Culture as socially distributed knowledge

Recent work by anthropologists and cultural psychologists (Lave and Wenger 1991; Resnick, Levine, Teasley 1991; Suchman 1987) on how people think in real life situations has provided another perspective on culture as knowledge. For these researchers, knowledge is no longer something exclusively residing in a person’s mental operations. As succinctly stated by anthropologist Jean Lave (1988: 1), when we observe how people problem-solve in everyday life, we find out that cognition is “distributed – stretched over, not divided – among mind, body, activity and culturally organized settings (which include other actors).” 

To say that cultural knowledge is socially distributed means to recognize that (i) the individual is not always the end point of the acquisition process, and (ii) not everyone has access to the same information or uses the same techniques for achieving certain goals. The first point implies that knowledge is not always all in the individual mind. It is also in the tools that a person uses, in the environment that allows for certain solutions to become possible, in the joint activity of several minds and bodies aiming at the same goal, in the institutions that regulate individuals’ functions and their interactions.

 This is the position taken by cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins, who, by studying navigation as practiced on the bridge of a Navy ship, came to the conclusion that the proper unit of analysis for talking about how cognition takes place must include the human and material resources that make problem-solving possible.

> The proper unit of analysis for talking about cognitive change includes the socio-material environment of thinking. Learning is adaptive reorganization in a complex system. It is difficult to resist the temptation to let the unit of analysis collapse to the Western view of the individual bounded by the skin, or to let it collapse even further to the “cognitive” symbol system lying protected from the world somewhere far below the skin. But, as we have seen, the relevant complex system includes a web of coordination among media and processes inside and outside the individual task performers. (Hutchins 1995: 289)

Such diversity in the distribution of knowledge across participants and tools does not only concern the more esoteric, technical, or specialized fields (e.g. medicine, navigation, arts and crafts, public speaking); it also permeates everyday domains and activities. This perspective on knowledge and learning implies that what a person needs to know or do in order to be a competent member of a given group cannot be easily represented by a set of propositions. The idea that one might learn how to do something from a set of explicit instructions is daily challenged by anyone who has ever tried to learn to cook from a cookbook or to use a computer program following a manual. More often than one might suspect, there is a moment when one gets stuck or the unexpected happens. It is then that we realize the invaluable experience of having been previously exposed to an expert’s actions, the need of having been in the task before being able to reproduce it on our own, the degree to which words alone can reproduce the context in which a transformation called learning takes place. Individual change is difficult to produce when it is the individual alone that is in charge. It is not by accident that the most common way of transmitting knowledge in the world is apprenticeship. It is a system that limits participation in the task and yet allows a person to feel involved in the whole task. The novice can watch the experts at work and is slowly let into the task. This means that at each stage of learning the learner already has an image of what the next step should be like. This kind of learning is quite different from the learning that is fostered in schools, where the learner is continuously exposed to a set of instructions on how to do something without having had the experience of watching experts at work for a while and without knowing why something is needed.

The idea that knowledge is distributed affects our notion of what it means to be a member of a culture. In the western popular view, all members of a culture are considered to have the same knowledge. But this is clearly not the case. People from different parts of the country, different households within the same community, or sometimes even individuals within the same family, may have quite different ideas about fundamental cultural beliefs (e.g. the identity or existence of God), different expertise in mundane cultural practices (e.g. cooking and eating), and different strategies for interpreting events and problem solving. Edward Sapir seemed quite aware of this property of culture when he stated that “Every individual is, then, in a very real sense, a representative of at least one sub-culture which may be abstracted from the generalized culture of the group of which he is a member” (Sapir 1949a: 515).

In some cases, people may not even be aware of the degree of diversity expressed in their own community – one could in fact argue that linguistic practices are important ways in which a homogenous view of culture may be perpetated. Languages provide ready-made categorizations and generalizations that are accepted as given. We speak of “Americans,” “Italians,” “Japanese,” as if they were monolithic groups. We use expressions like in this country we believe in freedom or English prefers short sentences, despite the fact that the notion of “freedom” is not something shared by all members of society and the notion of “short sentence” is quite context-specific and often violated by the best writers. Language, not only as a system of classification, but also as a practice, a way of taking from and giving to the world, comes to us with many decisions already made about point of view and classification. Although this does not mean that when two individuals use the same expression they are necessarily sharing the same beliefs or the same understanding of a given situation, stereotypes are routinely reproduced through the unreflective use of linguistic expressions that presuppose gender, race, or class differentiation.

Although communities vary in terms of the range of diversity represented in them, diversification is the norm rather than the exception. Within anthropology, it was Anthony Wallace’s theoretical writings on culture and personality that first introduced the alternative view of culture as an organization of diversity (see Wallace 1961: 28). According to Wallace, what characterizes people who share the same culture is not uniformity but “their capacity for mutual prediction.” Whether or not prediction is a factor, we know that communities are successful, that is, they survive with a manageable degree of internal conflict, not when everyone thinks the same (something that seems impossible), but when different points of view and representations can co-exist. Racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination as well as violence are manifestations of problems people have accepting as meaningful other ways of being, including their ways of speaking. The work done by John Gumperz and his associates on the use of language in multilingual communities highlights the specific ways in which language can be a barrier to social integration (Gumperz 1982a, 1982b; Jupp, Roberts, and Cook-Gumperz 1982).