Cross-Cultural

D’Andrade / A COGNITIVIST’S
Research / May 2001
VIEW

A Cognitivist’s View of the

Units Debate in Cultural
Anthropology

Roy D’Andrade
University of California, San Diego

This article explores some of the implications of the current idea-

tional definition of culture. If culture consists of shared ideas, then
the findings of cognitive psychology concerning the limits of short-
term memory necessarily constrain the size and complexity of cul-
tural units. Wierzbicka’s universal linguistic primes or primitives
would then be the atomic units of culture. Although this approach
has much to recommend it, problems remain concerning the rela-
tion of cultural ideas to their physical manifestations in artifacts
and actions, and a classification of the kinds of relations cultural
ideas have to their physical manifestations is presented. Finally,
the notion that the collection of cultural items held by the members
of a society form any kind of entity is critiqued, and the argument is
made that there is just one common culture for all humans.

There is a long-standing debate about whether it is possible to de-

fine basic units of culture. If it is possible, what are the basic units?
Are beliefs about ghosts, for example, the same kind of thing as an
initiation ceremony? Beliefs about ghosts are ideas that people

Author’s Note: This article was originally prepared for “Themes, Memes,
and Other Schemes: What Are the Units of Culture?” (Garry Chick, orga-
nizer), 27th Annual Meeting of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research,
February 1999, Santa Fe, NM.
Cross-Cultural Research, Vol. 35 No. 2, May 2001 242-257
© 2001 Sage Publications, Inc.
242
 D’Andrade / A COGNITIVIST’S VIEW 243

have, but initiation ceremonies are not ideas, they are a system of
observable activities. Are both ideas and activities units of culture?
What about physical objects—are they culture too? Any decision
about the nature of units of culture first requires a definition of cul-
ture.
For the past 40 years, there has been general consensus in
anthropology about the definition of culture (see Chick, 1997, for a
discussion of types of cultural definitions). Following Parsons,
Geertz (1973), Schneider (1968), Swartz (1991), Spiro (1987), and
others presented persuasive arguments for defining culture as
symbol and meaning. Ward Goodenough’s (1957) definition of a
society’s culture as “whatever it is one has to know or believe in
order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members” (p. 168)
has also been very influential. In this modern paradigm, culture
becomes purely mental—ideas and beliefs and knowledge and
meanings. The ideas and knowledge needed to put on an initiation
ceremony are culture, but the actual activities of the initiation cer-
emony are not culture and neither are the masks and ritual
paraphernalia.
In one sense, this is a trivial change. One just does a bit of
rewording—instead of saying “culture consists of shared ideas,
shared activities, and artifacts,” one says “culture consists of
shared ideas about the world in general, ideas about how to per-
form certain activities, and ideas about how to make and use cer-
tain things.” However, in another sense, a profound change has
taken place; culture is now a purely mental phenomenon and
hence a psychological phenomenon and hence constrained by the
psychological processes of cognition and learning.

COGNITIVE CULTURAL UNITS

If we define culture as a kind of mental phenomenon—something

cognitive—what follows? A central idea in the study of cognition is
that humans have two kinds of memory systems, short-term or
working memory and long-term memory. It is well-known that
short-term or working memory is very limited. The number of
items one can be aware of and hold in working memory is very
small, approximately five to seven things (five according to George
Mandler, 1985; seven according to George Miller, 1956). Long-term
memory, on the other hand, can contain many hundreds of thou-
sands of items (Dudai, 1997; Landauer, 1986).
244 Cross-Cultural Research / May 2001

The tiny size of working memory creates a severe bottleneck in

human information processing. The external world at any moment
contains many million potential chunks of information, informa-
tion that human beings could learn and make use of. But for this
information to become part of long-term memory, it must pass
through a tiny space of about five items of working memory and be
held there for a second or so. As a result, only a very small part of
the information about the world ever gets remembered.
One might think that this bottleneck would constrain human
intelligence quite severely, leaving humans with the sort of intel-
lect exhibited by earthworms and snails. With such a tiny working
memory, how can humans be so smart? A desktop computer’s work-
ing memory holds a hundred million bytes of information—which
means a desktop computer’s working memory is approximately 10
million times larger than a human’s working memory. And desktop
computers are not very smart. How is it that people, despite their
tiny working memories, have such impressive intellects?
How humans manage to be smart is undoubtedly the result of a
number of things, including multiple parallel processing systems
and distributed brain activation. Perhaps the most relevant pro-
cess is chunking. The phenomenon of chunking is easy to demon-
strate. For a classroom demonstration, an instructor prepares
sheets of paper with large letters printed on them. The instructor
holds up a sheet for a few seconds and then asks the students to
write down the letters they saw on the sheet. Given only three let-
ters on a sheet—for example, X, Q, and B—recall is excellent and
students find the task easy. As the number of letters rises to six or
so, students find the task more difficult but still possible. Above six
or seven letters, the task becomes too difficult, and only five or six
letters are remembered.
To illustrate the phenomenon of chunking, one of the sheets
shown to the participants contains a set of scrambled letters (e.g.,
R K Q O F U C B X N W O I), which, if unscrambled, make simple
words (e.g., QUICK BROWN FOX). Shown the sheet with the
scrambled letters, recall is poor. But shown the sheet with the let-
ters grouped into simple words, recall of all the letters is easy and
accurate. What has happened is that the letters have obviously
been chunked or packaged into larger units (words), and once
packaged, only a small number of items need to be retained in
working memory because recall of the words makes possible recall
of the letters that make up the words. Without chunking, humans
 D’Andrade / A COGNITIVIST’S VIEW 245

would be unable to talk or make complex designs or objects. Any

kind of complexity—in planning, reasoning, or categorizing—
would be very difficult because complexity requires the mental
manipulation of multiple items, and to manipulate more than a
small number items, one must be able to chunk and then unpack
items.
Less discussed in psychology are the sources of the chunks that
make humans so smart. Some chunks are learned through simple
experience. For example, the patterns that make up faces, trees,
rocks, and so on are learned by observation, not just by humans but
by most vertebrates. However, for humans, many chunks or pat-
terns are culturally learned. Houses, furniture, cars, clothing, and
so on—the artifacts of culture—are hierarchically complex arrange-
ments of items. If these artifacts were not present to learn about,
we would not be able to conceive of them. The development of these
artifacts is the result of thousands of years of trial and error.
Humans also live in a world of meaning artifacts. The speech
sounds and written marks of language are meaning artifacts,
physical stuff the child must learn to decode and encode.
What are the implications of this perspective for the problem of
units? First, given the ideational definition culture, the basic units
of culture are by definition cognitive processes. Although full con-
sensus is lacking on exactly which cognitive processes are most
basic, there is considerable agreement that the human cognitive
system operates to produce an experiential world of objects. This
basic cognitive proclivity is directly reflected in language.
Langacker and others in the field of cognitive linguistics argued
that the basic and universal sense of a noun is, as we were once
told, of something being a thing. Langacker (1987) said,

Counter to received wisdom, I claim that the basic grammatical cat-

egories such as noun, verb, adjective, and adverb are semantically
definable. . . . A noun, for example, is a symbolic structure whose
semantic pole instantiates the schema [THING]; or to phrase it more
simple, a noun designates a thing. In a similar fashion, a verb is said
to designate a process, whereas adjectives and adverbs designate
different kinds of atemporal relations. (p. 189)

Humans have an impressive ability to entify almost anything,

ranging from the perceptual objects that our visual system natu-
rally isolates, such as trees and babies, to reifications of abstract
relationships, such as equality.
246 Cross-Cultural Research / May 2001

An equally basic part of cognition is predication, the conceptual-

ization of things participating in processes. In its simple sense,
predication is the assertion that something is doing/having/being
something, for example, “The dog barks.” Langacker (1987) pre-
sented a detailed account of predication in his Foundations of Cog-
nitive Grammar. Predication is important because humans do not
just live in a world of objects; they live in a world in which objects
are somewhere, have certain properties, and do something. From
this perspective, noun-verb combinations are the basic molecules
of thought.
Given an ideational definition, intersubjectively shared objects
and the perceptual features of these objects constitute the basic
building blocks or units of culture. These objects are then chunked
into larger units through the process of predication. This claim fol-
lows from the cognitive perspective described earlier but does not
necessarily help in creating a useful taxonomy of cultural things.
However, the claim does have clear methodological implications.
Thus, as Romney and Moore (2001 [this issue]) point out in their
article in this collection, powerful techniques have been developed
for the discovery of the nature and organization of cultural fea-
tures characterizing the objects of a domain, and a variety of
ethnographic questions can be answered using these techniques.
Over the past 25 years, a strong case has been made by Anna
Wierzbicka that a small number of universal concepts are found as
lexical items in all languages (Wierzbicka, 1972, 1992). Wierzbicka
argued that these words are conceptual primes or primitives that
form the basic units from which all other concepts are constructed.
Wierzbicka’s goal is to construct a simple, clear, universal semantic
metalanguage, a language made up of the ordinary little words
that everyone knows. Wierzbicka’s universal metalanguage offers
a potential means to ground all complex concepts in ordinary lan-
guage and translate concepts from one language to another with-
out loss or distortion in meaning. The idea of developing a univer-
sal metalanguage has often been proposed by philosophers and
linguists. Wierzbicka’s work is the most thorough and complete
working out of this agenda to date. As Goddard (1998) said in his
text on semantics about Wierzbicka’s work,

The main “discovery method” which has led to the current NSM
[Natural Semantic Metalanguage] inventory has been experimen-
tation (trial and error) with trying to define a wide variety of expres-
sions. All the proposed primitive have proved themselves, on the one
 D’Andrade / A COGNITIVIST’S VIEW 247

TABLE 1
Proposed Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)
Semantic Primitives (after Wierzbicka, 1996)

Substantives: I, YOU, SOMEONE, PEOPLE/PERSON, SOMETHING/THING

Mental predicates: THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR
Speech: SAY, WORD
Actions, events, and movement: DO, HAPPEN, MOVE
Existence: THERE IS
Life: LIVE, DIE
Determiners: THIS, THE SAME, OTHER
Quantifiers: ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL, MANY/MUCH
Evaluators: GOOD, BAD
Descriptors: BIG, SMALL
Time: WHEN/TIME, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME,
FOR SOME TIME
Space: WHERE/PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, FAR, NEAR, SIDE, INSIDE
Interclausal linkers: BECAUSE, IF
Clause operators: NOT, MAYBE
Metapredicate: CAN
Intensifier, augmentor: VERY, MORE
Taxonomy, partonomy: KIND OF, PART OF
Similarity: LIKE

hand, to be very useful and versatile in framing explications, and, on

the other hand, to be themselves resistant to (non-circular) explica-
tion. Ultimately, the only way to show that something is NOT an
indefinable element is to succeed in defining it. It is never possible,
strictly speaking, to prove absolutely that something is indefinable.
The best we can say is that various attempts are made and seen to
fail—as in the case of elements like I, YOU, SOMEONE,
SOMETHING, THIS—to the claim to indefinability becomes stron-
ger and stronger. (p. 59)

The current inventory (taken from Goddard, 1998) is presented

in Table 1.
As an aside, an interesting use of Wierzbicka’s natural semantic
metalanguage is to construct clear definitions for technical terms
in the social sciences. For example, using Wierzbicka’s metalan-
guage, Goddard (1998) critiqued writers who present definitions
that are more complex semantically than the original term to be
defined. I have found attempting to translate social science theo-
retical terms into Wierzbicka’s universals to be a sobering
experience.
248 Cross-Cultural Research / May 2001

To give an example of Wierzbicka’s (1992) use of NSM, consider

her analysis of the difference between the English word disgust
and the approximate French translation dégoût:

disgust
X thinks something like this:
I now know: this person did something bad
people shouldn’t do things like this
when one thinks about it, one can’t not feel something bad
because of this, X feels something bad
X feels like someone who thinks something like this:
I have something bad in my mouth
I don’t want this
dégoût
X thinks something like this: this is bad
because of this, X feels something bad
X feels like someone who thinks this:
I have something bad in my mouth
I don’t want this
The differences in the definitions reflect the fact that “dégoût” is
associated more closely and directly with eating than “disgust,”
while “disgust” involves feelings caused by bad and ugly human ac-
tions. Thus “disgust” is more moral and judgmental than “dégoût.”
(pp. 125-129)

Wierzbicka has been remarkably effective in illuminating and

specifying cultural differences in meaning between near equiva-
lent words in different languages. Her inventory of prime terms
has empirical claims to universality. Although there are obvious
problems with regard to polysemy—consider all the different
senses of know found in any good English dictionary—such diffi-
culties do not seem unsolvable. The Natural Semantic Metalan-
guage project will, I think, be refined and elaborated with
ever-increasing amounts of data and will continue to grow in value
as a technique of semantic analysis.
If one defines culture as shared ideas/meanings/knowledge/
understandings, then these shared ideas must either be composed
of undefinable prime terms or they must be composed of chunks
made up of prime terms. To the extent that Wierzbicka has suc-
ceeded in finding a universal metalanguage, all cultural ideas/
meanings/knowledge/understandings are definable within this
metalanguage. This inventory also needs to include the features
of the terms and the syntax by which these terms can be put into
sentences/propositions/beliefs.
 D’Andrade / A COGNITIVIST’S VIEW 249

Wierzbicka’s universal terms are analogous to the atoms of the

physical world (unfortunately, use of this analogy seems to annoy
many anthropologists). Of the enormous number of combinations
of these terms that make up the sentences that correspond to the
possible ideas/meanings/knowledge/understandings of a person,
some are cultural—that is, are intersubjectively shared by collec-
tives within a society. Just as more than a hundred kinds of atoms
can combine into more than 20 million kinds of molecules, so the 50
or more universal concepts can combine into hundreds of thou-
sands of ideas. This puts the anthropologist who knows and is able
to use the Natural Semantic Metalanguage in the same position as
the chemist who knows about atoms—most of the actual things in
the world are molecules, and it is their properties that one wants to
investigate. Knowledge about atoms is helpful to the chemist only
because it helps in understanding the nature of the molecules.
Thus, knowing the basic units does not answer questions about
how to classify the many things that ethnographers see and write
about. A few simple elements can be chunked or combined into a
huge variety of complex things. Gatewood’s (2001 [this issue])
problem of how to classify bows still remains. How to build a bow
and how to use a bow can be described in using a few basic univer-
sal concepts, but that fact does not solve the problem of how to con-
struct a taxonomy of bows. A major difficulty involves the fact that
most cultural items can be packed into larger and larger cultural
chunks or broken down into smaller and smaller cultural chunks.
The problem then becomes one of picking the right level or size
chunks—that is, the level of detail that will facilitate analysis and
comparison.

PROBLEMS WITH THE DEFINITION

OF CULTURE AS PURE IDEA

In my view, it is a mistake to treat culture as consisting of noth-

ing but ideas, meanings, understandings, and so on. Definitions, to
be useful, should “carve nature at the joints.” But cultural
ideas/meanings/knowledge/understandings are always fused to
physical manifestations. Just as language needs both meaning and
sound, so culture needs both ideas and physical manifestations. It
would be odd if linguists decided to define language as just mean-
ings and to treat the sounds of speech as something else entirely.
250 Cross-Cultural Research / May 2001

Unfortunately, anthropologists have done exactly this with respect

to the definition of culture.
To make matters even more confusing, anthropologists and
other social scientists tend to use many technical terms that are
ambiguous with respect to whether they include both ideas and
physical manifestations. Thus the term discourse is ambiguous
with respect to whether it refers just to the actual talk that people
produce, just to the ideas that are expressed in the talk, or to both.
Standard terms such as role, norm, structure, and symbol also have
this dual character; rarely is it clear whether the person using the
term wants to include both the physical and mental or wants to
refer to only one of these. The advantage of such ambiguity is that
it avoids taking either an idealist or materialist position. The dis-
advantage is that it leaves unanalyzed the relations between cul-
tural ideas and the physical manifestations of these ideas.
There are a number of ways in which cultural ideas are fused to
physical events. First, there is the relation of the physical symbol
to the meaning of the symbol. Ideas, to be communicated, need a
medium—pantomime, speech, writing, or whatever—and conven-
tional meanings need conventional physical forms or physical
symbols. Second, there is the fusion between cultural ideas and
physical artifacts that instantiates those ideas. Chairs and tables
are examples. There is the idea of what a chair is, the ideas needed
to build a chair, and the ideas about the use of chairs; all of these
fuse the connection between this type of physical thing and mental
processes.
Third, there is the kind of complex fusion that exists between a
dollar bill and the idea of money. John Searle (1995) called money,
marriage, names, and rights culturally constructed objects. The
dollar bill counts as money or wealth, although it is paper and
wealth is not. A dollar bill is not a symbol for money in the way the
word hamburger is a symbol for a hamburger. A dollar bill counts
as money, but the word hamburger does not count as food (one can
use a dollar bill for money but one cannot use the word hamburger
for a hamburger). Whereas many culturally constructed objects
have direct physical instatiations (dollar bills, coins, signatures,
voting ballots, etc.), many other culturally constructed objects are
manifest only indirectly. One’s right to free speech, for example, is
manifested by actions such as standing on a soapbox and denounc-
ing the government and no one from the government being able to
do anything legally to stop it. This is indeed a complex contingency
 D’Andrade / A COGNITIVIST’S VIEW 251

but a contingency between ideas and kinds of physical events

nonetheless.
Fourth, cultural ideas can be conventionally externalized in a
society. For example, Western cultural ideas about love are conven-
tionally externalized in numerous sayings, jokes, stories, movies,
songs, paintings, and so on. Each of these externalizations involves
the physical expression of the cultural idea. Finally, cultural ideas
can also be institutionalized in roles; for example, the cultural con-
cept of grades is institutionalized in the role of the student who
must obtain a certain grade to pass a course, and gender-related
ideas are institutionalized in gender roles in a great variety of
ways.
In summary, each of the cognitive molecules that make up the
shared learnings of a society is in variable ways fused to physical
events: as the physical sign of a symbol, as an artifact, as a cultur-
ally constructed object, as a conventional externalization, and to
role behavior through institutionalization. Defining culture as just
shared ideation leaves out the fact that cultural ideas are always
fused to a variety of physical manifestations through which they
are learned, communicated, and enacted. With respect to the prob-
lems of identifying cultural units, the fusion of cultural ideas to
physical events creates complexities, as Gatewood’s (2001) discus-
sion of problems of form, function, and meaning with respect to the
Sun Dance illustrates. However, such complexities do not affect the
possibility of using cognitive molecules (or schemas, as I would
term them) as the basis for identifying and classifying cultural
items. Form, function, and meaning are each composed of cognitive
molecules with physical fusions, and the Sun Dance variations are
just that—variations in the cognitive molecules and their physical
fusions that make up different macromolecules in different Plains
tribes.

CULTURE AS A UNIT

Although one can argue that there are real cultural units in the
sense that the ideational aspect of culture must be composed of
whatever conceptual primes there are, one cannot argue from
either facts or first principles that cultures are units, at least not in
the usual sense of the word unit—something that has some degree
of real thingness.
252 Cross-Cultural Research / May 2001

Culture is not an entity, but it is a collection. For example, the

items now on my desk can be considered a collection of items, and I
can say “This collection of things on my desk—it is growing,” as if it
were a thing. Similarly, one can say that the collection of cultural
items active in the minds of the people of Bali form a collection of
sorts and therefore constitute a thing. But the collection of things
on my desk doesn’t really make much of a thing because the items
on my desk aren’t in immediate contact with each other, aren’t
made of the similar stuff, don’t have much of a common fate, don’t
strongly resist dispersion, and don’t interact strongly. Basically,
the collection as whole has no causal properties. These criteria for
entitativity are Donald Campbell’s (1958) and are presented in
more detail in Gatewood’s (2001) article. In my opinion, the situa-
tion with respect to the entitativity of the collection of cultural
items found in the minds of people living on Bali is not much better
than that for the things on my desk, Geertz’s (as presented in
Shweder & LeVine, 1984) opinion on the matter notwithstanding.
There are three strong arguments against thinking of a culture
as an entity. The first is defining a culture as the total collection of
cultural items held by the members of a society—the items held by
members of any one society are almost always held by members of
many other societies. Try, for example, to think of a truly unique
cultural item found in only one society in the world. It is not impos-
sible, but it is difficult. Different cultures—that is, the collection of
cultural items held by members of different societies—are not very
different. Cultures are recombinations of a limited stock of cultural
items. I take this to be an established empirical fact, amply docu-
mented by many hundreds of ethnographies.
True, the particular combination of cultural items found on Bali
is unique, but this kind of uniqueness is without consequence
unless one can show that this collection has special causal proper-
ties that it would not have if it were not exactly this particular com-
bination. No one has been able to demonstrate—or even argue
convincingly—that complex collections as total entities have spe-
cial causal properties.
Second, the particular combination of cultural items found for
any one society is usually in a state of change. Diffusion, innova-
tion, drift, and other processes are at work, making the claim that
there is one collection of items that can characterize a given society
for any substantial time period hard to maintain. Of course, there
are always items that are relatively permanent, and one could
arbitrarily call the collection of items that haven’t changed
 D’Andrade / A COGNITIVIST’S VIEW 253

recently “the culture of society X,” but this is not a very satisfactory
way to construct a definition.
Third, in 30 years of investigation in cognitive anthropology, I
have rarely found much conceptual interrelatedness across cul-
tural domains (D’Andrade, 1995). Within domains, on the other
hand, there is often a good deal of cognitive connectivity. But Amer-
ican ideas about how to use soupspoons are not cognitively related
to American ideas about the washability of cotton or the theorems
related to the square root of –1 or how to be a good friend. And so it
goes for most items—they are cognitively connected only to items
in the same domain and unrelated cognitively to the huge number
of items residing in other domains. Of course, again there is the
option of defining “the culture of society X” as just those items that
one believes are most strongly related to each other, but again, this
seems like a poor way of constructing a definition.
The real point here is that it doesn’t matter that one can’t define
the it that makes up culture because culture isn’t really an it at all.
The total collection of cultural items is a fact but not a thing. Each
of the items is a thing, and these things are real—they have physi-
cal existence in human brains, and they have causal powers. Do not
think of culture as a thing that does something. It doesn’t—it, as a
collection, has no causal powers. So it doesn’t matter if one can’t
enumerate the entire collection or that the collection changes rap-
idly. Cultural items matter; culture as a total entity doesn’t.

CULTURAL UNITY

I would argue that in a real sense there is only one culture—the

culture of humankind—and that societal differences with respect
to cultural items are small. The argument here is not that of psy-
chic unity but cultural unity. The basic assertion is that there is a
common basic culture that all humans learn that involves similar
shared understandings about people and the world. There are
interesting elaborations of this basic culture, but these elabora-
tions are tightly constrained by a common psychobiological heri-
tage (psychic unity comes in here) shared by all humans (Spiro,
1987). I agree with Gatewood (2001), who said, “Lowie (1936) had it
right more than 50 years ago when he wrote, ‘There is only one cul-
tural reality that is not artificial, to wit: the culture of all humanity
at all periods and in all places (p. 305) ” (p. 228).
254 Cross-Cultural Research / May 2001

Although I do not think that cultures are entities, and although

I believe there is just one basic culture for all humanity, I also
believe that small differences in individual cultural items have
great causal effects. Consider a society that is exactly like other
societies in most ways except that rather than having the typical
understanding that one should fight one’s enemies and kill them if
necessary, its members have the understanding that one should
whenever possible kill everyone who is not a member of one’s own
society. The change in propositional content is not great, but the
effects of that change would be, especially on visiting strangers.
Perhaps it is for reasons such as this that we humans have
learned to be very sensitive to small cultural differences and to be
very wary when we encounter unusual ways of acting or thinking.
The sense of being in a totally different universe when one encoun-
ters small cultural differences can be very powerful. For example,
tourists from San Diego who go to Tijuana encounter minor differ-
ences in the way buildings and roads are constructed along with
certain differences in smells and dress. It is interesting that many
tourists say they feel they are in a totally exotic and alien world.
For them, it all seems different. Perhaps this strong human sensi-
tivity to small cultural differences has led anthropologists to expe-
rience the culture they have studied as if it were almost totally dif-
ferent than anything else.
One problem with arguments about similarity and difference is
that it is hard to establish the relevant population of features or
items. For example, how different are a horse and a camel? It
depends on the set of features one selects. One can pick a set of fea-
tures such that no camel would share any feature with a horse. Or,
one could select a set of features such that every feature is shared
by both. How different one thinks horses and camels are depends
on the selection of items through which they are compared. Simi-
larly, the degree of difference between the collections of cultural
items held by different societies depends on how we select and
define items. If we select items such as getting food, having fami-
lies, interacting with spirits, using fire, and so on, then all cultures
are going to be very similar. If we select items such as having an
emperor who spends a lot of time gardening, not believing in
human physiological paternity, having a flag with 50 white stars
on it, and so on, then very few societies will be similar. However, if
cognitive molecules of culture are treated as real things, then con-
straints are placed on how items of culture are selected and
defined. Items of culture must correspond to the items that exist in
 D’Andrade / A COGNITIVIST’S VIEW 255

the shared short-term memories of the people of a society. This

fixes the population of items and makes possible meaningful state-
ments about similarity and difference.
Perhaps it would be helpful to mention the kinds of experience
that have led me to argue that societies do not differ greatly in their
collections of cultural items. As a graduate student, I was a
research assistant for John Whiting, and among other things, I
worked in the HRAF files, coding the presence or absence of vari-
ous culture traits. Together with William Stephens (Stephens &
D’Andrade, 1961), I worked on the coding of kin avoidances. In
reading the ethnographic literature, the first impression was that
with respect to kin avoidances, societies differed greatly. However,
after analyzing the usual items that make up avoidances (e.g., “not
being permitted to be alone together,” “not being permitted to use
the other person’s name,” “not being permitted to sleep in the same
bed,” “not being permitted to touch,” etc.), it became clear that most
of these items are found in various relationships in almost every
society. Furthermore, it also became clear that there is consider-
able patterning of avoidance items; avoidance items form Guttman
scales using both between- and within-society data. Finally, it also
became clear that there is a high degree of patterning across societ-
ies in which relatives are avoided and which are not. Of course,
there is variation across societies, but the degree of variation is
more accurately described as the elaboration of underlying univer-
sal patterns than as a world of large differences.
It is important to be clear about such matters. Although the col-
lections of cultural items held by different societies may be broadly
similar, there are differences, and these differences can have huge
effects on everything from the psychological health of a people to
the number of fish in the sea. Culture is not a structure in any
meaningful sense, but it is a complex and pervasive network of
causally active items, as Malinowski argued.
What then is the difference between a cultural structure and a
cultural causal system? A cultural structure is a set of culture ele-
ments that are cognitively related to each other. Examples are the
taxonomic structure of plant terms in many languages,
componential paradigms of kin terms, Levi-Straussian analyses of
myths, the grammars of languages, story grammars, and a variety
of cultural models. A cultural system, in contrast, consists of a
number of cultural elements that are causally related such that
every item in the structure can be connected along a long or short
pathway of causal links to every other element. Thus, modern
256 Cross-Cultural Research / May 2001

automobiles need computer chips in the engines to regulate the

flow of gas and air, the production of computer chips is a result of
the invention of the transistor, which is causally related the devel-
opment of research laboratories, which require huge capital
investments, and so on. The ramifications of the causal networks
connecting cultural elements are so great that almost any cultural
element can be plausibly related to another in 5 to 10 causal steps.
Much of the confusion about the entitativity of culture may be due
to confusing the widespread systematicity of culture with the very
limited structuring of culture.

SUMMARY

The items of culture are complex cognitive molecules or

schemas, chunked out of universal cognitive atoms. They are
cognitively particulate, fused to a variety of physical manifesta-
tions, variably distributed within societies, widely shared across
societies, and variably internalized psychologically. Because they
are internalized in human minds, they have causal powers. As a
result of the fact that cognitive atoms can be chunked into many
different kinds of cognitive molecules of varying size and complex-
ity, it is sometimes difficult to classify cultural items. But as an
empirical matter, cross-cultural research has been able to estab-
lish strong functional, geographic, and historical correlations by
doing exactly this.

References

Campbell, D. T. (1958). Common fate, similarity, and other measures of the

status of aggregates of persons as social entities. Behavioral Science, 3,
14-25.
Chick, G. (1997). Cultural complexity: The concept and its measurement.
Cross-Cultural Research, 31, 275-307.
D’Andrade, R. G. (1995). The development of cognitive anthropology. Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Dudai, Y. (1997). How big is human memory, or on being just useful
enough. Learning and Memory, 3, 341-365.
Gatewood, J. B. (2001). Reflections on the nature of cultural distributions
and the units of culture problem. Cross-Cultural Research, 35, 227-241.
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.
 D’Andrade / A COGNITIVIST’S VIEW 257

Goddard, C. (1998). Semantic analysis. Oxford, UK: Oxford University

Press.
Goodenough, W. (1957). Cultural anthropology and linguistics. Language
and linguistics 9. Washington, DC: Georgetown University.
Landauer, T. K. (1986). How much do people remember? Some estimates of
the quantity of learned information in long-term memory. Cognitive
Science, 10, 477-493.
Langacker, R. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Mandler, G. (1985). Cognitive psychology: An essay in cognitive science.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Miller, G. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some lim-
its on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63,
2.
Romney, A. K., & Moore, C. C. (2001). Systemic culture patterns as basic
units of cultural transmission and evolution. Cross-Cultural Research,
35, 154-178.
Schneider, D. (1968). American kinship: A cultural account. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Searle, J. R. (1995). The construction of social reality. New York: Free Press.
Shweder, R. A., & LeVine, R. (1984). Culture theory: Essays on minds, self,
and emotion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Spiro, M. (1987). Culture and human nature: Theoretical papers of Melford
E. Spiro. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stephens, W. B., & D’Andrade, R. G. (1961). Kin avoidance. In W. B. Stephens
(Ed.), Oedipus complex, cross-cultural evidence (pp. 124-150). New
York: Free Press.
Swartz, M. (1991). The way the world is: Cultural processes and social rela-
tions among the Mombasa Swahili. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Wierzbicka, A. (1972). Semantic primitives. New York: Athaneum.
Wierzbicka, A. (1992). Semantics, culture, and cognition. Oxford, UK: Ox-
ford University Press.
Wierzbicka, A. (1996). Semantics, primes and universals. Oxford, UK: Ox-
ford University Press.

Roy D’Andrade is professor of anthropology at the University of California,

San Diego. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1962. His ma-
jor interests are in cognitive anthropology, quantitative methods, theory,
and American culture. He is the author of The Development of Cognitive
Anthropology (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and is a member of the
National Academy of Sciences.