9 - Beyond old oppositions

Summary

The model we have presented in this book makes it clear that the centripetal cultural effects we have reviewed are a contingent product of interaction between minds and a world shaped a certain way – not an inevitable functional requirement of social systems or ecology or a product of timeless mental structures or of the human need to find meaning through socially given symbol systems (to put it in some of the theoretical terms of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s). It follows from our model that it is equally possible for cultural inputs to result in understandings varying across individuals and contexts, or for understandings to be learned without the emotional associations that give them motivational force. Furthermore, with changes in the circumstances under which people grow up, understandings can undergo historical change; and with effort, people can alter their habitual responses. Thus, the centrifugal effects noticed by anthropologists in the 1980s can be accommodated within a model that also accounts for the centripetal aspects of culture that were the focus of earlier descriptions. In our formulation, we do not have to choose between theories that acknowledge actors' intentions and theories that acknowledge the role of durable, shared cultural schemas: intentions depend on schemas. These may be widely shared or intraculturally variable; long-held or recently invented; thematically repeated or juxtaposed in odd combinations.