Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 37:2
0021–8308
Theories of Embodied Knowledge: New
Directions for Cultural and Cognitive Sociology?
Theories
Original
Gabriel
Ignatow
Articles
of
Embodied
Knowledge
Journal
JTSB
Blackwell
Oxford,
0021-8308
XXX
© 2007 The
UK
for
Publishing
the
Author
Theory
Journal
Ltd
of
Social
compilation
Behaviour
©The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007
GABRIEL IGNATOW
1. INTRODUCTION
A small number of sociologists interested in culture have recently argued that
knowledge developed in fields like cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience
can have significant theoretical implications for cultural research (e.g., Bergesen,
2004a,b; DiMaggio, 1997, 2002). DiMaggio (2002), for example, has argued that
cognitive psychology can take sociologists’ “debates over presuppositions and
render them empirical,” and can fill important gaps in sociological theory (p. 275).
Indeed, sociological propositions about the workings of cognition are rarely specified
or tested, but are of central relevance to studies of identity, collective memory, cultural
codes, symbolic boundaries, logics of action, social movement framing, and many
other productive theoretical concepts and categories. In this paper I attempt to
advance sociological analysis of culture and cognition by drawing out lessons from
recent work in cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience on the relations
between bodily and emotional processes, on the one side, and knowledge and
reasoning on the other. I place this work within the context of the turn to the body
in sociological theory and several other fields, and submit that cultural and cognitive
sociology have tended to elide the body, but that this elision is no longer defensible
given what is now known on the relations between reason and emotion, and
knowledge and the body. I suggest that greater recognition of the bodily foundations
of culture and cognition can lead to promising new directions for cultural sociology.
In turn, a cultural sociology that theoretically accounts for the bodily foundations
of knowledge can make more convincing arguments regarding social influences
on the construction of knowledge.
While sociologists have in recent decades taken an interest in both cognition
(e.g., Cicourel, 1973; Cerulo, 1998, 2002, 2006; Eyerman and Jamison, 1991;
DiMaggio, 1997, 2002; Martin, 2000, 2002; Lizardo, 2004) and the body (e.g.,
Turner, 1996; Featherstone, 2000; Shilling, 1993, 2004), sociological theories of
culture and cognition, and of the body, have overlapped little if at all. This has left
sociology out of step with a broad shift in the human sciences toward conceiving
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Gabriel Ignatow
of knowledge not in terms of disembodied and emotion-free information, but
rather as thoroughly embodied. This “bodily turn” has taken different forms
across disciplines, but it has been pronounced in philosophy (Clark, 1997; Hurley,
1998; Haugeland, 1998), as well as in psychology, neuroscience, robotics, education,
cognitive anthropology, and linguistics (see Clark, 1999).
Sociological studies of culture and cognition (e.g., Cicourel, 1973; Cerulo, 1998,
2002, 2006) have developed within the intellectual context of the rise to prominence
of “amodal” theories of knowledge in the second half of the twentieth century (see
Barsalou, 1999). In amodal approaches, knowledge is assumed to function independent
of sensations—of vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and emotions. To a large extent,
amodal theories developed by cognitive scientists reflected major developments in
logic, applied mathematics, statistics, and computer science during the early to
mid-twentieth century, when formalisms such as predicate calculus, probability
theory, and programming languages became widely influential. As cognitive scientists
developed theories of cognition following the “cognitive revolution” of the 1950s
and ’60s, their assumptions about knowledge drew heavily on these resources.
Prior to the cognitive revolution, theories of knowledge had generally taken a very
different form, as nearly all theorists had assumed that knowledge was intertwined
with perceptions and sensations (Barsalou, 1999: 578). Most philosophers who
theorized about knowledge, including empiricists like Locke and Berkeley and
nativists like Kant and Reid (Barsalou, 1999; Prinz, 2002), assumed that sensations
and perceptions played a central role in the representation of knowledge. Yet in
the twentieth century, theorists were so captured by formal developments in logic,
statistics, and programming languages that they largely abandoned such perceptual approaches. Instead, they developed amodal approaches, including semantic
networks, feature lists, frames, and schemata, none of which feature sensory or
bodily processes.
2. SOCIOLOGY AFTER THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION
In sociological studies of cognition, the body per se is only rarely addressed.
Rather, for many analysts, the empirical relationships of primary theoretical interest
are those between individual cognitive processes and meso- and macro-level social
processes (e.g., Cerulo, 2006). Although the sociology of culture and cognition is
an expanding area reaching across many sub-fields of sociology, including the
family (LaRossa, Simonds, and Reitzes, 2005), social movements (Eyerman and
Jamison, 1991), morality (Fine, 2002), and sociological theory (Bergesen, 2004a,b),
in what follows, I focus on the theoretical writings of two major analysts, Eviatar
Zerubavel (1991, 1996, 1997) and Paul DiMaggio (1997, 2002). These authors’
theoretical writings on culture and cognition, in particular Zerubavel’s 1997 book
Social Mindscapes, and a 1997 review article by DiMaggio, have been highly influential
and are frequently cited.
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Zerubavel’s focus is on mental categories, which he argues are not products of
nature (Zerubavel, 1991: 70–80) or of individuals’ mental idiosyncracies. Rather,
individuals carve an otherwise continuous reality into meaningful units as members
of “thought communities” with particular thought styles and thought traditions
(Zerubavel, 1997). In this way, Zerubavel distinguishes his approach from subjectivist,
relativist, or depth psychological treatments that emphasize the uniqueness of subjective
experience. He also distinguishes cognitive sociology from cognitive science, as the
latter is thought to focus exclusively on cognitive and neural processes common to all
humans. The “islands of meaning” people create in their everyday lives are thus
“not part of nature” (Zerubavel, 1996: 422). Islands of meaning “may not exist
‘out there’ in the real world” (1996: 427) at all. Rather, reality is continuous,
and if we envision distinct clusters separated from one another by actual gaps it is because we
have been socialized to ‘see’ them. In other words, it is social convention that transforms actual
oceans into mental archipelagos” (Zerubavel, 1996: 427)
The task of sociologists interested in cognition, then, becomes to learn how different
thought communities construct meaning and category knowledge differently. In
this theoretical approach, commonalities across communities and societies are not
imagined to be of much interest to sociologists; nor are the neural, psychological,
emotional, or bodily processes that may be associated with various forms of knowledge.
In a 1997 paper that has done much to define the sociological study of culture and
cognition, DiMaggio lays out a program for cognitive sociology that differs from
Zerubavel’s vision in several respects. Rather than sharply distinguishing cognitive
sociology from cognitive science, DiMaggio reviews research from cognitive psychology
and social psychology that he finds relevant to sociological work on culture and
cognition. Parting ways, at least tacitly, with Zerubavel, DiMaggio argues that
sociologists ought to have a firm grasp of concepts and research from cognitive
psychology and psychology, because many questions that are metatheoretical for
cultural sociologists are treated as empirical by cognitive psychologists (see also
DiMaggio, 2002: 275). For DiMaggio, the main point of sociological studies of culture
and cognition is not to highlight cultural differences in category knowledge, as it
is for Zerubavel, but rather to try to grasp the social, cultural, and psychological
mechanisms by which social and cognitive processes influence one another.
More narrowly, DiMaggio argues that research from cognitive psychology ought
to encourage sociologists to conceive of knowledge as “bits of information” stored
in memory in a relatively haphazard way. In this way, culture is not thought to
be heavily structured by neural or bodily processes. Rather it is structured socially,
through interactions with institutions and social and cultural environments. It is
these complex interactions that are argued to be of interest to sociologists.
In a 2002 chapter, DiMaggio addresses the issue of emotion at greater length
than he does in the 1997 review article. Based on findings from cognitive psychology,
he argues that sociologists can conceptualize cognition in terms of two main
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dimensions. The first dimension is “systematic” versus “heuristic” cognition, with
systematic cognition referring to deliberative and reflexive thought, and heuristic
cognition referring to immediate reactions, snap judgments, and unconscious thought.
The second dimension is “warm” versus “cool” cognition, with warm implying
greater emotional involvement. DiMaggio maintains that these two dimensions
should remain analytically distinct.
As in Zerubavel’s work on categorization, in DiMaggio’s approach, nature, in
the sense of either the outside physical world or the inner, living, breathing, feeling
human body, plays a relatively minor role. As people navigate social situations
using schemas stored in long-term memory, reacting to social situations that cue
modes of cognition and retrievals of bits of information, neither the body nor
emotions are much of a factor. The schemas thought to be of greatest interest to
sociologists are those “that appear independent of individual experience” (DiMaggio,
1997: 273). Thus while Zerubavel’s and DiMaggio’s conceptions of cognitive
sociology differ substantially, the theory of knowledge underlying each is similar.
Both analysts theorize knowledge as at least analytically separable from physical
reality, the body, and emotions. Knowledge is stored in long-term memory as
categories derived from society, or as relatively disorganized bits of information.
Societies, institutions, and small group interaction cue certain modes of thought
and forms of knowledge (DiMaggio, 1997: 274), and it is the task of cognitive
sociologists to explore these social-cognitive interactions and to describe their
differences across cultures (Zerubavael, 1991). Subjective, bodily experience is
assumed to be tangential to these interactions.
3. THE BODILY TURN IN SOCIOLOGY
Since the 1980s, many sociologists have focused their attention on the body and
emotions, partly out of a concern that the sociological tendency to prioritize
structural considerations over experiential and agentic considerations has rendered
sociology incapable of accounting for embodied, emotional, and subjective lived
experience (see Howson and Inglis, 2001; Shilling, 2001; Eliasoph and Lichterman,
2003). While several sociological approaches have been developed to explicate the
ways in which social structures and ideological practices regulate and restrain
bodies (see Turner and Stets, 2005; Featherstone, 2000; Turner, 1996), other
analysts have identified the body as central to the internal environment of social
action. Drawing on interactionist, phenomenological, and existentialist resources
provided by such figures as Simmel and Merleau-Ponty (Csordas, 1994; Frank,
1991: 48; Leder, 1990), these latter approaches highlight how human behavior
involves subjects who engage sensorially and emotionally, as well as cognitively,
with their social worlds.
The work of body theorists like Shilling and Mellor (1998; Shilling, 2001,
2005a,b) falls into this latter category of sociological theorizing in which the body
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and emotions play a central role. Shilling and Mellor outline a theory of embodiment
as a medium for the constitution of society, an approach that draws on Durkheim,
Simmel, and other classical sociological sources. From Durkheim, they argue that
bodies are a major source of those symbols through which individuals recognize
themselves as belonging to society. In particular, in The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life, Durkheim argued that blood, hair, and bodily fat were treated as
intrinsically sacred in many societies. Bodies constitute a major location for these
symbols, as in tattooing, “the most direct and expressive means by which the
communion of minds can be affirmed” (Durkheim, 1912[1995]: 233–4). Finally,
bodies provide social potentialities which provide the means by which individuals
transcend their egoistic selves and become energetically attached to the symbolic
order of society (Shilling, 2005a: 212; 2001: 332–36), as bodily congregation is
itself “an exceptionally powerful stimulant” (Durkheim, 1912[1995]: 217).
More broadly, Shilling and Mellor argue that in The Elementary Forms and elsewhere,
Durkheim conceived of culture as having a “double nature” ( Janssen and Verheggen,
1997). It is “natural as well as human and material as well as moral” (1995[1912]:
224). While Durkheim stressed that the meaning of an object is not determined
a priori by properties intrinsic to the object, there was a “nonrelativist” element in his
sociology too ( Janssen and Verheggen, 1997: 296). Durkheim envisioned a “dualism
of human nature” (1973[1914]), a homo duplex view in which mind and matter
were mutually constitutive. But reason and cognition could never overcome the
“lower” instincts and emotions.
Homo duplex social theories that view the body as a source, location, and means
of cultural representations present challenges for cognitive and cultural sociologists.
By focusing on individuals’ emotional, embodied, lived experiences, this brand of
body theory demands reconsideration of cultural and cognitive sociology’s nearly
exclusive focus on disembodied information, cool cognition, and cultural schemas
that “appear independent of individual experience” (DiMaggio, 1997: 273). I will
argue below that the influence of embodied sociological approaches on cultural
and cognitive sociology can be broadened and sharpened through an engagement
with recent work in cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive
linguistics.
4. THE BODILY TURN IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY
Cognitive scientists’ theoretical and empirical studies of embodied cognition support
homo duplex sociological arguments identifying the body as central to culture and
social action. For example, Barsalou and his colleagues have argued that cognition
is inherently perceptual, sharing systems with perception at both the cognitive and
neural levels (Barsalou, 1999, 2005; Niedenthal et al., 2005), and that the divergence
between the fields of cognitive science and perception research masks the empirical
dependence of the former on the latter (Goldstone and Barsalou, 1998: 232–3).
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This institutional divergence also reflects a widespread assumption, shared by
cognitive sociologists, that cognitive representations are inherently “amodal” (Barsalou,
1999: 577), or not associated with modality-specific systems like those for touch, taste,
smell, vision, hearing, emotions, or other bodily systems. The intellectual context
for this assumption, discussed above, is the rise to prominence of amodal theories
of knowledge since the 1950s. While amodal theories of knowledge differ widely
in form, they share a common underlying assumption—what Barsalou (1999) refers
to as the “transduction principle.” This principle first assumes that when a situation
is experienced (as vision, movement, touch, audition, and internal states like emotions
and motivation), the sensory systems produce mental representations of sensory
experience. According to the transduction principle, these mental representations
are “amodal symbols.” Like numbers, letters, and words, amodal symbols do not
contain sensory, bodily, or emotional information within themselves. Thus an
amodal symbol system “transduces” a subset of a perceptual state into a completely
new representation language that is inherently nonperceptual (Barsalou, 1999: 578).
Amodal representations are transduced to represent visual experience as well as
sounds, actions, emotions, and motivations experienced. So once a transduction process
is complete, only a symbolic description of the sensory experience subsequently
represents it in memory. Across many similar experiences, representations are
transduced and integrated to establish knowledge for the specific type of situation
and for the various entities, events, and states encountered in it.
In amodal approaches to knowledge, representations are both amodal and
arbitrary (Barsalou, 1999: 578). They are amodal because their internal structures
bear no correspondence to the perceptual states that produced them, and they are
arbitrary in Saussure’s sense: like words, representations typically have arbitrary
relations to entities in the world. The theory of amodal representations and the
transduction principle underlie the conceptualizations of knowledge that have
dominated cognitive science since the cognitive revolution, and they are central to
the zeitgeist of the cognitive revolution, and much cultural and cognitive sociology
today.
Since the 1980s, problems with amodal representations and the transduction
principle have become increasingly salient (Barsalou, 1999; Glenberg, 1997; Lakoff,
1987). First, theorists have failed to provide empirical accounts of the transduction
principle or evidence of the existence of amodal representations. Second, no
compelling account of how amodal representations are linked to perception and
action has been provided. Further, as is discussed at greater length below, neuroscience
research increasingly implicates the brain’s perceptual and sensory systems in the
representation of conceptual knowledge (Damasio and Damasio, 1994).
Due in part to problems with the transduction principle and amodal theories
of knowledge, approaches to knowledge in which perceptions, sensations, and
mental images play leading roles are being reinvented in diverse forms. Such
theories tend to share what Barsalou (2005) has termed the “simulation principle.”
Like the transduction principle, the simulation principle assumes that visual, auditory,
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motor, touch, emotional, and motivational states become active as people experience
a situation. The two principles diverge in that while the transduction principle
assumes that perceptions and sensations are transduced into amodal representations,
the simulation principle assumes that the original perceptual and bodily states are
partially captured to represent the situation. Rather than creating a new symbolic
level for conceptual purposes, representations of situations are captured as both
conceptual and perceptual representations. Perceptions, sensations, and bodily
and emotional states are disassociated from mental representations only later, as
a secondary process of abstraction. In this way, knowledge is fundamentally
“embodied.”
The mechanistic process underlying the simulation principle is the following.
Rather than extracting a subset of a perceptual state and storing it for later use
as an abstract representation, as a perceptual state arises in sensorimotor systems
a subset of it is extracted through selective attention and stored in long-term
memory. For example, on first seeing a chair in a room, some neurons fire for
edges, vertices, and planar surfaces, whereas others fire for color, orientation, and
direction of movement. The overall pattern of activation represents the chair in
visual perception, and this pattern is captured as a sensory representation which
can later be simulated. On later retrievals, the sensory representation of the chair,
and some of its associated pattern of neural activation, can enter into language and
abstract and creative thought (Barsalou, 2005; Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings, 2005).
As collections of sensory representations develop as patterns of neural activation
in long-term memory, they constitute the representations that underlie knowledge
(Barsalou, 1999: 578).
Importantly, as the original perceptual and bodily states are not fully reenacted,
the represented information is generally incomplete and perhaps distorted. More
fundamentally, in the chair example, the chair is not represented by abstract
symbols transduced from firsthand experience with the chair. Rather, the chair is
represented by perceptual, bodily, and emotional states experienced during interaction
with it. According to this theoretical perspective, processes of simulation underlie
the role of knowledge across the spectrum of cognitive activities, including longterm memory. So in later remembering an object, a simulation of it is evoked, as
opposed to the retrieval of disembodied and emotion-free schematic representations
of the object.
In a discussion of embodied knowledge, Wilson (2002) makes a useful distinction
between “online” and “offline” embodiment. Online embodiment refers to the idea
that much cognitive activity operates directly on real-world environments. For
example, upon meeting someone new, people spontaneously and automatically
produce sensory and somatic responses (such as looking up and feeling apprehensive
if the person is very tall) and motor responses (such as stepping back to keep
distance). In embodied theories of knowledge, these sorts of immediate bodily
responses to new conditions are necessary for the encoding and interpretation of
new experiences. Online embodiment is also a form of knowledge acquisition,
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building up a repertoire of rapid bodily and sensory responses to social and physical
stimuli. This repertoire of “embodiments” interacts with cognition and language,
and is stored in memory with cognition and language rather than in a separate
location.
Offline embodiment refers to the continuing influence of this repertoire of bodily
responses even when cognitive activity is decoupled from the social and physical
environment. Just thinking about an object produces embodied states as if the
object were actually there, as does perceiving a symbol, such as the name of the
person or object. According to a strong embodiment view, online embodiments
are stored in long-term memory, and these embodiments constitute the basic
elements of knowledge. Several recent studies illustrate the influence of the bodily
dimension of knowledge stored in long-term memory. For example, in a study by
Rauscher, Krauss, and Chen (1996), participants first watched an animated action
cartoon. After a break, participants were asked to describe the cartoon to a listener.
When participants were asked not to gesture, they were significantly slower to
describe spatial elements of the cartoon. Presumably, blocking the embodiment
impaired access to the conceptual elements of the representation. In another
example, Spivey and his colleagues report that participants who listen to vignettes
including spatial descriptions, such as “the top of a skyscraper” or “the bottom of
a canyon,” perform appropriate eye movements up or down, respectively, as if actually
present in the situation (Spivey, Tyler, Richardson, and Young, 2000). Glenberg and
Kaschak (2002) found that participants were faster at judging the sensibility of a
sentence when its meaning was compatible with the hand movement required for
the response (e.g., “Close the drawer” and forward movement; “Open the drawer”
and backward movement). Schubert (2004) showed that making a fist influenced
men’s and women’s automatic processing of words related to the concept of power.
Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996) showed that participants in whom an “elderly
stereotype” had been primed subsequently walked down a hallway more slowly
than did participants in whom the stereotype had not been primed. Wells and
Petty (1980) reported that nodding the head while listening to persuasive messages
led to more positive attitudes toward the message content than shaking the head
back and forth as in disagreement. Studies showing strong content effects in
reasoning further support the view that information is processed through simulation
rather than through a transduction process. Many researchers have reported that
reasoning improves when abstract variables in arguments are replaced with familiar
situations (Barsalou, 1999: 606; for further evidence supporting embodied over amodal
approaches, see Barsalou, Solomon, and Wu, 1999; Pecher, Zeelenberg, and Barsalou,
2003; Stanfield and Zwaan, 2001; Berkowitz and Troccoli, 1990; Ohira and Kurono,
1993). Findings such as these suggest that the body is closely tied to the processing
of many kinds of social information (Niedenthal et al., 2005: 184–187).
Contemporaneous with the recent development of perceptual theories of knowledge
in cognitive science, “intuitionist” models of thought and reasoning are increasingly
prominent in both psychology and neuroscience. Intuitionist models hark back to
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Freud’s distinction between primary process (older animal desires) and secondary
process (realistic thinking aimed at satisfying the older animal drives), and concur
with Freud’s point that primary processes are, in fact, primary (Freud, 1976 [1900]).
In the history of academic psychology this view rose to prominence with Freudian
theory and analysis in the early twentieth century, lost ground following the cognitive
revolution, and now seems to be on the rise again in neuroscience and psychology
today.
In recent years, Damasio (1994, 1999) has been perhaps the foremost advocate
of an intuitionist understanding of human reason. In Descartes’ Error (1994), Damasio,
a practicing neuropsychologist whose clinical work is with severely brain-damaged
patients, has developed intuitionist models of reasoning that employ the basic
architecture of theories of embodied cognition. Damasio argues that humans’ capacity
for reason is dependent on bodily and emotional processes. Reason is a product of
the cooperation of both “high-level” and “low-level” brain centers, from the prefrontal
cortices to the hypothalamus and brain stem:
lower levels in the neural edifice of reason are the same ones that regulate the processing of
emotions and feelings. These lower levels maintain direct and mutual relations with virtually
every bodily organ, thus placing the body directly within the chain of operations that generate
the highest reaches of reasoning, decision making, and, by extension, social behavior and
creativity (1994: xiii)
Thus nature has built the apparatus of human rationality not just “on top of the
apparatus of biological regulation but also from in and with it” (1994: 128). The
body plays a second role as well, as the body not only shapes reasoning through
processes of emotional association and motivation, but also through a cognitive
process where the body is used as a reference for the constructions we make of
the world around us (Damasio, 1994: xvi; more on this point below).
Psychologists studying social and moral judgment have found that emotion and
intuition often precede reflective thought (e.g., Haidt, 2001; Wright, 1994; Glenberg
et al., 2005; Haenggi, Gernsbacher, and Bolliger, 1993). Studies show that people
are quick to make moral condemnations of culturally aberrant behaviors, yet struggle
to find reasons to support their condemnations (Haidt, Koller, and Dias, 1993;
Haidt and Hersh, 2001). For example, students presented scenarios involving
aberrant behaviors, such as eating one’s dead pet and recreational drug use,
generally judged the scenarios to be morally wrong, but struggled to justify their
judgments on rational grounds. When cross-examined, participants often dropped
their post hoc reasons for their moral judgments, yet did not change their minds.
They were “morally dumbfounded” in that they had strong feelings that an action
was wrong, and were surprised that they could not find reasons to support their
feelings (Haidt, 2001). Thus it seems that in the case of moral reasoning, intuitions
can be the primary process, while abstract reasoning may be secondary and post
hoc. Thus it is the “emotional dog” that wags its “rational tail,” and not the other
way around (Haidt, 2001).
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Cognitive linguists have argued as well that the body shapes language not only
directly, through the interplay of perceptions, emotions, and cognition, but also
through cultural models as intermediaries. Cultural models are the topic of study of
much of cognitive science and its subspecies, cognitive linguistics and cognitive
rhetoric (Gibbs, 1994; Holland and Quinn, 1987; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999).
Cultural models consist of small numbers of conceptual objects and their relations
to each other (D’Andrade, 1987). These models shape reasoning (Gentner and
Gentner, 1983) and language generally (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999), and are generally
thought to take one of two forms: proposition-schemas, which specify concepts
and the relations which hold among them (D’Andrade, 1987), and image-schemas,
which are gestalt-like just as visual images are, but are more schematic than what
we ordinarily think of as visual imagery. Also, image-schemas contain emotional
and physical information of all kinds (Lakoff and Kövecses, 1987). Examples include
folk image-schemas of the “flow” of electricity (Gentner and Gentner, 1983), of the
operation of home heating systems (Kempton, 1987), and of the greenhouse effect
and global warming (Kempton, Hartley, and Boster, 1995), among others (see
Kempton and Lave, 1983 for an early review; for evidence of the existence of
schemas, see Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 81– 87).
Cultural models are instantiated primarily, but not solely (McNeill, 1992; Wilbur,
1987), through metaphor, which is ubiquitous in human languages (Lakoff and
Johnson, 1999; Sweetser, 1990; Fernandez, 1991; Gibbs, 1994). Metaphors are
generally structured by projections based on the human body and perceptual and
sensory experience, a process known as “phenomenological embodiment” (Lakoff
and Johnson, 1999: 46). These bodily projections include pushing, pulling, supporting,
balance, straight-curved, near-far, front-back, and high-low (Lakoff, 1987; Boroditsky,
2000; Richardson et al., 2003), all of which provide phenomenological bases of
metaphors in most languages, including sign language (Wilbur, 1987).
While cognitive scientists and cognitive linguists may disagree on whether perceptual
representations or metaphorical processes are more central in the formation of
knowledge (Barsalou, 1999: 600; Gibbs and Berg, 1999: 617), they generally agree
that embodied theories of knowledge are superior to amodal theories (Fauconnier,
1999: 615; Gibbs and Berg, 1999: 617). Taken together, theoretical and empirical
work in these fields, as well as in neuroscience and psychology, strongly supports
embodied over amodal approaches. Insofar as cultural sociologists have chosen to
theorize and investigate cognitive phenomena such as schemas, categories, and
representations without theoretically incorporating the body and emotions, embodied
approaches to knowledge pose significant conceptual challenges.
5. THE BODY AS A FOUNDATION FOR COGNITION AND CULTURE
Theories of embodied knowledge demand the consideration of cultural and cognitive
sociologists for several reasons. First, in light of such theories, sociologists’ exclusion
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of bodily experience and emotions from their theoretical purview appears arbitrary
and artificial, as sensory and perceptual experience are now understood to be
fundamental components of knowledge. Where sociologists of culture and cognition
have considered emotions, they have tended to model them in a binary way, as “warm”
versus “cool,” that, while useful in places, eliminates much of the nuance of emotional
life. This conceptualization of emotion would seem to demand reconsideration, as
would cultural sociologists’ treatment of memory. DiMaggio (1997) suggests that
culture seems to be basically unstructured, and thus is stored in long-term memory
in a relatively haphazard way, as “bits of information.” This is consistent with cognitive
science theories of memory that treat internal representations as meaningless symbols
such as a string of zeros and ones that “encode” features (e.g., Hintzman, 1986;
McClelland and Rumelhart, 1986), as point-like objects with no structure (Gillund
and Shiffrin, 1984), or as propositions relating intrinsically meaningless symbols
(Kintsch, 1988). Cognitive scientists have criticized “dictionary-like theories” of
disembodied knowledge (Glenberg et al., 2005), and have developed embodied
approaches in which subjective experiences are seen as encoded into long-term
memory in terms of perceptual categories (Brandimonte et al., 1997; Martin and
Jones, 1998). The encoding of experience into memory is thought to involve fusions
of perceptions, sensations, and simulations of subjective experience. As such, memory
retrieval is another form of perceptual simulation. As a memory is retrieved, it produces
a simulation of the original experience, and conscious recollection thus has a
“phenomenal feel” that reflects embodied subjective experience (Glenberg, 1997).
The Cognitive Structure of Right and Wrong
Cerulo’s (1998) study of cognitive structures embedded in newspaper headlines
provides a valuable sociological test case for amodal and embodied views of knowledge
and meaning. Cerulo argues that newspaper headlines concerning acts of violence
have moral connotations that are due not only to the headlines’ content, but to
their semantic sequences. For instance, newspaper headlines with “performer
sequences” begin with the performer (the subject), followed by the action (verb),
and then victim (object), as in the standard active voice English sentence. By
foregrounding the perpetrator of violence, this sequence creates empathy for the
perpetrator and implies that the violence being reported is “normal” rather than
“deviant” (e.g., police shoot robbery suspect ). In “victim sequences,” the headline
begins with the object, or victim, followed by the action and then the performer,
as in the passive voice (e.g., a man was injured by an attacker). The “affective effect”
of victim sequences is to create empathy for the victim, and to imply that the
violence being reported is deviant rather than normal.
Cerulo’s study is among the most compelling sociological studies of culture and
cognition because it makes a strong case for the power of cognitive structures to
systematically influence social interpretation. However, we can ask just what it is
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that makes, for example, a victim sequence meaningful. How are victim sequences
stored in long-term memory, how are they recognized, and how can they have
the affective and moral connotations that Cerulo suggests they have?
Constructing an account of victim sequences based on amodal theories of
knowledge is not a straightforward task. In such an account, a mental model for
victimhood is stored in long-term memory as an amodal schema or perhaps a
feature list. But just what is contained in such a model, and how is it learned and
then cued later? We can hypothesize that such a model would need to include
components for victim, perpetrator, violence, injustice, and perhaps other elements.
In certain combinations, these components may trigger emotional or bodily states:
empathy, anger, sorrow, and so on. There are problems with such a conceptualization,
however. First, it seems cumbersome, as victim sequences in newspaper headlines
are understood to communicate their moral connotations nearly instantly. Second,
a disembodied view is inconsistent with the research reviewed above. Third, such
a view faces the same problems faced by disembodied theories of knowledge
generally: it fails to provide a mechanistic account of what is happening, does not
identify the contents of amodal schemas in any detail, and is unparsimonious in
comparison with embodied theories.
An embodied conceptualization of victimhood sequences is far more parsimonious.
In an embodied view, mental representations are posited to be stored in long-term
memory. In mechanistic terms, these representations are neural associations of
perceptual, bodily, emotional, and cognitive modal structures. In this way a representation of victimhood is understood to be an associative pattern of neurons,
not an amodal schema or feature list. A representation of victimhood is stored
in long-term memory as a simplified and perhaps distorted pattern of neural
associations gleaned from perceptual and sensory experiences associated with being
a victim. Such experiences may have been firsthand, vicarious, or both. Perceptual,
emotional, and bodily states such as the memory of seeing someone hurt, or
feelings of anger, sadness, nausea, or pain, are intrinsic parts of this representation.
This representation is also associated with a conventional schema (for English
speakers) of something like A is victimized by B, along the lines of the semantic
sequences Cerulo describes. When reading a victim sequence headline in a newspaper,
the semantic sequence, the content of the headline, and the context of the headline
(its location in a section of a newspaper that often reports on crime and violence)
prime and then cue a somewhat stable associative pattern of neurons that stimulates
a subset of the emotional, bodily, and cognitive states, and perhaps even conscious
memories, of personal or vicarious experiences of victimhood.
Social Movements Framing Theory
Much has been written on the cognitive and cultural dimensions of social movements
and collective action (e.g., Eyerman and Jamison, 1991; Johnston and Klandermans,
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1995; Crossley, 2002), and many sociologists are interested in bringing consideration
of emotions and the body back into social movement theory and research (e.g.,
Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta, 2001; Jasper, 1997) following a long period in which
emotions were largely ignored (see Dobbin, 2001). Theories of embodied knowledge
reveal limitations inherent in analyzing either the cognitive or bodily and emotional
dimensions of social movements per se. The idea that emotions do not intrude on
cognition, but are rather part of its basic structure (Damasio, 1994), contradicts
those social movements analysts who conceive of emotions as impinging on
otherwise rational, normal thought. For example, in a discussion of emotions in social
movements, Aminzade and McAdam (2001: 18) cite with approval Rosaldo’s
(1984: 143) definition of emotions as “embodied thoughts, thoughts seeped with
the apprehension that ‘I am involved.’ ” By now we can see that this “cognitivist”
view of emotions (Lumhold, 1992) is misleading,1 because everyday social knowledge
is thoroughly embodied. The body is never absent from thought. Thus rather than
viewing participants in social movement as thinkers for whom feelings sometimes
intrude, participants are more accurately viewed as emotional, intuitive human
beings for whom reflective thought may channel intuitions (Haidt, 2002).
An embodied cognitive approach can complement one of the dominant approaches
to questions of how meaning is created in social movements, that of “frame
theory.” Snow, Benford and their colleagues (Benford and Snow, 2000; Snow et al.,
1986) have argued that social movement activists create frames of meaning that
“resonate” differently with different segments of society. Benford and Snow (2000)
consider “frame resonance” to be determined by two main factors: the credibility
of social movements’ claims (their consistency, empirical credibility, and the credibility
of the claimsmakers), and the claims’ salience (their centrality to peoples’ values,
commensurability with daily experience, and “narrative fidelity”). An embodied
cognitive approach allows for greater specification of “narrative fidelity,” a notion
that is crucial to frame theory (see Modigliani, 1989: 5; Oberschall, 1996: 99).
Snow and Benford claim that frames “resonate with cultural narration, that is
with stories, myths, and folk tales that are part and parcel of one’s cultural heritage
(Snow and Benford, 1988: 210). Identifying frames, and explaining why they may
have narrative fidelity for some groups more than for others, has proven a difficult
task (see Benford, 1997). However, while people may respond to social movement
frames for many different reasons, because knowledge is embodied in many ways,
embodied schemas likely play a significant role in frame resonance. Social movements
activists’ rhetoric, too, can be embodied in several ways: by hand gestures, bodily
movements, and embodied imagery and metaphors. These rhetorical embodiments
may resonate with embodied knowledge stored in memory, as in the psychology
studies reviewed above. The challenge of theories of embodied cognition for analysts
of social movement framing, then, would be to identify specific embodied elements
in activists’ rhetoric, and to hypothesize how these discursive elements may resonate
differently for members of different social groups with different repertoires of
embodied schemas.
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For social movements analysis, the promise of an embodied cognitive approach
would be a better understanding of the relations between the body, emotions,
cognition, and social movements frames, and perhaps as a consequence, an
incorporation of the body and emotions into social movement theory that is
durable rather than episodic (Dobbin, 2001).
Motivation and Culture
Embodied theories of knowledge point up weaknesses in sociological work on
culture and cognition, and provide a richer empirical understanding of studies
like Cerulo’s (1998) and of social movement theorists’ ideas of “frame resonance”
and “narrative fidelity.” Such theories also suggest new directions for cultural
theory and research. As DiMaggio (2002: 275) has argued, psychology can fill in
some of the gaps in current theorizing on culture. One such gap concerns the
question of motivation, of the demand for, rather than supply of, cultural material.
Focused as they are on macro-level forces, which may expand or restrict the
cultural repertoires available to individuals, cultural sociological theories have had
little to say regarding why some people are more strongly attracted to some ideas,
ideals, or styles of thought. In “pragmatic actor” approaches (Boltanski and Thévenot,
2001; Swidler, 1986, 2003), individual motivation is seen as neither problematic
nor heavily influenced by culture (Reed, 2002). Rather, as in rational-choice approaches
in economics, individuals are seen as pursuing specifiable ends, and as using whatever
means available in pursuit of their goals.
On the question of motivation, Alexander’s (e.g., 1992, 2004) neo-Durkheimian
approach to culture stands in stark contrast to pragmatic actor approaches. Alexander
argues that culture is “indelibly penetrated by the nonrational,” by “deeply irrational
systems of psychological defense,” and by “deep emotional impulses” (1992: 295–
305). For Alexander, the task of cultural sociology is thus to interpret social meanings
by “tracing the moral textures and delicate emotional pathways by which individuals
and groups come to be influenced by them . . . it is such subjective and internal feelings
that so often seem to rule the world” (2005: 5). While Alexander’s attention is drawn
to irrational and emotional, rather than pragmatic and calculated, motivations,
his theoretical framework is in this regard as universalizing as is that of pragmatic
actor theory. All people, after all, whether they live in mostly secular or religious
communities and societies, are seen as subject to the same fundamental motivations,
such as the tendency to divide reality in terms of sacred and profane.
Embodied theories of knowledge do not entail universalist or determinist
approaches to questions of motivation, and may provide a foundation for a more
culturally relative approach. As Wilson (2002) has argued, from infancy onward
humans build up in long-term memory a repertoire of “online” embodiments, of
reactions, movements, sensations, perceptions, and feelings. These embodiments
are then available offline for various purposes, including cultural ones. Repertoires
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of embodiments, and the often culturally conditioned ways embodiments are linked
to ideas, images, and social situations (e.g., feeling shame, or not, upon seeing a
naked body), are internalized by individuals. The nexus of embodiments and their
social and cultural associations can be thought of as part of a person’s habitus (Bourdieu,
1992; Lizardo, 2004). From cognitive linguists, we can see how this nexus generates
different sets of embodied metaphors within different groups. Lakoff (1996, 2006),
for example, has argued that differences between politically liberal and conservative
Americans are rooted in different ideas about the role of the parent within the
family, and that these differences generate different sets of metaphors that shape
how people think and feel about politics, religion, and social and cultural issues.
Theories of embodied knowledge allow sociologists to theorize motivation as
both cultural and embodied, as rooted in more or less universal embodiments that
are generalized and associated with ideas, images, and social situations in culturally
specific ways. Theories of embodied knowledge also have implications for the supply
side of culture, for discourses. Because experience stored in long-term memory is
organized partly in terms of bodily operations, assertions that culture operates
mainly as unstructured, fragmented bits appear incorrect, or at least incomplete
(see Vaisey, 2006; Ignatow, 2004; Silber, 2003; Reed, 2002). Alexander’s neoDurkheimian “strong program” of cultural sociology, in which discourses are
conceived as structured by binary oppositions rooted in bodily potentialities, such
as the sacred/profane binary, appears more consistent with theories of embodied
knowledge. However, neo-Durkheimians’ near-exclusive focus on the sacred /profane
binary seems needlessly restricted (McLennan, 2005: 7). People think and act through
a habitus made up of a large number of bodily operations, as first Piaget (see Lizardo,
2004) and more recently cognitive linguists (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 1999) have
argued. These include embodiments of forward-backward, high-low, curved-straight,
back-front, in-out, right- and left-handedness, pleasure, pain, pride, shame, guilt,
and many more. These sorts of basic bodily operations can all structure discourses
(Ignatow, 2003, 2004) through processes endogenous to culture itself (see Kauffman
[2004] for a review of recent sociological theorizing in this direction).
If both motivations and discourses are embodied cultural phenomena, then it
should be possible to identify isomorphisms between an individual’s habitus and
the discourses in which she participates. For instance, if we conceptualize the
habitus in cultural-psychological terms, as a nexus of bodily operations and social
and cultural associations (Lizardo, 2004), we can predict that people will participate
more intensely and for longer durations in groups when the group’s discourse is
internally structured in ways that are isomorphic with, or “resonate” with (Benford
and Snow, 2000), elements of the individual’s habitus (see Crossley, 2002). Identifying
such isomorphisms would require fairly sophisticated methods of measuring
“meaning structures” embedded in discourses (Mohr, 1998; Cerulo, 1998; Franzosi,
1989, 1990, 1994; Ignatow, 2003, 2004). By exploring the social effects of endogenous
cultural structures, however, such an approach can complement recent emprical
sociological studies of how small groups’ discourses are shaped by exogenous
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Gabriel Ignatow
social structures, such as patterns of authority (e.g., Martin, 2002) and social networks
(Yeung, 2005).
If sociologists interested in culture and cognition would give more theoretical
weight to the body, and to the many roles it plays in knowledge and thought,
sociology would likely be better positioned to contribute to debates in psychology,
cognitive science, and other disciplines. As an example, the cross-disciplinary
impact of neo-Durkheimian sociology would likely be far greater if it were viewed
as one strand of a more integrated program of cultural sociology. Today Durkheim
is cited constantly by anthropologists and psychologists interested in culture, morality,
and emotions (e.g., McCauley and Whitehouse, 2005), yet neither neo-Durkheimian
sociology nor sociological studies of culture and cognition, many of which are
strongly influenced by Durkheim, have played much of a role in the theoretical
consilience taking place across many disciplines. Just as philosophers, cognitive
scientists, linguists, and other analysts have taken a renewed interest in the body,
so it may be time for sociologists interested in questions of culture to do the same.
Gabriel Ignatow
Department of Sociology
University of North Texas
P.O. Box 311157
Denton, Texas 76203-1157
USA
gignatow@gmail.com
NOTE
1
This cognitivist perspective on emotions is also overly individualistic, as emotions are
defined as “highlighting a deep sense of the actor’s self ” and are “seeped with the
apprehension that ‘I am involved’ ” (Aminzade and McAdam, 2001: 18, italics added). The
Western, atomized self implied here is never problematized, but ought to be (Markus and
Kitayama, 1991).
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