The embodied mind

Extracted text from Negotiation-1.pdf:

From the Embodied Mind to the Social Brain: the Negotiation of the Self and Translation Dedication Roger Omanson has embodied the best of scholarship and an undying commitment to accessible translation of the Bible for most of his adult life. In his work as teacher and translation consultant, he has been a mentor to some, a friend to many, and an example to all. Roger was not all that interested in the area of cognition as a theoretical science, but as a practitioner of translation, none knew better than he the implications of differing cognitive environments. This small offering hopes to honor him for his many and varied contributions. Introduction Over the last half century various scholars (Erving Goffman, Mary Douglas, George Lakoff, et. al.) have made the case that a rich network of cognitive frames make up what could be called the matrix of human experience for people everywhere. Furthermore, some of these scholars agree that frames (seen in this way) are not static entities, but rather are in constant flux, being evoked, discarded, transformed, broken, subverted, adapted and re-situated within the network in a never-ending dynamic process of negotiation on the part of participants through various kinds of social interactions. Erving Goffman and Mary Douglas make the case that the most fundamental and far-reaching of these negotiations has to do with the presentation of the self. Douglas grid-group heuristic taxonomy of these frames (which she at times refers to as thought styles) is also supported by insights from scholars like Richard Shweder, Jonathan Haidt, and Allan Fiske, working in the areas of domains of moral judgment and the negotiation of human relations. These scholars will also be cited in an attempt to bridge the apparent gap between the personal and the social self. One of the basic links in the chain is the idea that cognition begins in the affective sphere (see esp. Haidt) and is not limited to reason and reflection. In this way too George Lakoffs idea of conceptual metaphors and the embodied mind can be expanded to include the social brain. In particular it is apparently by means of theory of mind (what neuroscientists sometimes call simulation, achieved in part through mirror neurons) that what is usually thought of as personal and cognitive can be seen as social and emotional as well, and vice versa. Frames and framing Cognitive and cultural frames are most often presented as static entities, basic building blocks waiting to be used by individuals in various situations. Lakoff (1999, p. 116) uses the example of a restaurant, where elements such as waiters, menus, and checks are expected and even necessary elements defining the overall situation of restaurant.1 This way of thinking about frames is indeed very useful, and can explain such things as how one can more or less understand what is being communicated in contexts such as a fast-food drive-thru restaurant or in a busy airport when the broken speaker to which one is directing ones attention produces only unintelligible squawks. Frames, even in the above cases, are being constantly negotiated, constructed and manipulated and destroyed at many levels, and interactants make use of any and all linguistic tools available to them to evoke whatever frames suit their purposes. Thus a rhetorical question provides the hearer with the expected answer embedded in the supposed question (e.g. do you think Im stupid?), creating a frame of a question with a built-in answer, semantically equivalent at some level to a strong statement (Im not stupid). Metaphors evoking images (e.g. Lakoffs example of dont think of an elephant) can be built upon for the purpose of comparison (clumsiness, unavoidability, et. al.). These frames are all present potentially but only come into being in the various acts of framing in communication and interaction. These frames are used to evoke various 1 We will present overlapping sets of taxonomies (and in particular one) of the construction of the self (or selves). Key to this selfconstruction will be the inclusion of the affective aspects of the person in cognition, and in particular, the unde rstanding of the social brain as fundamental to the process.

cognitive processes, and can thus be usefully seen as dynamic and ephemeral. Here are just two examples in very different domains of various types of frames used to evoke various cognitive and affective responses: lexicon/values: term/phrase illegal immigrants/aliens undocumented workers economic refugees frames (evoking values) crime and foreigners/non-humans bureaucracy and labor class distinction and human rights

phonology/semantics:

phonological unit frame (evoking semantics) gl- (glint, glisten, glow, glory et. al.) something about light

According to Goffman and Douglas, the way most frames come into being, get modified, and pass out of existence is through social interaction. As a sociologist, Goffman believed cognitive frames are always reducible to social or natural ones, since they are evoked within the context of social negotiation or interaction with the natural world. He went on to describe these negotiations with various metaphors, from frames and framing (Frame Analysis) to theater, with roles and various elements of the staging process (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life), to the concept of total institutions in mental health treatment (Asylums), to spoiled identity (Stigma), public behavior (Behavior in Public Places), or the idea of the sacred self (Interaction Ritual). Goffman was more interested in the actual grammar of behavior than in taxonomies, and worked with various local concepts based on the metaphors he utilized (e.g. front and back space from theater, deference and demeanor from ritual, the maintenance of appropriate identity from mental health, etc.). Two of Goffmans clearest and strongest statements in relation to the negotiated (social) self2 as the basis for human interaction and communication come in lesser-known works. The first is from Asylums, where he puts forth the idea that the self is not so much revealed in all the diverse interactions it has with others as it is constituted by these interactions. Furthermore, to the extent that these interactions are represented by symbolic means (including communication), Goffman believed that the symbols themselves can be understood as constitutive of personal and group identity. He went further in Interaction Ritual (pp. 84-85): ...the individual must rely on others to complete the picture of him of which he himself is allowed to paint only certain parts. Each individual is responsible for the demeanor image of himself and the deference image of others... While it may be true that the individual has a unique self all his own, evidence of this possession is thoroughly a product of joint ceremonial labor... Theory of Mind and Cultural Embodiment The mechanism for the evocation (including creation, transformation, subversion, and destruction) of frames has been postulated recently as simulation. Jerome Feldman describes this in terms of the acquisition of language among children: [certain] words explicitly involve acts of communication with another person this seems to require that that child have causal simulation models that involve other people. Furthermore, according to Feldman, language primarily operates at the level of frame parameters and understanding involves imaginative simulation invoked by these frames. (2006 p. 130, 147) Michael Tomasello uses the more common terminology of theory of mind to describe a more specific version this same mechanism: cultural learning [is] made possible by a very special form of social cognition, namely, the ability of individual organisms to understand conspecifics as beings like themselves who have intentional and mental lives like their own. (2000, p. 5, 178ff, 205)

2 Antonio Damasio (a neuroscientist cited by Jonathan Haidt and others below) takes a more individualist approach to the definition of the self, yet it is one which is entirely compatible to the social self in which Goffman is interested. Damasio and others like him point out that the body is a foundation of the conscious mind. (2010, p. 20) This formulation in turn sounds remarkably like George Lakoffs con cept of the embodied mind (1999, passim), of which the social brain is but a logical extension (by means of theory of mind-see below).

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While more empirical research is needed in support of these theories as to the connection of theory of mind and the development of language, it is a promising area of study. If correct, it would provide a crucial link in the extension of Lakoffs embodied mind to include Goffmans ideas of the negotiation of the self via what could be called the social brain. Theory of mind builds on the idea of the embodied nature of cultural learning. Haidt, for example, includes cultural immersion as well as peer socialization as an element in the development of moral judgment. He concludes one section with what serves as an interesting bridge between Lakoffs embodied mind and Douglas thought styles: Even though people in all cultures have more or less the same bodies, they have different embodiments, and therefore they end up with different minds. Haidts summary of the developmental literature on moral judgment is worth quoting in its entirety: People can acquire explicit propositional knowledge about right and wrong in adulthood, but it is primarily through participation in custom complexes (Shweder, et al., 1998) involving sensory, motor, and other forms of implicit knowledge (Fiske, 1999; Lieberman, 2000; Shore, 1996), that are shared with ones peers during the sensitive period of late childhood and adolescence (Harris, 1995; Huttenlocher, 1994; Minoura, 1992) that one comes to feel, physically and emotionally (Damasio, 1994; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), the self-evident truth of moral propositions. (2001, p. 21) Haidt and Greene add to this picture from a nueroscientific perspective. They think they can see in brain scans that moral reasoning is fundamentally emotional and social as well as what has often been thought of as purely cognitive (i.e. reflective or rational): Neuroimaging studies of moral judgment in normal adults, as well as studies of individuals exhibiting aberrant moral behavior, all point to the conclusion, embraced by the social intuitionist model, that emotion is a significant driving force in moral judgment These results also suggest that much, although not necessarily all, moral judgment makes use of processes specifically dedicated to social cognition and, more specifically, the representation of others mental states (ToM) Morality is probably not a natural kind in the brain. Just as the ordinary concept of memory refers to a variety of disparate cognitive processes (working memory, episodic memory, motor memory, etc.), we believe that the ordinary concept of moral judgment refers to a variety of more fine-grained and disparate processes, both affective and cognitive. (2002, pp. 522-523) Contrary to what we might think, we do not usually 1) reflect on our ideologies in order to 2) construct our values which then 3) activate our emotions which finally 4) guide our actions, but more often the reverse. Embodied activities (mostly learned as children) give rise to emotions which in turn produce values. And finally a narrative is constructed to explain these feelings and values. People who grow up touching their heads to other higher status people's feet (in hierarchical cultures) when greeting them learn in their bodies both about hierarchy and sacred space as it pertains to human bodies. They do not feel right about acting any other way, and come to reflect this attitude as well in their systems of honorifics, for example. These values may eventually find some narrative justification, but for most people their basic physical reactions are enough to keep them acting in accordance with the established rituals, which are simply explained as "this is how people well-behaved should act." (Haidt:2001 p.20) Children who are taught to sleep apart from their parents are likely being taught an embodied sense of independence while virtually no one would use this as a justification of the practice. Meanwhile other culturally patterned co-sleeping arrangements clearly foster relationships of familial dependency and unity while once again any number of other justifications are likely to be invoked to explain the practice. (Shweder:2003 p.46ff.)

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Thought-Communities and Cultural Clusters Douglas, as an anthropologist, begins and ends with social frames and puts forth a short canonical-looking taxonomy known as grid-group (1966a, et. al.) She expands Ferdinand Tnnies concepts of Gemeinschaft /Gesellschaft (but mostly referencing Emile Durkheim) into four categories or cultural types applied across a two-dimensional grid of freedom and solidarity. Thus personal freedom comes at the cost of solidarity and vice versa, or else the combination (of personal freedom and social solidarity) is unstable. Douglas starts from the point of view that the conceptual worlds formed from the purposeful categorizing activities mentioned above are essentially social, not individual: Emile Durkheim had another way of thinking about the conflict between individual and society (Durkheim, 1903, 1912) For him the initial error is to deny the social origins of individual thought. Classifications, logical operations, and guiding metaphors are given to the individual by society. Above all, the sense of a priori rightness of some ideas and the nonsensicality of others are handed out as part of the social environment. He thought the reaction of outrage when entrenched judgments are challenged is a gut response directly due to commitment to a social group. (1986, p. 10) Douglas uses the work of Ludwick Fleck to further develop this idea of the social origins of conceptual systems, which he names thought collectives and thought styles (Douglas elsewhere calls them cultural biases, among other things): For Fleck, the thought style sets the precondition of any cognition, and it determines what can be counted as a reasonable question and a true and false answer. It provides the context and sets the limits for any judgment about objective reality. Its essential feature is to be hidden from the members of the thought collective. (Douglas:1986 p. 13) Douglas has developed a grid/group theory of cultures which is an extension of the idea of personal freedom versus social solidarity put forth earlier by Durkheim and others as the contrast between community and society (Gemeinschaft /Gesellschaft). The original social argument stated that where there existed a high degree of individual freedom, there usually was also a corresponding lack of social solidarity, and vice versa. Douglas has mapped this dichotomy onto a graph which describes not two, but four different thought-style patterns. While Douglas herself at times seems to present her paradigm as if it is descriptive of essentially different ways cultures (but also different institutions or groups) think, it is probably better to think of Flecks thought styles as frames or cognitive environments available (in theory anyway) to just about everyone everywhere. Cultures and sub-cultures will have certain tendencies, as will texts and even textual corpora (see biblical examples below), but the key point is that these styles offer differing and to a great degree mutually exclusive ways of framing what are usually thought of as personal values in specific situations. And ultimately the availability of these cognitive styles to the individual is based on the underlying negotiation of the self in community and society (and in different situations) as independent agent, alienated individual, dutiful hierarchist or committed communitarian.

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Douglas Clusters Isolate Alienation Hierarchist Cooperation within structure

Individualist Individual competition

Enclavist (communitarian) Cooperation in dissent

Increasing limits on personal freedom // Increasing solidarity In this graph, the horizontal axis describes increasing solidarity while increasing limits on options is plotted along the vertical axis. The resulting chart describes four models, and Douglas argues that cultures tend to cluster in these corners, such that one does not usually get the values and behaviors of the differing patterns mixing together to any great extent. These thought styles can express themselves in various aspects of life, whether economics, religion, politics, the arts, or even such things as personal taste. The four models are: Hierarchists socialist or welfare economies (as well as traditional communities), whose various and varied attempts to form a more structured society than that of the individualists give them a great deal of social cohesion but rob them of personal freedom. Knowing and keeping ones place in society is highly valued. Individualists - market economies, individualist perspectives where the free and open exchange of goods, ideas, values, etc., is the primary mode of interaction. Personal achievement is rewarded; failure to achieve on a personal level is not well tolerated. Competition is expected, conspicuous consumption is a sign of wealth and value. Enclavists - also known as sectarians or communards, they value both personal freedom and social solidarity. The only way to achieve the latter without sacrificing the former is through sheer commitment to the group. This is often achieved by means of ideas about purity and boundedness which function to protect the group from outside contamination as well as from members abandoning their commitments to the collective. Utopian groups cluster here. Leadership is weak, membership often temporary (e.g. political campaigns, protest movements). Isolates - these people are not connected well to their peers, but feel trapped by rules imposed by the dominant cultural forms. They are the homeless, the blue-collar workers on the bottom rung without union support, and others living at the margins of the other models. Perhaps iconoclastic artists and ideologues should be categorized here as well. Douglas considers isolates and enclavists by their nature to be less stable, and thus less viable as long-term patterns than the individualist and hierarchist models. That is because she believes that what she traces out as the diagonal between individualists and hierarchists (shown below as the diagonal of power) describes the older, but still valid observation (by Durkheim) that individual freedom and social solidarity naturally work as opposing pairs to form the most stable cultures. While isolates and enclavists do exist, they usually do so in some sort of subordinate (marginalized) or dissenting relationship to an individualist or hierarchist society.

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As Douglas analysis applies to the concept of the self, it looks like this: Four selves in four perspectives Isolate Hierarchist Person Unpredictable Person Needs Structure

Individualist Person Robust

Enclavist (communitarian) Person Under Duress

This presentation is consistent with what Douglas has put forth elsewhere, and deserves a more extended treatment below. But Douglas, while talking in terms of cultures at times, seems (like Goffman) to use her thought-style types more as a matter of descriptive convenience than as somehow encompassing the entirety of all the complex systems of human interaction. She states: If anyone protests that there are really fifteen, five hundred, or two thousand types, or six or eight dimensions, they mistake the exercise. Eleven thousand or a million would not be enough to cover the variety that is out there (Douglas:1998 p. 101). That this four-fold structure is not canonical is that not only is it an explicit exercise according to Douglas, but also in that a kind of hybridization (or better, contextual compartmentalization) can be seen at work within the scheme, as individuals and groups negotiate meaning in three or four categories at the same time, or within different situations. A diagram of traditional political divisions in the USA can illustrate this: Hierarchist Social Welfare Corporate Welfare

Privacy-bedroom

Privacy- gun closet

Individualist / Enclavist

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Here we can see that those on the political right can argue against government involvement in individuals lives when the issue is gun ownership, yet argue for government involvement when it comes to helping out businesses with tax breaks and subsidies. Those on the left also argue for and against government involvement, depending on the issue (social welfare, wiretapping). Note that the horseshoe brings those in favor of government involvement together at the top of the arc, while those opposed are more typically irreconcilably divided ideologically at the bottom. There also seem to be elements of Douglas enclavist category (especially boundary-setting) at work in this aspect of the representation. What Douglas states here is consistent as well with how Goffman views framing. It is seen as specific-purpose driven, arising from human interaction, and based on the negotiation of the self (as individualist, hierarchist, enclavist, isolate, et. al.) as the primary layer of all human interaction and therefore, communication.3 Douglas further maps out the cultural or thought-style types along the two diagonals of her graph. What she calls the positive diagonal (or diagonal of power), is where most organized groups and societies cluster. Hierarchy and individual competition are for Douglas the most stable of the groupings. Again, these two types correspond most closely to the original Durkheimian community/society contrast. Though they differ in how they are structured, they both have strong leadership which can reward members (by personal honor and financial gain or by prestige within the group structure) and punish them (by personal failure and poverty or by exclusion from the group) based on how well they are able to play by the rules of the ruling type. Diagonal of Power Hierarchist Cooperation within structure

Individualist Individual competition While Durkheim and other sociologists were keenly aware of isolates (the term they used to refer to their alienated states was anomie), Douglas adds the dissenting enclavist (or communitarian) thought style and completes her paradigm with a negative diagonal (or diagonal of dissent) between the isolate and communitarian poles. Here, whether in groups or as individuals, are the cognitive clusters which are antistructure. Environmentalist groups, anti-war and other protest movements and some sectarian communities represent the enclavist cluster. They have weak leadership and not much structure. They can neither structurally punish nor reward. Yet individual members have such a high degree of solidarity with other members of the group that enclavists can achieve a great deal together until such a time as they decide not to work together any longer. Isolates, on the other hand, are completely independent, not even forming the temporary alliances of the enclavists. Either by choice or by lack of options, isolates represent the marginalized individuals from every other cognitive cluster.

3 The resulting matrix of experience has been referred to as the maintenance of social occasions and the organization of experience by Goffman and as thought styles or cultural biases by Douglas. It also can be seen as directly related to (if not identical with) the concept of a shared cognitive environment in Relevance Theory. .

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Diagonal of Dissent Isolate Alienation

Enclavist Cooperation in dissent An important feature of Douglas argument is that most of this loyalty to whatever thought-style type or cluster one belongs to goes on without the explicit recognition of it or how it works by the members of the group. In this way it acts like the grammar of a language, known and obeyed by all who speak the language, but often explicitly known only to a few. In fact, the group loyalty is usually expressed not positively, but negatively. In her article On Not Being Seen Dead: Shopping as Protest (Douglas:1996), she describes the choices made by consumers as an agonistic struggle to define not what one is, but what one is not. (p. 104). Many have noted (cf. E.T. Hall) the hidden dimension of personal and cultural beliefs and values (though one might argue that marketing specialists and political campaigns must understand some aspects of these very well). Douglas contribution is to attempt to categorize the kinds of systems to which these heretofore little understood or examined areas of social structure belong. In more that one of her books (1992, 1996) Douglas uses her model to look at different approaches to the problems of dealing with the natural environment. Here a different sort of illustration is useful. One can see the different cognitive styles at work in the attitudes towards nature and human interaction with it. Individualists tend to see nature as robust. Thus human intervention (logging, drilling, mining, etc.) is not to be feared, since nature will recover its equilibrium easily (in the figure, the ball representing the environment will roll back down into the bowl even when pushed far up one side or the other). Isolates take no particular view, and see nature as essentially unpredictable. Hierarchists are willing to interfere to a degree, but wish to put limits on human action with regard to nature. And certain enclavists will see nature as precariously balanced and in need of protection. These enclavists will oppose the intervention of the hierarchists and especially of the individualists. While all these positions seem to be about nature, according to Douglas they are really about the cognitive types. One can see how these views of nature justify the very kinds of behavior one expects from each of the clusters. Isolates-Fatalists: Nature is Capricious Ecology HierarchistsBalancers: Nature is Robust within Limits

IndividualistsEntrepreneurs: Nature is Robust

Enclavists-Protectors: Nature is Fragile

In another application of Douglas grid/group model (Douglas:1992), Gerald Mars has analyzed organizational cultures using various animal metaphors. The categories are self-explanatory, and the metaphors are helpful in capturing the distinctive traits of the four different styles or cultures.

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Organizations Isolate Donkeys Used by others Unorganized labor Hierarchist Wolves Pack hunters Organized labor/management

Individualist Hawks Lone operators Entrepreneurs

Enclavist Vultures Solidarity/individuality Sales reps/semi-skilled craftsmen

Increasing limits on personal freedom // Increasing solidarity One can easily expand the model to include cultures relevant to whatever area is under discussion. Thus religion, or one particular form of it, can be classified as shown below: Christianity Isolate Some forms of asceticism Hierarchist Roman Catholicism

Individualist Protestantism

Enclavist New Testament Era Christianity

Bible Translation Isolate Marginalized persons Hierarchist Hebrew Bible, most translating language cultures and some national cultures Enclavist NT and some translating language cultures

Individualist Most consultants and some national cultures

In this representation, the history of modern Europe and North America can be seen a general move from hierarchist to individualist modes. Whether in the arts (The Renaissance), science (The Enlightenment), or religion (The Reformation), the trend has been from the upper right to the lower left. Recent trends away from all forms of organized religion in modern Europe and North America merely strengthen and extend the individualist thought style even more. 9

Domains of moral judgment and forms of human relations It is interesting to see how certain other students of human behavior have come to similar conclusions as those represented by Mary Douglas grid-group taxonomy, often with no apparent awareness of or reference to her work whatsoever. Richard Shweder has written on domains of moral judgment which he describes as the ethics of autonomy, community, and divinity: Presupposed by the ethics of autonomy is a conceptualization of the self as an individual where the point of moral regulation is to increase choice and personal liberty. Presupposed by the ethics of community is a conceptualization of the self as an office-holder ones role or station in life is intrinsic to ones identity Presupposed by the ethics of divinity is a conceptualization of the self as a spiritual entity connected to some sacred or natural order of things (1997, p. 138) When reading Shweders descriptions of these categories one can immediately see the connections to Douglass individualist (autonomy), hierarchy (community) and enclavist (divinity) distinctions. Shweder goes on to say something similar to Douglas claim that her paradigm is meant to capture general tendencies which coexist and can and do compete for cognitive relevance within any number of given discursive contexts: The three thematic clusters may be thought of as culturally coexisting discourses of morality [which] are symbol systems for describing aspects of experience. More than one such symbol system may be applicable to any area of experience There is no reason that one must select one and only one discourse to represent and area of experience. (1997, p. 140) Haidt sees moral reasoning from a social intuitionist point of view that proposes that moral judgment should be studied as an interpersonal process. Moral reasoning is usually an ex-post facto process used to influence the intuitions (and hence judgments) of other people. In the social intuitionist model one [first] feels a quick flash of revulsion and one knows intuitively that something is wrong. (2001, p. 2) Both Haidts location of moral judgments in the social arena and his view that these judgments tend to be produced at the affective level first and later rationalized support the kinds of social framing Goffman, Douglas and Shweder all have put forth. This view of how moral judgments are formed in the real world fit especially well within Douglas enclavist thought style as well as Shweders ethics of divinity4 which primarily use concepts of purity and boundedness (rather than the rules of the hierarchist style) to achieve the desired behavior (by means of solidarity). Allan Fiske, unlike Shweder and Haidt, cites both Douglas and Goffman. He outlines what he sees as the four elementary forms of human relations (the sub-title of his book). These are communal sharing (CS), authority ranking (AR), equality matching (EM), and market pricing (MP). Again these can be mapped onto Douglas diagram fairly easily. Communal sharing fits with Douglass enclavist thought style, authority ranking with her hierarchist, and market pricing with the individualist. Equality matching does not easily fit in one category in Douglas system (it fits in both individualist and enclavist). But Fiske also has a null set, which is a failure to negotiate any social relationship. This fits well with Douglas isolate category. (Fiske:1991, passim) Haidt most explicitly lines up with the others when he lays out his five psychological systems that provide the foundations for the worlds many moralities. He explains as follows: The five foundations are psychological preparations for caring about and reacting emotionally to harm, reciprocity (including justice, fairness, and rights), in-group, hierarchy, and purity. (2007, p. 98) Haidts categories are an obvious fit with Douglas,

4 Haidt cites Lakoff on the idea that moral purity has been mapped onto the conceptual metaphor of food purity. He also cites Fiske (below) with regard to the four models of human cognition. Haidt claims that chimpanzees exhibit all of Fiskes socio -cognitive behaviors except market pricing-a seemingly uniquely human relational model. (2001, p. 18) Haidt exploits his citations of various scholars from different fields of study, claiming this gives his theory greater plausibi lity due to consilience.(1998, passim).

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Shweders, and Fiskes (see below) typologies. These (three or four) categories from the various authors cited are summarized in the chart below:5 Douglas Shweder Haidt Fiske individualist autonomy harm/reciprocity market pricing hierarchist community hierarchy/in-group authority ranking enclavist /communitarian divinity purity communal sharing/equality matching(?) isolate

null set

Furthermore, it is instructive to overlay the more recent categorizations of Shweder, Haidt, and Fiske on Douglas grid/group matrix: Shweder-ethical categories Ethics of community

Ethics of autonomy

Ethics of Divinity

Haidt-domains of moral judgment hierarchy / in-group

harm / reciprocity

purity

Fiske-negotiating human relations null set authority ranking

market pricing

communal sharing / equality matching (?)

There are of course obvious differences (mostly in terminology) which must be explained and brought together. Douglas isolate category is really only matched by Fiske, who admits to a null set, or asocial category. Haidt explicitly relates his harm category with reciprocity and to Shweders ethics of autonomy, and his in-group with hierarchy and Shweders ethics of community. These in turn can be related to the others (see chart). Fiskes equality matching may not match any other categories, or may belong best with his communal sharing when compared to the corresponding categories of the other authors. Shweders ethics of community 5 What Haidt in particular argues against (and Shweder as well) are earlier formulations (e.g. those of Lawrence Kohlberg) of moral reasoning and judgment coming from just one (autonomy/reciprocity) domain. (2007, p. 100)

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actually correlates with Douglas hierarchist rather than her communitarian category, and his divinity category as well as Haidts purity category relate to Douglas enclavist/communitarian thought style. But these are all quite minor issues, and a careful reading of the four authors show they are in general agreement-amazingly so, given the apparent independent nature of much of their research. A further fine-tuning of the relation of Douglas and Fiskes typologies comes with a comparison of their prototypical descriptions of the enclavist/community sharing categories. For Douglas this categorys prototype would be a political campaign/protest movement or a utopian society. Solidarity is high, but also personal freedom. This category is essentially unstable, and persons reasoning from it tend to do so when wanting to change something about the more stable individualist or hierarchist structures. Families in Douglas framing thus might prototypically fit more in the hierarchist category, though she would no doubt admit families often show enclavist tendencies as well. Fiske, on the other hand, uses the family as his prototypical example of the community sharing form of human relations. He would admit there are authority ranking elements to family relations as well (parents/children, older/younger siblings, men/women-in many families), but by his prototype he slightly rearranges the relationships of the overlapping categories he shares with Douglas.6 Fiske furthermore insists that his market pricing relation really has no relation to ideas about individualism or competitiveness, but his market pricing and Douglas individualist categories do seem to overlap quite a lot in the kinds of examples given. (1991, p. 18) Key concepts or key terms An application of Douglas model to key concepts in scripture can also be enlightening. Key concepts (sometimes referred to as key terms) have for some time been a special concern for many of those involved in Bible translation. There has been a feeling on the part of some that certain words or phrases, or better the ideas behind them, are either especially important or especially difficult to translate, or both. But it has been difficult at times to explain why a particular term or concept should be included in the list.7 Using Douglas thought styles can help us to make a start, though it turns out that the list would have to be constructed anew for each translation project, at least in principle. Concepts are especially difficult to translate when the conceptual systems (cognitive frames) negotiated by individuals within the communities to which they belong are so fundamentally different that what might be the corresponding semantic domains cease to have the same content. Faith Faith in the Hebrew Bible (prototypically a hierarchist culture, though with many enclavist tendencies as well) is usually presented as faithfulness.8 In a society valuing social solidarity, it is hardly surprising that this should be so. The NT situation is already quite different. The nascent Christian community is prototypically enclavist (though still within a hierarchist environment), and thus we see faith (or belief in) as trust and hope (cf. Pauls famous reinterpretation of the Habakkuk citation The just shall live by (their) faith(fulness). Yet in modern interpretation (stemming from individualist cultures for the most part), faith (or belief that) as mental assent or strength of conviction are often emphasized. For isolates it is difficult to predict, but one can imagine that faith for them would be both personal and risky.

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Eve Sweetser (in personal communication) has reminded me that George Lakoff also has referred to both family types described here. Lakoff labels them as strict father versus nurturant parent conceptual metaphors. Lakoff sees these conceptual metaphors as underlying conservative versus liberal politics in the U.S. (2004). 7 Some have speculated that nominalization (the fact is that most of the key terms/concepts are abstract nouns in the original languages) is the cause of the difficulty, but to my knowledge no serious work has been done on the problem, even toward justifying the nature and extent of the list. 8 This does not mean at all that faith as trust and hope is unknown in the Hebrew Bible. It does mean that the cognitive framing of faith in the Hebrew Bible is far more likely to be in terms of obedience and loyalty than in terms of the trust or belief () of the New Testament.

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Faith/fulness ( Isolate Blind faith?

/

, ) Hierarchist Commitment/loyalty (faithfulness)

Individualist Belief/confidence/conviction

Enclavist Trust/hope

One can easily see how important it would be to know and account for the translating cognitive type as well, since one might need to mediate understandings of commitment and loyalty into a cognitive context of personal belief and conviction, or alternately ideas of trust and hope into a culture of social solidarity and hierarchy. Individualist cognitive perspectives often understand commitment negatively as odious duty, and hierarchist perspectives often sees trust or hope as too weak to sustain the relationships between God and humans described in scripture. Translators need to mediate these understandings one way or the other in order to ensure that the translating culture comes away with an understanding which evokes similar enough frames to those presumed to be evoked by the original communication to be considered a valid representation. Righteousness Righteousness is another term/concept with which translators wrestle. In Gen 38 the Hebrew Bible relates the story of Judah and Tamar, his daughter-in-law. At the end of the story (which includes Tamar tricking Judah into having sexual relations with her), as Tamar is being brought out to be stoned and in that moment reveals that Judah is the father of the child she is bearing, Judah declares: she is more righteous than I am. This sentence is utter nonsense to most modern readers coming from individualist perspectives. For them, righteousness is most often personal piety and virtue. Seducing your father-in-law by trickery does not only does not qualify one as righteous, but quite the opposite. Yet for a culture of hierarchy, the whole point of the story is that Tamar was simply doing all she could to fulfill the mutual obligations which existed in the relationship between herself and her father-in-law. He owed her a husband, and she owed him an offspring to continue his linage. That she felt forced to do this by subterfuge and incest is secondary to the real point of righteousness in such a culture. The NT at many points assumes a hierarchist perspective similar to that of the Hebrew Bible with regard to righteousness, but at other times (cf. Romans) seems to take an enclavist position whereby righteousness is more of a state of being in a right relationship based on trust (faith and universal love). Righteousness ( Isolate Existential good faith (true to self)

/ ) Hierarchist Mutual obligations

Individualist Personal virtue / rights

Enclavist Universal love

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Salvation Salvation is a term/concept which normally is discussed in commentaries under the headings of the individual or the community, and of physical or spiritual realization. As a matter of fact, the Hebrew Bible speaks often of salvation in both physical and communal terms (though the Psalms seem to have personal salvation in view in many contexts as well). The NT is many times less clear on both levels, speaking of salvation through/in Christ without specifying directly whether it is personal or communal, physical or spiritual or some combination of these possibilities. But the NT in general seems to favor a communal as well as a spiritual interpretation of salvation. In modern contexts of interpretation, there is often a sharp difference between different interpretive communities on the biblical concept in general. Personal spiritual salvation is the preferred interpretation within the individualist cultures of European descent. Yet the Theology of Liberation has sprung up in the more traditional hierarchist and communitarian soil of Latin America, emphasizing both the communal and physical aspects of salvation, and not surprisingly, depending mostly on texts from the Hebrew Bible to support their case. And when the audience is truly marginalized (isolates), the salvation message is often of both a personal and an apocalyptic (future) nature. According to Douglas analysis, we would expect just these patterns, as represented in the illustration below. Salvation ( Isolate Personal/apocalyptic

/ ) Hierarchist Communal/physical

Individualist Personal/spiritual

Enclavist Communal/spiritual

Thus a network of ideas of loyalty, obligation, and physical salvation of the community within the hierarchist cognitive cultural environment of mutual obligation represented at many points by the Hebrew Bible were first transformed in an enclavist perspective represented in the NT into concepts of trust, love, and spiritual community salvation. And these both have finally been largely distilled out within modern (European and North American) individualist cognitive environments as conviction, virtue and personal salvation. Competing frames for sin in the New Testament Finally, we turn to a more complex biblical example of framing. In the case of a text, the frame (or schema) is evoked by the texts representation and the negotiation is a matter of how successfully the frame is evoked in the mind of the reader or hearer. There are at least four divergent representations of the concept of sin in the New Testament. Similar frame elements (individual, authority figure, et. al.) are arrayed against various frame backgrounds (moral- legal/ medical/ animal care/ journey). In each frame, the various items are mapped onto the background and thus change their shape:

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Elements Backgrounds Individual Authority figure Deliberative action Determination Expected Result Action toward individual Return to balance

Moral-Legal (John 3.16) Defendant Judge-God Judgment Guilt Punishment (Hell) Payment of debtsalvation Legal-Moral system satisfied

Medical (Mat 9.12) Patient Doctor-Jesus Diagnosis Sickness Death Treatment-salvation Restoration to wholeness/health

Animal Husbandry (Mat 18.10-14) Sheep Shepherd-Jesus Caretaking Lost Death Search & Rescue Return to fold

Journey (Mat 7.13-14) Traveler Guide-Jesus Guiding Lost Death (destruction) Show way Find home (life)

Who is judged/treated in Bible Who is judged/treated now

Insiders

Outsiders Insiders

Outsiders Insiders

Everyone Insiders

Outsiders

One interesting aspect of these frames is that in the biblical moral-legal contexts, the objects (the sinners) are those in the religious in-group (e.g. the Pharisees), while in current interpretation, it is usually the opposite (see chart). And it is even more complex. One can easily find references in modern U.S. evangelical preaching and doctrine to the eternal punishment of the lost. This blends the legal-moral and animal care/journey frame backgrounds. In the Bible, the schema or scenario of the lost sinner (as a sheep) results in that sinner being found or (as a traveler) either finding the way or remaining lost. Meanwhile, the idea of punishment (and substitutionary atonement) naturally belongs to properly the moral-legal schema. But that this should be so should perhaps not be surprising. Depending on how one has negotiated ones self within ones own cultural/social/personal setting, different metaphors above will be more or less salient. The individualist will probably prefer the moral-legal schema, since it emphasizes personal agency and responsibility. The enclavist or communitarian might prefer the medical model, since it emphasizes care and solidarity. The hierarchist will likely prefer the lost sheep schema, since it emphasizes dependency and hierarchy. And possibly the isolate will be drawn to the metaphor of the lost traveler, since it seems to speak to the situation of the marginalized. Conclusion: People in different cognitive environments learn through embodied actions what sorts of selves they are expected to present to the world. These identities tend to cluster into a fairly limited number of categories (particularly for specific communicative purposes): individualist, hierarchist, isolate, or communitarian. Individuals negotiate their relationships with others and the world based on these ideas about their own selfhood based in part by means of theory of mind (i.e., figuring out what others might be thinking differently than they are). Much of the time these negotiations can be taken for granted (if enough cognitive background is shared). But negotiations often break down, especially cross-culturally, and people end up considering one another impolite at best and morally questionable at worst. Understanding the dynamics of identity negotiation should go a long way in helping translators and consultants mediate communication across the differing cognitive environments represented in translation.

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Bibliography Major Works by Mary Douglas 1966. Purity and Danger. London: Penguin. 1979. The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. New York: Basic Books. 1986. How Institutions Think. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. 1992. Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge. 1993. In the Wilderness. Sheffield: JSOT Press. 1996a. Natural Symbols. London: Routledge Press. 1996b. Thought Styles. London: Sage Publications. 1998. Missing persons: A Critique of the Personhood in the Social Sciences. Berkeley: UC Press. 1999. Implicit Meanings: 2nd Edition: Selected Essays in Anthropology. New York: Routledge. Major Works by Erving Goffman 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York, Doubleday. 1963a. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: The Free Press. 1963b. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Touchstone. 1967. Interaction Ritual - Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Random House. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper & Row. Major Works by George Lakoff 1980. with M. Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1989. with M. Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago. 1999. with M. Johnson. Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. 2004. Dont Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. Other works Damasio, A., Self Comes to Mind. New York: Random House, 2010. Durkheim, E., The Division of Labor in Society. Tr. W. D. Halls from De la division du travail social (1893). New York: The Free Press, 1984. Fauconnier, G., and Turner, M., Conceptual integration networks. In Geeraerts, D., ed., Cognitive linguistics: Basic readings. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter., pp. 303371, 2006. Feldman, J.A., From Molecule to Metaphor. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Fiske, A. P., Structures of Social Life. New York: The Free Press, 1991. Haidt, J., The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment. In Psychological Review. 108, 814-834, 2001. (cited in off-print pp. 1-36) Haidt, J., and Greene, J. How (and where) does moral judgment work? in TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.6 No.12 pp. 522-523, December 2002. Haidt, J., and Graham, J., When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals may not Recognize, in Social Justice Research. Volume: 20, Issue: 1, Springer, pp. 98-116, 2007. Katan, D., Translating Cultures. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 1999. Kohlberg, L., Stage and sequence: The cognitive-developmental approach to socialization. In D. A. Goslin (Ed.), Handbook of socialization theory and research. Chicago: Rand McNally 1969. Shweder, R. A., Thinking Through Cultures. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Shweder, R. A., The Big Three of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the Big Three Explanations of Suffering In Brandt, A., and Rozin, P., eds., Morality and Health. New York: Routledge, pp. 119-169, 1997. Shweder, R. A., Why do Men Barbeque? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Tomasello, M., The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Wendland, E., Framing the frames Journal of Translation, Volume 6, number 1 2010. pp. 27-50. Wilson, E. O., Consilience: The unity of knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. 16