Event Sequencing as an Organizing Cultural Principle

One common cultural organizing principle is event sequencing. This article describes and illustrates two widespread examples of this kind of organization, cultural routines, and cultural templates. Cultural routines organize recurrent activities in time and space. Cultural templates rely on causally linked sequences of more abstract events to support reasoning and narrative. Why should so much of culture be organized thusly? Myevents to support reasoning and narrative. Why should so much of culture be organized thusly? My argument rests on evidence from childhood development and evolutionary history. Recognition of discrete events and their sequencing in routines occurs early in childhood. Although event sequencing is an ancestral trait in humans, it is the full-blown human capacity to understand how the events in such a sequence are causally linked, including intentionally linked, that finds its way into the organization of cultural templates. In taking advantage of event sequencing and causality, culture has piggybacked on human cognitive capacities. It follows that a full accounting of human culture requires recognition of the way both world and brain are organized. [event sequencing, cultural routines, cultural templates, causality] Over the past decade or so, colleagues and I (D’Andrade 1991, 1992; Strauss 1992; Strauss and Quinn 1994, 1997) have developed a theory of culture as shared cognitive schemas (see also Bloch 1992; Westen 2001). Culture in this theory includes regularities in the humanly created world, both material and socialFand hence regularities in the experiences people have who live in this world. Out of these shared experiences are built shared schemas. We take our notion of schemas from cognitive science. Within that discipline, schemas can be understood as networks of neuronal synapses that fire together. These neurons have come to fire together, and even, in the latest neuroscientific understanding, to grow new synaptic connections, as a result of the recurrence of similar experiences (Bailey and Kandel 2004), especially emotionally arousing ones. It is through these recurrent and arousing experiences that schemas build and strengthen in individual brains. ‘‘Culture,’’ in our neuroscientific understanding of it, is nothing more than what happens when some group of people, having shared the same or similar experiences come to share the same or similar cognitive schemas. These experiences include, not only those that are first hand but also what people learn from what others tell them. Thus, the experience of any group is informed by its entire preexisting inventory of shared schemas. Up to now, however, cognitive anthropologists have not thought much about the organization of these shared schemas. In this article I argue that one common strategy for organizing cultural schemas is through event sequencing. I describe two widespread examples of this kind of organization, cultural routines, and cultural templates. I draw on Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology EVENT SEQUENCING AS AN ORGANIZING CULTURAL PRINCIPLE 249 ETHOS, Vol. 39, Issue 3, pp. 249–278, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. & 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1352.2011.01193.x. earlier insights of Charles Frake, based on his research among two Filipino groups, to illustrate the former, and my own work on American marriage to illustrate the latter. I consider why so much of culture should be organized thusly. My argument rests on evidence for the evolutionary history and the childhood development of event sequencing in humans. In terms of evolutionary history, the understanding that certain events follow other events in sequence is an ancestral trait. The principle at work is that, as it developed, culture piggybacked on existing cognitive capacities. Cultural evolution, like its biological cousin, takes advantage of what is already there. From the fact that event sequencing is an ancestral trait, we can suppose that this skill was readily available to humans as their capacity for culture emerged. That event sequencing, and the causal relations that link such sequences, are basic human cognitive capacities is supported by developmental evidence. I introduce experimental research showing that infants are able to parse human action into events. Then I describe other psychological research demonstrating that an understanding of the world composed of event sequences is an early and fundamental capacity supporting the development of children’s later cognitive skills. I also introduce evidence showing that, while primates and other mammals share the human ability to sequence events, compared to humans, our nearest primate relatives have limited understanding of the causal mechanisms that link one event to another. It is the full-blown human capacity to understand, not just event sequencing, but how pairs of events are causally linked, that finds its way into the organization of culture. Notable is that this capacity to understand causality extends to the realm of human action and intention. Demonstrating a relationship between the organization of culture and properties of human cognition is key to the understanding of culture itselfFits origins, its properties, and its ways of interacting with other aspects of human existence, including social life. The explanation of culture is, or should be, cultural anthropology’s signal contribution to the social sciences. It is perhaps a reflection of how far anthropology has yet to go in explaining this, its raison d’être, that culture is such a badly neglected variable, rarely integrated into research design, and typically only added as an afterthought or paid mere lip service, in most contemporary social science. This defining human capacity has been left wholly unexamined, if not downright dismissed (see Strauss and Quinn 1997:24–36), by the field of cultural anthropology today. I hope with this article to persuade anthropologists and other social scientists that culture is not a mere figment of anthropological imagination, but a real-world phenomenon like any other, the explanation of which can eventually be wrestled to the ground. What follows is a modest contribution to this explanatory effort.