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L e a r n i n g A C u l t u r e T h e Wa y I n f o r m a n t s D o :
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Observing, Imitating, and Participating

Alan Page Fiske

U CLA D ep art ment of A nt hrop ology

M anus crip t in p rep arat ion:

comment s w elcome but p leas e do not cit e w it hout p ermis s ion

Abstract

Most fieldwork in anthropology—indeed most social science research—relies 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.

1
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.

25 May, 2005 phoenix hd:users:gergo:library:mail:mail downloads:learncul.doc

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The Ine xplicability of Action

A society is a group of people who exhibit many resemblances among themselves produced by
imitation 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 way
they 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 very
helpful 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. (Nicholaisen
1988:205-206, 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, and
especially the truth of the practical relation to the practice. Academic interrogation inclines him
to take up a point of view on his own practice that is no longer that of action, without being that
of science.... Simply because he is questioned, and questions himself, about the reasons and the
raison d’être of his practice, he cannot communicate the essential point, which is that the very
nature 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 the
missionary compound, Government station, or planter’s bungalow, where, armed with pencil and
notebook and at times with a whisky and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from
informants, 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 with
them to distant sandbanks and to foreign tribes, and observe them in fishing, trading, and
ceremonial overseas expeditions. Information must come to him full-flavored from his own
observations 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 intensive
instruction 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 born—and 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 pumpkins—and 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 out—or why they celebrate birth anniversaries at all. Could you—or
most American informants—give 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. As
a 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 script—let alone an exegesis—for 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 independently
transmitted 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 infelicitous—never 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 was
enthralled 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 and
ethnopsychology 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 interviews—typically using
translators; 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
embodied—lumping 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-Conce ptual Sk ills

The capacity to do something does not entail discursive knowledge of how or why it is done—or 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 do—or
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 processes—or of their attitudes and behaviors—may be
accurate 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, or
why 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 that
savage religion is something not so much thought out as danced out; that, in other words, it
develops 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 manner—beliefs, 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
action—not 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 certain
ideas. These ideas, feelings, and impulses are moulded and conditioned by the culture in which we
find them, and are therefore an ethnic peculiarity of the given society. An attempt must be made
therefore, to study and record them.
But is this possible? Are these subjective states not too elusive and shapeless? And, even granted
that people usually do feel or think or experience certain psychological states in association with
the performance of customary acts, the majority of them surely are not able to formulate these
states, 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. (You
can 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 with
reference 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 configurations—unstated 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; on
repression 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 models—norms—that 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 the
ethnographer’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
circumscribed—and, 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 animals
all play major roles in the reproduction and transformation of culture. The use of space is important—for
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 food—especially nursing and egalitarian exchange of food among siblings—in 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 together—sacrificial meat and libation beer, or
Communion wafers and wine—is 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 lost—sometimes resulting in the subsequent creating of new meanings
for 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
manipulate—while 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 interest—indeed disdain—for 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 full
emergence into practical life. Play, therefore, is often mimetic in content, and expresses the child’s
identifications. But the Tale child’s play mimesis is never simply mechanical reproduction; it is
always 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, which
never occur in the adult activities copied, and rearranges adult functions to fit the specifically
logical 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 and
imitation on the part of children; they seldom “teach” them to do things systematically. Parents
were 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 they
just learn by themselves,” was the usual answer.
Children learn by observing and experimenting. Whatever adults are doing, children are present to
watch their activities and overhear their conversations. (Maretzki and Maretzki 1966:144; see
Williams 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 the
transmitter; 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 than
that which he uses when teaching an adult group. He explains nothing, since for him there is
nothing to explain. If there are mistakes, he corrects them, and his patience is great. (Mc Phee
1955:89)

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 energy—including such
practices as how to wash both the body and clothes, how to cook, how to cultivate, etc.—are
learned very gradually through imitation and tentative participation.... Knowledge transmission
tends 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 children—especially under age 6 or 7—as 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 among
the 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. In
contrast 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 learns
through another sequences: observe the approved task (as performed by an older sibling), imitate it
spontaneously, and receive corrective feedback only for inadequate performance. There is no
expectation of recognition for good performance in learning or carrying out a task, yet tasks are
learned 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 threaten—sometimes 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 are
selective 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 with
sharing 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

meaning—and, 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 the
conscious analysis of his cultural patterns around with him. That should be left to the student whose
business 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
difficult—sometimes impossible—to 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 a
verbal 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, and
communicate 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 do
here). 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 going—it’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 wrong—you 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 the
fundamental 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 via
explicit remembering, but also by subtle changes in our ability to identify, act on, and make
judgments about words, objects, and other stimuli—changes 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, implicit—indeed 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 an
organism 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 learning—but 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 these
experiences 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. Or—more likely—the 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 terms—or 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 to
represent 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 retransmit
in 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 them—which 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 (afiske@ucla.edu); when he wrote the first drafts of this he was
Research Associate in the Departments of Anthropology and Psychology at Bryn Mawr College.