Naomi Quinn

Cultural models in language and thought: Culture and cognition

Undeniably, a great deal of order exists in the natural world we experience. However, much of the order we perceive in the world is there only because we put it there. That we impose such order is even more apparent when we consider the social world, in which institutions such as marriage, deeds such as lying, and customs such as dating happen at all because the members of a society presume them to be. DAndrade (1984a:91) contrasts such culturally constructed things with cultural categories for objects such as stone, tree, and hand, which exist whether or not we invent labels for them. An entity such as marriage, on the other hand, is created by “the social agreement that something counts as that condition” (ibid.) and exists only by virtue of adherence to the rules that constitute it. Such culturally constituted understandings of the social world point up not only the degree to which people impose order on their world but also the degree to which such orderings are shared by the joint participants in this world, all of whom behave as though marriage, lying, and dating exist. A very large proportion of what we know and believe we derive from these shared models that specify what is in the world and how it works. The cognitive view of cultural meaning The enigma of cultural meaning, seemingly both social and psychological in nature, has challenged generations of anthropologists and stimulated the development of several distinctive perspectives (see Keesing 1974 for an early review).

Universals of child rearing

This article delineates four universal features of child rearing that together explain how child rearing everywhere so effectively turns children into valued adults. Cultural models for child rearing, so variable in the substance of what they teach, are all equally designed to make the child’s experience of those important lessons constant, to link those lessons to emotional arousal, to connect them to evaluations of the child as approved or disapproved of, and to prime the child to be emotionally predisposed to learn them. This design insures that the child is receptive to these lessons, and that the lessons themselves are unmistakable, motivating, and memorable. The result, human adulthood, could not be accomplished otherwise.

How to Reconstruct Schemas People Share, From What They Say

Over twenty years ago, when I began the research that illustrates the methods advocated in this chapter, the theoretical issues about the nature of culture that I intended this research to address were very much unsettled. An older theory of linguistic meaning, on which the theory of cultural meaning that I had learned in graduate school had been predicated, was failing. It was up to my generation of cognitive anthropologists, I felt, to build a new and better theory of culture. An exciting new framework, that held promise for cognitive anthropology, was emerging from the multidisciplinary enterprise of cognitive science. But the ideas we were borrowing from cognitive science were themselves still young, undeveloped, and disputed.

Adult Attachment Cross-culturally: A Reanalysis of the Ifaluk Emotion Fago

In the language of the Micronesians who inhabit the island of Ifaluk, fago is an emotion that the ethnographer Catherine Lutz, in her 1988 book, Unnatural Emotions, translates as love/compassion/sadness. Here I reanalyze the meaning of fago, an endeavor made possible by the depth and detail of Lutz’s ethnography, based on fieldwork conducted in 1977 and 1978. As Lutz footnotes in her book (1988:238, fn. 20), “The meaning of the concept of fago shows important similarities with related emotion words in other Pacific languages.” She names and cites published References for descriptions of Samoan alofa, Marquesan ka’oha, Maori aroha, and Tahitian arofa. I was first attracted to this set of related emotion terms common to the Pacific islands because of how different these cases seemed to the American material I had collected. My realization that there might be deeper commonalities between the Pacific Island and American cases came later. I have chosen to focus on Lutz’s Ifaluk case simply because I deem it to be the most ethnographically rich, for my particular purposes, among the set. It is likely, however, that much of what Lutz describes about Ifaluk fago is distributed more widely across the Pacific Islands.

Introduction to Special Issue on The Missing Psychology in Cultural Anthropology's Key Words

It is common practice in anthropology to use terms with implicit psychological content (such as embodiment). This is consistent with contemporary developments in anthropological theory and practice that lead to a focus on individuals voices and practices. Nevertheless, many cultural anthropologists are critical of psychology. This introduction considers and responds to some of the usual criticisms. As this introduction describes, the articles that follow each take one term that is widely used by anthropologists (agency, resistance, subjectivity, the imaginary, and the self) and show how the concept could be better illuminated, and some published case study better explained, through the use of person-centered methods and the selective application of psychological theories.

A cognitive theory of cultural meaning: 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 peoples 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.

Getting inside our informants' heads

William H. Geoghegan. Natural Information Processing Rules: Formal Theory and Applications to Ethnography. Monograph of the Language‐Behavior Research Laboratory, Number 3. Berkeley: University of California Language Research Laboratory, 1973. viii + 448 pp. Figures, tables, appendixes, and bibliography.

Emotional arousal in the making of cultural selves

6.50 (paper).

Attachment and Culture: An Introduction

The highly variable selves that ethnographers have documented cross-culturally all build upon the universal human self described by neurobiologists. The link between cultural selfhood and this neurally-based self is emotional arousal. Arousal heightens the effect of synaptic plasticity, insuring that clusters of strong associations, or cognitive schemas, result from many fewer repetitions of the arousing experience. There are identifiable types of such predictably arousing experiences cross-culturally, many occurring early in life. While susceptible to individual variation, these are typically based in kinds of experience widespread in groups. Culturally elaborated, these shared experiences result in distinctive cultural selves. The argument is illustrated at length with one of these types, disciplinary childrearing practices. Early attachment, cultural psychodynamic defenses, and several other shared, culturally variable experiences that are predictably emotionally arousing are also considered: unintended consequences of childrearing; separation from primary caretaker(s); trauma of all kinds; rituals such as initiation rites or religious conversion; and cultural idealizations of occasions, institutions, or roles.

A New Resolution of Fair Employment Practices for Women Anthropologists: Fresh Troops Arrive

The fundamental argument that motivates this volume, namely that attachment theory’s claims and constructs suffer from profound ethnocentrism, is not new. A handful of cross-cultural researchers have raised these worries since the early days of attachment theory, for more than a quarter century now. Most of these earlier critiques questioned the cross-cultural applicability of a category system that designated children’s attachment to their caregivers as secure versus insecure, and measurement along this dimension by means of the Strange Situation (SS)—an experimental procedure for testing the child’s relative security through absenting its mother from the laboratory. The current volume expands this critique beyond questions of classification and measurement, to question the cultural assumptions behind such a category system and such an experimental design, and extends this line of questioning to ethnocentric concepts beyond insecure attachment.