities of my samples in both North Carolina and Rhode Island, as well as majorities of both men and women, blacks and whites, respondents at every age level, and people

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at all income levels except those with a household income of over $75,000.1 should note, too, that my question about two-year time limits left open whether a job would be provided at the end of that period; some of my respondents indicated they assumed that it would. Thefindingsfrom my small, two-state survey match national survey findings. In a December 1994 Yankelovich poll, for example, majorities of the Americans sampled were opposed to cutting benefits for unmarried teenage mothers and ending benefits after two years if recipients have no other source of income (Time 12/19/94:32). In a May 1994 Yankelovich poll 74 per cent of the respondents agreed with the proposal, "Replace welfare with a system of guaranteed public jobs" (Time 6/20/94:26). Finally, a 1987 review often surveys conducted from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s revealed that changing the wording of a question from something like "Should the government to do more for people on welfare?" to "Should the government do more for the poor?" altered the results considerably: in every case but one, this change in wording raised approval of increased government spending from a minority to a majority of those polled (Smith 1987:76). My analysis of thesefindingsis that most Americans would like welfare recipients to be working but do not want to see anyone left destitute and recognize that there may not be enough private-sector jobs to go around (especially jobs that pay enough to cover the cost of health insurance and child care, in addition to other living expenses). A logical solution is government provision of jobs and these other benefits, if they are not available in the private sector, to someone who would otherwise be on welfare. A majority of US Americans support this solution, despite their tendency to favor limited government programs, generally. (Other survey research shows that US Americans often like the sound of rhetoric about small government, but in fact approve of most specific government programs, Free and Cantril 1967 and Gans 1988). It seems that the value of self-reliance is much more strongly held by the public than concerns about the size of government (as our analysis in chapter 4 of the psychological roots of belief in self-reliance might lead one to expect). Despite the popularity of expanded government jobs programs among the public, however, they have not enjoyed much support by political leaders in the United States in recent years. (In the summer of 1994 President Clinton's welfare reform task force called for expanded jobs programs, but his public discussion of that provision remained muted.29) If appealing to a majority of potential voters was all politicians cared about, this would be hard to explain. However, appealing to a majority of potential voters is not all that politicians care about. First, politicians are understandably more concerned about appealing

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to the sorts of potential voters who typically do vote than those who typically do not. Low-income adults are less likely to vote than their higher-income counterparts, so their interests are given much less weight. As former New York governor Mario Cuomo pointed out in criticizing politicians' cynical welfare scapegoating: "The poor people don't have any power. That's why welfare's such a terrific issue. Who's going to march against you...?'" (quoted in Rank 1994:233). Furthermore, while middle-income voters favor many of the same programs as poor voters, politicians may not know this, being guided by conventional wisdom or superficial studies of what the "silent majority" (recently called the "angry white male") wants. For example, analyses of the Republican victories in the 1994 midterm elections typically focused on white males' preference for Republican candidates, ignoring the fact that voters who felt their standard of living was getting worse preferred Republican candidates by a margin that was much larger than the difference between men and women.30 Also ignored was the fact that 94 per cent of the members of the Progressive Caucus in Congress, the most left-leaning legislators, were re-elected (Feldman 1995). These statistics suggest not a widespread conservatism among the majority of voters (in that midterm election, themselves only 39 per cent of the voting-age population31) but rather displeasure at the state of the economy and with ideologically bland leaders. Political leaders' disinterest in public jobs programs surely has other sources as well. One factor that diminishes their support for these programs is that, given the present costs of running a political campaign, it would be foolish to alienate wealthy potential donors. These wealthy donors usually have no use for public jobs programs, which reduce the pool of desperate job seekers, thereby increasing labor costs (Abramovitz 1996) and which also could require them to pay higher taxes. Some of their disinterest may also reflect their own views, typically shaped by less experience with the difficulties of making a living than their constituents have. This is true of most opinion leaders (including people in the media): even those who may have grown up under difficult circumstances come to earn, by virtue of their positions, an income that insulates them from the struggles of the average American.32 The difference in perspective that results was illustrated tellingly on one Rush Limbaugh radio broadcast. The popular talk show host was responding to a caller who began with the usual "megadittos" of praise, but went on to ask how Limbaugh would respond to someone who questioned how former welfare recipients are going to survive on $200 a week (then just a little over minimum wage). In one of Limbaugh's rare moments of public discomposure, he did the math on air: "Two hundred a week is eight hundred a month, times, uh,

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times, twelve, uh, is going to be," getting the math wrong, "eighty, what, four hundred dollars a year." As if just realizing that this is, indeed, not very much (even the correct figure of $9600 is not very much), he quickly added, "Uh, and there are, I think, opportunities for a little bit more than that. I don't think everybody is going to end up in those kinds ofjobs," and went on to suggest that former welfare recipients will be able to add to their incomes by using the entrepreneurial skills they honed defrauding the welfare system (Limbaugh radio show, 5/18/95). Clearly, he had never given much thought to the total income earned at a minimum wage job. 33 To the many Americans working at low-paying jobs, however, such statistics are a fact of life they cannot help knowing. In the lengthy follow-up interviews I have conducted with some of the people who participated in my phone survey about welfare, I have found a similar difference between low-income and higher-income interviewees. So far, higher-income interviewees, whether liberal or conservative, have tended to focus on large-scale systemic, moral, or psychological issues, while lower-income interviewees, both those who had been on welfare themselves and those who had not, have tended to be more pragmatic, focusing on the cost of day care, health insurance, transportation problems, and the like. The following passages illustrate this difference:

[director of nonprofit organization, a self-described liberal] I think that folks welfare get a bad rap a lot of times in terms of, you know, it being expressed by a lo of people that, you know, that they have kind of a I-don't-want-to-work-hard, I-don't-want-to-get-ofF-of-welfare attitude. You know, What's in it for me? But I think that that's all of our attitudes. You could take that attitude and say teachers have that attitude, [del. 2 lines] I think that that attitude's pervasive in society. I think we all deal with it. I think I have the attitude, I think my wife has the attitude

[former welfare recipient, responding to CS's question, "Why do you think people go on welfare?"] Money. [Spoken as if this is a dumb question.] You go job, you got no skills. I went because I had no job or money. My son's father was gone. I didn't know where I was going to get a job and pay for day care. I didn't have a car. Focusing on large-scale versus more mundane, pragmatic considerations can have important ramifications for the way one thinks about the usefulness of government programs in this area. The first approach makes it seem as if change is difficult to achieve, and, indeed, that interviewee was pessimistic that meaningful welfare reform was possible. The second interviewee's focus on skills, jobs, day care, and transportation points to specific forms of intervention that would be helpful to someone like her and, in fact, she was able to use the brief period of her welfare support to finish her college education and now has a job. None of this is terribly surprising, but it suggests that we need to be very

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careful about what we conclude about cultural understandings from hasty analyses of public culture alone. Conclusion I hope I do not need to say that I recognize that public discourses do shape peopled understandings. In my current research, for example, almost every one of my interviewees has repeated one of the myths about welfare that are emphasized in television news and other media sources (e.g., that welfare recipients keep having children to stay on welfare, when in fact welfare recipients on average have the same number of children as all US Americans do, New York Times 6/19/94, Sec.4:4).34 The point remains, however, that we should not expect public cultural texts to mirror people's understandings. The need of public culture producers to please wealthy backers is a constraint with different effects than the desire of interviewees to present a positive self-image to an interviewer, for example. We need to get away from ideas of culture as a single kind of thing, equally reflected in social discourse and mental models, and move instead toward ideas of culture as variegated public representations and psychological appropriations of these, interacting in complex ways.

Beyond old oppositions

The model we have presented in this book makes it clear that the centripetal cultural effects we have reviewed are a contingent product of interaction between minds and a world shaped a certain way - not an inevitable functional requirement of social systems or ecology or a product of timeless mental structures or of the human need to find meaning through socially given symbol systems (to put it in some of the theoretical terms of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s). It follows from our model that it is equally possible for cultural inputs to result in understandings varying across individuals and contexts, or for understandings to be learned without the emotional associations that give them motivational force. Furthermore, with changes in the circumstances under which people grow up, understandings can undergo historical change; and with effort, people can alter their habitual responses. Thus, the centrifugal effects noticed by anthropologists in the 1980s can be accommodated within a model that also accounts for the centripetal aspects of culture that were the focus of earlier descriptions. In our formulation, we do not have to choose between theories that acknowledge actors' intentions and theories that acknowledge the role of durable, shared cultural schemas: intentions depend on schemas. These may be widely shared or intraculturally variable; long-held or recently invented; thematically repeated or juxtaposed in odd combinations. Regardless of which of these tendencies centripetal or centrifugal - a given researcher or a given research tradition or a given disciplinary epoch chooses to emphasize, it is no less true that meanings and the intentions that accompany them arise from schemas in the minds of individuals. The cognitive theory we have outlined shows not only why but how. We have found connectionism a powerful framework for explaining all of the abovenamed properties of culture and the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies of ea'ch. We know of no other theory of cultural meaning that approaches this one in its explanatory fullness. Nevertheless we have been at pains to point out, the cognitive processes dealt with in connectionist models do not explain everything. The recognition that no one theory does, makes one watchful for theoretical conjunctions and syntheses. 252

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Throughout the book we have drawn freely and eclectically on theories andfindingsfrom other subfields of psychology to supplement connectionism - from neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, the psychology of perception, psychoanalysis, and other branches of psychological anthropology. Nor were our cross-disciplinary appropriations limited to psychological theory and research. We drew upon theory about power and social movements, studies of public culture, historical and religious studies, and political survey research, when these shed light on our own material or extended our own analyses. Admittedly, our presentations and uses of these various other theories and findings have been more illustrative than fully worked out. One book cannot do everything any more than one theory can, and we felt we had enough to do in presenting our theory and its applications and in persuading others, especially anthropologists, of its merit. Our hope is that researchers in several fields will be inspired by the points of potential conjunction and synthesis we have identified between our theory and theirs to pursue the implications of our approach for their future research. Even more gratifying would be actual collaboration between cognitive and other psychological anthropologists and the kinds of psychologists whose work we have found valuable, and between psychological anthropologists from ourfieldand practitioners of otherfieldsof anthropology. Nor, we have said, does our theory encompass public culture or explain the shape it takes. It is no more a complete theory of culture than of the individual. We have not intended it to be, and no reader should close this book still thinking that we did. Our theory of how cultural meaning is internalized in individuals does not stand alone, but neither does a theory of public culture. As we have argued, both intrapersonal and extrapersonal processes are needed to make a whole theory of culture. Our account is a necessary part of any such theory. Why has the intrapersonal, internalized, meaning-making side of culture been so overlooked in dominant anthropological discourse? A chief impediment to recognizing its separate explanatory status has been the view that meaning lies in signs or in the relations among them. Meanings, as we have been saying, are bestowed by the users of signs. They are in people not in things or in some nebulous space between. In large part, the failure to see this point falls naturally from the dualism opposing the collective to the individual that is part of our intellectual inheritance (Bloch 1985), and it is fixed in the modern disciplinary boundaries that define the turf that anthropologists and sociologists defend from incursion by psychologists and biologists. In the recent past of our discipline the territorial boundary marking the fault-line of this ancient dualism reemerged not only in Geertz's (1973e) interpretivism but more broadly in the symbolic anthropology associated

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with him and other influential spokesmen like David Schneider (1968).1 The position they developed still supplies the curious terms of present-day antipsychologism in anthropology. Culture was defined as meaning, but meaning, as we detailed in chapter 2, was deprived of its ordinary association with what things mean to individuals, and restricted to those meanings that can be "read" in public enactments and artifacts. If this summary intellectual history and the fuller one we gave in chapter 2 make anthropology's antipsychologism seem merely wrongheaded, but entirely innocent, that is an impression we should correct. What we called "overlooking" in the last paragraph also took the form of active "erasure." That this was so is exemplified as well as preserved in the following passage Geertz wrote in "Thick description" in 1973:

The main source of theoretical muddlement in contemporary anthropology is a view which . . . is right now very widely held - namely, that, to quote Ward Goodenough, perhaps its leading proponent, "culture [is located] in the minds and hearts of men." Variously called ethnoscience, componential analysis, or cognitive anthropology (a terminological wavering which reflects a deeper uncertainty), this school of thought holds that culture is composed of psychological structures by means of which individuals or groups of individuals guide their behavior. "A society's culture," to quote Goodenough again, this time in a passage which has become the locus classicus of a whole movement, "consists of whatever it is one has to know o believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members." And from this view of what culture is follows a view, equally assured, of what describing it is - the writing out of systematic rules, an ethnographic algorithm, which, if followed, would make it possible so to operate, to pass (physical appearance aside) for a native. In such a way, extreme subjectivism is married to extreme formalism, with the expected result: an explosion of debates as to whether particular analyses (which come in the form of taxonomies, paradigms, tables, trees, and other ingenuities) reflect what the natives "really" think or are merely clever simulations, logically equivalent but substantively different, of what they think. (Geertz 1973:11) This published attack contributed to the banishment of not only the cognitive anthropology of that time but all of psychologizing from mainstream American anthropology for a long time. That this erasure of psychological anthropology was successful can be seen in the struggle we have nowadays getting colleagues in our own department to see the need to include anything about it, or about the central place it has occupied in the history of American anthropology, in core graduate and undergraduate courses on anthropological theory and history. We, of course, agree with Geertz's reaction to Goodenough's definition of culture in one respect: as we have been saying throughout this book, culture is not only what is in people's minds. But wefindGeertz's argument faulty in another respect. Many contemporary readers, lulled by the com-

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bination of authoritative voice and heavy derision he used in this passage and Geertz's inimitable, Latin-studded prose, may have missed his error, but we think the subsequent history of cognitive anthropology has made it plain: no particular view of how to describe the mental or intrapersonal side of culture follows necessarily, as Geertz claimed it does, from the view that culture is internalized. Rather, the methods of ethnoscience to which Geertz alluded originated in a particular theory of meaning as being in the contrasts among related words - a view derived, as we noted in chapter 1, from the structural linguistics of de Saussure and as peculiar in its way as Geertz's own that we critiqued in that chapter. This was a theory of word meaning against which Charles Fillmore (1975), drawing on schema theoretical developments in cognitive science, was soon to provide a powerful critique. It is a theory of meaning that has largely given way to schema theory in several related cognitive sciences. In this book we have capitalized on this development in cognitive science that has influenced cognitive anthropology so heavily (see Casson 1983; Quinh and Holland 1987), and that has led us to quite a different, and we think more promising, theory of cultural meaning. Incidentally, too, ours is a theory of cultural meaning that prompts very different methods - some of them illustrated in chapters 6,7 and 8 of this book - from those to which Geertz, in the passage above, would have had cognitive anthropology shackled. Geertz's passage is a good illustration of the neighborhood-razing that we used in the beginning of chapter 2 in our urban-renewal metaphor for how each new group of anthropologists goes about eliminating the old. Academic politics all too often proceeds in this way. Whatever status and power such tactics gain the "winning" group, is paid for in missed opportunities for theoretical advance in the discipline as a whole. Theory advances most productively by learning and conserving what is most useful about each approach and collaborating to synthesize these perspectives. Instead, antipsychologism in anthropology led to the research strategy of studying cultural meanings through the lens of popular symbols and ignoring what particular individuals learn from those symbols, how the meanings of different individuals overlap or diverge, and how changes in context (both long- and short-term) affect individuals' interpretation of events. We believe that looking at popular symbols can provide a great deal of insight only if we do not ignore (or make unwarranted assumptions about) the intrapersonal reactions they evoke. A subsequent generation of anthropologists, that which we have assigned to about the 1980s, critiqued symbolic anthropology soundly for its characterization of culture, and especially "native" cultures, as unchanging and monolithic. As we noted in chapter 2, the new preoccupation of anthropologists (whether in cultural studies, contemporary historical materialist

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approaches, or studies of situated cognition and discourse) is with the shifting and inconsistent forms that cultural practices can take and with the strategic considerations that lead individuals to adopt some practices or identities and abandon others. The irony is that by not questioning symbolic anthropologists' rejection of the intrapersonal, psychological side of culture, the new generation is left without a convincing theory of either stability or change. How can actors invent, negotiate, and contest their cultural worlds if they lack learned, internalized motives and intentions to do so? As we have pointed out in this book, under some circumstances motives and intentions can be highly durable; certainly, they do not usually change from moment to moment. Stated in its most absurd form, this latter view makes culture change seem like changing clothes. The implications for people pursuing cultural studies are the same as for the older generation of interpretivists: do not presume that your readings of public culture are the same as those of the people you are studying. And for the postmodernists we need to add: stay alert to the possibility that some understandings are more shared, stable, consistent, and motivating than you might guess from the diversity of public discourses. The message for historical materialists concerned with people's ability to resist coercive institutions is that we need to remember that resistance, no less than the practices that are resisted, rests on internalized cultural understandings. It would be very useful if more researchers would study how people gain understandings that motivate actions leading to both social reproduction and social change. Finally, in response to colleagues studying situated cognition and discourse, we agree that such studies are a valuable corrective to less situated descriptions of cultural models, but the opposite stance, that meanings and action are produced solely by the situation, does not follow, nor does it make sense. Instead, we need to combine our approaches to show how situation and internalized understandings interact to produce meanings. It is time for us to confront the contradiction in the definition of culture we have inherited as meaningful, symbolic, signifying, conceptual, ideational, but not to anyone in particular, that has encumbered the thinking and limited the analyses of so many anthropologists over the last two decades. It is time to question the idea of culture as invented, negotiated and contested by human actors strangely lacking in any inner purpose and motivation behind their creative and transformative efforts. It is time to heed those who argue that culture is both public and private, both in the world and in people's minds. By bringing the knowing subject back into social process we can better account for what we have learned about culture so far and we can begin to develop a deeper understanding of the problems that still elude us.

Notes

1 INTRODUCTION 1 Not that all anthropologists ignored these discrepancies. Malinowski (1961 [1922]) was one of many who urged attention to such contradictions, for example, those between explicit beliefs and practice. 2 See, for example, anthropologists, Gomaroff and Comaroff (1991:17) and Rosaldo (1989:102), as well as the sociologist, Derae (1995:2). 3 D'Andrade, drawing on a suggestion of George Mandler's, proposes that the turn to studies of idea systems in British, French, and US anthropology in the late 1940s and 1950s was influenced by "the tremendous expansion of the importance of communication and information technology throughout industrial societies by mid-century" (1995:12). 4 Focusing on the "frequently recurring and widely shared components" of people's interpretations eliminates the possible objection that our definition of "meaning" lets in too many idiosyncratic irrelevancies. "Dog," uttered at noon on September 10, 1997, might evoke a different image and set of feelings for Marida than it did for Martin at 4 p.m. on April 4, 1995, but the modal components of Marida's, Martin's, Mary's, Marvin's (and so on, for all competent English speakers) meanings over time is an interpretation that would probably accord well with a dictionary definition and with the "central" features of our knowledge of a concept that are most important in our meanings (Langacker 1987:136, 159). Langacker posits that semantic centrality "tends to correlate with the extent to which a specification is conventional, generic, intrinsic, and characteristic" (ibid.: 159; emphasis in the original). We talk about this again in chapter 5. 5 See Hannerz (1993) for a different defense of the culture concept and D'Andrade (1995) for another definition of culture. D'Andrade's latest published (1995:146,212) definition of culture is a Tylorian one: "the entire social heritage of a group." More recently he has proposed that culture be defined as "shared schemas that have an agreed upon external physical sign" (D'Andrade 1996). While D'Andrade recognizes that there are degrees of externalization, we think that focusing on the correspondence between schemas and signs is too much influenced by a linguistic model (taking as its prototype words and the schemas that give them meaning) and is too restrictive. It leaves out schemas acquired nonverbally and considered so mundane as not to require an agreedupon external sign, such as knowledge of correct posture. When this knowledge 257

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is enacted it is externalized as ways of walking, standing, sitting, and so on. However, these actions are not agreed-upon signs (even indexical) of the corresponding schemas; instead, they are the results or symptoms of the schemas. Also left out are repressed understandings. In chapter 7 Naomi Quinn discusses the common practice of US adults using baby talk with their spouses and argues that this behavior arises from the desire to recreate in adulthood an infantile state of dependency. These desires, however, are considered improper for US adults and are defended against, leaving no agreed-upon external sign. (Again, the baby talk itself is a symptom or result, not a sign of the schema.) In both cases, we are discussing schemas that are historically and culturally variable, with significant motivational and behavioral consequences. (Holding one's body the right way is important for fitting into a group, for example, and unfulfilled dependency desires in marriage can be a major source of dissatisfaction.) Surely, these schemas are cultural. Yet, the lack of a single externalized sign to represent these schemas makes them low on D'Andrade's externalization scale, hence relatively acultural for him. Peter Hervik and Holly Mathews (personal communication) each brought this objection to our attention. See also Westen (n.d.). See, for example, Kondo (1990:34-5) and Hutchins (1995:312,355), whose arguments will be described in greater detail in chapter 2. Freud (1965 [1923]) discussed "internalization" as a special type of learning restricted to the formation of the child's superego in the oedipal phase. We use "internalization" much more broadly, as do most psychologists today, to refer to the psychological effects of experience. See D'Andrade (1995) for a history of cognitive anthropology and Ingham (1996) for an overview of some current work in psychological anthropology. See also Goodenough (1981:51-54). Each of these terms has a somewhat different connotation. Anthropologists who do work on "the self' typically study folk psychologies, that is, not selves so much as cultural models of the self (e.g., Geertz 1983a). Studies of "meaning" are typically Geertzian as well (e.g., Geertz 1973c), focusing on the public "forms [e.g., key words, rituals, works of art, etc.] through which people make sense of their lives" (Rosaldo 1989:26). Work on "identity," on the other hand, tends to focus on ethnic, race, class, gender, sexual orientation and other group identifications. Typically, such work focuses on deliberate strategies people use to claim or avoid such identities (e.g., Butler 1990). "Consciousness" is most often used by Marxists and other critical theorists to refer to awareness (or nonawareness) on the part of some subaltern group that they indeed are a group with shared interests and, as a result of systematic social forces, have suffered unjust treatment, received unequal resources, and the like. "Subjectivity" refers broadly to the actor's conscious experience (but see Johnson 1986/87:44 for a different definition); anthropologists of "experience" study subjectivities humanistically and usually acknowledge the influence of Victor Turner's work (e.g., Turner 1985). Some "reader response" approaches to literary criticism argue that the meaning of a text depends not on the author's intentions or content of the text but on the conventional interpretive frames through which readers read it at a given time (Fish 1980). Others working in

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cultural studies talk about the need to study people's "readings" of texts without implying that authorial intentions and text contents are irrelevant to the meaning produced (e.g., Johnson (1986/87). Appadurai (1990:5) expands on Anderson's (1983) term "imagined communities," using "the imagined" to refer to collective representations, especially those related to identities and created by modern media. (This is not to be confused with the "social imaginary," typically a corruption of Lacan's usage in which "the imaginary" refers to presymbolic fantasies.) Finally, "agency" takes its meaning from the opposition of "agency" to "structure." It is almost always used to refer to acts the author sees as admirable resistance to hegemonic social structures and (as Stanley Kurtz pointed out to us, personal communication) often carries the unfortunate connotation that this resistance is an act of undetermined free will. 12 We use the term "explain" deliberately. Although we will not devote any further space to the issue here, we deplore the rejection of explanation in favor of interpretation in anthropology at present. (See Geertz 1973f:5 and 14 for statements of the distinction between causal explanation and interpretive description, along with claims that anthropologists should pursue the latter instead of the former.) Interpretation is important, but used alone, it leaves us with tantalizing static descriptions without any understanding of process. 13 In this book we will use "implicit" to refer to psychological contents (such as schemas or habits) that are normally outside of awareness but face no resistance in coming to consciousness. These we distinguish from "unconscious" ideas, feelings, and motives, which are repressed. 14 See, for example, Sanday (1990). 15 Sperber has become interested in the modularity of thought, while we draw on neo-associationist models that are usually opposed to modular models (incorrectly, we will argue in chapter 3). Also, while Sperber's distinction between mental and public representations is close to our distinction between the intrapersonal and extrapersonal realms, we would not use the term "representations" for the latter, because not all publicly observable events and processes have as their primary role the function of representing something for someone, even if, incidentally, that is usually the case. 2 ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESISTANCE 1 See, for example, Parsons (1961). 2 Where Geertz himself stood on this is not clear. His "turtles" anecdote (1973i:29) is often taken to mean that texts are all there are, but he says other things that explicitly contradict that (1983b:14 or even 1973i:13). 3 Geertz says "indeed" because the rest of this sentence is a close paraphrase of a statement of Gilbert Ryle's that served as the epigraph for this essay (1973c:55). 4 Geertz went on, in the same essay, to say: How precisely to accomplish this, how to analyze symbol use as social action and write thereby an outdoor psychology is, of course, an exceedingly difficult business . . . But what is clear, if anything is, is that to do so is to attempt to navigate the plural/unific, product/process paradox by regarding the community as the shop in which thoughts are constructed and deconstructed, history the terrain they seize and surrender, and to attend therefore to such muscular matters as the representation of authority, the marking of

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Notes to pages 14-22 boundaries, the rhetoric of persuasion, the expression of commitment, and the registerine g of dissent. (I983d:153) The gendered imagery here is striking: "muscular" matters such as "seizing terrain" for thought in public versus delicate experiences like "wishing or regretting" for thought in private (instead of tending children for thought in public and plotting revenge for thought in private). We could jokingly suggest that this looks like a kind of protest masculinity. Perhaps these muscular examples were necessary for real men to pay attention to meanings and feelings. Many more examples could be given. See, for example, Geertz's discussion of the "extrinsic theory of thought" in "Ideology as a cultural system" (originally published in 1964). See Ewing (1992) for a different response to Geertz on this point and Chafe (1970) for a reply to similar claims. See D'Andrade (1987a: 113) for a discussion of what it means for mental structures to be intersubjectively shared. See, for example, Holland and Reeves (1994); Holland and Skinner (1995); Hutchins (1995); and Lave (1988). In fact, this discussion gives the Beethoven Quartet example greater consistency than Geertz did. This abbreviated quote omits "a coherent sequence of modeled sound - in a word, music" (1973i: 11-12), which mixes the concrete with the abstract. See Goodenough (1981) and Strauss (1992a:6) for a thorough discussion of this passage. Julie Tetel, personal communication. She was talking about sense for Frege or this version of meaning for Geertz. See also Goodenough (1981:53-4). Alexander (1987) also discusses inconsistencies in Geertz's henneneutics but of a different sort: between collective determination and contingency. I do not see that conflict as having influenced Geertz nearly as much as his struggle to reconcile studies of meaning with the antimentalism that was dominant during the critical period of his intellectual development in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Langacker (1987:5) makes the same claim for semantic theories generally. He states, "I take it as self-evident that meaning is a cognitive phenomenon and must eventually be analyzed as such," while noting that a cognitive theory of meaning "conflicts with major traditions of semantic theory (much of which can be read as an elaborate attempt to avoid this conclusion)." See Sperber 1996:79-80 for a related argument. See Barth (1993:332); Chafe (1970:74-76); D'Andrade (1984:101-105); and Spiro (1987a: 162-3) for closely related arguments. Geertz comes close to stating this himself at one point: "meaning is not intrinsic in the objects, acts, processes, and so, which bear it, but , . . [is] imposed upon them; and the explanation of its properties must therefore be sought in that which does the imposing - men living in society" (1973f:405). The emphasis here, however, is on the cross-cultural variability of meaning, not its psychological status. Although she (Ortner 1989:60) traces her usage of the schema concept to different origins than those to which we trace ours (see chapter 3). She points to her own earlier discussion of "key scenarios" and to ideas coming from the symbolic anthropology of the 1970s. Roy D'Andrade has pointed out to us (personal communication) that these

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socialization patterns, in turn, might be a response to conflicts over property, inheritance rights, and so on, as discussed by Barry, Child, and Bacon (1959). We are not claiming that the explanatory variables Ortner identifies are irrelevant, only that they are insufficient. 17 See Ewing (1992) for the recurrence of the cave metaphor in anthropologists* rejection of psychology. 18 See also the criticisms of Keesing 1987; LeVine 1982; and Wikan 1987, among others. Keesing (1987:165, n. 4) does note, appropriately, "Geertz at his best captures the evanescence and negotiatedness of cultural meanings and is able to go beyond the assumption that those doing the negotiating need share a culture or construct the same meanings - as witness the scenario of Cohen and the sheep (Geertz 1973)." 19 A developmental psychologist has made a similar critique of her own field: "To some extent, social learning theory seems to have a 'copy* theory of knowledge. A sequence of events in the world is more or less copied as it is represented in symbols and retained" (Miller 1989:260). 20 See, for example, Clifford (1988c); Clifford and Marcus (1986); Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler (1992); Marcus and Fischer (1986); and Rosaldo (1989). 21 Postmodernists were not the first to raise these suspicions. See, for example, Barth (1975); Roberts (1961); Wallace (1970). 22 See also Dirks (1992:75). 23 Those labeled "skeptical postmodernists" by Rosenau (1992). 24 See also Fox (1985) and Spivak (1987:205). Spivak recommends that subaltern groups make a strategic appeal to a shared identity, even though there is no shared group essence in fact. 25 See also: "For a long time ordinary individuality - the everyday individuality of everybody - remained below the threshold of description" (Foucault 1977:191) and "It appeared that I now had to undertake a third shift, in order to analyze what is termed 'the subject.' It seemed appropriate to look for the forms and modalities of the relation to self by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself qua subject" (Foucault 1985:6). 26 See also Foucault (1977:155). 27 This argument appears more strongly in The history of sexuality, Volume I than in earlier works, such as Discipline and punish. 28 Butler draws on Mary Douglas's (1966) discussion of the cultural construction of taboos about the body, especially those related to bodily boundaries, and takes Douglas's ideas to suggest "that the naturalized notion of 'the' body is itself a consequence of taboos that render that body discrete by virtue of its stable boundaries" (Butler 1990:132-3). However, as Butler notes on the preceding page, that is not Douglas's suggestion (Douglas being a structuralist who starts with the assumption of a basic nature-culture distinction); rather, Douglas's discussion furnishes "a possible point of departure" (190:131) for Butler's more radical deconstruction of the natural body. 29 Although, as we have already noted, Geertz himself did not completely reject the need to study psychological processes as a separable domain. Even in "Thick description" he notes that cognition presumably works the same way in every society, and so more knowledge of its principles would be helpful

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(1973i:13). The postmodern dismantling of the individual is a much more radical stance than he took. See also Dumont (1985); Kirkpatrick and White (1985); Kondo (1990); Markus and Kitayama (1991); and Shweder and Bourne (1984). See also Markus and Kitayama (1991:225). Here is an extreme example: "Pleasures are said to reside in the penis, the vagina, and the breasts or to emanate from them, but such descriptions correspond to a body which has already been constructed or naturalized as genderspecific" (1990:70). Are pleasures just "said" to emanate from these erogenous zones? Don't they really for most people? Furthermore, are not these pleasures biologically produced as well as socially shaped? In Bodies that Matter Butler uses the term "performative" as speech act theorists do when referring to the special class of verbs (e.g., promise, dare, christen) whose utterance creates the condition described (e.g., saying "I promise you" creates a new condition: a promise has been made, not merely referred to). Thus, she notes, "In philosophical terms, the constative claim is always to some degree performative" (1993:11). Her application in the next sentence of this notion of performativity to bodily sex differences ("In relation to sex, then, if one concedes the materiality of sex or of the body, does that very conceding operate - performatively - to materialize that sex?") leaves no doubt that this is a strong notion of discursive construction indeed. See also Hollan (1992); Parish (1994); Wellencamp (1988) and the discussions of these studies in Spiro (1993). See Best and Kellner's (1991:851) discussion of Deleuze and Guattari's "new postmodern 'schizo-subjects' who . . . become reconstituted as nomadic desiring-machines." Williams distorted Gramsci's analysis by exaggerating the hold of dominant ideologies over everyday thought and action. (See, e.g., Williams 1977:110.) Gramsci did discuss the production of everyday common sense, but also stressed that the average person's belief system was a confused mixture of residues from a variety of ideologies (e.g., Gramsci 1971:338). See Comaroff and Comaroff (1991:20-21) for another critique of Williams's reading of Gramsci. See, for example, Bourdieu (1977); Comaroff (1985); Comaroff and Comaroff (1991); Donham (1990); Roseberry (1989); and Silverblatt (1987). It \s curious that Leacock, after rejecting the culture-and-personality approach for not showing how social change occurs, goes on in the same article to recommend the linguistic determinism of her father, the literary analyst, Kenneth Burke, approvingly quoting passages such as the following: ... since language derives its materials from the cooperative acts of men in sociopolitical orders, which are themselves held together by a vast network of verbally perfected meanings, might it not follow that man must perceive nature through the fog of symbolridden social structures that he has erected atop nature? Material things would thus be like outward manifestations of the forms which are imposed upon the intuiting of nature by language... (Burke 1966:78-9, quoted in Leacock 1985:87) Given that languages change slowly, this view assumes a great deal of reproduction in perceptions and intuitions in a society over time - and even greater

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durability in an individual. In fact, as we will argue in chapter 4, it is too reproductionistic: it is unlikely that language shapes perception and thought as much as Burke said it did. 39 As Melville Herskovits put it many years ago, The political revolutionary does not refuse to cast his revolutionary songs in the modal structure and scale progressions of the culture he is in process of changing; his formations, if his organized forces are strong enough, will operate in terms of accepted patterns of military procedure. The one who rebels against the religious and moral system of his time will couch his appeals in the linguistic patterns of his people, use established affect symbols, and employ accepted esthetic standards in heightening the responses of his followers. (Herskovits 1951:153, quoted in Segall, Campbell, and Herskovits, 1966:11)

40 In fact, earlier versions of it (e.g., John Comaroffs comments as a discussant in an American Anthropological Association session on Language and political economy in 1986) inspired some of Claudia Strauss's previous work. 41 The readiness with which someone like Mintz incorporated culture-and-personality approaches into his work thirty years ago contrasts vividly with the extent to which this work and psychological anthropology in general are shunned now by most anthropologists. The last chapter of this book will consider why this happened. Some of our own work (e.g., Strauss 1990) attempts to combine these approaches, as does some newer work in cognitive anthropology. See, for example, Hirsch (1996) and Hinton (1996). 42 See, for example, Duranti (1988), Gumperz (1982), Hutchins (1990a, 1990b, 1991,1995), Lave (1988), Lave and Wenger (1991), and White (1993). 43 Soviet activity theory, especially the work of Lev Vygotsky (1962, 1978), is a major theoretical influence on this approach. 44 Hutchins seems to be taking a stand different from ours when he states, "the problem is not so much in acknowledging this boundary [between the person and the setting] as it is in assuming that the boundary constitutes a clear separation of cognitive realms. This I do not do" (1996:65). From statements such as the one quoted earlier, however, it appears that he means only to be making the same point we did in the introduction about the permeability of the boundaries between person and setting. 45 For an even more extreme example see Latour's (1996) praise of Hutchins (1995) for emptying individuals of minds and Hutchins's (1996) correction of that misreading. 46 The structure/agency opposition is not the same as the centripetal/centrifugal opposition. Centrifugal processes of cultural variation and change can be explained without recourse to the free will assumed by talk of "agency" (a point we owe to Stanley Kurtz, personal communication). 47 Bourdieu eventually recognized thisflaw.See Distinction (1984) and The logic ofpractice (1990). 48 The accumulation of what he calls "symbolic capital." 49 Bourdieu may have implicitly recognized that he was talking about two different forms of the unsaid, because part way through the second chapter of Outline he switches, without warning or explanation, from talking about the habitus (habit in Latin) to a discussion of "bodily hexis" (habit, condition, dispositions in ancient Greek). (Both are formed from verbs meaning "to have," with the

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Latin term probably deriving from the Greek, a point we owe to John Stevens, personal communication.) The way Bourdieu uses these terms, however, habitus includes both largely implicit kinaesthetic knowledge (e.g., bodily postures) and the officially unacknowledged but privately discussed knowledge underlying status maneuvers, such as avenging insults, giving gifts, and arranging marriages. In Bourdieu's usage hexis is limited to kinaesthetic knowledge. See Barth (1987) for a much more careful analysis of what he calls the "oscillations of subjectification and objectification" (ibid.:46) among the Mountain Ok of New Guinea. See Paul (1990:432) for a similar criticism of Bourdieu. It may be that consciousness of intentions is sometimes or always epiphenomenal (Libet 1985,1987), but that is a different matter. See Bloch (1985) for a different critique of Bourdieu's cognitive model.

3 SCHEMA THEORY AND CONNECTIONISM

1 In this book we opt for an Anglicized ending rather than the original Greek one, using "schemas" as the plural rather than "schemata." 2 In chapter 5 we will describe how schemas come to be shared and how shared schemas differ from idiosyncratic ones. 3 For Kant (1965:A137/B176-A147/B187), as for modern-day cognitive scientists, schemas guide the application of concepts to particular experiences. Piaget (e.g., 1952) used the same term to refer to the learned, changing cognitive structures that mediate children's (and adults') understandings of the world; see also Bartlett (1932). See Casson (1983) and Quinn and Holland (1987) for summaries of contributions to schema theory by Fillmore (e.g., 1975), Rosch (Heider) (e.g., 1977), and Schank and Abelson (1977), among others, on which anthropologists have drawn. 4 Chapter 6 includes further discussion of the special properties of cultural models. D'Andrade (1995:122) follows George Mandler (1984:55) in defining a schema as a "bounded, distinct, and unitary representation." Putting that idea of a schema together with the psychologist George Miller's claim that we can hold only seven items (approximately) in short-term memory (Miller 1956) leads D'Andrade to the conclusion that schemas cannot contain more than seven chunks, and he uses the term "model" to refer to collections of schemas with more than seven chunks (D'Andrade 1995:151-2). We depart from D'Andrade on this point because (a) on the connectionist explication of schemas they do not look quite so bounded and distinct and (b) research on short-term memory studies people's abilities to retain arbitrary lists of digits, words, nonsense syllables and the like, which probably depend on a different brain structure than that responsible for schema-based information processing (Kandel, Schwartz, and Jesell, 1995:664-5). Furthermore, not all memory researchers agree with Miller's claim about the "magical number seven" (Crowder 1989). 5 As we discuss further in chapter 4, we are capable of a more accurate form of recall, but schemas provide us with a quick-and-dirty memory that works well enough for most purposes. See Alba and Hasher 1983.

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6 See Westen (forthcoming) for discussion of research by Devine (1989) and others on the discrepancies between US Americans* explicit attitudes and implicit racial stereotypes. 7 See Quinlan (1991) for an accessible review of these older approaches. "Connectionism" also has an older, broader meaning, referring to the general principle that "ideas, sense data, memory nodes, or similar mental elements are associated together in the mind through experience** (Anderson and Bower 1973:10). 8 "Parallel distributed processing,'* PDP for short, is the name of one very influential version of this sort of modeling and is described in various chapters of Parallel distributed processing, volume 1, edited by David Rumelhart, James McClelland, and the PDP Research Group (1986) and volume 2, edited by James McClelland, David Rumelhart, and the PDP Research Group (1986). 9 For example, the editor of a collection of philosophical essays on meaning and understanding states, in an effort to separate what he calls an "anthropological" and "pragmatic** view of meaning and understanding from a "psychological*' one: "The practice of understanding is not an activity of the inner life on inner-life primitives; it is a practice-in-the-world or interpretation of contexts of understanding** (Parret 1981:253; italics in the original) - as if meaning could not be both the outcome of an inner process and an interpretation of contexts. 10 See Lakoff (1987:342-3) and Strauss (1988) for critical discussions. 11 "Embodied** is a highly ambiguous term. (See LakofT 1987, who uses it with several different meanings.) In this context will not attempt to define it more precisely, because the exact definition does not matter for the point we are making here. 12 Bourdieu's description of "moves which are objectively organized as strategies without being the product of a genuine strategic intention** (1977:73) is also apropos. The emphasis Bourdieu places on "strategy" in the first chapter of Outline may be misleading because it gives the impression that he is talking about a deliberate process of choosing among alternatives. He later makes it clear (e.g., 1977:76), however, that his talk of strategy refers only to the adaptiveness and flexibility of responses, without assuming that they are the result of conscious calculations. 13 In other words, we distinguish understanding from meaning in terms of background assumptions versus particular interpretations. In Continental philosophy the distinction was made a different way: between rich significance (meaning) and humans' limited grasp of that (understanding) (Parret 1981:251). 14 Other points made by Wittgenstein can be accommodated in this model as well. Thus, the family resemblance among (to use Wittgenstein*s example) the meanings of "game,*' when games are as varied as ring-around-the rosy, poker, and football, could be thought of as the tendency for that word to activate some of the same units in any two contexts, but different sets of shared units for any pairs of usages that are compared. 15 "Consciousness** does not even merit an entry in the index to the Parallel distributedprocessing volumes. 16 As we noted in n. 4, we disagree with D'Andrade (1995) that schemas are by definition small enough to fit in short-term memory.

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17 See Schneider and Shiffrin (1977) for an oft-cited discussion of the distinction between the two kinds of processing, D'Andrade (1995:144ff.) for discussion of this criticism of connectionism, and Schmajuk and Thieme (1992) and Gray Buhusi, and Schmajuk (n.d.) for neural network models of problem solving and controlled, conscious processing. 18 How exactly to draw the lines between the two kinds of processing - whether, indeed, there are two distinct systems - is the subject of an interesting exchange between Sloman (1996a,b) and Gigerenzer and Regier (1996). 19 Smolensky (1988b) and the peer commentary that follows his target article are good sources for reading about this issue. Smolensky (1988b:8-19) states that connectionist models are much closer to being neurally faithful in their processing than "symbolic processing models'1; several commentators on his article contend that connectionists can and should aim for even greater neural faithfulness. See, for example, the work of Grossberg (1987). 20 We should stress that our admission of neurobiology into a discussion of culture is not intended to suggest that there are essential biological differences between culturally distinct human populations; our point is exactly the opposite. There is a limit to cultural variability because minds are not infinitely plastic. Minds depend on brains, which are alike in all important respects in all humans. 21 Connection weights are not simply determined by the associations experienced between the things "represented" by the units. The connection weight between units i and j may also be influenced by how many other units contribute to the activation of unit j (McClelland and Rumelhart 1986:187). 22 That is the way the claim is usually put. Knowledge is also represented by any biases the units have (tendencies to be on or off), by the patterns of connections between units (i.e., which are connected to which), and by the initial determination of what (micro)features of the world wiD activate input units. 23 For general discussions, see Bechtel and Abrahamsen (1991), Churchland (1995), Clark (1991), Macdonald and Macdonald (1995), Quinlan (1991), Ramsey, Stich, and Rumelhart (1991), and Smolensky (1988b). 24 The last designation is misleading if it is supposed to contrast with connectionist models, which are computational too. 25 Other kinds of in-between models are connectionist models that rely on localized representations of concepts or (worse yet from a distributed perspective) localized representations of whole propositions or hybrids with some connectionist parts and some symbolic parts (e.g., Smolensky's 1995 "Integrated Connectionist/Symbolic" cognitive architecture, which is basically connectionist but can model syntactic structure and starts with knowledge of a Universal Grammar. 26 Ervin-Tripp credits William Geoghegan, who eventually published his analysis in 1971. 27 We think that the dotted diamond stands for other features not specified here. 28 For this reason connectionism has been described as not "representationalist" (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1988:31). Or you could, as we will, continue to speak of conceptual representations in these models, bearing in mind that these are typical activity patterns rather than fixed symbols.

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29 For example, in some models (auto-associators) every input unit is also an output unit or input and output layers have the same number of units. The point of these models is to learn the prototype features of some set of objects. See, for example, Rumelhart, Hinton, and McClelland (1986:56). 30 One feature that is included in Ervin-Tripp's model and should have been in ours as well is whether alter's name is known. We did not realize that until after the artwork was finished for figure 3.2, Ervin-Tripp's model also includes some features (Identity set, which specifies occupations such as judge, doctor, and professor; Married; and Male) that are needed if the model is to decide among titles; we assume that problem can be decided by a further model into which this one feeds. Finally Ervin-Tripp's model includes the feature Dispensation (i.e., signal from alter, if of a higher rank than ego, that a first name is acceptable). We have covered that, in part, with the feature of "approachability." Often, if a clear signal of this sort had been given earlier, that determines the speaker's choice. On the other hand, we can think of times when we have told students that we do not mind being addressed by our first names, only to hear them continue to call us Professor Strauss or Professor Quinn. Possibly, the model would be improved by adding dispensation to the input features. 31 These values, as well as the values in table 3.2, were not arrived at through the learning procedures described in the next section: but were postulated by us, using as a heuristic the assumption that the first hidden unit responds best to inputs for close intimates, the second to inputs for friends, the third to friendly acquaintances, the fourth to more affectively neutral acquaintances of the same status, the fifth to affectively neutral acquaintances of a lower status, and the sixth to affectively neutral acquaintances of a higher status. When weights are slowly built up through the learning procedures described in the next section, there is no need for the modeler to specify what hidden units represent, nor is it likely they would have such well-defined favored stimuli. (See Churchland 1995:48 for examples of the preferred stimuli of some of the hidden units in a face recognition network.) This is just a short-cut we used, because we are not very adept at using the connectionist software. 32 Sometimes these products are multiplied by a "strength" factor, for example, one giving greater weight to inputs from the world than inputs from other units and adjusted by a "bias," but we will not worry about these fine points at the moment. See Bechtel and Abrahamsen (1991:2Iff) for a readable but more technically complicated example. 33 See Holland (1992b) for an example of this. 34 A model can also start with "bias" units that always add or subtract some activation to selected units, regardless of what else is happening in the system. 35 And maybe also from the activation threshold of hidden layer and output units, i.e., how great the total input to that unit has to be for it to be activated. In some models the amount added or subtracted is 1 (e.g., in Rumelhart and McClelland's past-tense model). In other models the change is proportional to the size of the error, i.e., the difference between the target output for a given unit and the actual output for that unit. Computationally, this learning rule is nicer because it speeds up the learning at the beginning and slows it down as the weights get close to the desired figures, which keeps it from ratcheting past the

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desired weights. 36 On the other hand, there are cases of "catastrophic interference" in which learning new patterns eliminates knowledge of earlier ones (McCloskey and Cohen 1989). 37 Quinlan (1991:53) notes a third type: "reinforcement learning" in which the only feedback the model gets is whether it was right or wrong. 38 See, for example, Sweetser's (1987) discussion of what counts as a "lie." 39 A divorced colleague of ours provided an example of how these different sources of information can be confusing for a child. After her son asked why he didn't have a "normal" family (with both parents married and living together in the same house), she pointed out to him that very few of the families he knew fit that definition of normality, a fact that surprised him. Other sorts of objections have been raised by other commentators to connectionist learning procedures. One standard objection, for example, is that "backpropagation," i.e., changing all the weights from output layer back to input layer that participated in an incorrect output, has no neurobiological analog. 40 See also Herdt (1987) and Whiting (1990) for applications of these observations to masculine gender identities. 41 Terry Regier has alerted us (personal communication) that Kruschke (1992) and Smith, Gasser, and Sandhofer (in press) do present models of selective attention. While we have not seen the second article, the first does not attempt to take emotional and motivational factors into account. 42 Hirschfeld (1988:613) quotes Gorer (1955:31) making that claim in exactly those words. 43 They can start with some weights that are fixed, not modifiable by training. 44 Not all universals are prewired, of course. See Brown (1991). 45 Specifically, "closed-class" spatial terms, i.e., ones for which there is a fixed set in a language. 46 Except that Chomsky has taken the complexity of Unguistic structures, more than cross-linguistic variability, to show the need for universal, innate structures. 47 Regier has told us (personal communication) that his current thinking has taken him away from the neurobiological reduction that could be inferred from publications such as the 1995 Cognitive Linguistics article we cite. See Regier (in press). 48 This was a problem with older "ideational" theories of meaning; see Alston (1964:23-4). 49 This mechanistic language is not meant to imply that intentional states can be fully simulated by computers (or, at least, any computers and programs existing now). Our concern at the moment is with meanings, not with the mental state in which we subjectively link meanings to signs. 4 TWO PROPERTIES OF C U L T U R E 1 The details of how this works at the neural level are very complicated: Various types of learning affect neurons differently and the effects vary, as well, in different parts of the brain. Some of these mechanisms are more, others less,

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classically "Hebbian" (Hebb 1949). (See Kandel, Schwartz and Jessell 1995:684.) 2 The durability of old learning, of course, is also one reason why contemporary anthropological theories, the "post"-isms of a new generation, share so much with the theories they supersede. 3 In Piaget's still-useful terrninology, the experiences are assimilated to the pattern of the schemas, rather than, as can also happen, the schemas accomodating to the experiences. Contrary to Piaget's assumption of even development, though, schemas may become well established at different rates in different regions of the brain (see Ingham 1996:56). 4 We would certainly not want to be interpreted as believing that racism is solely a matter of superficial interaction and consequent miscommunication. We are simply pointing to one effect of negative stereotyping that can reinforce racist attitudes. The verisimiUtude of our fictional example is attested by Staples's description. The persistence of this behavioral pattern is attested by a real-life experience reported in a more recent letter to the editor of the Duke University student newspaper, from two white women undergraduates, that appeared after we had drafted our imaginary account of Paula's experience. The letter was written in response to a story published the previous week. This story related an incident in which "a sophomore told Public Safety she was chased by seven or eight black males" whom she evaded by boarding a bus (The Chronicle, Friday, October 11,1991). While they sympathized with the woman who had reported being chased, the letter writers cautioned, On Oct. 13 at 6:45 p.m., we were walking on Central Campus past the basketball court going to Uncle Harry's when we saw about ten big, tall, black males running in our direction. We assumed they were chasing us, so wefledto the safety of Uncle Harry's. Little did we know, these men were running to the other side of the basketball court. We are not trying to make light of the rape/assault situations on campus, but has anyone ever thought it possible that not every group of black men is out to rape or assault someone?.. .(The Chronicle, October 16,1991). Fortunately, the women who wrote this letter had a chance to see their stereotype disconfirmed and learned from that experience. 5 See D'Andrade (1984) and Spiro (e.g., 1987b) for fuller discussions of the importance of teaching. 6 This may or may not mean that it is consciously attended to, since strengthening of associations can occur without awareness, as psychologists will want to make sure we realize. However, the conditions contrived in the psychologist's laboratory to elicit learning without awareness are atypical of conditions in the real world, where multiple potential distractions, if allowed to intrude, could readily swamp the learner's sensory capacity, causing him or her not to perceive, at any level, what is being taught. 7 Psychologists of several persuasions have posited a universal motive to maintain a positive view of oneself (see Markus and Kitayama 1991:242). Such a motive may be innate, promoting the process by which children everywhere learn to mind their socializes. Or, wanting to see oneself in a positive fight may be an inevitable side-effect of learning to be good, and the latter process driven

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entirely by motives pertaining to security and survival. That is, wanting to be loved, the child not only learns to be good, but learns to want to be good in order to be loved. Being good, and feeling more generally that one is a good person, eventually become rewarding in and of themselves in the way that, as we have already explained, praise for any behavior can become self-administered. Whether self-esteem is learned in this way or whether it is innate does not matter for our argument. Some connectionists model this by multiplying by a strength parameter that is greater for inputs from the world than inputs generated within the network (Bechtel and Abrahamsen 1991:27). It is more accurate to say that Paula's knowledge can be modeled as connections among units. Units are only in models; they stand for groups of neurons in people's heads. For brevity, however, here and elsewhere we speak of units as if they were real. Bradd Shore (personal communication) has pointed out to us that this is only one possible outcome. Paula could remain conflicted about how to act and uneasy in her interactions. Although connectionists generally avoid talking about the conscious experiences that accompany the mechanisms they describe (for an exception, see Smolensky 1988:13), we could postulate that these conflicted, uneasy feelings are likely when no outcome is activated much more strongly than any other and one is left not knowing how to act. On the other hand, Shore notes, Paula could just go with her prior boss schema or her prior female-friend schema without enacting a behavioral compromise between them. If Paula's boss acts enough like either a female friend or like Paula's former male bosses, one of her prior schemas is likely to be activated in toto. This is a good point: connectionist models do not predict a compromise outcome in all cases. As he began to get good at this new job, of course, Michael's pleasure in mastering it reinforced his learning it, as we have described for Paula's learning to be self-reliant. It is interesting that US American men and women like Michael and Paula often seem to get special pleasure out of mastering tasks like this one that are opposite-sex-typed. Perhaps overcoming the implicit challenge to what is assumed about inborn ability makes us feel especially competent. Robert Paul (1990) arrives at a similar conclusion from a different theoretical direction. As some connectionist modelers have realized; see Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClelland, and Hinton 1986:48, who make this point about goals and intentions. Psychodynamic processes that posit an unconscious can be incorporated into a connectionist model if we assume that strong inhibitions can develop at any age to prevent or hinder memories of traumatic events from coming to consciousness. The latter sort of knowledge would be unconscious, because it is actively inhibited from being remembered ('repressed') in the same way as we are actively inhibited from touching a glowing coal. Some neurons inhibit, rather than excite, others and this property of neurons is replicated in most connectionist models. This model of how feeling motivates behavior and other conscious and unconscious responses, Westen has argued elsewhere (1985:22-96), lends itself to an

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evolutionary argument: Feelings, in his view, are evolved mechanisms for the selective retention of behavioral and mental processes. 16 One kind of socially valued identity is that of expert. Just as we have seen, in the last section, that the intrinsic pleasure of being expert at something can contribute to the durability of that behavior, this pleasure can also motivate one to practice one's expertise. Thus, in a study of college women who are differentially involved in the world of college romance, Dorothy Holland (1992) shows that the cultural model of romance acquires motivating force for these women as they develop mastery of it. We assume this is because their mastery of it is associated with pleasurable feelings of being competent at romance and, perhaps also, having a favorable reputation on campus, and that these positive feelings motivate the women further to practice, and exhibit, their expertise. 17 LeVine and Norman (ibid.:5) observe that parents everywhere have theories about what they refer to as children's "moral development": that is, that there are some critical values children must learn to become competent adults - for German parents, self-reliance and love of order, that because these values do not come to children naturally, parents and other socializes have a necessary role to play in teaching them, and that this teaching requires the engineering of situations in which the values will be inculcated. A confirming example, persuasive just because it illustrates LeVine and Norman's claim with a very different theory of moral development, comes from Micronesia. Catherine Lutz (1983, 1987) provides a particularly full and nuanced description of the engineering of children's learning to do what adults want them to do - the way in which children raised on the atoll of Ifaluk are taught to feel metagu (glossed as fear/anxiety). Lutz's detailed description of how children actually learn metagu reveals that Ifaluk adults use the full array of universal teaching techniques we have already noted - explicitly teaching its value, engineering contexts for its recognition and opportunities for its practice, and heightening the emotional impact of this learning through scolding, mocking, and, in the most recalcitrant cases, frightening. Metagu is not only a valued behavior in it own right; once established, the motivation to be metagu figures, in turn, in learning a more general ideal of the good person. The most valued of adult traits, which all parents try to instill in their children, is that of maluwelu (which Lutz glosses as calmness). The hyperawareness of cultural norms and of the consequences of one's behavior, maluwelu depends substantially upon being metagu in appropriate contexts (ibid.:253-254), 18 If, as we draw on psychoanalytic insights here and elsewhere, we appear to favor object relations theory, there is a reason. As Nancy Chodorow (1989:157-158) points out, object relations theory "conceptualizes the self as inexorably social and intrinsically connected." Thus, she says, while the classical analytic account and the object-relations model both challenge the traditional notion of the pristine individual, the classical account "does so without fundamental recourse to the 'outside world'." The compatibility of our own approach with a psychoanalytic view that forefronts the interaction of the individual child with the outside world should be clear. Relatedly, Paul (1990:439) points out that the object-relations formulation of motivation is congenial to anthropological approaches like ours. It posits motives not as

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drives consisting of quantities of formless energy, but, just as we do, as "cognitive mental images already endowed with an affective tone that renders them motivational." (Object relations theory, of course, focusses on images of the primary dyadic relationship and their affective tone.) 19 Holland (1992) and Strauss (1992b) give further empirical examples of knowledge detached from motivation.

5 THREE FURTHER PROPERTIES OF CULTURE 1 The most obvious and direct effect of the individual durability of schemas on their historical stability comes from the fact that an average person's life spans a not-inconsiderable period of historical time. Some of the tendency of schemas to recur historically is certainly because the same individuals who learn and enact given schemas at one time are still around at a later time, still enacting many of the same schemas. (See Bourdieu 1984:455 for a related point.) Of course, human mortality sets a temporal limit on this source of historical durability. 2 A long tradition of study in anthropology focuses on the psychic effects of differing patterns of child socialization cross-culturally. Interestingly, this tradition shares with Bourdieu an emphasis on learning from the cultural shape of the environment, including the customs and beliefs child caretakers enact as well as the physical and social settings children grow up inhabiting. Recent formulations of the cross-cultural study of child socialization are very explicit about the key analytic role they grant to the culturally determined environment (Whiting and Edwards 1988) or "developmental niche" (Super and Harkness 1986) of the child, and offer substantial empirical findings concerning the effects of differently constructed cultural environments on the developing individuals who inhabit them. 3 The first of these examples was suggested by Harriet Whitehead (personal communication). 4 The Wittgensteinian terminology (1958, sec. 67) is dehberate. See note 14 in chapter 3 for a connectionist explanation of his family-resemblance analysis of concepts. 5 See Anita Clair Fellman (1990) for a fascinating analysis of how the improvidence of Laura Ingalls Wilder's father, which required the frontier family to move a number of times, was rewritten in the Little house books as an idealized story of self-reliance. Fellman finds the roots of this literary project in the hard lives and unbending natures of Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, and, born of this difficult experience, the laissez-faire political philosophy of the latter. 6 We would not want to be read as believing that producers of things for public consumption respond in any direct, uncomplicated way to such messages from consumers. As Richard Slotkin (1984:413) has argued for the movies, "all sorts of considerations, only one of which is a guess about the response of the mass audience," affect what works will be produced. Furthermore, he observes, "The weakness of market research as a way of predicting shifts in public enthusiasm reduces the effective role of the audience as a contributor to the process of

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planning new films; and this increases the proportional weight of inputs from more predictable constituencies like the various schools of film critics and reviewers, social and religious institutions, known preferences of distributing and exhibiting companies, and so on." These powerful constituencies all affect what people will see at the movies, as do exceptional artists in creating what Slotkin (ibid.:414) calls "primary works" that engender "intense interest in themes, ideas and symbols that might previously have been indistinguishable from the mass of routine culture terms and productions," and that initiate a subsequent outpouring of "formulaic" productions of the same genre, superficially varied to hold public interest. Nonetheless, it is also true that cultural themes like self-reliance do survive all these production considerations to lend shape to movies and other cultural products. If, as we have been arguing, private meaning cannot be read unproblematically from public forms, arguments like SlotkhVs caution us that public forms cannot be read unproblematically from private meanings - one more reason to study both. Claudia Strauss develops this point further in chapter 8. This is rapidly changing in the movies today, where things often work out well for women who take matters into their own hands and take action formerly the province of men. These new images of women could extend the range of behaviors that future women experience as self-reliant and perhaps even engender in them a felt contradiction between being self-reliant and being feminine in some situations. Of course, to the extent that human nature renders some experiences and the apprehension of these universal, the cultural schemas that have evolved independently in different places will bear more of a family resemblance to one another than might be expected from the barriers to their diffusion. A moment's thought generates any number of additional examples of how the world is organized to promote sharing. In the United States, for instance, the customary times of work, school and other activities conspire to insure that many of us sit in rush-hour traffic, most of us sit down to dinner at roughly the same time of day, take our vacations in summer, and plan leisure activities, socializing, and home improvement projects for weekends. It is not only the legal or customary timing of events that dictates similar experiences. For example, domestic architectural tradition insures that most of us five in dwellings with separate kitchens, bedrooms and living rooms; systems for media production and distribution insure that many of us end up watching the same films and reading the same books; legislation or court decisions can insure that all of us are subject to the same options and strictures concerning such personal matters as divorce or abortion, and so forth. There are also more selective cohort effects. Naomi Quinn was struck, reading autobiographical accounts submitted by her college classmates and published in a reunion booklet, by how many of those who had gone on, like her, to academic and other professional careers had near-identical-sounding things to say about the accommodation of their careers to their childrearing, and how closely this shared story corresponded to the way she thought about her own life. Such local comparisons can surprise our senses of ourselves as unique individuals and captains of our own fates.

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11 A related, but not identical, concept is what Dorothy Holland and Jaan Valsiner (1988) call, after Vygotsky, mediating devices. These authors say they are careful "to restrict 'mediating device' to circumscribed, tangible, activities or objects of sensory dimensions" (ibid.:258) and most of their examples begin from such activities or objects and emphasize the different interpretations and hence tasks to which these devices can be put. This is a particularly helpful approach to the way symbols work as one kind of "mediating device." It may be less helpful in illuminating the way in which tasks are actually mediated and performed. For example, Holland and Valsiner (ibid.:259-260) interpret Lakoff and Kovecses' (1987) analysis of metaphors for anger in American English as standing for a model of anger metonymically, and as the primary means by which such a cultural model is organized and learned. In chapter 6 Naomi Quinn will develop a very different account of the task that metaphors like these mediate. She begins, as does Hutchins, with the close analysis of task performance, and she asks what internal structures are brought to bear on this. 12 Jean Lave (1988:145-169) stresses the dialectic, transformative nature of shopping in the supermarket, saying, for example, that such "a setting is not simply a mental map in the mind of the shopper. Instead, it has simultaneously an independent, physical character and a potential for realization only in relation to shoppers' activity. These together constitute its essential character." (ibid.: 152-153). It would be a mistake, though, to diminish the role the supermarket layout does play as a mental map. In its capacity to organize the overall trip through the supermarket efficiently it relieves the shopper of as much cognitive effort as it does by supplying aids to the solution of particular purchasing dilemmas that occur along the way up and down the aisles. Of course, shoppers frequent given supermarkets because they have developed mental maps of them, the physical setting triggering and facilitating the mental representation of it as Lave enjoins us to see. The point here is our usual one, that mental maps in the mind of the individual should not be counterposed dismissively to interaction with the physical environment. Both have their role to play in activity. 13 Radway observes: "Although the ideal romance initially admits the difficulty of relying on men for gentleness and affective intensity, thus confirming the reader's own likely experience, it also reassures her that such satisfaction is possible because men really do know how to attend to a woman's needs" (Radway 1984:140). What romance novels do for their women readers, she goes on to explain, is to teach them to reread men's behavior as fulfilling their need for nurturance. In the same way, Paula had to learn to be satisfied with something less than a husband who met her every need without her having to ask. 14 This is a standard criticism of Weber's otherwise insightful discussion. 15 Previously we pointed out that stereotypes can have centripetal effects, keeping people from encountering and noticing information that would disconfirm the stereotype and thus reinforcing it. Here we are observing that negative stereotypes can also have centrifugal effects, keeping groups from wanting to interact so that, not interacting, over time they become more different. Circularly, it is just such segregation and difference between proximate groups that is the breeding ground for negative stereotypes. We noted that Paula had had little

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first-hand experience of the poor inner-city African-American men that she stereotyped. 16 Writing about religious doctrine, Spiro (ibid.) actually distinguishes five levels of such cognitive salience, thefirstof which he takes to be cultural cliche and the fifth, true belief: (1) learning about the doctrines; (2) understanding their traditional meanings as interpreted by authorities or experts; (3) believing that the doctrines are true, correct, or right; (4) being guided in their actions by the doctrines, which structures the believers perceptual world; and (5) being instigated or motivated to action by the doctrines. Many features of the learning experience itself would seem to collaborate in determining the level at which a given belief will be held. Claudia Strauss will argue in chapter 7 for the utility of expanding (4) and (5) to account for different types, as well as degrees, of motivational effect. 17 The contrasting autobiographies of Clifton Taulbert (1989) and Anne Moody (1968) offer especially vivid examples of different associations held by two people growing up in similar circumstances in the same area at the same time. Taulbert (1989:144-146) and Moody (1968:129) attach very different connotations to the manners blacks were expected to show toward whites in Mississippi in the 1950s, for example, Taulbert exulting in his use of manners to get ahead, Moody raging at blacks, like Taulbert, who acceded to their use. 18 As should be clear, it does not follow that personality is the same thing as culture (see D'Andrade 1990). 6 R E S E A R C H ON S H A R E D T A S K S O L U T I O N S 1 The down side of being the unmarked category for North Americans in general is that we have no single term, such as "Canadian" or "Mexican," by which to differentiate ourselves. 2 All were residents in the same middle-sized southeastern city or its environs; all were native-born Americans who spoke English as a first language; all were married, and all in first marriages, during the period of their interviews. 3 The goals of interviewing each individual so intensively were threefold. I wished to amass sufficient discourse for the reconstruction of understandings that are not often, and perhaps cannot always be, explicitly and succinctly articulated by people. I wished to accumulate sufficient examples, from each interviewee, of discourse features such as narrative or reasoning or use of key terms that might occur, perhaps, only once or twice or a half-dozen times in an hour of talk. Finally, I wished to be able to say what understandings about marriage held across this small but quite diverse group of Americans and could thus be said to be cultural, and what could better be attributed to each interviewee's more idiosyncratic or subcultural understandings, and to learn enough about the experiential background of each to be able to explore the source of those individual understandings (see, especially, Quinn 1992). 4 The other interviewers and I started thefirstsession with each person by asking, "How did you meet your husband (wife)?'* We went on from there, picking up on conversational leads and asking clarifying questions as might any exceptionally good listener. We had time between interviews (typically conducted once a week for an hour) to listen to the previous tape and identify topics that deserved

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further exploration at the next session. Each person was interviewed until he or she reported having nothing more to say, which ranged from a relatively taciturn eleven hours to a garrulous twenty-eight (both men). Then, to insure exhaustiveness and rough comparability, each was asked afinalset of questions that had been compiled from all topics any interviewee had raised to that point. These topics were wide-ranging, dealing, for example, with dreams one spouse had about the other, pet names for each other, and birthday gifts they exchanged. That these questions rarely elicited much additional material gives some indication that the interviews were exhaustive of what people considered it important to tell. 5 A guiding concept was Charlotte Linde's (1993) idea of the life story, which includes all the constantly accumulating, changing stories one tells in which the point is about oneself- in the present case, one's marital experience- and which remain relevant and reportable over a significant portion of one's life. Not all that interviewees had to say on the topic of marriage was part of their life story, however. Sometimes, for example, they wanted to talk about other people's marriages, or about marriage in our society more generally; a considerable portion of the interview content fell into this category. 6 In these and all other excerpts quoted in this chapter, speakers are referring to the marital or spousal relationship, even though this is not always ascertainable from the restricted amount of context provided in the interests of brevity. 7 A wholly characteristic assertion of this position, among countless others that could be cited, is Lakoff and Mark Turner's (1989:xi) "metaphor allows us to understand our selves and our world in ways that no other modes of thought can." Equally representative is Lakoff and Zoltan Kovecses' (1987:408) comment, about a set of common metaphors for anger in American English, that "most of our understanding of anger comes from these basic-level metaphors" which, they go on to say, "allow us to comprehend and draw inferences about anger, using our knowledge of familiar, well-structured domains" from which the metaphors for anger are drawn. In the same vein, another of LakofFs colleagues (Johnson 1987:105) declares that metaphors "constitute our understanding." 8 For two widely read instances, see Martin (1987:76-79) and Shweder and Bourne (1984:189-192). 9 Parenthetically, but importantly, mine is not the same claim as that of Lakoff and others (i.e., Lakoff and Kovecses 1987:219; Lakoff and Turner 1989:172, not to mention my own earlier argument in Quinn 1991:57-58) that metaphors are drawn from "familiar, well-structured" or otherwise "better-understood" domains. A veteran player who, at forty, had likely played baseball longer than he had been married, Brett surely knew at least as much about the former as about the latter. Nor is marriage inherently any better structured than baseball. (We might want to argue that it is even less so, given the absence of an official rule book.) Indeed, the features of marriage that Brett invokes - its predictable difficulty and its capacity to be beneficial and therefore endure in the face of these difficulties - are the same features of marriage that speakers often reconceptualize metaphorically in terms of other domains - casting marriage, for one example, as a journey over uneven terrain to a place worth staying at. Marriage

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is neither less familiar nor less well structured than a journey, nor more so than a baseball contract. Not its familiarity nor the degree to which it exhibits structure, but its intersubjective sharedness as a good example of something makes a metaphor useful. 10 This and other long interview excerpts quoted in the remainder of this chapter and the next are identified, in the brackets that follow the quotation, by interviewee code followed by interview sequence number. The interviewee code contains a number for each couple and an "H" or a "W" to indicate that the interviewee is either husband or wife in that couple. Occasional brackets within the text of the interview excerpt itself surround information that I have added for clarification. Interviewer questions or comments that interrupt a given excerpt are prefaced by an "I:". 11 Historian Stuart Schwartz, to whom I am most grateful for this telling anecdote. 12 Although nature may take on different cultural guises. When I gave a talk on this topic at the University of Bergen in Norway (October, 1995), I found the audience unaccepting of the "Gibraltar" example, one man even offering an alternative interpretation of this metaphor as exemplifying the separation of husband and wife in the way that Gibraltar is separated by water from England. After very little discussion, the Norwegians supplied their own, more culturally correct, metaphorical substitute for the Rock of Gibraltar - a certain Mount Dovre. Norwegians have an expression, they told me, that translates, "Until Dovre falls." 13 At Wesleyan University in October, 1996. 14 Such ignorance of conventional metaphors is by no means limited to the young. More recently, the chair of a university committee on which I sat used the metaphor of "stepping in a mare's nest" as synonymous with "opening Pandora's box," or "opening a can of worms." (He told me afterwards that, as he was speaking, he mentally eliminated "Pandora's box" in favor of "mare's nest" in case thefirstmetaphor would be thought sexist.) At the next meeting, he informed me he had since learned that he had misused the "mare's nest" metaphor; it was meant to stand, instead, for something highly unlikely to be encountered in reality. 15 D'Andrade (1995:167) observes that this language is tacit because not learned by direct instruction. Rather, Much of the folk model of the mind is deeply embodied in the lexicon of natural language, so that in learning the language the child learns the great distinctions between perception, cognition, affect, motivation, and intention. Also, as the philosopher Zeno Vendler (1972) has pointed out, there is a close correspondence between the kinds of speech acts found in natural language and these same categories (ibid.).

16 Indeed, natural reasoning is quite different from exercises in forma) logic. D'Andrade (1989a:823) comments that "it is therefore a matter of some irony that when cognitive scientists began to try to simulate human reasoning, they took as exemplary tasks either cognitive games or the highly specialized symbol-manipulation problems found in math and logic. Neither choice gives a very representative sample of the cognitive tasks that people do frequently or do well." 17 That this contemporary understanding of marriage as a shared life has its roots

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in the nineteenth century ideal of the companionate marriage is suggested by historian Robert Griswold when he observes: Home life assumed a new significance in the nineteenth century, for it was there that marital companionship either blossomed or withered. But before the home could fulfill its important functions, before it could become an effective refuge and a repository of morality, husbands had to be convinced that home, not society, was where they should spend their leisure time. (Griswold 1982:129) Not mutual need fulfillment, but home and companionship, were then the idiom in which the desirability of spouses leading a shared life was understood. 18 Milton Regan (1993:34-67) traces this shift from status to contract, which he characterizes (ibid.:33) as a contrast between complementary obligations and the voluntary commitment of individuals, through developments in family law regarding such matters as marital contracts and no-fault divorce. He presents this trend in law as part of a more pervasive American movement from social role to authentic self, or "what Robert Bellah and his colleagues have termed 'expressive individualism/ the belief that self-actualization occurs through the expression of each individual's unique emotional core" (ibid.:45). This trend finds support, Regan argues (ibid.), in the decline of the Victorian ethic of self-restraint and the rise of modern consumer culture. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English (1978:268-281) attribute the same shift differently, to a contractual view of relationships much more specifically to the rise of the human potential movement in the popular psychology of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. These authors summarize how, in the way of thinking introduced by that self-help movement, need fulfillment translates into the contractual terms of the marketplace: If you are not responsible to anyone but yourself, it follows that relationships with other people are merely there to be exploited when (emotionally) profitable, and terminated when they cease to be profitable. The primary assumption is that each person in a relationship has a set of emotional, sexual, or other "needs" which he or she wants met. If they are no longer being satisfied by a friend or sexual partner, then that bond may be broken just as reasonably as a buyer would take his business away from a seller if he found a better price. The needs have an inherent legitimacy - the people are replaceable. Thus a bad relationship is one where you "put in" more than you "get out." Relationships - especially marriages - are in realityfinancial/emotional"contracts" in which rights and responsibilities should be clearly agreed on, and preferably spelled out in writing, down to the last intimate expectation... Marriage, it is revealed, is a deal like any other which begins when two people "sell" themselves to each other. (Ehrenreich and English 1978:274-275; italics in original). Whether or not popular psychology was the main impetus for this new contractual way of thinking about relationships, or just an extreme expression of it, this fashionable "marketplace psychology" (ibid.:269) certainly provided a language for it - a language linking need fulfillment to benefit and unmet needs to costs that had infiltrated my interviewees* talk about their marital experience at the end of the seventies. 19 D'Andrade (1989b) has investigated experimental subjects' performance on logic problems, observing that reasoners are much better at modus tollens problems and syllogisms when these are constructed out of "culturally coherent" rather than arbitrary content. For example, as is well known, subjects have

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great difficulty figuring out, from ifp then q and not q whether p is true or false. What makes modus tollens so difficult, D'Andrade considers, is the double change of perspective it requires, from/> to q as a topic, and again from q to not q (ibid.: 138). Yet, he finds, subjects reason readily from the identically formed problem, "If this rock is a garnet then this rock is a semi-precious stone" and "This rock is not a semi-precious stone" to the correct conclusion that "This rock is not a garnet" (ibid.: 139-140). Similarly, D'Andrade points out, subjects given "Some of the artists are beekeepers" and "None of the beekeepers are chefs," have trouble seeing that "Some of the artists are not chefs" (taken from Johnson-Laird 1983:101). But given a syllogism of the same form with a culturally coherent content - "Some artists are temperamental types" and "No temperamental type always keeps his temper" - it is easy for the same subjects to infer that "Some artists do not always keep their temper" (D'Andrade, ibid.: 141-142). Noting that any instantiations subjects create on the spot are likely to be ill-formed and hence too fragile to support complex reasoning about problems like these that require even a moderate amount of mental manipulation, D'Andrade concludes that such reasoning depends on already "having a well-structured cognitive schema which can be used as the template for a specific instantiation of a particular state of affairs" (ibid.: 141). In such a well-structured schema, relationships are maintained across the shifting perspectives that must be taken to solve the problem, he argues (ibid.: 139). Instead of disassembling experimental tasks to see why people cannot do them and how to make them easier for people to do, I have taken the tack of analyzing a naturally occurring task to see how people do it and what makes it easy for them to do. This approach has allowed me to get closer to the process by which well-structured schemas for reasoning work. 20 Jean Mandler (1984:14) uses the term event schema to designate one kind of schema that structures narrative. Connections among events in such a schema may be causal, conventional, or arbitrary temporal ones. The structure I am describing in this book is a chain of events wholly causally connected, and is used for reasoning. It has begun to emerge, however, from analysis that Christopher McCollum (1996; personal communication) is conducting on the narratives my interviewees tell about marriage, that the same event sequence structures these. Perhaps the event sequence I have uncovered is a restricted example of Mandler's event schema. Perhaps, further, such event schemas are not limited to structuring narrative, but have more general uses. 21 I am indebted to D'Andrade not only for the analysis on which I draw in this paragraph, but also for the accompanying crash mini-review of formal logic. 22 Staying together for the sake of the children, even when the marriage is not fulfilling to the spouses, is an alternative event sequence, a subplot in the American marriage narrative. We recognize that it happens while denying that it should, since marriages are supposed to be fulfilling. That her sister-in-law's may be one of these latter kinds of marriage kept together for the children's sake is suggested to this speaker by an added piece of evidence: the sister-in-law does not seem as happy as she would be if her marriage were fulfilling. 23 Even could a speaker keep track of his or her own argument and had the leisure to make it in all its length and complexity, the speaker would risk losing his or

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her audience, both figuratively and literally. Thus memory may conspire with sociality to dictate the simplification of natural reasoning. Tellingly, Hutchins (1996:67) has written about his choice of ship navigation as an object of study that he had no idea when he began how important it would be to his research that "many of the resources available to the participants are directly observable by the researcher" as well, making "the analysis of the use of those resources much easier than it would otherwise be." He suggests that, more generally, "settings where problems and their solutions have been crystallized in physical artifacts are simply easier to study than settings that lack that kind of structure," and he recommends that we "tackle the methodologically easy cases first" when doing theoretical exploration. In spite of the greater methodological challenge it entails, I trust my work shows that analysis of internalized and largely tacit cultural mediating structures is entirely feasible and theoretically rewarding. Considered as a discourse type (Linde 1993:90-92) this is a well-formed explanation: The proposition to be proven - that the marriage is a successful one - is set out in the beginning, the evidence for this proposition is adduced, in the form of examples showing that the marriage is mutually fulfilling, and, finally, the proposition is restated as a conclusion: "So," - that is, because the marriage is fulfilling - "maybe we'll be a success." Like assumptions about the emotions people will feel, such as that linking fulfillment and happiness, assumptions like this about the motivations people will experience, though crucial to marriage, are rarely articulated. Filling in our understanding of all human activity, they are so continuously encountered as to be completely taken for granted. Thus, reasoners can rely on their audience to share these assumptions that fill in the links between mutual benefit, effort, and marital lastingness. For both reasoner and audience, the model of mind, emotion and motivation (see D'Andrade 1987, 1995:158-169) on which these assumptions are based is as transparent as is the conduit metaphor. He refused to take on what his wife considered a fair share of the work and responsibilities of their marriage, ignoring her expressed feelings of being very unequally treated (see Quinn 1992b for her story). Most strikingly, and again over her objections, he insisted on a largely unshared life in which he continued to spend most of his leisure time playing basketball and drinking beer with his friends, as he had done before he married. She complained that he never let her know where he was or when he was coming home, so that she constantly worried about him, and that she could never persuade him to do things with her. See Quinn (1987) for a brief discussion of causality in American English. Achievement of compatibility to date, as reflected in their trust, etc., appears to have had a feedback effect as well, giving this couple confidence that they can "continue working any other stuff that comes up" in the future. Litigation and dispute settlement, like the Trobriand land litigation analyzed by Hutchins (1980), provide clear examples of reasoning for high stakes. This model for success is not the only larger cultural theme that has colonized our contemporary understanding of marriage, as some readers will have observed - the most notable others being the themes of utilitarian exchange and need fulfillment. These, too, probably heighten the appeal of the schema for marriage somewhat.

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32 That success and self-reliance are historically linked has perhaps been most forcefully put by James Oliver Robertson: Success - survival - was the measure of fitness. Success had long been, for Americans, a moral goal. The Puritans had brought with them, later Americans believed, the idea that success was a sign of God's Grace, a sign that the successful individual was one of the elect. That aura continues to cling to the vision of success. For the social Darwinists, success was a sign that the racial and moral character of the individual was of the highest. If successful Americans could no longer claim to be among God's elect, they could still claim to be among nature's select. It was the individual who triumphed over competition, who succeeded by hard work, careful self-training, an eye to the main chance, the luck to be in the right place at the right time, and who had the versatility to grasp opportunity. The jack-of-all-trades, sturdy, independent, free American could not have been improved upon, in the imagination of most Americans, as a fit survivor. Horatio Alger's heroes were such survivors, and there have been few American heroes or heroines since Alger whose success was not a result of natural selection (Robertson 1980:290). While Robertson views success and independence as joined in the individualism popularized by social Darwinism, another writer, Loren Baritz points to the "difficult success" of the pioneer experience as shaping the distinctive American brand of individualism that stresses hard work and independence (see also Bellahetal. (1985:148-149): To the pioneers, individualism was a fact of life, not a prejudgment or a theory. Whereas for the Puritans individualism was a postulate deduced from their theology, for the pioneers it was a position induced from their daily experience. Living in perhaps dangerous isolation, threatened with destruction if he stepped wrong, the pioneer, whether he flourished or failed, had only himself to thank or blame. For him, success came from self-reliance and independence was proof of virtue (Baritz 1982:5). Fellman's analysis of the Little house series and its authors, alluded to in note 5 of Chapter 5, should remind us not to assume that hard work and independence were always a fact of the pioneer experience, although it also offers a psychological case study in how that experience was translated, over two generations, into that lesson. 33 We can think of occasions for learning self-reliance, like sleeping in a separate bedroom, going to overnight summer camp, or, later, managing one's own clothes budget, in which success receives little emphasis, and other occasions for learning to achieve and succeed, like participating in team sports or learning to play the piano, that have little to do with self-reliance. But the two values co-occur often enough, in American experience, to be tangled together in our understanding. 34 This possibility was raised by Robert Paul, in discussion following my presentation of an earlier version of the present argument (now Quinn 1996) at a Mellon Foundation Symposium organized by Bradd Shore and Charles Nuckolls, Cultural models and ambivalence: at the crossroads of cognitive and psychoanalytic anthropology, at Emory University in March of 1995. Paul's suggestion marked one among a number of moments during that lively symposium that demonstrated the fruitfulness of cross-fertilization between cognitive and psychoanalytic anthropology. 3 5 Arlene Skolnick (1991:177) likewise comments on this propensity of Americans to assume "that a cure exists for whatever ails us," linking it to the fact that social problems more generally, however serious, "are no longer seen as inevi-

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table; we believe that something should be done about them." Skolnick attributes this attitude to medicine's great successes in particular and the elimination of so many severe social problems from the lives of the majority of people in modern societies, in general. While a period of remarkable technological progress in world history might explain the origination of this "can do" orientation, we have to ask why Americans, in particular, cling to it and why we do so in the face of all our burgeoning unsolved social problems. 36 Da Silva's refusal to endorse "forever and ever" marriage probably does not represent a California precursor of changes coming to American marriage nationally. Her North Carolina contemporaries exhibited the same caution in occasional remarks about their marriages such as, "[0]ur idea of permanence is not permanent, permanent, permanent" [3W-6], "Even though I knew forever might not be forever" [9W-1], or "I don't feel like you can really rest assured that it's go - that anything can last forever and forever" [2H-2J. As I have already discussed, this reservation also comes through in the metaphors my interviewees chose to characterize marital lastingness, which were not always unqualifiedly everlasting. At the crest of the biggest rise in divorce rates in their lifetimes, and in the face of media obsession with this statistic and their own personal knowledge of the divorces of friends and relatives - all of which they talked about abundantly- it is not surprising that many interviewees acknowledged the possibility of even their own marriages ending. However, Da Silva's caveat should not obscure the logic of her argument, that a lasting marriage requires effort and marriage merits effort because we expect and want it to last however successful we might ultimately be in making it so, 37 Although Ann Swidler, the co-author of Habits of the heart who conducted the interviews for its chapter on "Love and marriage," has been quoted as saying in an unpublished 1985 manuscript: [The romantic love myth] has been replaced by another powerful heroism - the heroic effort people view as necessary to keep their relationships going. They insist that one must "work at" a relationship. But even more, they insist that a whole range of virtues - from honesty and a willingness to face change to stamina and a willingness to stick by one's commitments - are necessary to preserve a modern marriage. (Quoted in Skolnick 1991:194) 38 See Hutchins 1995:311 for a related observation about experts' inability to say how they perform some automated skill, once their memory for the mediating structures from which they acquired the skill has "atrophied." 39 As an instance of expert social commentary, this book represents a public cultural form of a special kind, one in which the cultural understandings of ordinary people are particularly susceptible to being distanced and filtered - in a way, for example, that TV talk shows cannot do to people's voices. 40 In a comment reminiscent of the coercive force that linguists grant to metaphor, they say at one point about the interviewee Ted Oster, "He seemed to reach for the idea that the interests, and indeed the selves of the partners, are no longer fully separable in a long-lasting relationship, but his utilitarian individualist language kept pulling him back" (ibid.: 109; italics mine). 41 This is not to say that Americans never experience the potential contradiction between marital lastingness and marital fulfillment as a psychic conflict. They are especially likely to do so when the culturally provided task solution breaks

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down. As Karen Seeley (personal communication), a marriage counselor, has pointed out to me, some couples in mid-divorce are prone to conceptualize their situations in decidedly Bellah-esque terms. 42 Or what Claudia Strauss, in her catalog of possible outcomes of conflict between idea systems in chapter 8, labels a "socially approved synthesis" of conflicting ideas. This talk about marital lastingness and fulfillment can be contrasted with other discourse on another subject covered in the same interviews - wives' contradictory ideas about their obligations as wives and their rights as human beings. Talk on this latter subject does indeed exhibit evidence of psychic conflict or ambivalence. The most graphic evidence for these women's internal conflicts between their expectations about performance of their wifely duties and their beliefs in their human rights comes from their reports of their own subjective experience (discussed at greater length in Quinn 1992): One of them described finding herself doing what she does not believe in; another described herself holding conversations between different parts of herself; and a third described oscillating between views from one day to the next - the "flip-flop syndrome" Arlie Hochschild (1989:104-105) named after an interviewee of hers who reported, "I flip-flop all the time" between thinking that her husband's career was more important and thinking that he and she should share housework equally. Neither these three women, nor any of my other interviewees, report these experiences of inner conflict between their idea that marriage should be lasting and their idea that marriage should be fulfilling. (Nor, in their talk about marital lastingness and marital fulfillment, do these interviewees evidence any of the discursive patterns Strauss describes in the next chapter that might suggest they are compartmentalizing these potentially contradictory ideas and hence, avoiding conflict over the contradiction in this way.) 43 See also Cancian (1987:107). 44 Skolnick summarizes:

The most recent extended argument for the decline of the family from a family scholar has been put forth by David Popenoe. Popenoe is precise about what he means by "family decline." Since the 1960s, he argues, four major trends have signaled a "flight" from the traditional nuclear family as both ideal and reality: declining birthrates, the sexual revolution, the movement of mothers into the workplace, and the divorce revolution. Citing Habits of the Heart, Popenoe suggests that the trends toward expressive individualism and the therapeutic attitude have contributed to family decline. He is also precise about what he means by "traditional nuclear family": it is "focused on the procreation of children" and consists of "a legal, lifelong, sexually exclusive, heterosexual monogamous marriage, based on affection and companionship, in which there is a sharp division of labor (separate spheres) with the female as full-time housewife and the male as prim provider and ultimate authority.'' (1991:203-204; italics hers)

7 RESEARCH ON THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SHARED UNDERSTANDINGS 1 Adults, that is. As Claudia Strauss and I discovered (Strauss and Quinn 1992), children, at least up to the mid-teens, do not have these understandings about love or do not get them right. 2 Another key word in this context is "commitment." While "love" labels the

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emotional aspect of marriage, "commitment" appears to capture a corresponding motivational component of the marital experience. In a separate analysis (Quinn 1982), I have shown that usages of commitment can be reduced to three classes: Use in the sense of promise (as in, "We were making a commitment together" or "The marriage commitment is a commitment to grow old together"); in the sense of dedication (as in, "I feel totally committed to the relationship" or "It's a commitment to our marriage, a commitment to wanting to make our marriage work"); and in the sense of attachment (as in, "We feel married already; we have the commitment to each other" or "Was I willing to commit myself to her?"). Commitment in these three senses might be interpreted as supplementing love as motivation for marriage. While love makes married people want to be together, stay together, and fulfill each other's needs, human experience indicates that it cannot be counted on to so motivate them over the entire course of marriage. Commitment may give them reason to stay in a marriage at times when they might otherwise leave it (promise), to make the extraordinary effort required of inevitable marital exigencies (dedication), and to sustain the relationship with the chosen spouse, even when feeling for that person might wane (attachment). In contrast to the involuntary nature of falling and being in love, the marital commitment is, as signified by its promissory import and its solemn overtones, a considered and (as virtually all civil and religious vows remind) serious act. It is probably not unusual for significant social institutions like this one to have accrued extra layers of motivation in their support. 3 To forestall a common objection that appears motivated by materialist concerns: I recognize that marriage, and hence our understanding of it, are also significantly shaped, historically, by economic, legal, and other social forces that may constrain the way the psychodynamics of love I describe in this chapter play themselves out, even as they may be constrained by these dynamics. Certainly, in particular (a clarification I owe to a personal communication from Steve Derne), family structure, and marriage, as part of that structure, shape early infant care, redounding upon the psychodynamics of love. If I do not hold these latter dynamics wholly responsible for the institutional form of marriage, even less would I want to be read as saying that this institution owes its creation to psychodynamic processes alone, although they may play a role; I am arguing that psychodynamic processes revolving around infantile, and later, adult love have found their realization in the institution of marriage, shaping this institution accordingly, in the US American case. That historically and cross-culturally this has not always been so is a point I will return to in this chapter. It is only certain aspects of our understanding of marriage that my analysis of these psychodynamics and this institutional mapping purports to explain, then; but these are central to that understanding and are otherwise quite inexplicable. 4 The expectation that people who marry should love each other is also revealed in the linguistic marking of violations of this expectation, each such label evoking a different conventional narrative for how things can go awry: people speak of a forced marriage or shotgun marriage (which some American English speakers, but not others, recognize as an acceptable extension of the phrase,

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shotgun wedding); marriage on the rebound; arranged marriage; marriag convenience; and loveless marriage. Another term used by some interviewees open marriage - describes a violation of the expectation that sex and hence, potentially also, emotional attachment, be exclusive to marriage. As we will see in this section, this latter violation can cause great consternation. 5 Like other feelings and similar internal states, love is understood metaphorically by these interviewees as a force that, in this case, grows stronger or as a substance of varying depth that can grow deeper over time (and hence can fill one up), metaphors that help capture the degree of a feeling's intensity. In another metaphor used by interviewees that similarly reflects their assumption that love is a feeling, it is cast as something "complex," thus capturing their sense that this is a feeling that does not readily yield to rational analysis. In still another metaphor that can be used to characterize internal states more generally, love is something that may or may not be "real" or "basic," capturing the degree of certainty these speakers have about what they feel - a certainty they say grows with the feeling's intensity. 6 The reciprocity of love is most often expressed in a metaphorical language of exchange, in which love is a resource that each one "gives" and "gets back" from the other, or "gets" and "returns." By extension of this metaphor, people marry to acquire love, as one man indicates when he claims that a former girlfriend just wanted to get married so that she could say, "Tve got a man,' or something like that. Not for love, you know" (2H-4). Love, in this metaphor, is jointly possessed: "I think that we both know that we have all of the love that we need between us" (6H-6). Itself a resource, it not only causes one person to want to give to another, but becomes one of the things given, so that interviewees can speak of "just being together and doing things that are beneficial to each other, and providing each other with companionship and care and love, all those things" (2W-1), or say, "generally there was support and care and love there for me" (5W-8). 7 A theoretical state of affairs summed up in the title of a new book on the subject, Romantic passion: a universal experience? (Jankowiak 1995b). Th ethnographic studies presented in this book (see, especially, Harris 1995) are actually quite persuasive on the cross-cultural recurrence of something like love as we experience it (an argument that goes back to Rosenblatt 1967). This book's theoretical chapters explain this putative human universal largely in terms of reproductive success. If I have not seriously entertained this latter explanation in my own analysis of American love and marriage, it is because the psychodynamic interpretation I have developed seems to fit the picture of adult love so satisfactorily. Also, I confess to being leery of an approach that can invent, for any cultural practice, a function in terms of reproductive success. Nevertheless, I hope I am open to debate on the relative merits of alternative explanatory paradigms for theorizing about love. 8 Although neither may remember, because the occasions were so long ago, both Sandra Scarr (at a 1986 conference at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville on Love in social and historical perspective organized by Baine Alexan der, Mary McConnell and Joel Robbins and sponsored by the Department of Anthropology there) and Robert Levy (at a University of California, San

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Notes to pages 204-206 Diego, Department of Anthropology colloquium in 1987) made me see the need to explain refinding rather than simply taking it as given. Mathews says that Oaxacan Mexican men "hope abstractly for marriage to the ideal mother" who exemplifies the Marian virtues, but because these men have learned to denigrate and distrust women and because their marriages are arranged, they are unable to look for love in marriage. Rather, they sabotage their marital relationships, for example by cheating on their wives or beating them. In this configuration, then, love is neither refound nor renounced, but as in the cult of unrequited love that flourished among some European classes in the Middle Ages - forever unattained. Robert LeVine and Karin Norman (1994:9), quoted in chapter 4 to the effect that "a new ideology of affectionate and emotionally responsive maternal care" overtook Americans after World War II, go on to say, "The ideology represented an extension of the romantic ideals of innocent childhood and solicitous mother-love to the specific domain of mother-infant relations, reconceptualizing discipline as cruelty, coercion and indifference" (ibid.) I wonder if this strain in our thinking about infant care was really so new, or whether it simply regained the status of official wisdom. My mother described her intense inner conflict over the care of my older brother, born in 1937. She tried to follow the strict feeding schedule recommended in the most popular childrearing-advice book of the time and prescribed by her pediatrician, but abandoned it, finally, because she could not bear to hear my brother crying. This mother, it seems, felt that the feeding regime then being advocated was cruel and favored a more emotionally responsive style well before the "experts" caught up to her after World War II. Perhaps even more telling, a man interviewed by Claudia Strauss reported to her that, around the same time my mother was giving up the doctor-prescribed feeding schedule, his wife had stuck to it, but over the objections of his mother. Scheduled feeding may have been a brief interruption of "solicitous mother-love." In a different twist than either the account I am about to give or Mathews' story (in note 9) about Oaxacan men, Wendy Luttrell (personal communication) has suggested to me that the inevitable disjuncture between extreme idealization of mother love and actual experience explains the later impetus to refinding. Experience must necessarily fall short of such an unrealistic ideal, and therefore disappoint, motivating adults to seek what they have come to feel they never had, or never had enough of, in infancy and childhood. Victor de Munck (1996) has analyzed a Dra vidian Sri Lankan case to show how social practices can direct the course of romantic love toward someone of an appropriate (in this case, cross-cousin) category for arranged marriage. Arranged-marriage practices need not be incompatible with love matches. Nevertheless, even in the case de Munck describes, a minority of individuals enter, against their will, into loveless arranged marriages; and the possibility of suicide, should parents reject one's chosen mate and arrange a marriage with someone else, is a parental concern. Christine Oppong (1980) makes the same argument, based on the evidence of historical changes in Akan marriage. She finds that among those classes and groups for whom marriage has taken over the economic functions once the

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province of the matrilineal descent group, extramarital liaisons have become common for men, outlets for the love and romantic sexuality once the province of marriage. 8 RESEARCH ON CULTURAL DISCONTINUITIES

1 The title is also ungrammatical. At the time, I did not know the rules on "that" versus "which." 2 Of thosefifteen,ten were men; nine held blue-collar jobs; twelve were between 40 and 65 years old; all but one was born in the United States (nearly all of them in Rhode Island); all were white, albeit of diverse ethnicities; and all but one were (or had been) married and had children. The focus, in my early papers (Strauss 1990, 1992b), on the attitudes of just the blue-collar men out of this sample came about because there were enough of them to start looking for similarities and differences among a seemingly homogeneous group. 3 To date, interviews have been conducted with 16 Rhode Islanders and 4 North Carolinians. They are a much more diverse group than my Ciba-Geigy interviewees: 11 are women; 6 were younger than 30; 6 had household incomes of less than $20,000 and 2 had household incomes of more than $75,000; 3 are persons of color; 4 are first-generation immigrants (from the Carribean, Portugal, and England); and 7 had never been married (although 3 of those were in long-term heterosexual or homosexual relationships). 4 For an example from Quinn's research, see chapter 6, note 42. 5 For clinicians I should add that this is not a pathological condition, e.g., not the kind of dissociation that is a reaction to trauma. In Strauss (1992b) I used the term "bounded" to describe schemas that I am now calling "compartmentalized." The advantage of "compartmentalized" over "bounded" and - another term I have used, "contained" - is that it suggests separation among a number of contained or bounded schemas. Disjuncture among schemas is my current interest. 6 Some of these theorists are not talking about conflicting beliefs so much as multiple roles, self-representations, or identities, or even absence of an experiencing center of awareness and feeling (sometimes called "the transcendental ego'). See Ewing (1990), Harris (1989), and Spiro (1993) for helpful discussions of different meanings of "self." 7 Occasionally Lovett became aware of and commented on these inconsistencies as well (Strauss 1997). 8 Page numbers from my transcripts are included in my citations since it is sometimes important for my argument to show whether two quoted interview passages were from separate or closely adjoining parts of the interviews. The year is indicated to distinguish the 1985 interviews from those conducted later. Since this information is irrelevant to Quinn's argument, her citations indicate the interview number only. My other transcription conventions are as follows: long pause [xxx] uncertain transcription [xxx] paraphrase or text added by author for clarification xxx uttered with strong force; speaker's emphasis authors emphasis xxx

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9 See also Boyte and Riessman (1986), whose discussion of "new populism" allies communitarian and this new (left) populism more closely than I have. 10 A cynical reader, noticing the pause in the third sentence and seeming midsentence switch to a different meaning of "success** than Lovett had started the sentence with, might speculate that this was a representation of himself he was putting forward just to make a favorable impression in the interview. It is true that Lovett highlighted this side of himself over other representations he might have chosen, but impression management does not explain why the theme of being a caring father permeated his discussion of a variety of topics, nor why these values were frequently expressed in actions outside of the interviews, including some I witnessed during my interviews with another member of his family. 11 The order of presentation of these three proposals was randomly rotated. 12 The significant differences reported in the previous section between those who heard the populist and those who heard the communitarian statements were found among all respondents. But most other results (for example, the relation between the individualist statement and support for cutting off welfare benefits for children born out of wedlock to teenage mothers) were statistically significant only for the smaller group of those who were less certain of their views. In addition, respondents who heard any of the priming statements, both those who felt strongly and those who did not, tended to be more in favor of providing jobs, health care, and child care to everyone who needs them than the control group, who were not given any of the initial statements. This suggests that in addition to the associations activated by one or another statement, merely having the opportunity to think about these sorts of issues for an extra minute affected respondents* judgments. (See Yankelovich 1991 on the difference between considered "judgments" and less considered "opinions.*') 13 Such a partly integrating schema would be a central node in what I have elsewhere called a personal semantic network (Strauss 1992b). 14 See Strauss (1997) for a more complete presentation of these ideas. 15 Yet Healey was not a vegetarian; using the same reasoning, he argued that humans had been designed to eat meat. 16 Although Naomi Quinn found that when she asked the students in one of her classes to define "self-reliance,'* some of the responses included "making things with your hands" and "survival when left in the wilderness." 17 My account is different from Spiro's in that I am concerned not so much with a quantitative scale (degree of salience) as a qualitative one (type of motivational effect). 18 See also Shweder (1992). 19 Sennett and Cobb's Hidden injuries of class (1972) suggests another reason why these working men may not have wanted to take white-collar jobs. These authors argue that the working-classmen they interviewed who had moved into white-collar jobs felt ambivalent about their work because they saw manual labor as having more dignity. This also fits Willis's discussion of the values of the British working-class "lads** he describes in Learning to labor (1977). I did not receive any hint of this attitude, however, from the eight working-class (or former working-class) men whom I interviewed intensively in the Ciba-Geigy,

Notes to pages 238-246

289

nor from the many more whom I interviewed more briefly for background. Nor did another researcher, Halle (1984), find the attitude among workers in his careful participant-observation study in a chemical factory. This discrepancy raises the suspicion that Willis and Sennett and Cobb may have focused on the views of an unrepresentative minority, possibly out of some defensiveness about their own white-collar, academic jobs. (Sennett reports a conversation his plumber had with him: "You mean, Dick, you mean you make a good living just by sitting around and thinking? By what right? Now don't take that personally - I mean, I'm sure you're a smart fellow and all that - but that's really the life, not having to break your balls for someone else" (ibid.:38). Willis's study concentrates on the attitudes of only one clique of boys, those especially authority-defying ones whose criticisms of the system he appreciated. And Sennett and Cobb admit that they see their work as "art" rather than "the recitation and interpretation of facts":

In a few instances we have put words in people's mouths, words they were struggling for, we felt, but couldn'tfind.Twice we have combined elements from several life histories into one. We hope that the people interviewed will forgive us for pushing the presentation of their lives so close to the boundaries offiction.It is for clarity and art that we have done so . . . (ibid.:42-3)

20 21 22

23

24

25 26

In recent years some social scientists have argued for the "fictive" character of our writing. Yes, we craft our accounts, choosing facts selectively to persuade readers of our interpretation. That does not mean, however, that we are free to distort our findings or make them up. See Passaro (1996). Monteiro had previously emphasized her father's advice to her. In 1987 (the most recent census figures I could obtain), the wife's earnings were greater than the husband's in only 10 per cent of US married-couple households (Earnings of married-couple families: 1987, Current population reports> Series P-60, Number 165, p. 5). Other commentators have noted the importance of adequate breadwinning for men's self-esteem, in the United States (Kimmel 1996; Weiss 1990) and elsewhere (Brandes 1980; Gilmore 1990). "Cultural historians will note that Disney has brazenly violated recent barriers of taste and cultural respect and has filled the movie with the ripest of Hollywood's 'Arab* cliches" (David Denby review of Aladdin, New York, 11/30/92:110). Although the particular sort of interracial romance shown in Pocahontas was not controversial in 1995. Sexual relations between Native Americans and Euro-Americans are not now and perhaps never have been as controversial as those between African-Americans and Euro-Americans. Probably the relationship between Pocahontas and John Smith shown in the movie indirectly refers to black-white relations in the United States now - in a safe, unlikely-to-ofFend way. It is surprising that Disney should be lauded for promoting interracial dating in 1995, when the Broadway musical, South Pacific, dealt with the same theme in 1949. This understanding may be changing, as both multiple early childhood caretakers and serial monogamy become more common than in the past few decades. See, for another example, Gladwin (1970). Similarly, Max Weber described the way the private visions of religious visionaries were adapted by clerics in the next generation to make religious practice more meaningful and acceptable to

290

27 28 29 30

31 32

33 34

Notes to pages 246-254

potential followers, until a "too comfortable" religion is produced, against which a new visionary revolts (Weber 1946,1958). In Weber's scheme, cultural production is complicated even further than in the situation described by Barth, because there is an oscillation between the public and two sorts of producers (the first-generation visionaries and the later-generation populizers). See also Sperber (1996:65). See also Newman (1993). One National Public Radio commentator I heard in the fall of 1994 referred to Clinton's welfare reform proposal as a "stealth jobs program." In 1994 54 per cent of the men sampled in exit polls favored Republican House of Representative candidates compared to 46 per cent of the women, but 63 per cent of those sampled who thought their standard of living was getting worse favored Republican House of Representative candidates compared to 34 per cent of those thought their standard of living was getting better. (The racial gap in this exit poll sample, on the other hand, was large: 58 per cent of Whites and only 12 per cent of Blacks favored the Republican candidates, Connolly 1994.) The low midterm election voter turnout meant that Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 1994 with the support of only 18 per cent of the eligible voters (Pillsbury and Richie 1995). Fallows (1996:60) gives the examples of Cokie Roberts, "a frequent and highly paid speaker before corporate audiences'* or Sam Donaldson, whose base pay from ABC is said to be about $2 million a year and who owns 20,000 acres of ranch land in New Mexico. Opinion leaders who are less well paid are still likely to have social networks that include the rich and so come to be much more familiar with their perspective than that of the poor. Another possibility, pointed out to me by Naomi Quinn, is that he may repress this knowledge. See also Rank (1994), who found that in 1981, Wisconsin women on welfare had a lower fertility rate than Wisconsin women and US women as a whole (ibid.:72ff.).

9 B E Y O N D OLD OPPOSITIONS 1 Remember, for example, Schneider's announcement, at the end of the introduction to his widely read book on American kinship, that it was his intention to create "an account of the American kinship system as a cultural system, as a system ofsymbols" and that therefore the book was "not about what Americans think, as a rational, conscious, cognitive process about kinship and family, although it is based in no small part on what Americans say they think about kinship and family" (Schneider 1968; italics in original). This disclaimer, though more tortuous, is every bit as unequivocal on this point as Geertz's remark about culture, quoted in chapter I, that "though ideational, it does not exist in someone's head" (Geertz 1973i:10).

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References

2 o, 263n39 Hervik,P.,258n6 Hinton,A.,263n41 Hinton, G., 6,56, 57,64,76,82, 128-29, 267n29,270nl3 Hirsch,JL263n41

Name index Hirschfeld,L.,79,268n42 Hobsbawm, E., 25, 54 Hochschild, A., 212,283n42 Hollan, D., 262n34 Holland, D., 42,49,77,78,79,139,140, 232,233,243,255,260n8,264n3,267n33, 271nl6,272nl9,274nll Hsu, F., 106 Husserl, E., 14 Hutchins, E., 42,49,115,125,154,163, 165,189,243,258n7,260n8,263n42, 263n44,263n45,274nl 1,280n24,280n30, 282n38 Ingham, J., 124,258n9,269n3 Ireland, W., 202,203 Irvine, J., 80 Jameson, F., 24,31,144,213,228-229,231 Jankowiak, W., 203,204,285n7 Jessell, T., 52,90,264n4,269nl Johnson, M, 141,143-44,152,158-59, 276n7 Johnson, R., 258nll Jordan, M., 65 Kandel, E., 52,90,264n4,269nl Kant,L,49,264n3 Karger,H.,247 Katz, M., 247 Kavaler,L., 182 Kazin,M.,2l6 Keefer,C, 106 Keesing, R., 261nl8 Kellner,D.,262n35 Kempton,W.,49 Kimmel,M.,289n22 Kirkpatrick, J., 262n30 Kitayama, S., 262.30,262n3l, 269n7 Klady,L.,246 Kluckhohn,C, 176,210 Kondo, D., 30,98,214,258n7,262n30 Kovecses, Z., 144,158-59,274nl 1,276n7, 276n9 Kroeber,A., 176 Kruschke,J.,268n41 Kurtz, S., 203,204,259nl 1,263n46 LaBarre,W., 137 Lacan,J.,229,259nll Lachter, J., 79 Lakoff,G.,81,140,143-144,152,158-59, 265nl0,265nl 1,274nl 1,276n7,276n9 Lane, R., 212 Langacker, R., 18,140,257n4,260nl2

321 Lasky, J., 203 Latour, B„ 263n45 Lave, J., 43-44, 54,115,260n8,263n42, 274nl2 Leacock, E., 37, 38,262n38 Levinson, S., 66,80 Levi-Strauss, C, 5,36,44-45 LeVine, R„ 106-107,113,116,133,210, 261nl8,271nl7,286nl0 Levy, R., 35-36,285n8 Libet,B.,264n52 Limbaugh, R., 249-250 Linde,C,276n5,280n25 Lindesmith, AM 120 Linger, D„ 18,153 Locke, J., 5 Loftus,E.,61,91 Lucy, J., 124 Lun,W.,113 Luttrell,W.,286nll Lutz,C,4,29-30,271nt7 Lystra,K.,206,207 Maccoby.R, 78,105,238 Macdonald, C., 266n23 Macdonald, G., 266n23 Mackenzie, G., 211 Madsen, R., 106,162,183-187,219, 278nl8,281n32,283n44 Malinowski, B„ 238,241,257nl Mandler,J.,279n20 Mandler,G.,257n3,264n4 Marcus, G., 35-36,261n20 Marcus, S., 182 Markus, H„ 262n30,262n31,269n7 Martin, E., 276n8 Martin, J., 78,105,238 Marx, K., 36, 38,210 Mathews, H., 49,204,258n6,286n9, 286nll May, E., 178 McClelland, J., 6,56, 57,60,64,82,128-29, 164,179,265n8,266n21,267n29,267n35, 270nl3 McCloskey, M., 268n36 McClosky,HM2U McCollum, C, 279n20 McGaugh, J., 93 McHugh,E.,31 Mead, G., 35 Medved, M„ 390 Merzenich,M.,52,81,90 Metcalfe, J., 53 Miller, G., 264n4 Miller, P., 26 In 19

322

Name index

Mintz,S.,41,263n41 Moody, A„275nt7 Morelli,G.,205 Munro, P., 57 Nelson, C,261n20 Newell, A., 61 Newman, K., 290n28 Norman, D., 57,63 Norman, K., 106-107,116,271nl7, 286nl0 Nuckolls, C, 189,281 n34 Obeyesekere,G., 12,22 Oppenheim, D., 205 Oppong,C,286nl3 Ortner, S., 20-23,44,93,115,118,260nl5, 260nl6 Parish, S., 262n34 Parret,H.,265n9,265nl3 Parsons, T., 13,259nl Passaro, J., 289n20 Paul, R., 189,264n51,270nl2,271nl8, 281n34 Pavelchak, M., 103 PDP Research Group, the, 60,265n8 Person, E., 203 Piaget, J., 49,264n3 Pillsbury,G.,290n31 Popenoe.D., 187,283n44 Pylyshyn, Z., 61 Quine,W.,5 Quinlan, P., 60,265n7,266n23,268n37 Quinn, N., 24,41,49,77,78,79,121,133, 135,138,139,140,141,144,151,157, 158,164,212,243,255,264n3,275n3, 276n9,280n27,280n28,281n34,283nl, 283n42,284n2 Radway,J.,35,129,274nl3 Rahula,W.,33 Ramsey, W., 266n23 Ranger, T., 25,54 Rank, M., 249,290n34 Reddy,M., 18,153, 155-156 Reeves, J., 260n8 Regan, M, 178,208,278n 18 Regier, T., 61,80-81,266nl8,268n41, 268n47 Reich, R„ 216 Rice, L„ 35 Richie, R.,290n31 Rickman,J„ 119

Riessmah, R, 216,288n9 Roberts, C, 290n32 Roberts, J., 261 n21 Robertson, J., 28 ln32 Rogoff, B., 205 Rosaldo, R., 24,44,122,257n2,258nl 1, 261n20 Rosch (Heider), E., 264n3 Roseberry,W.,23,262n37 Rosenau, P.,26tn23 Rosenblatt, P., 285n7 Rumelhart, D., 6,56,57,60,63,64,76,82, 128-29,164,179,265n8,266n21,266n23, 267n29,267n35,270nl3 Ryle, G„ 14,17, 35,82,259n3 Sahlins, M., 98 Said, E., 24 Sameshima, K., 52, 81,90 Sanday, P., 259nl4 Sandhofer,C.,268n41 Sartre, J.-P., 44 Scarr, S., 285n8 Schank, R., 264n3 Schlachet, B„ 205 Schmajuk,N.,266nl7 Schneider, D. J., 98 Schneider, D. M, 254,290nl Schneider, W., 100,266nl7 Schober, ML, 221 Schwartz, J., 52,90,264n4,269nl Schwartz, S.,277n 11 Seeley, K., 283n41 Segall, M., 263n39 Seidman, S., 207-08 Sennett,R.,212,288nl9 Seyfarth, R. 80 Shavlik, J., 57 Shiffrin,R., 100,266nl7 Shore, B„ 10,12,270nl0,281n34 Shweder, R., 262n30,276n8,288nl8 Silverblatt,L,262n37 Silverman, H., 203 Simon, H., 61 Singer, M., 214 Skinner, D., 49,260n8 Skolnick, A., 110,187,281n35,282n37, 283n44 Sloman,S.,266nl8 Slotkin, R., 246,272n6 Smith, L„ 268n41 Smith, T., 247,248 Smolensky, P., 6, 53, 56, 57, 58,77,128-29, 164,179,266nl9,266n23,266n25, 270nl0,270nl3

Name index Sperber, D., 7,10,12,210, 259nl5,260nl3, 290n27 Spiro, M., 6,9, 12,23,30-31,33-34,95, 123,133,210,233,260nl4,262n34, 269n5,275nl6,287n6,288nl7 Spivak, G„ 261n24 Squire, L., 93 Staples, B., 91.269n4 Steele, C, 92 Stich, S., 266n23 Stoesz, D., 247 Strauss, A., 120 Strauss, C, 23,35,41,49,48,78,82,103, 121,133,135,151,180,184,214,215, 222,228,230,234,237,240,242,247, 260n9,263n41,265nl0,272nl9,283nl, 287n2,287n5,287n7,288nl3,288nl4 Sullivan, W., 106,162,183-87,219,278nl8, 281n32,283n44 Super, C, 106,272n2 Sweetser, E., 268n38 Swidler, A., 106,162, 183-187,191,219, 278nl8,281n32,282n37,283n44 Taulbert,C,275nl7 Tetel,J.,260nlO Thieme,A.,266nl7 Thompson, E., 151,152 Tiles, J., 5 Tipton, S., 106,162,183-187,219,278nl8, 281n32,283n44 Treichler,P.,261n20 Trinh, M., 35 Turner, M.,276n7,276n9 Turner, V., 10,258nll Tylor,E.,5,257n5

323 Valsiner,J.,274nll van Gelder, T., 63 Vendler,Z.,277nl5 Vygotsky, L., 263n43,274nl 1 Wallace, A., 16,120,210,261n21 Wasser, F., 246 Waxenberg, B., 205 Weber, M., 34,120,274nl4,289n26 Weisner.T., 112 Weiss, R., 214,289n22 Weitzman, L„ 186 Wellencamp,J.,262n34 Wenger,E.,263n42 Westen, D., 92,103,258n6,264n6,270nl5 White, G., 80,262n30,263n42 White, H., 182 Whitehead, H., 272n3 Whiting, B., 113,272n2 Whiting, J., U3,124,268n40 Wierzbicka,A., 30-31,106 Wikan,U., 12,31,261nl8,144 Wilder, L.,272n5,281n32 Williams, R., 36,38,210,262n36 Williams, W., 40 Willis,P.,35,288nl9 Wittgenstein, L., 5,14,15, 17,42, 54, 265nl4,272n4 Wolf, E., 25 Yankelovich, DM 248,288nl2 Yule, G., 239 Yurchak,A.,41 Zaller,J.,2U Zipser, D., 76

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