10 - Radiality and mental representations of social relationships

Summary

Introduction

In the investigation of spatial relationships presented in Chapters 3–5, the linguistic data was deemed insufficient to provide an adequate picture of the mental representation of those same relationships and a set of psychological tasks was also administered. It was the results of these latter tasks, together with crucial ethnographic data, that provided the most enlightening information about the structure and format of the mental representation of spatial relationships (see Chapter 4). Similarly, when investigating the mental representations of social relationships it is not sufficient to collect and analyze only linguistic data. Consequently, I decided to administer a battery of three cognitive tasks in which the topic was kept constant, social relationships, and the participation/interference of language was kept to a minimum.

The first task administered was the memory task or free listing. In this task participants were asked to name all the adult co-villagers they could remember. Thus, their mental coverage of a significant part, their co-villagers, of the domain of social relationships was obtained. It is obvious that their social world extends well beyond the boundaries of their village; nonetheless, it is their co-villagers that represent the most salient component of their daily social lives. The second task was a pile sort task.