Types of claims about culture and cultural phenomena

A relatively neglected task of cultural analysis (or cultural/culture theory) concerns itself with specifying the nature (and therefore expected properties) of the sorts of entities and processes that can be said to be cultural. Most serious cultural theorists do this, but they are seldom explicit to note that this is precisely what they are doing. In that sense, it is refreshing when a cultural theorist such as Margaret Archer just comes right and says something like “…a Cultural System is constituted by the corpus of existing intelligibilia—by all things capable of being grasped, deciphered, understood or known by someone…by definition the cultural intelligibilia form a system, for all items must be expressed in a common language” (Archer 1996, 104 italics added).

Here the theorist is making a number of claims as to what they think culture (and possibly culture “units”) are, and how they come together. For instance, we learn that the Cultural System is made up of intelligible things, that these things have the inherent property of linking up into larger clumps, that the nature of these things is language-like, and so on. These types of claims are refreshing because even if you disagree with them, at least you know exactly what you are disagreeing with. This addresses one of the key weaknesses of cultural analysis in sociology which is as Steve Vaisey (personal communication) points out, the lack of precise points (and targets of) agreement and disagreement.

In this post, I would like to make headway on this issue by coming up with a more or less systematic catalog of types of claims one can make about cultural entities and cultural processes. One aim is to help cultural analysts be clear about the claims they make and even explicitly flag those claims as one that they are committed to making, thus staking out a clear (or clearer) position(s). Another aim is actually to spur the sort of productive disagreement Steve says is lacking in the field. I borrow from a spate of similar debates that have been going on in cognitive science for the better part of two decades with regard to the nature of the “cognitive” and the types of claims that can be made about “cognitive” phenomena in this field. We will see that some of the distinctions that have been made by philosophers of mind in this area can also be useful (and travel quite easily) to help clarify analogous debates in cultural theory.

The first distinction, borrowing from the philosopher Mark Rowlands (2010: 55-59) is between epistemic and ontic claims about a given (e.g., the “cognitive”) domain. In terms of cultural analysis, an epistemic claim has to do with the best way we have to gain knowledge about a given phenomenon. These claims can be either positive (“the best way to learn about X is via Y”) or negative (“it is not possible to gain adequate knowledge about X via Y”). Where “X” is some kind of cultural phenomenon or process and Y is (usually) some established method of inquiry. Thus, when Jerolmack and Khan (2014) argue that the best way to gain knowledge about situated practices is via direct ethnographic observation and not via interviews, they are making both a positive and a negative (respectively) epistemic claim about situated practices as a type of cultural phenomenon. A lot of recent (productive) disagreement in cultural analysis has been really about epistemic claims, of both the positive and negative kinds, with regard to cultural entities and processes (e.g., Pugh 2013; Vaisey 2013).

Ontic claims, on the other hand, are about the nature or make-up of some kind of cultural entity or process (in the case of processes, ontic claims are ultimately about the nature of the entities, and their properties, participating in the process). Surprisingly, even though these are more controversial, there has been less productive disagreement about them in recent scholarship.

Thus, Archer is making an ontic claim about the “Cultural System” when she tells us that it is “constituted by the corpus of existing intelligibilia.” This is not a claim about the best way to study the Cultural System, but about the sort of entities (and their properties) that make it up. So the first thing to recommend is that debates about the nature of culture (ontic ones) should be kept distinct about debates about the best way to study culture. The reason for this is that epistemic claims about culture may have no (or at least neutral) ontic implications (e.g., Jerolmack and Khan do not tell us much about the nature of situated practices). However, ontic claims about culture usually have epistemic implications. For instance, one may argue that because culture has such and such properties or is this particular type of thing then the best way to learn about it is via a particular method of inquiry.

The second point is that there are different types of ontic claims. In the case of cultural analysis, I think two broad types are of particular relevance: Compositional claims and locational claims.

Let us begin with the first kind. Compositional ontic claims answer the question: “what is this thing (at least partially) made out of?” (a more general way, and therefore less useful, way of asking the question is to say “what is the nature of this thing?”). For instance, Christian Smith’s (2010) “What is a Person?” is a (long) disquisition on the ontic nature of (you guessed it) the social science kind person.

Compositional claims also partially answer the question of the typical properties of things (since they specify components with a given set of properties). So in the case of culture, cultural phenomena, or cultural entities, a compositional claim would tell us what they are made out of, and what is the nature of these parts or components. So, in the quote above, Margaret Archer tells us that culture is composed of entities she refers to as “intelligibilia” and that it is in the nature of these entities to be “capable of being grasped, deciphered, understood or known by someone” (this would be considered a relational property, such as the capability of sugar to dissolve in the presence of water) and to link up to one another via logical implicational chains to form “systems.”

Not all ontic compositional claims need to be seen as proposing highly controvertible (or controversial) proposals (as in the Archer example). Some can be quite mundane. For instance, when it comes to what archeologists and anthropologists call material culture (objects, artifacts, and so on that exist by way of human ingenuity and intervention), the ontic compositional question both straightforward and relatively uncontroversial: Material culture is made out of matter or “physical stuff.”

This non-controversial ontic claim example is important, because a key point of debate in cultural theory since the introduction of various “culture concepts” in early 20th century anthropology by such scholars as Boas, Sapir, Whorf, Mead, Kluckhohn, Kroeber, and others, had to do with the fact that some ontic compositional claims posited that culture (or some realms of culture) was composed of parts that seem to have no clear physical or material status (Bidney 1944), such as “ideas” or “patterns.” In fact, the entire tradition in which culture is seen as being composed of ideas, concepts, and so on, and saw itself as distinct from one that emphasized something empirical or material (such as material artifacts, practices, or the “social heritage”) is based on (only half-defended) ontic claims that you can have a concept of culture in which the main components of culture are somehow non-material (Bidney 1944). The cultural theory developed by Talcott Parsons in the mid-twentieth century from anthropological sources influenced by idealism, was of this sort (Lizardo 2016).

Ontic compositional claims about the components of culture are useful in delineating the divide (or point of productive disagreement) what can be said to be “naturalistic” versus “non-naturalistic” approaches to cultural analysis; while the latter is open to postulating that at least some components of culture do not have to have a material realization in some kind of physical structure or medium, the latter insists that culture must be composed of entities with such a realization (Sperber 1996).

The point to keep in mind is that if you postulate a non-material component of culture (e.g., concepts, ideas and so on) you are making an ontic compositional claim that has to be cashed in somehow. For instance, you will be forced to defend some type of metaphysical “substance” dualism (of the type Rene Descartes ultimately was committed to (Rowlands 2010, 12)), in which in addition to objects having material substance there are also non-material (or spatially non-extended) objects, with the human mind being the most important of these. The problem with such types of substance dualisms are many, and therefore analysts may want to reduce their allegiance to ontic claims that commit them to the postulation of non-material entities (as elimination of metaphysically suspect entities and substances has been the historical trend across all scientific disciplines (Thagard 2014)).

One way in which analysts committed to some form of naturalism, but who also want to “save” some of the core concepts of idealistic theories of culture can proceed is by proposing what philosophers McCauley and Bechtel (2001) refer to as heuristic identities (the philosopher Thagard [2014] refers to them as “explanatory identities”). A heuristic identity (ontic) claim says that this type of thing is identical to this other type for purposes of theorizing and scientific discovery (in this respect heuristic identity claims are ontic claims that are used for epistemic purposes), wherein the first type is the metaphysically suspect kind and the second type is the more respectable naturalistic kind. So the trick for ontic naturalists about culture is simply to say a type of cultural entity that had been conceptualized as “non-material” in the idealist tradition of cultural theory is actually this type of thing that has a relatively non-controversial material basis (even if the details of that basis have not been completely worked out yet).

Following the heuristic identity trick, we can, for instance, say that something like “concepts” or “ideas” are (type) identical to patterns of connectivity and activation across populations of neurons in the human brain (Blouw et al. 2016). This makes ideas physically realizable, and would then lend specificity to the ontic claim that culture, in this “idealist” sense, is composed of ideas or concepts (and would make culture a “collection of collections” (D’andrade 2001), or the distribution of patterns of connectivity and activation across populations of neurons in the brains of human populations [Sperber 1996]). Note that heuristic identity claims are both heuristic (they are tools for theorizing and discovery) and provisional (open to revision in light of new scientific evidence or theoretical advances).

Behavioral conceptions of culture (as distributions of activities and practices in human populations) also make implicit ontic claims as to the nature of cultural objects, although these are less problematic (from a naturalistic perspective) than those made in idealist theories. The reason for this is that practices and enacted behaviors have a more or less non-controversial grounding in the human body and are readily observable. Thus, the ontic claim here is that culture is composed of behavioral units or linked systems of such units (possibly along with the material or artifactual complements of those practices). A more restrictive version of this practice approach would make the ontic claim that culture is actually composed of distributions of procedural knowledge (Cohen and Bacdayan 1994), in which case culture would also have to be grounded in patterns of connectivity and activation in the (e.g., motor) neurons in the human brain (partly) responsible for the generation of those practices (Lizardo 2007).

Now to the second type of ontic claim. Locational claims are the type of ontic claims that answer the question “where is culture?” Everybody who makes an ontic claim about culture makes an implicit locational claim, because entities, even non-material or non-extended ones, have to have a location (Rowlands 2010, 11–13), and the nature of the entity usually determines their typical locations (e.g., standard material objects are located in physical space). For instance, Margaret Archer, in the quote above goes on to specify that given the fact that the Cultural System is made up of intelligibilia, then the Cultural System is located in what Karl Popper referred to as “World Three” (this is similar to Descartes’ claim that even though the mind had no physical extension, it had a physical location near the pineal gland). In this respect, ontic locational claims are analytically distinct from ontic compositional claims.

I have argued elsewhere, that much progress can be made in cultural analysis by being specific about locational claims. For instance, key distinctions among different types of culture, such as the distinction between “personal” and “public” culture first developed in cognitive anthropology are primarily of a locational type. We know that personal culture is “in” people, while public culture is “in” the world and this is an important analytic point to make. We can make these claims even if the more controversial ontic claims about composition have yet to be worked out. We don’t have to agree about the underlying nature of culture in the world, but we can agree that it is in the world.

The same thing goes with culture in persons; we don’t have to agree about the way that culture is internalized by people and the underlying form it takes in this state (e.g., cognitive, neural, ideational, conceptual, etc.) but we can agree that culture does get internalized by people, even if we have yet to work out a full theory of how this internalization happens (Quinn, Sirota, and Stromberg 2018), such that a person can carry some sort of cultural knowledge when they move around the world and this is different from the type of cultural knowledge embedded in material objects, artifacts and other recording technologies (inclusive of Archer’s ontologically ambiguous “intelligibilia”). Note that even anti-cognitive cultural analysts who say that there is no such thing as personal culture (because all of culture is “outside the head” (Wuthnow 1989)) are making an (negative or eliminationist) ontic claim in this respect.

To sum up, I have argued that if we are to have productive disagreements in cultural analysis of the sort Steve Vaisey craves, we must get clearer about the sort of claims we are making so that we know what exactly we are disagreeing about. I have proposed that there are at least two broad types of claims we can make about a given domain (such as culture). We may make claims about the best way to gain knowledge about it (epistemic) or the best way to think about its underlying nature (ontic). Cultural analysts, therefore, may have two broad points of productive disagreement. Much recent productive disagreement in cultural analysis has centered on epistemic claims. Surprisingly little has been about ontic claims, although the first generation of cultural theorists in early and mid-20th century American anthropology mainly argued about these (Bidney 1944). The recent “culture and cognition” turn in cultural analysis provides an opportunity, I believe, to not only disagree about methods but also about different ontic conceptions of what cultural phenomena and cultural processes are.

References

Archer, M. S. 1996. Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory. Cambridge University Press.

Bidney, David. 1944. “On the Concept of Culture and Some Cultural Fallacies.” American Anthropologist. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1944.46.1.02a00030 .

Blouw, Peter, Eugene Solodkin, Paul Thagard, and Chris Eliasmith. 2016. “Concepts as Semantic Pointers: A Framework and Computational Model.” Cognitive Science 40 (5): 1128–62.

Cohen, Michael D., and Paul Bacdayan. 1994. “Organizational Routines Are Stored as Procedural Memory: Evidence from a Laboratory Study.” Organization Science 5 (4): 554–68.

D’andrade, Roy. 2001. “A Cognitivist’s View of the Units Debate in Cultural Anthropology.” Cross-Cultural Research: Official Journal of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research / Sponsored by the Human Relations Area Files, Inc 35 (2): 242–57.

Jerolmack, Colin, and Shamus Khan. 2014. “Talk Is Cheap: Ethnography and the Attitudinal Fallacy.” Sociological Methods & Research, March. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124114523396 .

Lizardo, O. 2007. “‘Mirror Neurons,’ Collective Objects and the Problem of Transmission: Reconsidering Stephen Turner’s Critique of Practice Theory.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-5914.2007.00340.x .

———. 2016. “Cultural Theory.” Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-32250-6_6 .

McCauley, Robert N., and William Bechtel. 2001. “Explanatory Pluralism and Heuristic Identity Theory.” Theory & Psychology 11 (6): 736–60.

Pugh, A. J. 2013. “What Good Are Interviews for Thinking about Culture? Demystifying Interpretive Analysis.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ajcs/journal/v1/n1/abs/ajcs20124a.html .

Quinn, Naomi, Karen Gainer Sirota, and Peter G. Stromberg. 2018. “Conclusion: Some Advances in Culture Theory.” In Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology, edited by Naomi Quinn, 285–327. Palgrave Macmillan.

Rowlands, Mark. 2010. The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology. MIT Press.

Smith, Christian. 2010. What Is a Person? Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Thagard, Paul. 2014. “Explanatory Identities and Conceptual Change.” Science & Education 23 (7): 1531–48.

Vaisey, Stephen. 2013. “Is Interviewing Compatible with the Dual-Process Model of Culture?” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 2 (1): 150–58.

Wuthnow, Robert. 1989. Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Where Did Sewell Get “Schema”?

Although there are precedents to using the term “schema” in an analytical manner in sociology (e.g., Goffman’s Frame Analysis and Cicourel’s Cognitive Sociology), it is undoubtedly William Sewell Jr’s “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1992 that really launched the career of the term in sociology.

In our forthcoming paper, Schemas and Frames (Wood et al. 2018), we briefly sketch the history of the schema concept in the cognitive sciences—from psychology and artificial intelligence to anthropology and cognitive neuroscience. We note how certain ambiguities in Sewell’s formulation renders it unclear whether it is compatible with the concept as used in the cognitive sciences. Part of the reason, I would suggest, is because Sewell did not get this concept from the cognitive sciences, not even cognitive anthropology.

First, we must discuss (briefly) Giddens’ intervention. To summarize (following Piaget 2015:6–16) the defining features of the various varieties of structuralism—in mathematics, psychology, anthropology, linguistics—include: (1) patterned-wholes are not mere aggregates, (2) patterned-wholes presuppose some principles of composition or transformation which structure them, and (3) the dynamics of wholes, as the product of these underlying principles, result in self-maintenance such that the process which constitutes the patterned-whole is not immediately terminated.

Giddens’ innovation, first articulated in Central Problems in Social Theory (1979), and later in Constitution of Society (1984), involved separating aspects (1) and (2) above. He referred to the patterned-whole as a social system and to the underlying principles of composition and transformation as structure. In essence, he asks for a Gestalt shift in how sociologists approached the regularities of social life. This, in turn, places structure as operating “behind the scenes,” or in Giddens words, “structure as a ‘virtual order’ of differences” (Giddens 1979:64)

In response to this move, Sewell uses the term schema for the first time in this passage:

Structures, therefore, have only what [Giddens] elsewhere terms a ‘virtual’ existence (e.g., 1984, p. 17). Structures do not exist concretely in time and space except as ‘memory traces, the organic basis of knowledgeability’ (i.e., only as ideas or schemas lodged in human brains) and as they are ‘instantiated in action’ (i.e., put into practice). (Sewell 1992:6)

Giddens also, confusingly, defines “structure” as consisting of “rules and resources” (1979:63–64). The latter of which, Sewell points out, is not virtual. He goes on to demonstrate Giddens term “rules” isn’t virtual either as it implies public prescriptions. Sewell focuses his intervention here (1992:7):

Giddens develops no vocabulary for specifying the content of what people know. I would argue that such a vocabulary is, in fact, readily available, but is best developed in a field Giddens has to date almost entirely ignored: cultural anthropology. After all, the usual social scientific term for ‘what people know’ is ‘culture,’ and those who have most fruitfully theorized and studied culture are the anthropologists… What I mean to get at is not formally stated prescriptions but the informal and not always conscious schemas, metaphors, or assumptions presupposed by such formal statements. I would in fact argue that publicly fixed codifications of rules are actual rather than virtual and should be regarded as resources rather than as rules in Giddens’s sense. Because of this ambiguity about the meaning of the word ‘rules,’ I believe it is useful to introduce a change in terminology. Henceforth I shall use the term ‘schemas’ rather than ‘rules’.

Beyond noting that he is inspired by the work of anthropologists, Sewell offers few clues as to what motivates his use of schema.

Is Sherry Ortner and Michigan’s CSST the source?

Despite referring to “schema” over a hundred times in the essay, he cites almost no scholars. In a footnote, he states “It is not possible here to list a representative example of anthropological works that elaborate various ‘rules of social life.’” In the same footnote, after citing Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures as the most influential discussion of culture, he states “For a superb review of recent developments in cultural anthropology, see Ortner (1984).” As this footnote suggests, it may have been Sherry Ortner who motivated his conceptualization.

In the essay, Sewell cites Ortner’s 1984 piece “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” and includes Ortner among several scholars he thanks for feedback on his AJS piece. However, in the cited article, Ortner’s only mention of “schema” is in a quotation from Bourdieu (1978:15). In this essay, she outlines the main cleavage within symbolic anthropology in the 1960s was between the Turnerians and the Geertzians. Geertz’s “most radical move,” according to Ortner, was arguing “culture is not something locked inside people’s heads, rather is embodied in public symbols” (1984:129). Ortner identified as “Geertzian,” as he was her advisor at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1960 to 1970, before leaving for the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (David Schneider, another Parsonsian symbolic anthropologist, was also her teacher at Chicago).

Sewell received his Ph.D. in history at Berkeley in 1971, and was an instructor at the University of Chicago from 1968 to 1971, before becoming an Assistant Professor there from 1971 until 1975 — overlapping with Ortner’s graduate studies there. He then had a five-year stint at the Institute for Advanced Study with Geertz in residence. From 1985 to 1990, Sewell was faculty in the history and sociology at the University of Michigan, overlapping again with Ortner, a faculty member in anthropology from 1977—1995. However, the overlaps between the two (and Sewell with Ortner’s mentor), is speculative evidence of their interactions.

In 1991, the relatively new American Sociological Association Sociology of Culture Section gave an honorable mention for the best article to Nicola Beisel for “Class, Culture, and Campaigns Against Vice in Three American Cities.” Her advisor at Michigan was Sewell, and in the Culture section newsletter’s interview with her, she states (1991:4-5):

Certainly, the biggest influence on my work was the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Social Transformations (CSST), a group of sociologists, social historians, and anthropologists that was started by Bill Sewell, Terry McDonald, Sherri Ortner, and Jeff Paige. The year I spent as a CSST fellow was one long and extremely fruitful discussion of culture, structure, agency, and social change….I do think that we have to demonstrate to our colleagues who think they do work on ‘hard structures’ that culture plays a vital part in the constitution and reproduction of those structures. In thinking about these issues I have been greatly influenced by Bill Sewell’s and Anthony Giddens’ theorizing the duality of structures, particularly the discussions in Sewell’s forthcoming AJS article.

In a recent interview about her 1995 essay, “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal” published in Comparative Studies in Society and History (CSSH), Ortner also refers to the founding of CSST:

In 1995 I was still at the University of Michigan and was involved in the formation of an incredibly exciting interdisciplinary discussion group, Comparative Studies in Social Transformation or CSST (not to be confused with the journal CSSH!). CSST was populated by anthropologists, historians, and a few folks from other fields, with many shared theoretical interests (Marxism, culture theory, practice theory, feminism, Foucault, etc.) and with overlapping cultural and historical interests in–broadly speaking–issues of power, domination, and resistance. If you look at the acknowledgments of “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal” (and I am a big believer in looking at acknowledgments), you will see the names of many of the key participants in that group, and it is an amazing roll call of some of the leading anthropologists, historians, and other social and cultural thinkers of that generation.

Sewell was among those acknowledged (alongside, Fred Cooper, Fernando Coronil, Nick Dirks, Val Daniel, Geoff Eley, Ray Grew, Roger Rouse, Julie Skurski, Ann Stoler, and Terry McDonald). Curiously, Sewell acknowledges none of those members of CSST in his 1992 article — only Ortner. This strongly suggests there was, at least, cross-pollination between Ortner and Sewell.

Where Did Ortner Get “Schema”?

Ortner’s sketch of the Gyepshi altar in Sherpas Through Their Rituals

We may speculate, therefore, that Sewell received the schema concept from Ortner through, either informal talks, discussions at the CSST, or something of Ortner’s he read but did not cite in the AJS article. That is, it is strange that in the single essay of Ortner’s cited by Sewell, she does not really refer to “schemas” beyond a quoting Bourdieu.

In Ortner’s first book (1978), Sherpas Through Their Rituals (based on her dissertation), she references schemas only once, in quoting Ricoeur: “the stain [defilement] is the first schema of evil” (Ortner’s addendum). In a collection of reactions to Ortner’s “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” by Maurice Bloch, Jane Collier, Sylvia Yanagisako, Thomas Gibson, Sharon Stephens, and Pierre Bourdieu—based on the 1987 American Ethnological Society invited session, held at the American Anthropological Association Meetings in Chicago and published as a working paper by the CSST—Ortner offers the following in her response (1989:102-103, emphasis added):

And finally, my own recent work on Sherpa social and religious history utilizes a notion of cultural schemas, recurring stories that depict structures as posing problems, to which actors must and do find solutions. Here again structure (or culture) exists in and through its varying relations with various kinds of actors. Further, structure comes here as part of a package of emotional and moral configurations, and not just abstract ordering principles.

The work she is referring to here is in her 1989 book, High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism. It is here that “schema”— specifically “cultural schema”—is used numerous times (54 in total). In the opening chapter, Ortner describes two “notions” of structure will be used in the analysis (1989:14 emphasis added):

The first is a concept of structural contradictions—conflicting discourses and conflicting patterns of practice—that recurrently pose problems to actors. The second is a concept of cultural ‘schemas,’ plot structures that recur throughout many cultural stories and rituals, that depict actors responding to the contradictions of their culture and dealing with them in appropriate, even “heroic,” ways.

In chapter four, Ortner argues “Sherpa society is founded on a contradiction between an egalitarian and hierarchical ethic.” She furthermore argues that recognition of this contradiction is “culturally formalized, in the sense that important cultural stories both depict such competitive relations and show the ways in which they may be resolved….the stories collectively embody what I will call a cultural schema” (1989:59, emphasis added; see also her 1990 chapter “Patterns of History: Cultural Schemas in the Founding of Sherpa Religious Institutions”).

Ortner then offers a short survey of the “pedigree” of this concept in anthropology, beginning with what she called “key scenarios” in her dissertation and a 1973 American Anthropologist article. These are a particular kind of “key symbol,” which “implies clear-cut modes of action appropriate to correct and successful living in the culture…they formulate the culture’s basic means-ends relationship in actionable form” (1973:1341). Ortner outlines how numerous different contexts—like seating arrangements, shamanistic seances, ritual offerings to gods—were structured as if they were a hospitality event. Therefore, the “scenario of hospitality” acted as a “cultural schema,” transposable across situations and providing prescriptions for action.

Next, Ortner identifies other exemplars, including Schieffelin’s ([1976] 2005) examination of reciprocity and opposition as “cultural scenarios” among the Kaluli of New Guinea, Turner’s (1975) “root paradigms” like martyrdom in Christianity, Geertz’s “transcription of a fixed ideal” in Negara (1980), and Sahlins’ “structures of the long run” in Historical Metaphors (1981) (1981). Ortner argues that cultural schemas have “durability” because “they depict actors respond to, and resolving…the central contradictions of the culture” (1989:61). After High Religion, Ortner refers to schemas only once, in a retrospective on Geertz in 1997.

What is absent from Ortner’s otherwise exhaustive review of anthropology in the 1984 essay, and throughout her work on cultural schemas, is any references to “cognitive” anthropology. She offers no reference to Goodenough, Lounsbury, Romney, D’Andrade, Frake or others, and only referring to Bloch’s work prior to his turn to the cognitive sciences as exemplified by his 1991 article “Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science.” In fact, it is odd that she does not reference a 1980 review essay in the American Ethnologist, titled “On Cultural Schemata” written by G. Elizabeth Rice, a UC-Irvine PhD. Nor is there a reference to the 1983 Annual Review of Anthropology essay, “Schemata in Cognitive Anthropology,” written by Ronald Casson, a student of D’Andrade and Frake while at Stanford. Furthermore, she does not cite the work of Robert I. Levy who studied Nepal (1990) from a cognitive-anthropological perspective (in fact, both Levy’s and Ortner’s book on Nepal are reviewed in the same issue of the American Ethnologist). Originally trained as a psychiatrist, Levy was brought to UC-San Diego in 1969 to help establish the nascent field of “psychological anthropology.” In Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands (1975), he applies the concept of schema—which he attributes to the psychiatrist Ernest Schachtel’s study of memory and amnesia.

Several more such examples can be found. We can conclude that Ortner’s conceptualization of schema (and therefore Sewell’s and likely Sewell’s students) appears to be largely independent of its parallel development in the cognitive sciences (including cognitive anthropology) forming in the U.S. west coast (briefly discussed in my post on connectionism).