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solves through finding patterns in that experience, applies these patterns in a “customized” adapted way to understand new experiences, and dynamically changes these patterns in the face of those new experiences.
Recall, for instance, our example in the last chapter of how you think about bedrooms p. 49. Your “image” of a prototypical bedroom is a compendium something rather like an edited collection of what you take to be your most
typical bedroom videotapes of your many experiences of bedrooms, linking, at a lower level, many smaller images, such as types of beds and carpets, and linking, at a larger level, to other sorts of images, such as types of adjoining
bathrooms and closets.
When I tell you the bedroom has a small sink and refrigerator in it, you immediately transform your image and “customize” it for this new setting, forming an image, perhaps, of something like a college dorm room. The two
different images you have formed are what I called, in the last chapter, ‘‘situated meanings” for “bedroom”. But each one is used against or in relation to different cultural models. In one case, your cultural model of what you take
to be typical adults and their bedrooms and houses, in the other case your cultural model of what you take to be typical college students, and their living quarters.
Both of these cultural models will vary significantly based on your social class and other sociocultural memberships. In fact, you may very well have not formed a situated meaning involving college students at all in the second case.
And, indeed, your situated meaning of bedrooms with and without refrigerators in them will vary a good bit based on your class-based and other sociocultural experiences and the cultural models about people, bedrooms, and houses
to which they have given rise.
Any situated meanings and cultural models active in a given context bring with them are linked to a good many other related situated meanings and cultural models. When you think about bedrooms, you activate more or less
strongly related situated meanings and cultural models having to do with houses, homes, relationships, and a good deal more. Any situated meaning or any cultural model is like a ball attached to a great many other balls on a string.
When you pick up the ball situated meaning or cultural model you drag along all the other balls some more closely attached to the original ball than others.
In the rest of this chapter we will see other sorts of cultural models and other ways to think about cultural models. We will also see an array of psychological, social, and political issues that arise, in different cases, when we study
cultural models and the situated meanings they help to organize, and lead us to form and transform.
4.3 All meaning is local
It is difficult to appreciate the importance and pervasiveness of cultural models, or to understand how they work, if we stick only to examples
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from cultures close to our own. So let me give an example of cultural models at work adapted from William Hanks’ excellent book, Language and Communicative Practices 1996. This example will also let us see that cultural
models are at work in even the “simplest” cases of communication and in regard to even the simplest words.
When we watch language-in-action in a culture quite different from our own, even simple interactions can be inexplicable, thanks to the fact that we do not know many of the cultural models at play. This means that even if we
can figure out the situated meanings of some words, we cannot see any sense to why these situated meanings have arisen why they were assembled here and how. So let’s move, with Hanks, to Yucatan, Mexico.
In a small town in Yucatan, a Mayan Shaman named “Don Chabo” is sharing a meal with his daughter-in-law, Margot, and a visiting anthropologist. A young man, named “Yuum,’’ approaches from the outside, and, standing
at the window, asks: “Is Don Chabo seated?” Margot replies: “Go over there. He’s drinking. Go over there inside.” These are about as simple as sentences get.
And yet the meaning of these sentences is not so straightforward after all. For example, the people seated around the table are having a meal, so why does Margo say that Don Chabo is drinking? Furthermore, Margot’s response
implies that Don Chabo is drinking, despite the fact that he was, at that moment, gazing off into space with a roll in his hand. Indeed, in Mayan, it would have been equally true here to say Don Chabo was “drinking” had he been
altogether done with eating his meal.
Margot’s response implies, as well, that Don Chabo was “seated.” Yet, it turns out, it would have been equally true to say he was seated had he been standing or even off somewhere else, even taking a bath in his own home.
Or, to take one final example, Margot uses the Mayan word for “there” that means “maximally distant from the speaker,” the same word people in Yucatan use for relatives who live outside Yucatan, in other states in the
Mexican Republic. She does this despite the fact that she is telling Yuum to go into her father-in-law’s house, not 10 meters away from hers and within the same compound as her house.
How can it be that people can be drinking when they are eating or doing nothing at all? That they are seated when they are standing or taking a bath? That they are far distant from something 10 meters away?
Things work this way because Mayans these Mayans, in any case, though they almost always take food with drink and vice versa, use the words “drink” and “eat” against a cultural model of meals in terms of which their morning
and evening meals are “drinking” and their larger main meal in the midafternoon is “eating.” Furthermore, to these Mayans, as long as the social engagement of mealtime is still going on, regardless of whether the “meal” itself is
finished or not, a person is still “drinking” or “eating.”
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Many Mayans live in walled compounds that contain several houses. Their cultural models for house and home are, thus, rather different from some of ours. They use the word “seated” to mean that one is “at home” and available,
regardless of where one is in the compound. Being “available” has, in addition, a special meaning for Shamans, since, of course, the whole business of Shamans brings to the fore a distinctive set of cultural models. To ask
whether a Shaman is ‘‘available” is to use this word against these cultural models and is to ask, in part, whether he is available to engage in counseling.
Finally, Mayans have their own cultural models, as all of us do, of how physical and social space work and are related. Margot is excluded from her father-in-law’s house, unless she has a specific reason to be there, for social
reasons having to doing with Mayan cultural models of social relationships and spaces within homes. Thus, she uses the word for “far distant” due to social, rather than physical distance.
In this brief example, I have, in fact, given you very little of what you really need to know to fully understand these simple sentences for example, why does Margot, rather than Don Chabo respond?. To really understand them,
even to understand just their “literal meaning,” one needs to understand how social hierarchies, gender, meals, social engagements, Shamanism, and a great deal more, work day-to-day in local settings among certain of the
Mayans.
Hanks devotes dozens of pages of dense, scholarly prose to explicating what these sentences mean, not at any deep symbolic or thematic level, just at the “literal” level. He points out that when a husband asks his wife, early in the
morning, in English, “D’the paper come today, sweetheart?” and she answers “It’s right on the table,” the situation is no less strange, complex, local, and cultural, however invisible all this complexity our own may be to us.
The moral that Hanks draws from even so simple sentences as these is this: meaning, even literal meaning, is wedded to local, “on-site,” social, and cultural practices. To put the matter another way: meaning is not general
and abstract, not something that resides in dictionaries, or even in general symbolic representations inside people’s heads. Rather, it is situated in specific social and cultural practices, and is continually transformed in those
practices. Or to put the matter in the terms we introduced in the last chapter: meaning is a matter of situated meanings, customized in, to, and for context, used always against a rich store of cultural knowledge cultural
models that are themselves “activated” in, for, and by contexts remember our example above of bedrooms.
This is, of course, as true of English as it is of Mayan, but, since we know our own local practices so thoroughly and unreflectively, the situated and local nature of meaning is largely invisible to us. It is easy for us to miss the
specificity and localness of our own practices and think we have
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general, abstract, even universal meanings. We come to think, when we have confronted no other languages, that “sitting” is just sitting, “drinking” is just drinking, “over there’’ is just over there. In fact, the situated, social, and
cultural nature of meaning often becomes visible to us only when we confront language-at-work in languages and cultures far distant from our own.
4.4 Cultural models in action: middle-class parenting
