Cultural Scripts

Cultural scripts are patterns of interaction which are unique to a particular culture. The use of the concept of "scripts," a metaphor from the language of the theater, was introduced into sociology with the ideas of symbolic interactionism. That scripts guiding social action are culture-specific is taken from anthropology. The setting of the stage, the dramaturgy, the scripts, the roles—all of these aspects we find also in everyday social interactions. Several scholars have tried to show that these scripts often very explicitly pre-structure the semantic content of social interactions. Cultural scripts exist in a given culture to deal with conflicts that arise, and pre-structure the resolution through ritual forms.

Keywords Cultural Relativism; Cultural Scripts; Goffman, Irving; Implicatures; Linguistics; Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis; Semantics; Symbolic Interactionism

Culture > Cultural Scripts

Overview

Sociology, Culture & Language

Erving Goffman (1922–1982) introduced the idea of the use of dramaturgic language (the language of the theater) to describe situations of social interaction into the lore of sociological theory, with his 1959 work "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life." Much of his work has profited deeply from the influence of George Herbert Mead on Goffman as a young man. He also owes a lot to the education he received in Chicago under Edward Shils and Lloyd Warner; both men were once deeply involved in Harvard's Human and Social Relations movements and well acquainted with the famous sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–1979), who was one of the most interdisciplinary and internationally trained scholars of his time. Parsons revolutionized the language of sociological theory and helped initiate the interdisciplinary Social Relations Laboratory at Harvard.

The interaction of sociology and anthropology with linguistics was highly prominent at Harvard, involving first Parsons, Alfred Tozzer, and Albert Watmaugh, and later Clyde Kluckhohn, Alfred Kroeber, and Roman Jacobson. Parsons, who was well acquainted with the work of anthropologists Malinowski and Franz Boas (1858–1942), also introduced the work of Boas’s students Ruth Benedict, Alfred Kroeber, and Margaret Mead to his students of sociology. The historical importance of this connection to Parsons for the development of the sociological theoretical language has been studied in detail by Stingl (2008).

Franz Boas, who himself had studied in Germany before moving to the US, was trained in an interdisciplinary curriculum that involved physics, geography, philosophy, and physiology. Boas can be credited with emphasizing the cultural context in anthropology, which later became known as "historical-particularism." Boas nurtured the idea that all societies and cultures have a developmental history which helped the preformation of aspects unique to each society. He is also responsible for some anthropological contributions to linguistics, which originally had been the topic of the German Völkerpsychologie, begun by Wilhelm Wundt, Lazarus and Steindahl, and Goerg Simmel, yet developed in a different direction by Carl Stumpf.

Boas’s efforts in investigating the relation between language and culture was followed by the work of his student Edward Sapir (1884–1939). Sapir (and his younger colleague Whorf) developed the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the controversial idea that language structures the way people think about reality. While the examples they used to illustrate their hypothesis have come under critical scrutiny, the general idea that there seems to be interplay between culture, language, perception and thought is widely accepted today.

Building on Boas’s idea of cultural relativism, Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) established herself as a leading voice in anthropology with her seminal, "Patterns of Culture" (1934), which postulated that human evolution has to offer, in each culture a few specific traits are impressed onto the development of personalities within that culture. These personalities are formed in interdependent sets of values and principles of aesthetics that in their composure are unique to that culture. In her equally revered "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" (1946), she studied these patterns not by immersing herself in the everyday life of a culture, but by reading through Japanese literature and thereby restricting herself to the study of linguistic expressions only. Another of Boas’s students, Margaret Mead (1901–1978), distinctively studied the phase of "coming of age" in the culture of Samoa. Her work thereby emphasized the role of individual socialization in the rituals and practices of a culture, although Mead focused strongly on the question of the development of sexuality.

Boas’s most famous colleague, Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), was born in Poland and studied mathematics, physics, philosophy, and physiology, before he eventually became a famous anthropologist who taught at the London School for Economics, where Talcott Parsons studied with him for a year. Malinowski, however, focused less on relativism and more on the functions within a culture, which he saw as working towards the benefit of the development and fulfillment of the needs of individuals. His colleague Radcliffe-Brown, on the other hand, emphasized the role that functions play to fulfill the needs of whole societies.

The Language of Sociology

Parsons, having been immersed in this intellectual climate and soaking up its core ideas, used these concepts of patterns, structures, socialization and so forth to synthesize a unified language for sociology along with Kluchkohn and others. It is this theoretical language which in the 1940s and 1950s was the most prevalent "dialect" which almost every sociologist had to know how to speak. Working from his concepts of social action and social structure, Parsons introduced the idea of the social role to solve functional problems that arose while he was investigating the family as a social unit and the doctor-patient relationship.

It is a short-circuit conclusion from here to the point where the Parsonian language and the early forms of what would later be called Symbolic Interactionism would see the role for the dramaturgic potential it held.

Symbolic Interactionism

Herbert Blumer coined the term Symbolic Interactionism in his effort to do justice to the teachings of George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley. According to Mead, the Self is integrated in everyday practices. The self is socialized into these practices which integrate the levels of 'I' and 'Me' (a distinction that Mead takes from William James). The active I, is the creative and spontaneous aspect, while the Me is the actually socialized and learned aspect; the Self that has learned how to interact with its physical and social environment. The formation of the Me, therefore, can be viewed to be culture specific from an anthropological point of view when it is regarded as the part of an individual identity and self that is shaped by the learning and application of symbolic systems.

Edmund Leach (1910–1989), after pursuing an early career as an engineer, studied anthropology with Malinowski and Raymond Firth (1901–2002), also a sympathetic colleague of Parsons and author of many books on the relations of culture and social organization. While Firth was primarily interested in the economic structures and functions within cultures, Leach focused in his work on the political systems. Leach studied the effects that differing and potentially conflicting structures of authority within one culture have in regard to social and cultural change.

Stanley Tambiah (born 1929), while also interested in the political structures of different cultures, began to investigate the interdependencies of the political aspects of a culture with magic, myth, ritual, and religion. He began to question whether the categories, distinctions, and classifications that Western anthropology used, for example magic, science or religion, could actually be used to describe non-Western cultures at all. In his view, these descriptions are not fitting and instead lead to bias.

From his earliest social theoretical contributions, Parsons identified culture systems with the use of symbolic systems. He later conflated these ideas with Freudian concepts from psychoanalysis, likening the Super-Ego (the Ueber-Ich) to the symbolic structure of culture as a system. The patterning and application of these symbolic systems can thus be viewed as dramaturgic through the lens of Goffman and later generations of anthropologists, linguists, and sociologists.

Further Insights

In trying to correct some of the flaws he saw in the works coming from Mead and others, Erving Goffman argued that the analysis and reconstruction of social action must accept a much stronger contextualism. The template we must take into account is not society itself, but the more specific context each situation is embedded in, which society alone cannot account for. Therefore he uses the metaphor of the theater to describe this embeddedness and the breadth of the contexts.

Cultural Scripts & the Theater Metaphor

Social interaction, as it plays on the front stage, does have a back-stage or a parking lot, from where the audience and the actors come with their "emotional baggage," etc. The setting of the stage, the dramaturgy, the scripts, and the roles are all aspects we find in everyday social interactions. The presentation of Self, therefore, is also embedded in the very patterns that are provided, while our actions in these patterns also create some minor changes. But it is a small step to realize that these patterns are to a large degree concomitant with cultures and sub-cultures. Therefore culture — in regard to the theatrical — is always a performative culture, for it can only be an existing culture if it is enacted on the stage.

Following Goffman and the work of Kenneth Burke (1897–1993, author of "Language as Symbolic Action"), ethnologist Victor Turner (1920–1983) has possibly contributed the most to the field of Performance studies. Turner focused strongly on the role that rituals and rites play in different cultures, and was interested (much like Stanley Tambiah) in the question of conflict. The resolution of conflict plays out symbolically in what he coined as "social drama." In other words, there should be cultural scripts in existence in a given culture to deal with conflicts that arise, that pre-structure the resolution through ritual forms. In the most extreme case, if we accept that there is a "world culture," the institution of war and its rules of engagement represent such a cultural script for conflict resolution.

The Case of Two Cultures

But on a more everyday life scale, the case of German and American culture is a very good example of the differences in cultural context and cultural scripts in various aspects, as both Anna Wierzbicka (1998) and Stephen Kalberg (1987) have shown in several studies, both semantically as well as socially.

While both nations belong to the wider context of Western Culture, there are subtle, yet consequential differences. In a way, the saying "they may look like us, but they are in no way like us" can be found a sarcastic overemphasis, but with a grain of truth. In Wierzbicka's account, the scripts involved in the use of the German words 'du' and 'Sie' is highly complex; both are used in contexts where the English language uses only the word 'you.' The use of du belongs to an informal context and engages and enables a whole range of cultural scripts that differ greatly from the highly formal way of addressing another person as Sie. One must be deeply immersed in German culture to be able to understand or interpret the variety of scripts enabled by the use of either.

Boston sociologist Stephen Kalberg (1987) has noticed similar phenomena, having himself worked in Germany and reported on his observations. The most prominent example for him is found in the use of the word 'friend' and its German counterpart 'Freund.'

In some regard these two words are "false friends." From a German point of view, the word Freund describes a very deep personal relationship, where both parties share very private details and have a very informal relationship, which involves a lot of cultural scripts that for Americans pertain to only very good and close friends that are actually close to being family. For Germans, the very casual use of the word "friend" by Americans is very confusing. For once they consider friendship to be established, they have certain expectations of personal loyalty, frankness, and accepted curiosity. Acting on what a German, once designated "friend,” would thus think of as Freund, an American in turn would perceive the responsive behavior to be rude, nosy, and largely inappropriate. This is not just a mere error of translation of the language; it involves the whole context and the cultural scripts attached to each concept.

In another example, one should think about cross-cultural dating. In one culture, a script may suggest that kissing is actually part of the third date, but that presenting flowers or holding hands is permissible on every occasion. In the other culture, dating may involve a script that has an entirely different hierarchy, so to speak: Kissing may be permissible any time, while flowers are only given in an actual relationship of lovers and holding hands may actually indicate the proposal of sexual intercourse.

Unawareness of these scripts can be confusing for all individuals engaged in situations of multi-cultural interaction; however, they may be easily explained.

Viewpoints

Among later developments in Symbolic Interactionism the work of Gary Alan Fine (1998) and Hans Bakker (1993) deserve mentioning. Fine has worked on the mechanisms of rumor and legend in society. His work is focused on the zone where expressive culture fringes with social system, and how they mutually interact with one another. His 1998 study on mushroom gatherers has yielded him praise for being one of the finest contributions in the field in decades.

Hans Bakker has spent a long time working in Indonesia before returning to the West. He later worked at the University of Guelph in Canada. His work on Indonesia (as well as on Gandhi) has been a remarkable effort in social theory that tried to bridge many cultural gaps. Turning Gandhian Philosophy into an actual model for human rights that is acceptable to Asian as well as Western cultures is a very difficult task, which Bakker has taken on, addressing also the issue of international development within the human rights context.

It can be said that Gandhi represents a "best of both worlds" scenario. Born in India, he studied in England, worked in South Africa and then returned to his native culture. His fluency in moving among cultural scripts may have helped him develop a philosophy that is indeed equipped with the potential to serve as a template for concepts of human rights and responsibilities that could gain universal value (Bakker, 1993).

In the field of linguistics, Wierzbicka has explicitly introduced semantic explicatures and cultural scripts to account for linguistic phenomena of meaning, which she thinks are part and parcel to specific cultural scripts. Her concept seems to be intended as a counter-concept to Paul Grice's (1913–1988) implicatures. Grice, a pragmatic language philosopher, distinguished in his work between the meaning of speakers, the linguistic meaning and the relations between those two levels. He coined the term implicature to refer to meaning that a statement suggests, while not directly expressing it or strictly implying it within the statement or utterance. Wierzbicka suggest that in a speech community, the speakers follow specific cultural rules, namely cultural scripts, which are manifestations of tacit systems. These ways of speaking must be made explicit to the listener/reader in order for her or him to understand a statement made by a member of a speech community.

Terms & Concepts

Cultural Relativism: Cultural Relativism is the idea that a human being's ideas, thoughts and actions can only be understood within the context of her or his culture. Any form of relativism has come under scrutiny and criticism in some regard, for relativism has been used to justify arbitrariness and randomness, summed up under the heading "anything goes.” In the extreme, arguments have been cast that state that any kind of behavior should be tolerated, when it is specific to a culture, preserving through relativism a cultural pluralism. In that regard, even the declaration of human rights, it has been argued, is culture specific to the cultures of the West only and has no legitimacy among Asian or African Cultures. This argument has been used to justify practices from the use of torture to female circumcision.

Implicatures: In the philosophy of Paul Grice, implicatures are those aspects of a statement that do not directly imply or express a certain meaning, yet are carried within the statement. In a simple example, the sentence "Anna got married, and she is expecting a baby,” the implicature would be the suggestion that the act of conception occurred after the marriage and that the husband is also the father.

Sapir-Whorf-Hypothesis: Language, according to this famous hypothesis, shapes the way that the world is perceived. Learning a language as a child, therefore, will ultimately structure the ways of perception of a person in a way that differs distinctly from a person who has grown up in another language system. If a language allows for the perception of certain details in one's environment such as textures, shapes or colors, the non-existence of these concepts in another language will constrain one's perception of these aspects.

Semantics: Semantics is the study of meaning in communication. It is distinguished from syntax, which studies the structure (grammar) of a language.

Symbolic Interactionism: Symbolic interactionism is based on the idea that human beings act in regard of one another based on the meanings they ascribe to the objects in and situation of the interaction. Meanings, expressed in symbols, are subject to interpretation, which is a dynamic process and also hinges on the socialization an individual has received in learning the meaning of significant symbols.

Bibliography

Bakker, H. (1990). The Gandhian approach to Swadeshi or appropriate technology: A conceptualization in terms of basic needs and equity. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 3 , 50–88.

Bakker, H. (1993). Toward a just Civilization: A Ghandian perspective on human rights and development. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press.

Benedict, R. (2006). Patterns of culture. New York: Mariner Books.

Benedict, R. (2005). The chrysanthemum and the sword. New York: Mariner Books.

Boas, F. (1982). Race language and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Eaton, A., & Rose, S. (2011). Has dating become more egalitarian? A 35 year review using sex roles. Sex Roles, 64(11/12), 843–862. Retrieved October 24, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=60939273

Fine, G. A. (1998). Morel tales: The culture of mushrooming. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Grindstaff, L., & West, E. (2011). Hegemonic masculinity on the sidelines of sport. Sociology Compass, 5, 859–881. Retrieved October 24, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=66588565

Kalberg, S. (1987). West German and American interaction forms: One level of structured misunderstanding. Theory, Culture and Society, 4 : 602–618.

Mead, G. H. (1962). Mind, self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stingl, A. (2008). The house of Parsons: The biological vernacular from Kant to James, Weber and Parsons. Lampeter: Edward Mellen Press.

Turner, V. (1970). The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual. New York: Cornell University Press.

Turner, V. (1974). Dramas, fields, and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society. New York: Cornell University Press.

Vanclay, F., & Enticott, G. (2011). The role and functioning of cultural scripts in farming and agriculture. Sociologia Ruralis, 51, 256–271. Retrieved October 24, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=61972419

Wierzbicka, A. (2006). English: Meaning and culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wierzbicka, A. (2003/1991). Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction (Expanded second edition). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Suggested Reading

Boas, F. (1938). The mind of primitive man. New York: MacMillan.

Fine, G. A. (1996). Kitchens: The culture of restaurant work. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Malinowski, B. (1992). Magic, science, religion and other essays. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Masters, N., Casey, E., Wells, E. A., & Morrison, D. M. (2013). Sexual scripts among young heterosexually active men and women: Continuity and change. Journal of Sex Research, 50, 409–420. Retrieved October 24, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=87450346

Mead, M. (1928/1971). Coming of age in Samoa. New York: Perennial (Harper Collins).

Pecchioni, L. L. (2012). Interruptions to cultural life scripts: Cancer diagnoses, contextual age, and life narratives. Research On Aging, 34, 758–780. Retrieved October 24, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=82378803

Sandstrom, M. & Fine, G. A. (2003). Symbols, selves and social life: a symbolic interactionist approach to sociology and social psychology. Los Angeles: Roxbury.

Wierzbicka, A. (1991). Cross-cultural pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.

Wierzbicka, A. (1998). German 'Cultural Scripts': Public signs as a key to social attitudes and cultural values. Discourse & Society, 9, 241-282.

Wierzbicka, A. (2004). The English expressions good boy and good girl and cultural models of child rearing. Culture & Psychology, 10: 251–278.