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Learning A Culture The Way Informants Do:

Observing, Imitat ing , and Part ic ipat ing1

Alan Page Fiske

UCLA Dep artment of Ant hropology

Manuscript in preparation:

comments welcome but please do not cite without permission

Abstract

Most fieldwork in anthropologyindeed most social science researchrelies primarily on informants’

verbal descriptions or explanations. Yet research on children around the world shows that adults hardly ever

tell children how to do anything or explain anything to them. Children typically learn their cultures by

observation, imitation, and participation. Ethnographers should do likewise if they aim to understand the

inarticulable practical competence that constitutes much of culture. Recent advances in psychology

demonstrate that explicit declarative knowledge is only one of several distinct kinds of competence, each of

which is learned in a different way.

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I am very grateful to NIMH, who supported the workshop that stimulated me to write this paper, and whose

grant, 5 R01 MH43857-07 made it possible for me to write it. Special thanks to Edison Trickett for organizing an

exciting workshop, and Mary Ellen Oliveri for supporting it. For comments and suggestions on earlier drafts, I

wish to thank Michael Agar, Steve Ferzacca, Siri Fiske, Susan Fiske-Emory, Byron Good, Nick Haslam, Michael

Jackson, Allen Johnson, Robert LeVine, Spero Manson, Clark McCauley, Richard Shweder, George Stocking.

Paul Stoller, Michael Tomasello, and Harriet Whitehead.



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The Ine xplicability of Action

A society is a group of people who exhibit many resemblances among themselves produced byimitation or by counter-imitation. (Tarde 1900:xii; emphasis in original)

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 waythey 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 veryhelpful 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. (Nicholaisen1988:205-206, 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, andespecially the truth of the practical relation to the practice. Academic interrogation inclines himto take up a point of view on his own practice that is no longer that of action, without being thatof science.... Simply because he is questioned, and questions himself, about the reasons and theraison d’être of his practice, he cannot communicate the essential point, which is that the verynature of practice is that it excludes this question. (Bourdieu 1990:91)

The anthropologist must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair on the veranda of themissionary compound, Government station, or planter’s bungalow, where, armed with pencil andnotebook and at times with a whisky and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements frominformants, 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 withthem to distant sandbanks and to foreign tribes, and observe them in fishing, trading, andceremonial overseas expeditions. Information must come to him full-flavored from his ownobservations 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



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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 intensiveinstruction 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 bornand 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 pumpkinsand 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 outor why they celebrate birth anniversaries at all. Could youor

most American informantsgive 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



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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. Asa 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 scriptlet alone an exegesisfor a ritual they have performed every year of their lives.

In some cultures, people do describe and discuss their rituals with each other. However, like many 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



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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 independentlytransmitted 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 infelicitousnever 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 wasenthralled 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.



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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 andethnopsychology 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 of culture. 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 interviewstypically usingtranslators; 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

embodiedlumping together all that is inarticulate without attempting to characterize or differentiate the

manner in which it is learned, remembered, reformulated, or produced.

Non-Ve rbal, Non-Co nce ptual Skills

The capacity to do something does not entail discursive knowledge of how or why it is doneor even

awareness that one is doing it. Developing a long tradition in philosophy and psychology, Merleau-Ponty

(1962/1945) contrasted the explicit, verbally formulated, objectifying symbolic understanding of the conscious

mind with the praktognosia (practical knowledge) contained in bodily action. Ryle (1949) labeled this

distinction “knowing how” versus “knowing that”. To introduce an example, a person may know how to ride a

bicycle without being able to describe or explain how to do so, without being able to control the necessary



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movements reflectively and self-consciously, and without remembering the occasions or the manner in which

she first learned the skill. (Did you know that to start a left turn you momentarily pull the handle bars a little to

the right?) This distinction has been developed, revised, and elaborated by many philosophers and psychologists.

Schutz (1977/1951) contrasted social interactions involving communication though concepts (whose meaning

can be grasped at a given moment in time) with communication based on meaning that is inherently temporal,based on a joint experience of the flux of activities that are articulated temporally in a step-by-step sequence,

such as music (see Lindsay’s 1996 phenomenological account of making music together, Feld’s 1982

ethnography of music, sound, and emotion among the Kaluli, and Highwater’s 1985 discussion of the meaning

of dance). One consequence of this awareness in philosophy and social science has been the development of

phenomenological approaches (see Jackson 1996 for an excellent review of the philosophical and

anthropological contributions to phenomenology).

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 door

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 processesor of their attitudes and behaviorsmay beaccurate 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 explain how 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 articulation and processes



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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, orwhy 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 thatsavage religion is something not so much thought out as danced out; that, in other words, itdevelops 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 mannerbeliefs, 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

actionnot abstraction.

Later Malinowski raised the issue again.



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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 certainideas. These ideas, feelings, and impulses are moulded and conditioned by the culture in which wefind them, and are therefore an ethnic peculiarity of the given society. An attempt must be madetherefore, to study and record them.

But is this possible? Are these subjective states not too elusive and shapeless? And, even grantedthat people usually do feel or think or experience certain psychological states in association withthe performance of customary acts, the majority of them surely are not able to formulate thesestates, 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. (Youcan 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



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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 withreference 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 configurationsunstated 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; onrepression 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 institutions is 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



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system, social structure, mythology, and other communicative action. Often, he argued, people have no

conscious models of their communicative structures and the conscious collective modelsnormsthat 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 theethnographer’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

circumscribedand, 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 importantfor

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 foodespecially nursing and egalitarian exchange of food among siblingsin 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 togethersacrificial meat and libation beer, or

Communion wafers and wineis 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.



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Imitation

Tarde (1900/1890) and Baldwin (1897) regarded imitation as the basis of society, socialization, and the

formation of the self. Tarde (1900:73) wrote that a society is a group of people in so far as they are imitating

each other or, if not currently imitating each other, who resemble each other because their common traits are

previously copied from a common model.2 In one of the first books on developmental psychology, Baldwin

(1895) criticized and reformulated Tarde’s ideas, analyzing imitation as the principal source of mental

development and showing how it gives rise to volition and the self. Describing his own children, Baldwin

(1895:362–365) also illustrated how they learned adult roles by imitative play (see also Baldwin 1910). Baldwin

(1897, 1910) developed his theory of imitation into a sophisticated theory of cultural transmission (“social

heredity”), the constitution of social norms, and what we now call agency Baldwin emphasized that children

imitate selectively and generalize from their imitations, learning how to learn and to invent. Baldwin described

how sociality results from imitation: children learn and incorporate the subjective perspectives of their social

partners (the “socius”) by imitating them. Then when children observe others acting as they themselves have

acted, they attribute to them similar volition and emotions, developing empathy and intersubjectivity as they

develop a social self. Thus imitation is the basis of social organization but also of social change (“progress”).

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 lostsometimes resulting in the subsequent creating of new meaningsfor 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

manipulatewhile smiling, vocalizing, gesturing to, and approaching the adult (Eckerman, Whately, and

2

Tarde acknowledged the importance of invention as the source of acts subsequently imitated, and also

recognized resistance or counter-imitation. But he regarded mutual imitation as the mechanism of creativity,

resistance, and all other aspects of sociality.



12

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 interestindeed disdainfor 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



13

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 fullemergence into practical life. Play, therefore, is often mimetic in content, and expresses the child’sidentifications. But the Tale child’s play mimesis is never simply mechanical reproduction; it isalways 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, whichnever occur in the adult activities copied, and rearranges adult functions to fit the specificallylogical 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 andimitation on the part of children; they seldom “teach” them to do things systematically. Parentswere 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 theyjust learn by themselves,” was the usual answer.

Children learn by observing and experimenting. Whatever adults are doing, children are present towatch their activities and overhear their conversations. (Maretzki and Maretzki 1966:144; seeWilliams 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



14

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 thetransmitter; 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 thanthat which he uses when teaching an adult group. He explains nothing, since for him there isnothing to explain. If there are mistakes, he corrects them, and his patience is great. (Mc Phee1955:89)

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 energyincluding suchpractices as how to wash both the body and clothes, how to cook, how to cultivate, etc.arelearned very gradually through imitation and tentative participation.... Knowledge transmissiontends 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 childrenespecially under age 6 or 7as 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



15

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 amongthe 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. Incontrast 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 learnsthrough another sequences: observe the approved task (as performed by an older sibling), imitate itspontaneously, and receive corrective feedback only for inadequate performance. There is noexpectation of recognition for good performance in learning or carrying out a task, yet tasks arelearned 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 threatensometimes 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.

3

Socialization in Wogeo, on the north coast of New Guinea, seems to be an exception to these generalizations;

Hogbin (1970 [1946]) describes a great deal of explanation and praise.



16

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 areselective 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 withsharing 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



17

meaningand, 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.

The Conce pt of Culture and the Obje ctive in Ethnography

If I could tell you what it meant I wouldn’t have had to dance it. (Isadora Duncan, quoted in

lectures by Gregory Bateson, cited by Levy 1996)

In the normal business of life it is useless and even mischievous for the individual to carry theconscious analysis of his cultural patterns around with him. That should be left to the student whosebusiness 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

difficultsometimes impossibleto 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 averbal 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



18

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, andcommunicate 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 dohere). 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 goingit’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 wrongyou 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



19

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 thefundamental 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



20

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.

Multiple Forms of Competence: Evidence from Memory Systems

The effects of past events on current experience and performance can be expressed not only viaexplicit remembering, but also by subtle changes in our ability to identify, act on, and makejudgments about words, objects, and other stimulichanges that are frequently independent of the

ability to engage in conscious recollection of a prior experience (Schacter 1995:821).

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?

4

We do not get much help here from most contemporary anthropology. The recent move toward “embodied”

epistemology lacks a very sophisticated theory of the forms of somatosensory, kinesthetic, or mimetic

representation; it often conflates, for example, mind and language. And it tends to contrast mind to body as if

minds did not operate in brains and as if bodies acted and communicated with each other without perceptual or

mental mediation. Some contemporary anthropological writing conflates personal, subjective, experience,

sensory, body, tacit, implicitindeed everything that informants or ethnographers cannot readily formulate in

referential propositional language.



21

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 anorganism 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



22

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 learningbut 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



23

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 theseexperiences 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. Ormore likelythe 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 termsor 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



24

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 torepresent 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 of practices

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 retransmitin 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 themwhich are the ways we learn our own.



25

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34

ALAN PAGE FISKE is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of

California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1553 ([email protected]); when he wrote the first drafts of this he was

Research Associate in the Departments of Anthropology and Psychology at Bryn Mawr College.

Documents

FISKE_metodologia etnografica_1997