Introduction to the Special Issue on "Formalization as a tool for empirical research: what it buys us and what it doesn't.”

Models of theoretically generated relations among analytic entities have formal properties which enable them to accurately represent some desired relationships, but not necessarily all imaginable relationships. One important part of the modeling task is matching the properties of the model type with the relevant formal properties that one ascribes to the relationships being modeled. Some kinds of mismatches render the model type inappropriate for the given use while others may make it inadequate.

As an example: Tree models can represent “descent” relations among languages. They presume languages have single parents but possibly multiple children—entailing a distinction between elements present through descent and elements “borrowed” or otherwise created. Their interpretation typically includes assuming a smooth temporal transition from minimal dialect differences to separate languages. Two other change processes, interpretable within a family tree but not modeled by it, are: 1) the creation of pidgins and 2) the hiving off of a cross-section of a language community to form a new, contrasting language community. By contrast, a multiple parents claim would be incompatible with the tree model.

This article focuses on the relationship between a formal description of some cognitively driven behavioral regularity (such as language/speech or culture/action) and the cognitive basis of that regular behavior-as seen in Chomskyan grammar, Lounsburyan kinship terminology analysis, and circles in Euclidian analytic geometry. It considers the nature of people's production of the regularity, including their use of "rules of thumb", their learning of underlying regularities, and the increasing abstraction of their knowledge. In this context the role of formal descriptions, including both their attractions and their limitations is discussed-as is the repeated attempts by anthropologists to copy or adapt linguistic formalisms. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

“Cultural Models” (CM) is a term that has come to apply to culturally standardized and shared/distributed cognitive structures for explaining or structuring action. They contrast with more cultural conceptual systems (such as kinship or ethnobiological terminological systems) and more general procedures analyzing and imposing initial structure on new problems. They are functionally a little like Schank and Abelson’s “scripts”. CMs combine motives, emotions, goals, mechanisms, classificatory information, etc.--in each case, perhaps, cross-linking to separate cognitive structures within which these separate entities are organized, structured, and classified--into possible actions. CMs can be used by individual actors to generate behavior--often after some consideration of the downstream implications of the choice of one model over another--but are not themselves the individual internal cognitive schemas that actually generate behavior. Different CMs are cross-linked with one another in a variety of ways. One area of cross-linkage includes models held by members of a given community in responsse to similar situations (as in overlap among models for doing similar things, modes for use in similar situations, models involving similar attidudes or goals, and so forth). Another kind of cross-linkage involves models for more or less the same thing that are held by members of different communities--expecially where membership overlaps in one way or another. CMs have to be easily learned, productive, and systematic.

I want to discuss the implications of these kinds of overlap for the shape of cultural models and the way in which they are learned, held, and applied. Illustrative examples will be utilized, but no systematic formal description or model of CMs will be offered--it’s too soon.

I found Kunkel's article, "The Pomo Kin Group and the Political Unit in Aboriginal California," to be most interesting and stimulating (see Vol. 1, No. 1 of the Journal). I do trust that, even though only an interloping Africanist of sorts, I may be allowed to offer some criticism of certain of his conclusions. Insofar as I am qualified to say, I found his ethnographic case for the existence of "ambilocal residential kingroups as… basic [Pomo] political subdivisions" quite convincing. My reservations primarily concern his contention that the finding is inconsistent with the existence and/or political significance of unilineal kin groups.

Kinship terms--like words in other domains--are part of the general semantic system of contrastive sense and reference while encoding pragmatic conceptualizations of a particular substantive domain. A good classification of types of terminology takes account of intrinsic structure in the categorized world--for words, both semantic and pragmatic structure--while enabling clean and effective analytic statements relating to given theoretical goals. For data universes which are fairly well understood and which have received theoretical attention, revised and improved data categorizations may offer a powerful and effective means for the refinement of theory.