American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research: The Journal of the National Center

The cognitive anthropological method of deriving cultural models from ethnographic discourse analysis is illustrated in relation to case studies yielding nativistic insights regarding American Indian substance dependency and recovery. Discussion focuses on the broader applicability and local community relevance of incorporating cultural models directly into the design and implementation of prevention and intervention programs. Such an approach may benefit local community cultural revitalization efforts while enhancing the cultural relevance and effectiveness of substance abuse programs. In cognitive anthropology, cultural models have been defined by Quinn and Holland (1987) as “presupposed, taken-for-granted models of the world that are widely shared (although not necessarily to the exclusion of other, alternative models) by the members of a social group and that play an enormous role in their understanding of that world and their behavior in it” (p. 4). Keesing (1987) adds that such models “comprise the realms of (culturally constructed) common sense,” serving a pragmatic role as “models of everyday reality” (p. 374). Cultural models research in current cognitive anthropology generally utilizes ethnographic interviewing along with discourse analysis, participant observation and statistical techniques such as multidimensional scaling in order to uncover and represent composite cognitive models of subject groups in alignment with a connectionist theory of cognitive processing (Strauss & Quinn, 1994). Some notable examples of cultural model analysis reported on in the anthropological literature include Holland and Skinner’s (1987) study of folk semantics and related behavioral schemas associated with vernacular gender terms by a population of college undergraduates, D’Andrade’s (1995, pp. 152-157) discussion of Gladwin’s (1970) account of Caroline Islanders’ model of sea navigation by triangulating the position of various