This study has,
as it's title implies, two primary objectives which are woven together
throughout the presentation. First, the
study is about the lives of fishermen who live on an island off the west coast
of Sweden. The people of this community
have, for hundreds of years, engaged in various forms of fishing as their
primary means of existence. Fishing has
played a central role in the lives of these people—early on in subsistence
terms, later on in economic terms, and always in terms defining who they are to
themselves and others. The study is
also about reconceptualizing a theory of culture and cognition. The primary aspect of this second objective
entails formulating—through empirical means—principles about the ways behavior
is (and becomes) organized, and about the consequences of this organization for
social and cognitive life. In the
theory of distributed cognition
employed herein, cognitive actions are mediated by internal structures which
result from embodied experience with (and, simultaneously, result in) the structure
and processes of social practices and cultural histories of which the actions
are part. The theory entails an
information processing account of the material, social, and historical means
for organizing behavior.
In order to
accomplish these objectives, different units of analysis than those typical of
anthropology and cognitive science are employed. At the same time, the analysis also draws upon important elements
of methodology and theory from both of these fields. For instance, while most of cognitive science chooses to bound
the system of analysis at the skin of the individual—effectively ignoring the
role of extra-individual and historical phenomena in the explanation of
cognitive events—the analysis of this study does not privilege the boundaries
of individuals, per se. While Chapter 2
does address the ways individuals
organize experience (and thereby make meaningful certain forms of behavior for
themselves as individuals), the mechanisms which enable this organization are
seen to be constructed through participation in a material, social, and
historical order. Only through these
mechanisms—as instantiated in this larger context—does the organization of
experience come about, and only through an examination of the working of these
mechanisms in context does the organization of experience become tangible to us
as analysts. Chapter 3 presents a
descriptive account of the practice of pair-trawling for herring. It demonstrates how historical processes
entailing change and persistence in technology and social organization have
shaped the nature of resources employed by participants in their activities as
fishermen. These resources are shown to
be important mediators of cognitive performance but are rarely considered in
traditional treatments by cognitive science.
On the other
hand, anthropological theory of cognition, while sensitive to the historical
properties of human living, has been unable to unify theories of culture and
behavior. Culture is generally taken to
be the mental contents, understandings, or knowledge of (often idealized)
members of a social group—leaving the processes by which organized behavior is
accomplished either quite mysterious or tautologically grounded in cultural
knowledge. Again, a shift in the units
of analysis proves helpful—this time from the static description of idealized
conceptual structure to the dynamic description of embodied performance in real
situations, shaped by material structures and socio-historical processes.
Chapter 4
provides an analysis of a real-time sequence of events which takes place during
the activity of searching for where to set the trawl by a pair-trawling team of
ships. Cognitive events are here
analyzed in terms of captains' time-course constructions and manipulations of
resources for accomplishing the familiar, yet complexly dynamic, tasks
involved. These resources are seen to
be both external and internal to individuals—in the social and material means
of the practice and the abilities acquired through performance with these
means—creating the functional systems by which complex problems and
computations are made simpler and the practice reproduced. The system of activity so constituted is
shown to exhibit emergent properties which are not simply the sum of the
abilities of the individuals involved.
Rather, the system exhibits properties which result from the
interactions between participants and the tools at their disposal.
Some of the
most key cognitive resources turn out to be those created in the communication
which takes place between captains of the team working within a loosely
cooperative fleet of such pair-trawling teams.
A large part of this process entails the establishment of
intersubjectively shared accounts of fish sightings which are mediated by sonar
representations of herring and the linguistic coding of those
representations. Chapter 5 presents an
experiment conducted to investigate the nature of this intersubjectivity as a
product of performing in different practices (employing different techniques)
of fishing. The experiment provides
solid evidence for the proposition that the sharing of interpretive and
communicative skills regarding sonar displays of fish is patterned upon the
specific histories of experience fishermen have engaging each other as
interlocutors and interpreters in these tasks.
The experiment also provides evidence suggesting that the linguistic
representations employed to talk about sonar displays and fish are important
cognitive resources employed in establishing the meanings of those sightings for
practitioners.
In the
remainder of this introductory chapter, the theoretical framework used to guide
the data collection and analysis of the study is presented. First, a brief account of the intellectual history
of cognitive anthropology, including an assessment of the current state of
theory in this and allied disciplines of cognition, is discussed. This discussion leads to a statement of the
failings of current theory to accommodate a number of important aspects of the
relationship between culture and cognition.
Finally, a theory of "distributed cognition" is outlined as a set of
conceptual tools for addressing these problems and unifying the chapters which
follow.
There is a
history of at least 35 years in cognitive anthropology of trying to describe
the "native's point of view" by making explicit local conceptual categories
which underlie native interpretations of the world. In early work, this entailed reconstructing indigenous semantic
systems from the relationships between constituent terms of the respective
languages (cf. Conklin, 1962; Frake, 1962; Goodenough, 1956; Lounsbury,
1956). In its cross-cultural form, this
research often sought to provide evidence for biological properties which might
constrain knowledge structures and the cultural phenomena which entail this
knowledge (cf. Berlin & Kay, 1969; Kay & McDaniel, 1978; Romney &
D'Andrade, 1964; Wallace, 1961). Later
forms of research have been extended to address relationships between the
organization of knowledge and: perception, inferences, emotions,
conceptualization, language, motivation, and reasoning. (See edited volumes by D'Andrade &
Strauss, 1992; Dougherty, 1985; Holland & Quinn, 1987). This effort has been multifaceted and
productive but is not without shortcomings.
Before addressing these issues, it is worth briefly considering how this
branch of anthropology differs from other kinds of anthropological
investigation. I begin with an
empirical claim:
Cultural anthropology (of all stripes) entails describing interpretive processes: the ways individuals located in time and space (within a cultural history and social and physical space), evaluate their situations with some consequence (be it actions, emotions, thoughts, feelings, or what have you).
All modern
ethnographic accounts include the specific and regular acts of interpretation
which individuals perform, as part of the researcher's attempt to communicate a
picture of the social life of some historically bounded group of people. Whether one is describing an ethos, a world
view, a ritual, a performance, or a social structure, examples of interpretive acts of individuals in the
group are used to make the description convincing. Take, for example, the nuances of a speech
act—the range of contexts in which it is used, the variety of forms it takes,
how it compares with other similar and complement acts, the reactions it
engenders, the emotions it evokes, the expectations it produces—all are used as
evidence in support of the claim that it is a speech act, and not an accidental
puff of wind, that is at stake.
Exemplifying
the problem of (and for) ethnography—in this case making sense of an act we
might want to call a ‘wink'—Geertz (1973:7) makes a similar claim: "[B]etween what Ryle calls ‘thin
description' of what the rehearser (parodist, winker, twitcher ...) is doing (‘rapidly contracting his right
eyelids') and the ‘thick description' of what he is doing (‘practicing a burlesque
of a friend faking a wink to deceive an innocent into thinking a conspiracy is
in motion') lies the object of ethnography:
a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which
twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals of parodies are produced,
perceived, and interpreted, and without which they would not ..... in fact
exist, no matter what anyone did or didn't do with his eyelids." No modern ethnography fails to describe such
acts (whether of speech or gesture) in communicating the particular picture of
society the author has experienced. In
this sense I am arguing that all cultural
anthropologists engage in the activity of describing interpretive processes.
Cognitive
anthropology, however, has primarily been engaged in describing what members of a culture know (including how the
organization of what they know, and internal constraints upon knowing, effect
what they know) rather than describing interpretive processes more
generally. Methodologically, this has
entailed much more explicit
descriptions of relationships between culture and cognition. Theoretically (and perhaps, partly, as a
result of the methodology) the unexamined assumptions of cognitive anthropology
have always been that: knowledge is the more or less exclusive determinant of
interpretative processes; knowledge is usually composed of (or, at least, is
optimally described in terms of) propositional structures; knowledge is
transmitted through socialization in a group; and knowledge comes to rest in
the heads of competent individuals of the group.[1]
Hutchins (1980)
summarized a piece of this intellectual history in a comparison of the problems
faced by earlier cognitive anthropology and cognitive psychology.
It seems that the search for representations of what people know, as exemplified by the ethnoscience tradition in anthropology, got into trouble largely because it ignored the processes of how people go about knowing. On the other hand, the search for characterizations of how people make inferences has suffered from a failure to consider what it is that people are thinking about. Surely this results because representation and process, while analytically separable, are intimately intertwined in any real instance of cognition (ibid:11).
Hutchins'
interest in the interplay between representation and cognitive process
(specifically, inference) leads him to a formal account of the negotiation of
Trobriand land tenure agreements. This
account accommodated both the cultural content of what was being discussed and
the (internal) mechanisms by which understanding in the discourse was
accomplished. Hutchins employed
analytic constructs (schemata) which modelled the structured knowledge of
participants observed in local court arguing their claims of land
ownership. In this same piece of work,
Hutchins (1980) articulated a theory of culture which, following earlier
proposals by Kay (1966) and D'Andrade et
al. (1972), likened the
relationship between cultural knowledge and social behavior to that posited to
exist between language grammar and speech behavior.[2] A cultural grammar, in this theory, is a
system of knowledge which (due to structural organization and generativity) is
capable of both internally representing courses of action and making available
to natives the means for operating upon those representations.[3] The analytic use of "schemata"—the
formalization of cultural grammars—which followed from Hutchins' description of
Trobriand land litigation continues to be the primary theoretical and
methodological tool of cognitive anthropology (cf. Casson, 1983; D'Andrade,
1990; D'Andrade & Strauss, 1992; Holland & Quinn, 1987).
There are many
reasons, aside from the productivity of this paradigm during the 1980's, for
the primary position held by "schema theory" in cognitive anthropology
today. One factor contributing to this
state of affairs has been the dominant theory of language since 1960—generative
grammar—and the influence it has had upon anthropology, linguistics,
psychology, philosophy, computer science, and cognitive science. As a result of this influence, cognitive
theory during the past three decades has largely been focused upon abstract
mental concepts as the contents of "deep structure," where explanatory
principles of cognition are posited to reside.
Explanations of cognitive phenomena are seen to lie, in this theory, in
the articulation of syntactic operations which act upon mental symbols or
thought tokens—uninterpreted, abstract, atomic elements whose grounding (both
material/biological and semantic/social) in a real world is of secondary (and,
to varying extents, peripheral) concern (cf. Fodor, 1976; Fodor & Pylyshyn,
1988; Newell & Simon, 1990[1976]; Pylyshyn, 1980).
These scholars (for
the sake of convenience, call them "classicists") all generally argue as
follows: a) cognition is "systematic" (i.e., basic concepts and relations
combine to yield complex expressions yet retain their independent constituent
effects upon the cognitive system); b) cognition is "productive" (i.e., an
infinite set of behaviors can be generated by a finite system); therefore, c)
cognitive architectures manipulate context-independent symbols by means of
"deep" syntactic rules—that is, logical operations insulated from the fuzziness
of semantic interpretation and real world performance. The digital computer, at the abstract level
of symbol manipulation, has provided the prototype upon which this model of
cognition has flourished (cf. Newell, 1980).
Of course the methodology of ethnography has forced a more "semantically
grounded" version of this theory upon cognitive anthropologists than is true of
other disciplines. That is, the
methodological requirement that ethnographies incorporate real world (as opposed
to laboratory or introspective) data, together with an epistemological position
which privileges the native's point of view as the object of study (as opposed
to one which renders meaning transparent and unproblematic) have mitigated the
influence classical cognitive theory has had in anthropology to an extent which
is not true of philosophy, psychology, and artificial intelligence.
At the same
time, cultural anthropology's own history suggests a bias towards
abstract-level representations of social and historical phenomena which
predisposed cognitive anthropology to partake in the classical paradigm. Following a tradition that goes back at
least as far as Durkheim's (1915) notion of "collective representations," most
anthropological formulations of culture have entailed the idealized mental
contents of people as the backbone of theory meant to bridge history, behavior,
and social constitution. These
formulations, whether focused upon individuals or societies, were attempts to
account for behavioral regularities—within a more or less bounded group of
directly or indirectly interacting individuals—as a consequence of shared
contents of mind (cf. Benedict, 1934; Kluckhohn, 1941; Kroeber, 1917; Linton,
1936; Sapir 1931, 1934). The modern
central dogma of cultural anthropology, "shared understandings," is a product
of these accounts.[4]
Werner and
Schoepfle (1987), citing the extent to which data and explicit formalisms in
analysis have been left out of published ethnographies, attribute the central
dogma to anthropology's traditional methodology of participant observation
which, they say, "forced ethnographers to learn culture as any human being
immersed in it would... who then wrote about their personal synthesis of what
the natives' culture was about" (ibid:82).
While
participant observation employed as an unexplicit methodology undoubtedly
accounts for part of the central dogma, an unappreciated aspect of this issue
lies in anthropology's explicit emphasis upon interviews which do not contain the data necessary to account for contextualized performance in cognition
and social behavior. As a result of (or
even, as theoretical grounding for) this methodological commitment, cognition
is equated with "knowledge," culture with "shared knowledge," and intracultural
variation becomes a statistic of consensus rather than an aspect of the way
cognition and culture work. For
instance, interviews have long been taken by cultural (including cognitive)
anthropology to be the premiere "epistemological window" through which
understanding of social life is to be attained (cf. Werner & Schoepfle,
1987, Chapter 1). But interview data,
results of social behavior in their own rights, are seldom explicitly
contextualized for the performance properties entailed in the production of
those data. Instead, interview data
(including the protocols of formal elicitation techniques) are usually analyzed
for the context-free content and structure of the propositions expressed or
derived.[5] By imputing mental contents in one-to-one
correspondence with these data (or the derived propositions) this kind of
analysis has been unable to account for the dynamics among and relationships
between mental structure, behavior, and the material, historical, and social
contexts of human activity.
Current theory
in cognitive anthropology, it is being suggested, is a result of both
multi-disciplinary ("classical") formulations of cognition derived from a
formal theory of language—a theory emphasizing the disembodied, uninterpreted,
context-free, structural organization and syntactic manipulation of thought
tokens or concepts at the level of deep structure—and the central dogma of
cultural anthropology which equates "culture" (a sum of the defining
characteristics of an historically situated group of people) with idealized
mental structure, or "shared understandings."
For the current argument, it is most important simply to recognize that
theory in cognitive anthropology has reduced the description of processes
of interpretation to the description
of knowledge structures with the consequence that many of the important
contributors to acts of interpretation get
left out. There is little attention
paid to situations or the contexts which structure interpretive acts; to the
learning of appropriate behaviors or courses of action; to the ways history,
institutions, materials, and other actors constrain and facilitate cognitive
and social performance. In short, an
exclusive focus upon conceptual structure in cognitive theory has neglected
many of the processes and structures involved in individuals interpreting and
acting in the world and through such acts contributing to its contents, form,
and meaning.[6]
The motivation
for changing this state in the theory of cognitive anthropology is easily
communicated by reviewing a simple experiment conducted by John Gatewood
(1983). Gatewood asked students in his
class to list all of the trees they could name, and then to list all of the
trees they could recognize. He found
that, on average, subjects could only recognize (according to their own
introspections) 50% of the trees they could name. Furthermore, he says, "informants may be unable to recognize a
kind of tree in their lists, and yet they can arrange their labels into
taxonomies, use them in descriptions of landscapes, and wield them in
figurative language" (ibid:382)
Clearly, there is a large degree of "slippage" between knowledge of
language and knowledge of trees (in terms of recognition ability). The two kinds of knowing entail different
cognitive phenomena which would clearly be conflated if one simply asked
subjects to build a taxonomy of tree names and then went on to draw conclusions
about what these taxonomies mean for the individuals or, worse yet, for the
society as a whole.
Thus far, the
result merely reproduces an earlier concern for the "psychological validity" of
underconstrained analytic models of cognitive phenomena (cf. Burling, 1964;
Wallace, 1965; D'Andrade, 1976; Holy & Stuchlik, 1983). Of more interest, is Gatewood's discussion
about why the observed slippage (in his experiment) may exist. He says, "[a]n obvious proximate cause for
the persistence of unrecognizable category labels is the prevalence of written
language in modern society. People
learn names for things and even a considerable amount about them without ever
encountering a concrete example" (ibid:384).
One way to take
Gatewood's observation here is in terms of how people come to "know" things
from performing in specific contexts with
those things as resources for acting–in this case with trees and with tree
labels, respectively. Furthermore,
institutions and value systems arise and evolve through individual performances
which take place in these socio-historically constructed, and materially
instantiated, situations. Knowing about
trees is not the same as knowing about "trees" because of the differences in
embodied experiences and social practices which structure the properties of these
two kinds of cognitive events. The point
is deceptively obvious, and there is a risk it might be taken to be
trivial. For example, a response might
be, "this is just the difference between knowing about trees as a college
student in anthropology would, and knowing about trees as a logger, or
botanist, or gardener would—a difference all anthropologists are sensitive to
in their elucidations of cultural diversity."
The goal is precisely to make
the processes which lie behind this kind of difference more explicit, not
simply as a phenomenon which appears across "cultures"—i.e., tautologically
defined by the partition of possible mental contents into sub-groups of shared
understandings—but one prevalent within all interacting human groups as a
consequence of the nature of situated human activity.[7]
Finally,
Gatewood finds it plausible to speculate about the origins of this kind of
phenomenon (that is, the "slippage" between the two kinds of knowing in his
experiment) in human evolution. The
notion here is that social organization and symbol manipulation have extended
the capacity of a strictly genetic system to reproduce ordered
heterogeneity. That is, solutions to
problems confronting goal-directed agents (many entailing matters of survival)
are now distributed beyond the immediate access of any individual (Hutchins
& Hazlehurst, 1991). Accessing
those solutions requires intermediaries (e.g., symbols, tools, and social
organization) and expertise in the use of each of these. These intermediaries, then, come to set up
their own constraints upon the
interpretive processes of individuals (that is, they mediate cognitive
performance) and yet they only do so via the consequences of those processes (that is, the learning and institutionalization
of these intermediaries in social practice).[8]
The problems
for cognitive science posed by classicists have not gone away—the "systematic"
aspects of human cognition remain in need of attention. But research entailing both computational
modelling and empirical study of language and cognition has shifted the focus
of attention to more inclusive properties, making classical concerns appear
selective and unrepresentative of cognitive phenomena. For example, supposed "noise" in language
behavior, once taken to be artifacts of production from deep structure by
classical accounts—the residues of competence minus resource limitations—is now
recognized to be a productive source
of information for language processing.
Systematic analyses of language use reveal cognitive mastery of complex
conventions for: turn-taking (Sacks et al.,
1974); utterance repair (Jefferson, 1974); signaling appropriateness or
meta-communicative frames for interpretation (Goodwin, 1981; Gumperz, 1982);
employing gesture and shared visual representations to ground intersubjectivity
(Goodwin, 1993; Hutchins & Palen, 1993; Ochs et al., n.d.); and the construal of meaning via both referential
and syntactic construction (Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980;
Langacker, 1986, 1987; Ochs, 1988).
Clearly, the lesson of this research is that language performance (the embodied,
communicative, and context-sensitive aspects of language) should not be
partitioned off as an orthogonal domain of study, but rather must centrally
contribute to the constraints that are placed upon theories of language and
cognition.
Some of these
implications have been productively explored in a new paradigm of cognitive
modeling called (generally) "connectionism"
(Rumelhart et al., 1986;
McClelland et al., 1986). Building upon earlier information processing
models of cognition (including schema theory), this research has provided a
refreshing alternative to classical accounts of cognition. Connectionist modeling has emphasized
learning as a process involving the satisfaction of diverse constraints on
performance. Cognitive performance is
seen in terms of computational processes that integrate representations at
different levels internally, and from different sources externally. Connectionist models implementing this
theory have demonstrated the ability to account for a variety of cognitive and
language phenomena (cf. Elman, 1990; McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981; Plunket
& Marchman, 1991; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989; St. John &
McClelland, 1990). These models are
capable of abstracting relevant information from the structure of the
environment. This abstraction process
yields internal coding of competing constraints that represent experience with
these particular environments and which become internal resources for
performing in these contexts and generalizing in novel situations. By focusing on the process of abstracting
environmental regularities in order to build internal structure which is a
reliable predictor of (i.e., affords the organization of behavior using)
external structure, this paradigm shows promise for effectively addressing many
of the inadequacies of the dominant view in language and cognition discussed
above.
The
organization of behavior in this re-envisioned cognitive system can be
profitably viewed as some function of current and past behaviors, as well as
the nature of media and processes (e.g., internal representations, social
organization, and material artifacts) which modulate the flow of information to
(and within) the system and actions taken by the system (cf. Hazlehurst, 1990;
Hutchins, 1990, 1991(a), 1993). In such
a framework, the "systematic" cognition of individual behavior results from the
use of symbols—themselves the
material products of social and cognitive action—and other resources available
in the environment for achieving individual and collective goals. Cognition, then, is to be studied through
descriptions of the relations that obtain and evolve between resources and
constraints (both internal and external to the individual) in the course of acting. Culture, here, is a term that characterizes
those processes which determine the intergenerational stability (or change) in
the constraints and resources by which individuals organize their behavior. Social organization, here, emerges through
the institutionalization (for example, the elaboration through explicit,
salient, redundant, or exclusive coding and instantiating) of means for
interaction between individuals which, in turn, functions to constrain
individual action (cf. Barth, 1966).
Both culture
and social structure, that is, are most profitably understood through
articulation of those mechanisms of situated human activity which are essential
to the organization of individuals' behaviors.
The broad outline of these mechanisms is best articulated via three
claims about situated human activity.
(1) Humans are continually engaged in the ongoing process of acting (i.e., behaving intentionally, or with purpose as in a goal-driven manner) in structured environments at the same time that they are—through those actions—constructing those environments.
By structured environment I mean to
identify the physical and material settings in which action takes place as well
as the historical and social context of the activity. That is,
(2) Structured environments include two different populations of (ordered, information-bearing) material elements: artifactual structures, and natural structures.
By artifactual structure I mean ordered
material elements (including behaviors) in the environment created by other
social actors or their artifacts. By natural structure I mean objects in the
environment created by processes of nature.
"Structure" is
a term which must be used be used with care.
It only makes sense to talk about "structure" in conjunction with an interpreter which (or who) acts on
it. The earth's magnetic field is
"structure" only insofar as it creates differences which make a difference to
some interpreter(s). In this case, the
natural structure is a force which can be registered on a device (a magnetic
compass), thereby reliably indicating a consistent direction in two dimensional
space (say, along the surface of the earth) which is of use to an interpreter
trying to locate something in that space.
Surely aspects of the earth's magnetic field are "structure" to some
interpreters and not to others, depending upon those interpreters' uses of the entailed properties of this
structure.
Notice that the
presence of natural structures in no way precludes the use or importance of
artifactual structures (and vice versa).
Throughout human history natural structures have provided a rich domain
upon which artifactual structures have been modelled in order to capture
relevant properties of the natural world.
Sun dials, magnetic compasses, the formula "F=ma," and words uttered as
simple referential nouns denoting aspects of the physical world are all
examples of using artifactual structure to model natural structure. Of course, artifactual structure is also
regularly generated from processes involving other artifactual structure. Thus "F=ma," is quite arguably mediated by
many layers of artifactual structure (e.g., a theory of gravitation, algebraic
notation, institutions for learning, etc.) which stand between an event in
nature and someone knowing what to do with or employing this string of
symbols. In any case, regarding human
interpreters,
(3) The organization of behavior is made possible by, and simultaneously yields, internal structures.
By internal structures I mean those
resources internal to individuals which enable organized behavior in structured
environments. Internal structure comes
into being—that is, becomes organized—via mechanisms which save information
generated by embodied action in structured environments. Internal structure results from both
phylogenetic learning (evolution) and individual learning of the constraints
imposed by structured environments on the processes entailed by embodied
action. That is, in a manner analogous
to the way evolution has brought about genetically encoded (and ontogenetically
developed) structures for effective behaviors in ecological niches of survival
value, learning affords building of internal structures which enable
coordinated action in socio-historically, and materially, structured
environments.
The interpreters which act upon internal
structure are taken to be physiological systems within the individual. The interpreters at work here are engaged in
processes as diverse as parsing sequences of acoustic signals, generating motor
commands, and manipulating the relations which constitute organized experience.[9] It may be the case that we have very
impoverished data on the nature of many of these internal interpreters and how
they interact.[10] However, many of the important properties
can be described by careful attention to the situations in which individuals
act and which, when repeated often, in time lead to the deposit of residua—or
saved solutions or working pieces of an activity cycle—which enable coordination
between parts of the system (Hutchins, 1986).
We are also
free to "probe" the depths of internal processes with, for example,
psychological tests in order to try and see what these internal structures are
like directly. When this is done, however,
attention must be paid to the ways our probes may be unable to "see" the
internal workings without the supporting role of the structured environment
from which internal structure was derived and in which it normally operates.[11] Another way to state the epistemological
dilemma here is, again, with regard to the
need to observe interpreters at work in order to see the structures and
processes involved.
Finally, notice
that "action in structured environments" can entail a complex set of
relationships between artifactual, natural, and internal structure. Each may be engaged in mediation between the
others via the imposition of constraints on the functional possibilities of the
system. (See Figures 1 and 58.)
This set of
ideas about the ways interpretive processes function at the level of the
individual (mediated by internal structure as a result of embodied experience
with—and resulting in—the structure and processes of social practices and
cultural histories), I call a theory of "distributed cognition." The name and many of the ideas come from the
work of, and with, Edwin Hutchins and colleagues (Flor & Hutchins, 1990;
Hazlehurst, 1990; Hutchins 1990, 1991(a), 1991(b), 1993, 1995; Hutchins &
Hazlehurst, 1991, 1995; Hutchins & Klausen, in press). The theory entails an information processing
account of the cognitive, material, social, and historical means for organizing
behavior. The term "distributed
cognition" comes from an explicit recognition of the way interpretive acts are
carried out in structured environments—shaped by structure, both internal and
external to actors, as well as the processes which bring structures into
interaction—resulting in changes to both internal and external structures and
the processes which involve them. The
theory requires moving the traditional boundaries of cognition outward from the
individual, without losing sight of the fact that there is still one kind of
boundary at the skin of the individual and others "inside," which have their
own psychological and information processing properties. Cognition, in this sense, is distributed
across the participants and mediating objects of socio-historically constructed
situations and develops in real time—both the micro time of situated performers' actions, and the macro time of cultural history.
The methodology
employs empirical methods meant to answer the question, "what are the
differences that make a difference for individuals and groups of interacting
individuals located and acting in (real and historical) time and (material/physical
and social) space?" The specific
methods for doing this are various, and a sample of them are employed in the
chapters which follow. In general, all
of these methods attempt to articulate the relations between—and processes
entailing—cognitive resources (material structures both internal and external
to actors) employed in socio-historically situated activity, and how these
evolve in time.
Chapter 2
attempts to bring to bear diverse sources of information about social
activities now and in the past in order to portray "fisherman identity," the
means by which accounts of experience are organized and rendered by fishermen
from this community. The data sources
of this chapter include: story-telling in the harbor and in interviews,
historical accounts of the island and fishermen's activities, the nature of
local institutions and their influence on attitudes and activities, materials
and behaviors which were observed to signify or make salient to actors and
others who they are, what they do, what they have done, where they come from,
and where they plan to be in the future.
The analysis of
Chapter 2 makes it clear that the organization of experience for fishermen from
this community is constructed through participation in a practice which is (and
has been) shaped by a wide array of structures and processes. These are not abstract entities but, rather,
are parts of the lived-in world—they include the ships fishermen design and
spend many hours aboard, the containers into which fish get packed and which
provide the units for measuring success, the behavioral patterns of fish which
determine where and how fishermen spend their time, the linguistic formulations
by which fishermen communicate on the radio and in person, the conventions for
telling stories at the harbor, and the means for getting along with other
residents on the island. Casting these
phenomena (as embodied experiences of individuals) in terms of distributed
cognition—entailing structures whose interactions have functional consequences
for social and cognitive actors—provides an insightful characterization of
"identity" as those structures internal to individuals which participate in
this interaction and which make possible and coherent both the subjective and
objective properties of social life.
In Chapter 3,
the analysis turns its attention to a structural and historical description of
one specific fishing practice, pair-trawling for herring. In this chapter, the history of practice is
grounded in a structural account of the actual tasks required of fishermen—as
cognitive performers and social actors—for accomplishing their objectives. These tasks—that is, the articulation of
constraints upon, and resources for, the accomplishment of work routines as
they are now and have been in the past—provide the lense through which the
significance of ecological, economic and political conditions, technology, and
social organization is made explicit.
In Chapter 4,
the investigation of pair-trawling practice continues with a "micro analysis"—a
reconstruction of part of one night's fishing by a team of trawlers. On board audio and video recording of events
are translated into task-relevant representations which reveal the ways
resources—internal and external structures and the processes which incorporate these—are
employed by actors to solve problems and accomplish goals in the live
performance of their activities. In
particular, a transcript of sequential events recorded during the team's search
for where to set their trawl is employed to investigate properties of both the
individual and collective organization of behavior.
The analysis of
Chapter 4 makes it clear that processes of reasoning employed by the driving
captains are very dynamic, opportunistic, and heavily dependent upon the
contexts and technology which structure the activity. In their efforts to keep track of where other boats are (in order
to make sense of what other teams are "seeing" for fish) much of the activity
centers upon disambiguating which boat is where as reports come over the radio
and echoes are displayed on radar devices local to each boat of the team. These information gathering devices and
strategies—the generators of external representations which, in coordination
with internal structures, enable reasoning processes—are seen as cognitive
resources which are essential to the nature of the activity. These external structures, and the internal
structures built through experience using them, thus mediate the ongoing
activity at the same time actions taken which employ these resources reproduce
the practice itself.
Finally,
Chapter 5 presents a more formal account of some relations between internal and
external structures which are employed by fishermen in their practice. In this chapter, the results of an
experiment are reported, in which fishermen's understandings and linguistic
productions regarding sonar representations of fish are compared, both within
and across individuals and fishing practices.
Sonar devices are the primary vehicles for "seeing" fish underneath the
surface of the water, and the representations these devices create are very
important components of all techniques employed for catching herring. These techniques vary, however, with respect
to the characteristics understood to define potentially "good" sightings of
fish, and the means, necessity, and scope of sharing of this information with
others while fishing.
Subjects in the
experiment—representing members of different teams who engage in different
fishing practices (which engender different experiences with each other and
with the representations which mediate their respective activities)—should, the
theory holds, reflect these differences in their task performance. In the terms of distributed cognition,
internal structures are generated through the retention of information (the
residua of coordinating actions) brought on by patterns of embodied
experiences—in this case, performances employing visual and linguistic
representations of sonar displays of fish for accomplishing goals. Task performance then, to the extent the
experimental tasks simulate the real problems of interpreting sonar
representations and communicating about them, should reflect those patterns of
shared activity which are defined by the boundaries of the practice—who fishes
with whom, and what peculiar properties of interpreting sonar images are
entailed by specific fishing techniques.
The findings are consistent with this prediction. The experiment also provides specific
evidence for the proposition that the linguistic representations employed to
discuss and communicate about sonar displays of fish are essential resources
for reasoning about those sonar representations.
[1]In each of the last two clauses, one wants to write "culture" (as a noun) in place of "group." It seems to me this is a symptom of thinking in this tradition where the "buzzing booming confusion" of social life is crystallized into discrete, synchronic descriptions of mental contents, which lose their historical import and their grounding in the world of material and social action (cf. Boyer, 1990; Holy & Stuchlik, 1983).
[2]Interest in the analogy between culture and language grammar was quite widespread throughout the 1960's and 1970's (cf. Goodenough, 1957; Burling, 1969; Spradley, 1972).
[3]Thus, for example, inferences (including extended or "chained" reasoning) are possible due to the relations which obtain between basic elements of structured knowledge.
[4]Although recent work has suggested formal validity for the central dogma on statistical grounds (cf. Boster, 1985; Romney et al, 1986; D'Andrade, 1990), there remains a need to establish what effects variability in cognitive resources afford cognitive, cultural, and social processes.
[5]Holy and Stuchlik (1983) make a similar argument about anthropology's misuse of the problematic between knowing and acting. They also attempt, as others have before them (for example Barth, 1966), to formulate a solution via processes which construct social phenomena through individual action. However, Holy and Stuchlik fail to make problematic the organization of behavior at the level of the individual. As a result, all behavior of interest is taken to be social and all knowledge of interest is taken to be intersubjectively shared and (by definition) cultural. In failing to articulate a theory of cognition, they are left with only logical (rather than empirical) mechanisms to do the work of bridging knowing and acting.
[6]The reader will notice, in what follows, a distinction between this critique of cognitive anthropology and other critiques which start from similar observations but end up with a theory of anthropologists as interpreters. I do not believe the current critique is inconsistent with these other formulations, in the sense that both are responding to similar failures in the established paradigm. Where they end up, however, is another matter. My own view is that a theory of anthropologists as interpreters must entail a theory of interpretation as a cognitive phenomenon which applies to natives and anthropologists, and so the latter is a more inclusive, epistemologically sound, and useful theory.
[7]The point is, anthropology's traditional attribution of significance to "cultures" as the object of study, has the longstanding (and still lingering) effect of deflecting our attention from addressing the more general problem of "the ways humans organize their behavior." It should be clear that this is not a call for anthropologists to abandon their sensitivities to the ways people of different histories organize experience in different ways. On the contrary, it is a call to recognize our own framing of the problems of describing human behavior in terms of our own history of practice—a practice were the exotica of foreign peoples were best communicated in terms of the disembodied propositions one could learn, bring home, and conveniently arrange in a monograph for publication.
[8]Neither the author, nor Gatewood, are the first to make this line of argument, which has resurfaced under the banner of "NeoVygotskian theory." Recent publications (or translations) of relevance here include Goody (1977),Scribner and Cole (1981), Rogoff (1990), Vygotsky (1962, 1978), Wertsch (1985).
[9]See Dennett (1992) for an account of human consciousness built out of many such interacting, yet independent, processes.
[10]In the context of these theoretical constructs, cognitive psychology has an important role to play and provides us with many insights into the nature of the internal interpreters.
[11]More precisely, psychological experiments will substitute a new structured environment which probably only partially overlaps with the structured environment from which the target internal structure was derived.