Observing, Imitating, and Participating
Alan Page
Fiske
Abstract
The Inexplicability of Action
Children,
even the older ones, are rarely offered straightforward explanations on
social matters, beliefs, ideas, values, or rituals. They must use their
eyes and ears and reason a great deal on their own. They are not encouraged
to ask questions or to seek explanations on why things are the way they
are. When they do so, they will usually be cut short with a remark like
‘that is how it is’, or ‘that is customary’....
I
may add perhaps, that I felt this absence of formal teaching quite trying
myself, and not very helpful to my endeavors to familiarize myself with
the culture. But children have an amazing gift of participation, and they
learn to behave though they are given limited instruction.(Nicholaisen
1988:205-206, on the Punan Bah of Sarawak.)
There
is every reason to think that as soon as he reflects on his practice, adopting
a quasi-theoretical posture, the agent loses any chance of expressing the
truth of his practice, and especially the truth of the practical relation
to the practice.Academic interrogation
inclines him to take up a point of view on his own practice that is no
longer that of action, without being that of science.... Simply because
he is questioned, and questions himself, about the reasons and the raison
d’être of his practice, he cannot communicate the essential point,
which is that the very nature of practice is that it excludes this question.(Bourdieu1990:91)
The
anthropologist must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair
on the veranda of the missionary compound, Government station, or planter’s
bungalow, where, armed with pencil and notebook and at times with a whisky
and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from informants,
write down stories, and fill out sheets of paper with savage texts.He
must go out into the villages, and see the natives at work in gardens,
on the beach, in the jungle; he must sail with them to distant sandbanks
and to foreign tribes, and observe them in fishing, trading, and ceremonial
overseas expeditions.{sic}
Information must come to him full-flavored from his own observations of
native life, and not be squeezed out of reluctant informants as a trickle
of talk.... Open-air anthropology, as opposed to hearsay note-taking, is
hard work, but it is also great fun(Malinowski
1954/1926:146–147)
The thesis
of this article is that people acquire most of their culture by observing
and participating.This participation
is often based primarily on imitation of observed practices that people
acquire and know motorically, as bodily skills. These kinds of competence
can rarely be translated into articulate verbal concepts. Informants pressed
to explain practices that they themselves learned by observation, imitation,
and participation generally have to make up concepts that have very tenuous,
often imaginary relations with the manner in which the informants themselves
actually acquired or generate the actions in question. Informants’ translations
of such savoir faire into conceptual language tend to be highly
problematic, distorted, and confabulated because informants are simply
unaware of and quite unable to explain how or why they actually do perform
most of their practices. Consequently, interviewing, questionnaires, life
history narratives, descriptions of events, explanations of motives or
norms, and other verbal reports are not valid primary methods for learning
about most of any culture.Fieldworkers
have to rely on true participant observation to learn a culture, because
that is the only medium in which people can acquire, reproduce, or transmit
most of their culture.
Let me
give you an example. I am doing fieldwork in a small village among the
Moose (pronounced
MOH-say; formerly spelled “Mossi”) of Burkina
Faso, in West Africa. After eighteen months of intensive instruction and
immersion, I have become quite fluent in Moore. Some people are beginning
to trust me. I’ve learned that tomorrow there is going to be a major ritual
that comes only once a year. I go to talk to some friendly, cooperative
informants.
“What’s
going to happen tomorrow?” I ask.
“It’s
Kiuugu,” they say.
“What’s
Kiuugu?” I ask.
“A sacrifice,”
they answer, with a combination of mild amusement and perplexity.
“What
will happen?” I probe.
They pause,
trying to find an answer. “Well, you’ll be there; you’ll see” they finally
respond.
“Well,
can you at least tell me why you do Kiuugu?” I ask.
They reply
with a stock phrase: “It’s what we found when we were born—and we’ll leave
behind when we die.”
I try
to push, gently, politely, but firmly, for more description, explanation,
anything!The more I push my friends,
the more irritated and perplexed they become. They don’t understand what
my questions mean, or how to answer them. Finally I give up. I go to
the ritual. It begins with the phrase, “This is what we found when we were
born” [identified possessively: our tradition].Afterwards,
I try again to get some kind of exegesis. It’s impossible; we all get exasperated
at each other. It’s not a matter of secrecy: there is no hidden or privileged
meaning. It’s just a tradition. It’s as
if I grilled you about why you carve faces in pumpkins—and why pumpkins,
rather than watermelons? Why on October 31?“That’s
just what we do!”That’s
what Halloween is!” Similarly, most Americans would probably be
at a loss if I asked them why they eat cake and ice cream at birthday parties,
why they light candles and then blow them out—or why they celebrate birth
anniversaries at all.Could you—or
most American informants—give any answer that reflects an articulated
understanding of birthday rituals that was in your mind before I asked
the question? Americans
learn about the significance of birthday candles primarily by observing
and participating in birthday parties. We rarely, if ever, discuss their
meaning with anyone, beyond a few simple ideas such as matching the number
of candles to the number of years or asserting that you get your wish if
you blow out the candles. You probably do not carve jack-o’-lanterns and
put candles on cakes as a result of anyone’s explanation of their significance.
You construct Halloween or a birthday party ritual primarily by reenacting
memories of past practices in which you have participated. These reenactments
are imitations of observed actions, not deductions from propositional rules
or conformity to linguistically formulated norms. Semiotically,
the practice of placing candles on birthday cakes and blowing them out
is transmitted by bodily mimesis. It is encoded in the mind almost kinesthetically,
as a set of motoric enactments, like mime. As a result, if I inquire about
birthday candles, you are likely to be at a loss to provide a verbal articulation
that captures the basis for this practice. You did not learn this practice
in a linguistic medium, and it is difficult to explain it verbally. Imagine
learning to dance, to pitch a baseball, or to flirt. You learn by imitatively
attempting to perform the actions you have observed. Conversely, it would
be virtually impossible to get it right without ever seeing it done. One
demonstration that you can mimic is worth a number of words. Of course,
there are limits to what we can learn by observation. I’ve watched Michael
Jordon on a number of occasions, and I still can’t quite manage some of
those moves. Unfortunately, interviewing won’t solve that problem. Think
about it: if Michael Jordan could explain to me the somatosensory and motoric
processes that enable him to hit those baskets and make those passes, and
if I could just translate his explanations back into somatosensory and
motoric competence, I could be a short, aging, feeble Michael Jordan! (I’d
settle for that!) But for
the Moose, it goes beyond the problem of exegesis. They seem unable even
to give me a verbal description of the ritual. This Kiuugu ritual
is extremely important; I deduce that it is the single most important enactment
and constitutive marker of village solidarity. Nevertheless, even my most
motivated and intelligent informants can not give me a verbal script—let
alone an exegesis—for a ritual they have performed every year of their
lives. In some
cultures, people do describe and discuss their rituals with each other.
However, likemany other peoples
in Africa, the Moose have no indigenous tradition of reflective analysis
of their own practices. They have a rich, elaborate religion, but no theology.
They have a complex society, but no ethnosociology. Like many other African
peoples, they have virtually no mythology or cosmology. They have a sophisticated
political system, but no political science. They live their lives in practice,
but without any great interest in reflecting on it, analyzing it, or trying
to explain it. Did you
ever dance? Can you describe to me, in words alone, how to dance? Have
you ever analyzed the meaning of dance steps? (Explain the mambo
or jitterbug, if you can.)Did you
play basketball or field hockey? Did you devote your energies to doing
these things, or to accounting for them? Did you ever analyze the reasons
for the having precisely five players on each side, or for the rule against
kicking the basketball? Clearly, practice, even the most refined practical
competence, need not necessarily give rise to reflective analysis. Moose
learn their many rituals by observing them, then participating in minor
roles, and eventually carrying them out with others.Moose
evidently encode, think about, and reproduce their rituals in a kinesthetic
or sensori-motor mode that resembles the way a dancer, a gymnast, a magician,
a surgeon, a carpenter, a weaver, or a fly-caster encodes, thinks about,
and reproduces the relevant skilled practices.As
an ethnographer, I had to do likewise. Eventually, Moose carried out many
rituals with me, often for the health and welfare of me and my family.
But they never described them or verbally prescribed how to do them. They
just performed them, and then left me to carry on performing them mimetically.
Later, three different diviners independently transmitted to me what they
asserted was the capacity to see the moral meanings of misfortune in the
patterns of cowry shells tossed on the ground. They passed on to me the
magical implements and legitimated my personal powers, anointing me and
my implements in special rituals. But none of the diviners ever thought
to explain or even demonstrate divination to me pedagogically. Nor did
they recognize the point in doing so when I asked them to teach me. That leaves
me, as an ethnographer, with the responsibility for translating these practices
into a written text, oral talk, diagrams, charts, or figures for my own
academic audiences. And it certainly leaves me to explain these practices;
the Moose have very little interest in doing so.These
are difficult semiotic and analytic problems, but they are properly my
problems: there is no reason to try to force the Moose to do something
they are not accustomed to doing, and do not see the point in doing.Attempting
a verbal representation of a ritual is unnatural and infelicitous—never
mind a discursive exegetical analysis. The Moose
are not unique in this respect.Victor
Turner found that Ndembu have hardly any mythology or explicit cosmology,
and he found it rather difficult to make sense of their rituals. Then he
ran into Muchona, a wandering, marginal man who loved to talk about ritual
and about his own activities as a healer. Muchona’s interpretations of
ritual symbols were uniquely detailed, clear, consistent, and cogent. Turner
was enthralled by these elaborate exegetical discourses, paying Muchona
handsomely for them and using them as the basis for most of his analysis
of Ndembu ritual. Turner discounts as mere jealousy the skepticism of his
Ndembu research assistant, who ridiculed Muchona’s accounts and said he
was lying. Turner acknowledges that many Ndembu scoffed at Muchona, points
out that Muchona “delighted in making explicit what he had known subliminally
about his religion” (p. 138), and observes poignantly that when Turner
left, Muchona “could no longer communicate his ideas to anyone who would
understand them” (p. 150).So we
have to ask whether Muchona’s singular verbal explications have anything
much to do with the way most other Ndembu understand, remember, reproduce,
and use rituals or find them compelling. The same problem arises with respect
to the famous cosmology generated by the Dogon philosopher Ogotemmeli in
his conversations with the French ethnographer, Griaule. Subsequent research
among the Dogon has completely failed to uncover any corroborative evidence
or resonance of this cosmology among other Dogon (van Beek 1991).It
seems as if the religious practices of the Moose, Ndembu, and Dogon are
fundamentally sensori-motor enactments, motorically represented and transmitted.
There may be little or no linguistically explicit conceptual foundation
for them at all. This lack
of articulable knowledge poses big methodological problems. In a few cultures,
such as many of those in Europe and South Asia, reflective exegetical analysis
is a widespread cultural practice. In these cultures, widely-known and
discussed indigenous accounts of cultural practices may sometimes feed
back to transform these practices. But even where they are readily forthcoming,
informants’ explanations may be far removed from the generative mechanisms
that actually produce the actions in question.Ethnosociology
and ethnopsychology are appropriate topics of research in their own right,
but they are not valid substitutes for scientific sociology, psychology,
or anthropology. This is
important, of course, because most anthropological and psychological investigations
have relied primarily on verbal data. Interviewing is the core of most
fieldwork. Language has also been the focus in many or most studies of
the child’s constructive acquisition ofculture.
Indeed, some researchers have even focused on meta-language, utilizing
interviews, narratives, or other linguistically-formulated representations
of language (e.g., Miller and Hoogstra 1992). This work has suggested that
language learning is closely associated with certain aspects of the acquisition
of social competence (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984; Ochs 1988; Watson-Gegeo
and Gegeo 1977). However, this discourse-oriented research tradition generally
fails to consider the overall question of how children or adults use different
semiotic media to acquire or construct their culture. Indeed, many developmental
and psychological anthropologists effectively ignore the existence of any
other mode of communication or learning aside from language. Anthropological
fieldwork often consists primarily of interviewing, supplemented by recording
of other verbal communications, without regard for any of these epistemological,
cognitive, or semiotic issues.(In
two informal samples representing hundreds of recent Ph.D. dissertations
in anthropology, an enormous majority relied almost exclusively on interviews—typically
using translators;S. Ferzacca, personal
communication.) Social and clinical psychologists rely even more exclusively
on verbal data collection. Rarely do anthropologists or psychologists even
stop to consider whether the competence, knowledge, practice, or action
they are studying is verbally articulable.If
they recognize that they are studying something that is non-verbal, they
usually do not go beyond stating that it is implicit or embodied—lumping
together all that is inarticulate without attempting to characterize or
differentiate the manner in which it is learned, remembered, reformulated,
or produced. Psychologists
have collected a considerable body of experimental and clinical evidence
demonstrating the importance of this disjunction between what people can
verbally articulate and what they can do—or between the cognitive and affective
processes that actually shape their behavior and their conscious (albeit
private) representations of their motives and minds.Nisbett
and Wilson (1977) reviewed the early evidence about “Telling More than
We Can Know,” showing that people are often unaware of the stimuli that
influence their own actions, unaware of the influences of dispositional
and situational factors that affect their actions, or unaware of their
own actions. Because they are unaware of the actual causes, people often
mistakenly explain even their own actions by referring to their a priori,
implicit theories of behavior. Subsequent research has shown that people’s
verbal reports of their own thought processes—or of their attitudes and
behaviors—may be accurate in some circumstances, but they may also misrepresent
many aspects of cognition (Ericsson and Simon 1993). Clearly, competence
does not imply cognizance. We can adequately explainhow we do only
a very few of the things we are able to do (see Borofksy 1994, for some
implications of this). Donald
Fiske (1978, 1981, 1986) pointed out that the ambiguity and shifting denotation
of words (in such instruments as rating scales and written records of behavior)
often make the validity of verbal reports of one’s own or others’ actions
problematic as the basis for a scientific psychology. Major problems in
the use of verbal reports stem from the sensitivity of subjects’ responses
to the precise manner in which questions are formulated and also from the
variation in responses that depend on the subject’s perceptions of the
interviewer. Furthermore, subjects may construct invalid responses to questions
that request knowledge they do not have. Consequently, verbal reports are
often invalid, unreliable, and misleading. (See Susan Fiske 1995 for strategies
for dealing with these problems in social psychological experiments, and
Rowe 1997 for an overview focusing on issues regarding self-reports.) In particular,
social inferences exhibit this distinction between processes of memory/learning/competence
that are accessible to conscious reflection or verbal articulationand
processes that are not. Bargh has demonstrated the pervasiveness of unintended,
involuntary, effortless, autonomous, nonconscious processes of social attention,
perception, categorization, attribution of meaning, evaluation, affective
response, motivation, and goal-establishment (e.g., Bargh 1990, 1992, 1994
1997; Spielman, Pratto and Bargh 1988; Uleman and Bargh 1988). Since people
are unaware of these “automatic” social processes, they cannot report them
or explain why they make the resultant categorizations, interpretations,
and evaluations, or why they pursue the resultant goals. Many of the most
important kinds of social competence are procedural, in this sense: people
can make skilled social inferences or utilize stereotypes and other categories
and relational schemas without knowing how they do so, or even that
they do so (e.g., Smith 1989, 1994, 1997;Smith
and Branscombe 1987). For example, in a score of studies we found that
people think about others in terms of a set of implicit relational models
they could not label or characterize; memory for events and persons, errors
of action and naming, judgments of similarity and classification of social
relationships are all based on relational models that are not represented
in the surface lexicon and are not ordinarily articulated as such (summarized
in Fiske & Haslam 1996). People were not even aware that they were
thinking about others in relational terms rather than focusing on individual
attributes. Some anthropologists
have always been aware of this issue. In 1887 when E. B. Tylor prepared
a guide for the collection of ethnographic data in northwest Canada, he
cautioned against reliance on asking preset questions, recommending instead
the observation of religious rites and the transcription and translation
of myths (Stocking 1983:72–73).In
a famous aphorism, Marett (1929/1909:xxxi) criticized intellectualist theories
of religion for being too
prone to identify religion with this or that doctrine or system of ideas.
My own view is that savage religion is something not so much thought out
as danced out; that, in other words, it develops under conditions, psychological
and sociological, which favor emotional and motor processes, whereas ideation
remains relatively in abeyance. Marett’s
student James (1917) joined him in his critique of Frazer and Durkheim’s
ideational theories, arguing that “In the first place savages live
out rather than think out their cult. To them, ‘religion’ is not a matter
of theory but of practice” (p. 5). Myths, James argued, were ex post facto
explanations and justifications of how and why they conducted their rites
(p. 217).What is required in Australian
aboriginal rites, for example, is the performance of the ceremony in a
prescribed manner—beliefs, theories, theology and dogma may grow out of
ritual, but are not the original source of it (p. 224).While
the thesis of Marett and James suffers from the attribution of concrete
enactive thought to “primitives” or “savages,” leaving abstract theories
to more “civilized” peoples, their contribution is in recognizing that
daily life, including religion, is often embodied in action—not abstraction. Later
Malinowski raised the issue again. A man
who submits to various customary obligations, who follows a traditional
course of action, does it impelled by certain motives, to the accompaniment
of certain feelings, guided by certain ideas. These ideas, feelings, and
impulses are moulded and conditioned by the culture in which we find them,
and are therefore an ethnic peculiarity of the given society. An attempt
must be made therefore, to study and record them. But
is this possible? Are these subjective states not too elusive and shapeless?
And, even granted that people usually do feel or think or experience certain
psychological states in association with the performance of customary acts,
the majority of them surely are not able to formulate these states, to
put them into words.(Malinowski
1922:22). Mauss
(1973/1936) made very concrete contributions to the demonstration that
culture consists of more than ideas, values, and institutions; it also
consists of bodily techniques or “habitus”.People
sit, walk, swim, eat, sleep, and gaze according to their cultures. Bourdieu’s
(1990) development of Mauss’s concept of habitus is expressly intended
to capture the idea that the core of culture consists of generative dispositions,
principles, and kinds of competence that are ordinarily outside of and
incompatible with consciousness. (You can demonstrate this for yourself,
at some peril, if you attempt to walk down stairs or ride a bicycle by
consciously and reflectively deciding upon each of the necessary movements).
Bourdieu contrasts habitus with rule following or intentional conformity
to explicit norms. “Practice excludes attention to itself (that is, to
the past). It is unaware of the principles that govern it and the possibilities
they contain; it can only discover them by enacting them, unfolding them
in time” (Bourdieu 1990:92; cf. Connerton 1989:101–102). Agents generally
cannot take their practices out of their practical temporal context; consequently,
abstract “theoretical replications transform the logic of practice simply
by making it explicit” (Bourdieu 1990: 93). Most cultural practices are
taken for granted; they ‘go without saying.’ As Connerton (1989: 102) observes,
the performativity and formalization of many collective rituals makes them
especially immune to discursive questioning or critical scrutiny. Bourdieu
(1990:56) contrasts habitus with consciously formulated intentions. He
characterizes habitus as “embodied history, internalized as a second nature
and so forgotten as history.... a spontaneity without consciousness or
will.”Practical sense, Bourdieu
(1990:69) writes, is “social necessity turned into nature, converted into
motor schemes and body automatisms” without agents being fully aware of
what they are doing or how they do it.Habitus,
Bourdieu (1990:73) writes, is acquired by practical mimesis based on identification,
not by conscious effort to imitate something explicitly taken as a model
per se. Similarly, the reproduction of habitus takes place “below the level
of consciousness” without memory or reflexive, articulated knowledge. Especially
in societies without schools, “the essential part of the modus operandi
that defines practical mastery is transmitted through practice, in the
practical state, without rising to the level of discourse.... Schemes are
able to pass directly from practice to practice without moving through
discourse and consciousness” (pp. 73–74). As Connerton (1989:101–102) points
out, many performative bodily memories operate at the societal level, as
skilled habitual cultural performances that may take place and be transmitted
without conscious reflective attention to them. Sapir
(1949/1927) got much more specific and concrete. He described speakers’
unconsciousness of the conceptual and sound systems that form the basis
of their language, along with people’s lack of awareness of the premises
of their systems of exchange and accumulation of wealth. Sapir demonstrated
that people operate with reference to a myriad of historically transmitted
cultural patterns that they take for granted as given in the nature of
things and which they cannot understand in explicit terms. Whorf (1956a/1937)
built on Sapir’s analyses to describe many covert categories or cryptotypes
of language (such as intransitive verbs) that are not overtly marked by
any surface morpheme. Whorf (1956b/1940) also wrote about “background phenomena.”He
pointed out that speakers cannot readily reflect on the linguistically-relative
grammatical distinctions that their language requires them to make; moreover,
speakers are unaware of the effects of these distinctions on their everyday
action and thought.Using these ideas
and Linton’s characterization of covert culture, Kluckhohn (1943) analyzed
covert patterns of culture that he called cultural configurations—unstated
premises that informants use to organize their behavior without being aware
of doing so. Even within the broad category of overt culture that is visible
to an observer, Kluckhohn distinguished between explicitly stated, normatively
sanctioned patterns of culture such as formal ideals and actual
behavioral patterns.What
people say they do may be far from their real practices. From the
start, psychoanalytic anthropologists have assumed that basic dynamic processes,
by their very nature, inevitably ensure the inaccessibility of the most
fundamental collective and personal meanings of cultural practices and
symbols. (See Anna Freud’s 1973/1936 classic account of defense mechanisms;
on repression in relation to cultural practices, see Johnson, 1997). One
of the longest debates in anthropology concerns the variability of the
unconscious infantile object cathexes toward each parent and the resolution
of this Oedipus complex (Malinowski 1927, Anne Parsons 1969, Spiro 1982,
Obeyesekere 1990, Kurtz 1992).In
this view, most cultural institutions function to provide acceptably transformed
outlets for unconscious drives that people are inherently unable to satisfy
directly or even acknowledge. People adopt and sustain religion, mythology,
the arts and many other aspects of culture because they provide socially
supported mechanisms of defense against these libidinal drives that cannot
be directly expressed (Kardiner 1939,Róheim
1943).Conversely, defense mechanisms
such as repression, projection, or sublimation are culturally constituted
to a considerable degree (Spiro 1965).What
this means is that resistance against recognizing (much less communicating)
what underlies everyday cultural symbols, activities, and institutionsis
by no means adventitious.The axiom
of psychoanalytic anthropology is that personality and culture are largely
the result of the fact that humans cannot normally admit
their fundamental motives to consciousness. From another
point of view, the founder of anthropological structuralism, Lévi-Strauss
(1953:526–527), stressed the importance of unconscious structural models
that generate people’s kinship system, social structure, mythology, and
other communicative action. Often, he argued, people have no conscious
models of their communicative structures and the conscious collective models—norms—that
people do construct for themselves are generally unsatisfactory from an
explanatory point of view. In his
interpretations of Ndembu ritual symbols, Turner (1967a) distinguished
between three kinds of meaning. The exegetical meaning consists of the
explanations given by informants in response to the ethnographer’s questioning;
these responses may be uniquely personal, common lay knowledge, or esoteric
knowledge of specialists. The operational meaning of a ritual symbol is
evident in how Ndembu use it: who are the users, what are their emotions
when using it, and who is absent when the symbol is employed.“For
the observer must consider not only the symbol but the structure and composition
of the group that handles it or performs mimetic acts with direct reference
to it” (1967a: 51). The third type of meaning is positional, deriving from
its relationship with other symbols in the total Gestalt. The operational
and positional meaning of ritual symbols is largely inaccessible to most
ritual performers, while their exegetical knowledge may be quite circumscribed—and,
we might add, typically peripheral to their performance as practice. It is
clear at this juncture that there is much more to culture than just talk:
much is habitus, practical knowledge, procedural, automatic, unconscious,
covert, embodied, experiential, sensate. Some anthropologists such as Stoller
(1989), Desjarlis (1992), Devisch (1993), Csordas (1994), Jackson (1995)
and have recently experimented effectively with a more embodied or phenomenological
methodology. But we have only just begun to address the basic question:
What are the basic modes of cultural construction? How do people acquire,
remember, reformulate, constitutively perform, and transmit culture? Artifacts,
architecture, socially transformed landscapes and ecologies, domesticated
plants and animalsall play major
roles in the reproduction and transformation of culture. The use of space
is important—for example, the distribution of bodies when people sleep
(Shweder, Jensen, and Goldstein 1995). An especially important medium for
the constitution and conveyance of culture is the entry into the body of
substances such as food, drink, tobacco, kola, betel, psychotropic drugs,
medicines, and other persons. For example, Rabain (1979, Zempleni-Rabain
1973) points out the importance of body contact, posture, proximics, and
the giving and sharing of food—especially nursing and egalitarian exchange
of food among siblings—in the molding of social relations among Wolof children
in Senegal.Elias (1993) has detailed
the historical processes through which the manner of eating came to mark
social status in renaissance Europe.In
virtually every culture, but especially traditional ones, the sharing of
food is the most important marker of inclusion and solidarity: leaving
a co-present person out of a meal or a smoke or a drink or a share of any
other comestible is a sign of hostile exclusion. Conversely, partaking
in ceremonial food together—sacrificial meat and libation beer, or Communion
wafers and wine—is the basic performative marker of unity or participatory
equivalence that I call Communal Sharing (see Fiske 1991).There
are certainly other essential modalities as well. But one medium stands
out above all others as a core channel for the reproduction of culture:
motoric imitation. In one
of the first books on social psychology, McDougal (1908; as a member of
the Torres Straits expedition, one of the first fieldworkers) followed
Tarde and Baldwin in attributing collective mental life and shared ways
of doing to imitation. McDougal agreed with Tylor that many practices persist
by imitation, long after their original meanings have been lost—sometimes
resulting in the subsequent creating of new meanings for such survivals.
Much later Miller and Dollard (1941) offered a Hullian behaviorist theory
of imitation that they tested in various experiments: they confirmed that
children (and adults) are more likely to be rewarded when their behavior
matches that of higher status persons. Bandura and Walters (1963) extended
and revised these learning theory accounts. They conducted further experimental
investigations of social imitation, focusing on the acquisition, inhibition,
disinhibition, or eliciting of “prosocial” and “deviant” (particularly
aggressive) responses. More recently
Carol Eckerman has been studying imitation naturalistically by analyzing
videotapes of everyday interaction among American children in the first
two and a half years of life. Eckerman has shown that imitation is the
principal medium for social coordination and the matrix in which verbal
conversation takes form. She found that 12-month-old children observe adults
and then tend to select corresponding objects to manipulate—while smiling,
vocalizing, gesturing to, and approaching the adult (Eckerman, Whately,
and McGhee 1979). At 24 months, when an adult imitates their actions, toddlers
respond by seeking eye contact, prolonging their own actions, and generating
imitative games (Eckerman and Stein 1990).From
16 to 32 months, children increasingly coordinate their actions with peers,
primarily through mutual imitation (Eckerman, Davis, and Didow 1989).During
this developmental period, toddlers tend to initiate conversation after
first coordinating with each other through non-verbal imitation (Eckerman
and Didow 1996). Research
with apes and other animals indicates that humans have evolved a specialized
capacity to imitate (Nagel, Olguin, and Tomasello 1993; Tomasello, Kruger,
and Ratner 1993; Heyes and Galef 1996). The exceptional capacity for social
learning through imitation is a human adaptation which appears to be an
essential foundation for the development of culture (Donald 1991, 1993,
1995).And in fact ethnographies
of childhood show that imitation is a core medium for acquiring culture
in virtually every society that has been investigated. Moreover, these
ethnographies consistently reveal that there is much less child-rearing
than there is culture-seeking. Adults do little training but children
learn a lot on their own initiative. In the first ethnography of socialization,
F. C. Spencer (1899) emphasized imitation as the principal mechanism of
socialization for Pueblo children: children imitate adult work and by age
five or six begin to participate in subsistence activities and child care.
Zuni children learn complex rituals though participation that initially
is passive but becomes increasingly active and responsible. Mead’s (1975/1930)
famous ethnography of growing up in Manus (an island near New Guinea) describes
children learning to dance, to drum, to make war, and to shoot fish by
imitating their elders; young children also play drawn-out word-repetition
games with adults (pp. 36–45, 132, 153–154). As Mead (1975:120–129) points
out, this imitation is highly selective, and Manus children show little
interest—indeed disdain—for some of the activities most important to adults:
religion, trading expeditions, ritual exchanges, and some aspects of kinship
relations.On the other hand, Raum
(1940: 145–146, 243–255) describes in detail the imitative social role
playing of Chaga children from Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, which appears
to cover the whole range of adult activities of which children are aware.
In cultures as diverse as those in New Guinea, India, and France, children
learn adult behavior by observing and imitating it (Whiting 1941:44–47;Wolfenstein
1955:113–114; Minturn and Hitchcock 1966:113, 124, 128). Imitative
play is a common way of practicing adult activities (e.g., Fortes 1970
[1938]:58–74;Hogbin 1970 [1946]:136–140;Read
1959:82–85; Nydegger and Nydegger 1966:142–145;Leis
1972:53–54).In Okinawa, children
learn by observing adult activities and initiating participation in progressively
more complex tasks; even a four-year old may become skillful with a sickle
without his parents ever instructing him in any way (Maretzki and Maretzki
1966:144–148, 152–157). As Fortes describes the Tallensi, play has
a noteworthy role in their social development. In his play the child rehearses
his interests, skills, and obligations, and makes experiments in social
living without having to pay the penalty for mistakes. Hence there is always
a phase of play in the evolution of any schema preceding its full emergence
into practical life. Play, therefore, is often mimetic in content, and
expresses the child’s identifications. But the Tale child’s play mimesis
is never simply mechanical reproduction; it is always imaginative construction
based on the themes of adult life and of the life of slightly older children.
He or she adopts natural objects and other materials, often with great
ingenuity, which never occur in the adult activities copied, and rearranges
adult functions to fit the specifically logical and affective configurations
of play.(Fortes 1970 [1938]:58–59) Western
ethnographers expect to find adults telling children about the culture:
teaching how to do things, explaining the reasons for things,
instructing the child about basic precepts. They are surprised to
find that very little of this takes place; children learn most of their
cultures on their own initiative, without pedagogy (see Atran & Sperber,
1991). Nor do children in most societies commonly ask for explanations;
Western ethnographers often note the absence of “why” questions (e.g.,
Mead 1975:126). Almost every ethnography of children or socialization comments
on the paucity of instruction and, conversely, on the fact that children
take the primary initiative and responsibility for working out for themselves
how to participate in their culture.For
example, in Okinawa: There
are no complex systems of training in skills. Adults rely heavily on observation
and imitation on the part of children; they seldom “teach” them to do things
systematically. Parents were surprised and amused when question such as
“How do you teach children to transplant rice, harvest rice, or otherwise
help in the fields?” were put to them. “We don’t teach them; why they just
learn by themselves,” was the usual answer. Children
learn by observing and experimenting. Whatever adults are doing, children
are present to watch their activities and overhear their conversations.(Maretzki
and Maretzki 1966:144;see Williams
1970:168 for a similar observation.) In Oaxaca,
Mexico, Romney and Romney (1966) describe similar patterns of socialization
of children aged five and under: “Most of their simple tasks are more in
the nature of imitative behavior of the older siblings and cousins. Helping
by young children often takes the form of apparently spontaneous help within
being asked or with any kind of formal or overt instruction” (Romney and
Romney 1966:114). Mc Phee
(1955) says of Balinese boys age 6 to 11: “Their early life is based upon
imitation of their elders; their play is partly reproduction in miniature
of various adult activities, carried out with great regard for detail”
(p. 74). Balinese children are avid patrons of the performing arts and,
like children in most traditional societies, they have access to the settings
of most adult activities. Balinese children learn ritual and dance by observation
and by having adults move them like puppets: “Verbal directions are meager;
children learn from the feel of other people’s bodies and from watching,
although this watching itself has a kinesthetic quality” (Mead 1955:43).
They make simple puppets and masks to wear as they mimic adult performances.Mc
Phee (1955:76–77) describes how one group of neighborhood boys, listening
all their lives to gamelan (a type of orchestra formed around percussion
instruments), learned to play on their own. Making their own two-person
barong tiger costume, this group put on some remarkably polished
performances. Then when Mc Phee procured a full set of instruments for
the boys and hired a teacher, he was surprised to observe that from the
very beginning the instructor, Nengah, simply modeled the parts the children
were to learn: The
teacher here does not seem to teach, certainly not from our standpoint.
He is merely the transmitter; he simply makes audible the musical idea
to be passed on. The rest is up to the pupils.... No allowance was made
here for youth; it never occurred to Nengah to use any method other than
that which he uses when teaching an adult group. He explains nothing, since
for him there is nothing to explain. If there are mistakes, he corrects
them, and his patience is great.(Mc
Phee 1955:89) Occasionally
adults may intentionally model correct behavior. Schieffelin (1991) describes
daughters learning from their mothers, who never provide verbal instruction
but occasionally do explicitly model tasks by segmenting their performances
for their daughters to imitate. But intentional demonstration with pedagogical
intent seems infrequent.Even in
societies where such modeling occurs, it is infrequent and unimportant
for cultural competence in most domains. As Bloch (1994:278) notes, citing
some additional early sources, “In
nonindustrialized societies most of what takes people’s time and energy—including
such practices as how to wash both the body and clothes, how to cook, how
to cultivate, etc.—are learned very gradually through imitation and tentative
participation.... Knowledge transmission tends to occur in the context
of everyday activities through observation and “hands-on” practice,There
is a minimum of direct, verbal instruction.” Bloch
argues further that much of cultural knowledge is not formulated in sentential
or other linguistic form.Hence,
he reminds us, it can only be learned by participant observation, in which
the fieldworker’s learning is measured by her capacity to function in the
community, especially in social relations. In many,
perhaps most societies, people regard young children—especially under age
6 or 7—as pretty much incapable of knowing, understanding, or having common
sense; as unable to exercise moral control over their own behavior; and
as incapable of taking responsibility (e.g., Fortes 1970 [1938]:24–25;Read
1959:88;Maretzki and Maretzki 1966:114–115,
120;Nydegger and Nydegger 1966:146;Romney
and Romney 1966:118–119;Lucy and
Gaskins 1997).Consequently, adults
and older children make little effort to train young children or explain
anything to them. Rogoff, Newcombe, Fox, and Ellis (1980) found that in
many cultures children aged five to seven are assigned and perform family
chores such as tending animals or younger children, but they do these tasks
with supervision. Their participation in the culture is guided by older
mentors. However, by age eight to ten children can assume independent responsibility
for many such tasks. Learning
theory, along with the importance of commendation and recognition of children’s
accomplishments in the United States, might lead us to assume that, even
without explicit instruction per se, parents and other caretakers are training
children by rewarding through praise. But this assumption seems to be misguided,
again mistakenly assuming that adults are directing the process of cultural
transmission. Most observers of socialization in traditional societies
have reported that correct performance of expected skills is almost never
praised or rewarded.[3]
Robert LeVine’s (1989) characterization of socialization matches my own
observations among the Moose of Burkina Faso: As
Gay and Cole (1967) describe childhood among the Kpelle of Liberia, and
as I observed it among the Gusii of Kenya and other peoples, children grow
up without experiencing praise from their parents or others for behaving
in a socially approved way or for learning a desirable skill. In contrast
with the familiar [white middle class] American sequences of a child’s
performing well, calling the performance to adult attention, and being
praised by the adult, the African child learns through another sequences:
observe the approved task (as performed by an older sibling), imitate it
spontaneously, and receive corrective feedback only for inadequate performance.
There is no expectation of recognition for good performance in learning
or carrying out a task, yet tasksare
learned and performed with skill. (LeVine 1989, p. 63;see
also LeVine et al 1994:216) This resembles
this my own experience learning to cultivate millet fields along side Moose
farmers, but it is important to add that “corrective feedback” typically
involves nothing more than modeling the correct behavior, without explaining
what is deficient in the performance of the child or novice (cf. Maretzki
and Maretzki 1966:144–145). Indeed, Moose often laughed at my incompetence,
saying, “You don’t know how to do that!” and simply took the hoe away from
me. Similarly, Moose often prevent children from continuing with a task
that they are performing incorrectly, without demonstrating how to do it
right (see also Minturn and Hitchcock 1966:153 on similar practices among
Rajputs in India).When a child does
anything wrong, Moose mothers tell the child to stop or threaten punishment,
just as Gusii mothers do (LeVine and LeVine 1977:148). They do not explain,
discuss, or attempt to persuade by reason. In fact, in virtually all of
the cultures in which child rearing has been described, commands and negative
feedback supplement imitation. Parents and other adults and older children
send children to fetch things or tell them to perform tasks, with no instruction,
and then tell them if they are doing something wrong. For example, Moose
and Gusii children learn to do everyday tasks by participating in adult
activities, principally by being ordered to fetch and carry, by observing
and by asking to be allowed to help (LeVine and LeVine 1977:163-165). When
children fail to perform adequately, adults say “no,” tease, ridicule,
punish, or threaten—sometimes with bogey men or supernatural punishments
(see, e.g., Spencer 1899:80–81; Leighton and Kluckhohn 1947:51–52). Shaming
is common, and in many traditional societies it is sufficient to indicate
that the untoward behavior is “not what we ______
do,” or else observe that it is the way some outgroup behaves.LeVine
et al (1994) found that imperatives comprised over half of all caretakers’
utterances to children from 3 to 27 months old among the Gusii of Kenya;
beginning at nine months, negative utterances were more common that positive
ones. In short,
even when they are reacting to a child’s failure, adults or older siblings
virtually never explain the exact nature of the deficiency in a
child’s performance, much less the reasons for the way it should be done.
Caretakers’ awareness of a child’s incompetence does not lead to instruction.
Children generally have to deduce for themselves precisely what they have
done wrong if they are unable to imitate successfully. As Mead
(1975:120–124), Fortes (1970 [1938]:40 ff., 58–59) and Raum (1940: 255–259)
point out, imitation is not simple replication. Children’s mimetic actions
are never mere copies of what they have observed (or heard about). Imitation
is mediated by implicit motoric representations (models, syntaxes) that
are selective and creative. Using these representations of objects, activities,
relationships and roles, children’s imitation is generatively constructive.But
we actually know very little about how people imitate, and we should not
take the process for granted; it is a very subtle, skilled capacity. Even
the simplest mimicry of a molecular action is a complex perceptual-motor
task. Moreover, most of what we call imitation involves generative productivity
entailing subtle complementarities among actors and between actors and
objects. It is no trivial or mechanically obvious task to observe another’s
actions, discover the patterns or syntax, develop the practical competence
that underlies them, and then generatively reproduce not the mechanical
actions themselves, but meaningful patterns that correspond to them in
a meaningful way.This needs to
be carefully studied. Furthermore,
imitation arises from, is embedded in, and constitutively creates social
relationships. Imitation often is focused on high status persons, but it
is also a means of borrowing across cultures (Taussig 1993).Imitation
of adults and older children seems to result from identification, and perhaps
it cements that identification as well (see Fortes 1970:56–57). Mead (1975:135–150,
154–157) observed that Manus children identified with and adopted the social
personalities of their natal or adoptive parents; and of course they develop
gender identities. Most ethnographies of childhood clearly show the desire
of children to emulate and then take on adult activities and roles. Consequently,
imitation gradually develops into real assistance with sharing of tasks
and responsibilities. Children generally want to help; they want to participate;
they want to do what their older kin and neighbors do (see, e.g., Fortes
1970:37–39).Gradually they move
from mimetic play to peripheral apprentice-like participation to full task
performance and responsibility (Lave and Wenger 1991;Rogoff,
Mistry, Göncü, and Mosier 1993;Rogoff,
Baker-Sennett, Lacasa, and Goldsmith 1995). Imitation
is not the only means available to children for learning their cultures.
Complementing and supplementing imitation, there are numerous other media
in which children acquire the capacity to construct their cultures. Language
always has some role, and in many cultures proverbs, folk tales, myths,
and gossip are instruments of socialization, especially with regard to
morality. At initiation or marriage, adults in some cultures may admonish
or give general instructions. Of course, explanations and abstract analyses
may be available in some schools. However, in the African primary and secondary
schools that I have observed in Malawi, Zaïre, and Burkina Faso, as
well as those that I have read about elsewhere in the third world, a common
method of instruction is to repeat the teacher’s words in unison or copy
the lesson off the blackboard, word for word (see, e. g., Nash 1970:307).
In the Koranic schools I have observed in Burkina Faso, boys learn the
Koran by rote, in Arabic, sometimes memorizing major segments of the text
without any exegesis or discussion of its meaning—and, it appears, often
without much understanding of the Arabic language. So while certain kinds
of schooling may entail a dramatic shift from imitation toward explicit
conceptual transmission of declarative knowledge and certain formal skills,
the shift may be limited within schools, and may not transform the mimetic
transmission of more fundamental cultural practices outside of school. Linguistic
competence itself is not a result of simple imitation alone. However, modern
techniques of language instruction involve rote learning of phrases in
context, without translation and consequently without the learner initially
being able to conceptualize the meaning. Adults virtually never define
words for children, and small children often mimetically reproduce sentences
without much understanding of them. Such practices show that complex utterances
can be mimetically acquired with little or no conceptual articulation. In
the normal business of life it is useless and even mischievous for the
individual to carry the conscious analysis of his cultural patterns around
with him. That should be left to the student whose business it is to understand
these patterns.(Sapir 1949/1927:558) If people
learn their cultures in large part by observation, imitation, and incremental
participation, ethnographers should do likewise. In these terms, then,
“participant observation” should aim at the learning of practices in
the same manner that members of the culture acquire them. The goal
is for the fieldworker to operate in the same medium as informants, reproducing
the manner in which they normally learn, remember, reproduce, retransmit,
contest, and transform the relevant practices. That is, the best ethnography
aims at acquiring practical competence the same ways informants do.This
goal may be difficult—sometimes impossible—to attain, but it should be
the standard for judging fieldwork and ethnographic data. In fact,
however, anthropologists often rely on interviewing and related verbal
methods; psychologists use rating scales and sociologists use questionnaires.
Social scientists privilege articulate verbal concepts and propositions
in part because every scholar has been instructed in classrooms and studied
in libraries for 20 years through the medium of conceptual language and
then writes, teaches, and conducts conferences primarily in a verbal medium.
Because social science is conducted in this medium, it seems natural to
use verbal methods in research. Furthermore, informants’ linguistic behavior
is easy to record, translate, digest, and convey in articles, books, and
lectures. But the relative ease of recording and communicating the concepts
and propositions of linguistic discourse should not lead us to suppose
that the motives and causes of human action correspond to what any informant
says, or could possibly report. Verbal methods are
not a valid substitute for participant observation because we cannot expect
informants to explain or describe the many aspects of their cultures that
no one has ever explained or described to them.If
we require informants/respondents/subjects to tell us about their
cultures, we get responses that are valid representations of only a small
portion of the culture. With respect to the nonverbal domains and aspects
of the culture, informants’ responses must inevitably contain a great deal
of confabulation generated on the spot for the investigator. Asking people
to communicate information or attitudes in a mode other than the mode in
which they themselves acquired, think about, and communicate them produces
invalid or distorted responses. People cannot produce an accurate, valid,
meaningful verbal account of how they dance, conduct a ritual, or make
attributions about others’ motives—because they do not learn, remember,
transform, or reproduce these skills in a verbal medium. Naive attempts
to transform the knowledge/competence of one cognitive-semiotic system
into another produces a misrepresentation that is liable to be very incomplete,
distorted, or simply false. For the performer, most motoric and social
skills are inexplicable. To understand the human mind, action, and social
processes, researchers have to access the appropriate channels, in the
medium in which the relevant competence normally operates. If we
do participant observation in order to learn from informants in the manner
that our informants learned, then we face the difficult problem of recording,
analyzing, and conveying what we have learned implicitly. As researchers,
we have to begin by observing and attempting to imitate the practices of
informants, and then meticulously transforming our practical knowledge
into abstract conceptual understanding. Learning cultures implicitly by
observation and participation does not mean that we have to represent what
we learn in a corresponding medium, in mime, experiential narrative, or
film.If is perfectly appropriate
for researchers to analyze and express their non-conceptual practical competencies
in abstract language (as I am attempting to do here).But
the goal then is not “translation” (which only applies across linguistic
texts) but transformation of procedural knowledge into conceptual
frameworks that can be articulated formally and analyzed abstractly. This
extremely difficult task is properly ours, as researchers; we can ask our
informants for some help and corroboration of our interpretations, but
it is a mistake to expect them to simply verbalize non-verbal competence. Of course,
the necessity for participant observation does not in any way imply that
adequate fieldwork can be done without a command of the local language,
or without ever asking informants for accounts of their behavior. Observing
Moose rituals I typically found that the rituals were segmented, separated
by non-ritual interludes. Each segment of ritual often had a name, and
people would often say things to each other (or to me) such as, “Hey, let’s
get going—it’s time to feed the dead man.”There
were always verbal labels for categories of participants and ritual objects:
“Come on, all you sisters’ sons; come drink your funeral beer!” Occasionally
they would say with opprobrium, “That’s wrong—you messed it up!”Or
they would say, “The Nakomse offer up sheep; we offer up goats.”This
kind of verbal labeling, critique, and commentary on practices are part
of the normal process of organizing activities, and provide the ethnographer
with an invaluable orientation to salient entities and issues that are
otherwise inarticulate. Language
is a crucial channel for acquiring culture. But language is not the only
channel; in many domains it is not the primary channel; it is never a sufficient
channel; and linguistic information is not equivalent to or interchangeable
with information conveyed through other channels. In principle,
there is no theoretical reason why we cannot eventually devise more or
less adequate non-naturalistic methods for investigating many specific
aspects of implicit cultural knowledge. But the criterion for the validity
of such methods must be that they corroborate and match (or illuminate)
what is learned by imitative participant observation or other methods based
on learning cultures as informants naturally acquire them. Of course, ethnographic
fieldwork should not rely on participant observation alone, unsupported
by other means of observing and collecting data. Additional methods should
be used to supplement and provide convergent evidence to compare with the
results from participant observation. While in certain cases it may be
pragmatically expedient to use alternative methods for certain limited
purposes as makeshift substitutes for participant observation, long-term
participant observation is the key criterion against which other methods
should be evaluated. “Culture”
can be defined as whatever people acquire, do, use, produce, feel or think
by virtue of participation in a group or network of communicative social
interactions, and as the means for participation in such a group or network.Thus
culture is comprised of those processes which are simultaneously the presuppositions
for social interaction, the mechanisms people use to interact, and the
social consequences of these communicative relationships. This concept
of culture implies that participant observation is the fundamental method
for studying culture: If we want to understand that which is the prerequisite,
means, and consequence of social interaction, then we ourselves should
engage in the relevant social interactions. People learn their cultures
by participating in the social relationships that the culture makes necessary
or possible. At the same time, people reproduce, transform, and invent
their cultures though these culturally-mediated communicative interactions.
Hence the most direct, natural, valid means for learning a culture is for
the researcher to participate as fully as possible in the widest possible
range of culturally constituted (and cultural constituting) relationships. If ethnographers
learn a culture in approximately the same manner as informants they may
be able to acquire approximately the same implicit representations of that
culture. Indeed, if they become able to participate fully in the culture,
they have roughly the competence that characterizes informants. Participants
in a culture must acquire mediating devices (implicit models, scripts,
syntaxes, or whatever) that enable them to construct, interpret, coordinate,
evaluate, contest, and sanction meaningful, affective, motivated interactions.
That capacity to participate fully is the proper social test of the objectivity
of knowledge about a culture. If implicit knowledge permits fully meaningful
coordination of social interaction, appropriately motivated and evaluated,
it is objective.Thus the true test
of objectivity is the complementarity or ‘fit’ of the ethnographer’s actions,
affects, motives, and ideas vis-à-vis diverse informants’ actions,
affects, motives, and ideas.This
participatory competence must be assessed with respect to a wide range
of domains and aspects of the culture, and the adequacy of the participation
must be assessed with respect to many very different social relational
criteria.But the implication is
that, like children, immigrants, or spouses marrying into a community,
ethnographers can acquire a great deal of objective cultural competence,
in some cases more or less approximating that of the native. Furthermore,
different ethnographers can acquire comparable cultural competence if they
learn a culture in the same manner as informants, though the same channels.
This competence will inevitably be limited by the constraints of participation
that begins in adulthood, when many of the evolved mechanisms for acquiring
a culture may no longer be fully operable. Furthermore, adults trying to
function in a second culture have the difficult task of unlearning or ignoring
proclivities acquired in their first culture. (Because of such factors,
most adult language learners cannot duplicate the linguistic competence
of people who were immersed in a language before age eleven; Johnson &
Newport, 1989;Mayberry, 1993;Newport,
1990, 1991.)But even the deficiencies
in the ethnographers’ social relationships can be used with great effect
to understand just what native proficiency is. To this
point we have only distinguished between explicit, conceptual, verbal knowledge
and whatever is implicit, motoric, or practical. But this is a crude dichotomy.
Are there only two kinds of cultural competence, the one transmitted via
conceptual language, the other by observation, imitation, and participation
in bodily practices? Can we go beyond this dichotomy between language/abstract/explicit
and body/experience/implicit?[4]What
kinds of cultural knowledge, skills, and generative potentials are there?
How do people transmit, apprehend, and transform these kinds of culturally
patterned competence? Chomsky
(1980, 1988), Fodor (1983), and others have framed a general case for the
specificity of distinct modes of perception, learning, knowledge, and competence.Chomsky’s
modularity argument focuses on the specificity of the prior constraints
and structured potentials necessary for learning in different domains.Fodor’s
modularity argument emphasizes the relative independence of different perceptual
systems, each with their corresponding, distinct forms of mental representation;
modules are informationally encapsulated, meaning that information in one
is not fully or reliably accessible to others.Sperber
(1994) shows how the modularity of thought underlies the epidemiology of
cultural representations (see also the many other relevant chapters in
Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994).Keil
(1981, 1990), Gelman (1990), and Brown (1990) point out that learning requires
domain-specific constraints that provide an initial set of structured assumptions
and hypotheses and that focus attention on relevant features. For example,
people seem to have distinct ways of learning about and understanding animate
beings, material artifacts, numbers, and music. Some evidence suggests
that these respective kinds of knowledge may be based on anatomically distinct
brain structures (Caramazza, Hillis, Leek, & Miozzo 1994). Research
under the rubrics of learning and memory represents some of the most sophisticated,
empirically grounded analysis of the diverse and distinct ways in which
experience affects behavior, capacities, and knowledge. While little of
this research has focused on the everyday acquisition of culture, it is
nonetheless extremely informative regarding the media in which people learn
and the modalities of knowing. A wide range of research with humans and
other animals has invalidated earlier theories of a unitary mechanism for
learning: there are many distinct processes of acquiring or developing
competence. As Gallistel (1995) puts it, there is no more reason to expect
any organism to have one generalized learning mechanism than there is to
expect an organism to have a single general-purpose sense organ.It
is now clear that humans and other organisms have many specialized adaptations
for solving evolutionarily important problems (Barkow, Tooby, and Cosmides
1992;Tooby & Cosmides 1992;Gallistel
1990, 1995). These diverse capacities are content-dependent and involve
mechanisms that are quite specific to their proper domains. For example,
a person may have great difficulty adding and subtracting negative numbers,
yet find it easy and obvious to keep track of a formally homologous social
domain such as taking turns driving in a car pool or figuring out who owes
dinner invitations to whom. Researchers
studying human memory systems have made considerable progress in characterizing
and differentiating among several distinct types of memory. One kind of
evidence for the distinctness of these memory systems comes from studies
showing that species differ in the kinds of memory they have. Other studies
demonstrate that patients with lesions that cause loss of one memory system
may retain others intact; for example, certain patients with damage to
the temporopolar cortex may be completely unable to recall any events they
have experienced in their own life, while demonstrating normal semantic
knowledge of the meaning of ideas and things (Markowitsch 1995). Other
evidence comes from imaging studies showing differentially localized brain
activity related to tasks requiring different kinds of retrieval. Some
of the most important evidence comes from studies of retrieval and encoding:
research showing that measures of memory in one system are uncorrelated
with measures of memory in other systems, and research demonstrating that
different types of memory are acquired in different ways (Schacter 1995).
These kinds of experimental and clinical research on human memory systems
have extensively corroborated the theory that conscious explicit recall
(declarative knowledge) is quite distinct from learning that takes place
without awareness of the events, process, or result of the learning—but
that nonetheless affects responses in many ways (Schacter 1995). Recent
research has shown that in fact people have at least five or six distinct
systems for encoding, storing, and retrieving information (Schacter and
Tulving 1994; Umilta and Moscovitch 1994). Tulving (1985) contrasts episodic,
semantic, and procedural memory, comparing this scheme with many other
related taxonomies of memory systems. Procedural memory is knowledge of
how to do something, based on actual practice. Semantic memory is knowledge
of facts or meaning (e.g., the fact that my great-grandmother is dead),
while episodic memory is memory of events that the person has experienced
(I remember my mother talking about her grandmother). Episodic memory is
what is usually accessed by verbal methods that require descriptions of
events and autobiographical reports, and Tulving states that episodic memory
is the basis of self-awareness, personal identity, and the sense of a personal
history. Tulving argues that episodic memory depends on semantic memory
which in turn depends on procedural memory; hence semantic knowledge implies
procedural and episodic knowledge implies both semantic and procedural.
Conversely, procedural knowledge can function independently of the other
two, and semantic memory can be present without episodic memory. Similarly,
Connerton (1989:22–23), a social historian, distinguishes among personal
memory of one’s life history, cognitive memory of the meanings of cultural
entities, and the habit-like capacity reproduce a certain performance.In
accord with Tulving, Connerton observes that the second two types of memory
often exist without personal memory of the events or experiences in which
the learning occurred. In contrast
to semantic and episodic memory, procedural memory is acquired and expressed
primarily though overt action; hence we might better call it procedural
competence. Procedural memory involves a number of different mechanisms,
each capable of operating more or less independently. Tulving (1995) distinguishes
among four subsystems of procedural knowledge: simple associative learning,
simple conditioning, motor skills, and certain cognitive skills. Semantic
memory includes two subtypes: spatial and relational subsystems. Alongside
procedural, semantic, and episodic memory, Tulving (1995) later added two
other systems. The fourth basic type is the perceptual representation evident
in sensory priming that entails the capacity to quickly recognize familiar
entities based on prior exposure to their perceptual forms (auditory, visual,
tactile, etc.). Other cognitive research has revealed that the human capacities
to recognize faces, objects, and words are dissociable: patients may lose
one capacity without impairment of the others; see Young 1988. Subsequently
Tulving has added to his taxonomy a widely recognized contrast among these
long-term systems and the kind of short-term memory used in executing a
task or solving a problem (Baddeley 1995). In Tulving’s 1995 taxonomy,
primary (working or short-term) memory includes visual and auditory subsystems.
Amnesiac patients with no long term memory retain short-term working memory,
and the distinction is clear-cut in other animals as well (Squire and Knowlton
1995). Thus Tulving’s major systems are episodic, semantic, procedural,
perceptual priming, and working memory, each with their various subsystems.
Tulving (1985, 1991, 1995) describes the evidence that memory in these
distinct systems is serially encoded, stored in parallel, and retrieved
independently from each system. [Figure
about here.] Squire
and Knowlton (1995) make very similar distinctions, dividing declarative
(explicit) memory into memory for facts and memory for events. They divide
nondeclarative (implicit) memory into skills and habits, priming, nonassociative
learning, and simple classical conditioning.(See
Figure; they further subdivide classical conditioning into emotional responses
and skeletal musculature responses.).Each
system can be more or less localized in specified brain systems. Markowitsch
(1995) discusses the evidence that episodic and semantic memory structures
are located primarily in the cerebral cortex, while priming and procedural
memory are located primarily in the telencephalic nuclei (various subsystems
linked with distinct regions of the cerebellum). This research
has direct and important implications regarding how people acquire culture
and the methodologies we should use to should study cultural knowledge
and capacities. The distinction between semantic knowledge and episodic
memory tells us that people may be fully able to report personal life events
they have experienced without having a corresponding conceptual representation
of the meaning of these experiences in the abstract.Conversely,
people may be able to convey ideas without being able to describe the circumstances
in which or the point in time when they learned or formulated the ideas.These
two kinds of explicitly articulated knowledge are in no way equivalent
or interchangeable. Furthermore, each of them may operate independently
of cognitive skills such as the ability to make complex social inferences
and attributions. A person may have elaborately articulated ideas about
how a social system operates, without having the (Implicit/procedural)
cognitive skills to function effectively in it.Or—more
likely—the reverse.Additionally,
a person may remember many important biographical events and observed interactions
without having acquired the social skills or made the social inferences
that might seem relevant to this collection of experiences. And it is entirely
possible that any person’s autobiographic memory, their ideas and their
cognitive skills may be mutually inconsistent in various respects. Likewise,
it is obvious that a person may be able to make an elaborate work of art
or conduct a complex ritual without having a semantic representation of
its meaning in conceptual terms—or may have ideas about meaning without
the procedural capacity to construct the relevant entities. Another distinction,
the contrast between associative learning and perceptual priming, indicates
that people may be skilled at recognizing some entities without knowing
when or where they are likely to occur. On the other hand, people may have
been conditioned so that they are anxious when they encounter some entity
that has previously been followed by frightening or painful experiences.
Yet they may be unable to use this knowledge in a rational or calculative
way to solve the problems they face, unable to recall the aversive experiences,
and unable to articulate the (semantic) meaning of the entity.The
autonomy of working memory indicates that people may be able to represent
aspects of a situation in order to deal with it when it occurs, yet have
no enduring representation of it after the fact. Furthermore, their long-term
semantic knowledge regarding aspects of an experience may not correspond
to the way that they represented the immediate experience when dealing
with it at the time.In addition,
processes of non-associative learning such as habituation to constantly
repeated stimuli mean that people can take for granted and ignore their
most regular, invariant experiences: this background of perceptually taken-for-granted
and hence ignored features may not be directly represented in episodic,
semantic, procedural, or working memory. The dissociability
among these distinct ways of learning/knowing means that the fieldworker
who learns only in one mode is failing to discover what participants in
the culture learn in each of the other modalities. Cultural competence
is compartmentalized, such that knowledge or capacities are often limited
to one modality. What one system does is not fully or directly available
to other systems, and different aspects of any experience affect different
systems. People perceive, encode, retrieve, reformulate, and enact different
kinds ofpractices in different modalities.
The processes of storage and retrieval differ among these systems, so that
what goes into them and what can come out depends on the specific system.
What people are capable of acquiring, transforming, and retransmitting
in one modality they may be quite unable to acquire, transform, or retransmit
in another modality. Furthermore, capacities and proclivities in one modality
may not be consistent or harmonious with those in other modalities. Diverse
kinds of knowledge may be logically contradictory, even if they are pragmatically
compatible:dissociable ways of knowing
permit paradoxical knowledge. However, we may presume that the capacity
to participate fully in culturally organized social relations typically
depends on the complementarity and sometimes coordination of distinct modalities. We have
to adapt our methods to this diversity among the modes in which people
acquire and construct the various aspects of their cultures. This means
familiarizing ourselves with people’s perceptual worlds, experiencing events
and constructing conceptual meanings, listening and learning to converse,
developing inarticulate cognitive and motor skills, learning associations
and conditioned emotional and behavioral responses, while becoming inured
to familiar sensations until we take them for granted. We should learn
other people’s cultures in each of the ways that they themselves learn
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ALAN PAGE
FISKE is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University
of California, Los Angeles, CA90095-1553
(afiske@ucla.edu);when he wrote
the first drafts of this he was Research Associate in the Departments of
Anthropology and Psychology at Bryn Mawr College.
Non-Verbal, Non-Conceptual
Skills
Imitation
The Concept of
Culture and the Objective in Ethnography
Multiple Forms of Competence: Evidence
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