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As social beings, people need to be able to interact intelligently with others in their social environment. Accordingly, people spend much time conversing with one another in order to understand the broad and fine aspects of the relations that link them. They are especially interested in the interactive behaviors that constitute social relations, such as mutual aid, gift giving and exchange, sharing, informal socializing, or deception. The evaluations of these behaviors are embedded in social relationships and charged with values and emotions. We developed tasks to probe how people in an unfamiliar socio-cultural setting understand and account for the behavior of others conditional upon their category membership – by trying to elicit the basic categories, stereotypes, and models that inform the causal perceptions, inferences and reasoning people use in understanding others’ interactive behaviors – and we tested these tasks among the Wampar in Papua New Guinea. The results show changes in the relevance of social categories among the Wampar but also, and perhaps more important, limitations in the translation and applicability of cognitive tasks.
As social beings, people need to be able to interact intelligently with those others who constitute their interactive environment (
Most people are especially interested in the interactive behaviors that constitute social relations: mutual aid, gift giving and exchange, sharing, informal socializing, deception, free-riding and so on. Social behaviors have moral characteristics that index and have consequences for particular relationships; people have definite expectations about who will or should behave in which way and these are often based on essentialist assumptions (
Our aim was to make explicit the information-searches and presumed causes concerning social behaviors by stimulating discussions with subjects using short scenarios intended to motivate people to reason about relations and motivations involved in the scenarios. We developed tasks to probe how people understand and account for the behavior of others conditional upon their social relations – by targeting basic categories and stereotypes (
In the following, we first provide some background information on the socio-cultural context of the Wampar, before describing the two studies that were conducted there, one employing an active information search with fictive scenarios on social behavior, the other using such scenarios to evoke evaluative responses. As it turned out that the main insight to be gleaned from these studies is not so much their empirical results, but rather the methodological problems they pose, the discussion focuses on those challenges that arise from this kind of cross-cultural research (cf.
The Wampar
Aside from the growth in number of hamlets and orientation toward the Highlands Highway (and market economy), there has also been an increasing factionalism in the dominant Evangelical Lutheran Church and the growth of new religious denominations and churches. Thus, the once centralizing force of a single institutional church as the center of village life from the early colonial period has been dissolved as well.
These changes (
The study consisted of two parts: the first adopted the “active information search” paradigm (
In contrast to the majority of cross-cultural studies, we did not take a task that had been refined for usage with “WEIRD” (
All tasks were written in English and translated into PNG’s lingua franca
The main goal of Part 1 was to investigate which type of information Wampar consider to be essential for venturing causal explanations of the course of social interactions. It therefore amounted to an active information search task, in which the presentation of a target question (on distinct social behaviors) was aimed at generating further questions (e.g., about the persons involved, their relations, or the situation) relevant to the evaluation of the behavior described in the scenarios. We also wanted to know what initial reason/causes people imputed to the characters described in the scenarios.
Twelve Wampar from the village of Gabsongkeg participated in this part of the study (five women, six men, and one schoolboy), but its analysis is confined to the adults. The trial interview with the 7-years old schoolboy generated only one answer, which was not to the point: he commented on his own past behavior
The task revolved around two target scenarios, each followed by a set of three questions. The scenarios focused on the social interaction of “helping” and “deceiving,” respectively:
“X helps Y to finish some hard and boring work:”
“Why do you think X helped Y?”
“Ask me questions: what do you need to know to answer the question why he/she helps?”
“How would you say other people (living in your neighborhood/village) would explain why X helps Y?”
“X deceives Y by not giving him his share of the proceeds of a joint business/work”
“Why do you think X deceived Y?”
“Ask me questions: what do you need to know to explain why X does that?”
“How would you say other people (living in your neighborhood/village) would explain why X does this?”
X and Y were replaced either by local male and female names or by “a man” or “a woman.” When necessary the interviewer gave for “hard and boring work” local examples like carrying something heavy, or cleaning a big garden.
The first questions (A1, B1) aimed at finding out how people reason about the described behaviors. The second questions (A2, B2) were connected to the first and are very open; they tried to identify what information people ask for if they feel uncertain about the reasons for the behavior. The third questions (A3, B3) aimed at getting access to participants’ ideas about shared (and non-shared) desires, beliefs, and reasons for behavior.
Questions 1 and 3 thus directly targeted causal explanations, the latter with a focus on sharedness. We expected that mutual aid was explained more often in terms of balanced and generalized reciprocity, specificities of the situation, and less often by individual characteristics of personality or in terms of market exchange. Question 2 was intended to produce data on the information people considered most relevant to establishing causal explanations. Here, we expected people to ask either for attributes of the category of people involved (such as sex, age, or ethnicity), their personal attributes, and information about the relation they have, or for more details about the situation.
All participants were given both scenarios with three questions each in the above order; scenarios were read identical or very similar to the original text; eight of the 12 interviews were fully recorded. Furthermore, the ethnographer made detailed notes on the situation and context, and recorded other pertinent observations, in a field notebook.
As indicated above, the prime concern of this part rested on question 2 and on the data it would procure regarding active information search; this is presented first. Findings from questions 1 and 3 on the explanations for the behaviors are presented afterward, separately for scenarios A and B.
With respect to its main aim, the investigation of active information search, the questions about helping or not-sharing (A2 and B2) were a failure. When asked what one needed to answer the target question, literally
Talking about the scenarios gave some important insights, nevertheless; yet, they were different from what we expected.
Explanations for social interaction: helping.
Response categories (with concrete responses) | Frequency |
|
---|---|---|
In numbers | In % | |
Y helped X in the past or is expected to help X in the future | 5 | |
Y provided food for X | 1 | |
X wants to marry Y’s daughter | 1 | |
Subtotal | 7 | 36.8 |
X is feeling sorry | 3 | |
Y is alone | 1 | |
Y is weak and tired | 1 | |
Subtotal | 5 | 26.3 |
Y gave money to X | 3 | |
Subtotal | 3 | 15.8 |
X has special skills/knowledge | 1 | |
It is X’s manner [ |
1 | |
Subtotal | 2 | 10.5 |
This is good or good behavior [ |
4 | |
Subtotal | 4 | 21.1 |
19 | 100.0 |
The most frequently given answer, that helping is based on balanced reciprocity, was expected as it is a common feature of sociality in PNG (cf.
The question on what other Wampar may think about the situation (A3) was answered by the same 10 participants. One said he only knows what others think if he can talk to them. Another respondent (a much criticized businessman who leases Wampar land to non-Wampar migrants) inquired whether the question referred to what people think about his own business
Explanations for social interaction: deception.
Response categories (with concrete responses) | Frequency |
|
---|---|---|
In numbers | In % | |
Y deceived X in the past | 1 | |
Subtotal | 1 | 4.8 |
Money has changed the way people think | 1 | |
X is lying (for a specific reason) | 2 | |
X needs the money for realizing a plan | 4 | |
Subtotal | 7 | 33.3 |
X is selfish/greedy | 5 | |
X is lying (as a habit) | 1 | |
X is lazy / does not like to talk | 2 | |
Subtotal | 8 | 38.1 |
This is bad or bad behavior [ |
4 | |
Subtotal | 4 | 19.0 |
Y should have tried to find out by himself | 1 | |
Subtotal | 1 | 4.8 |
21 | 100.0 |
The reactions of participants to the first question (B1) were split like in the helping scenario: eight respondents located the reason for the behavior in the disposition of person X. One participant mentioned the transformative power of money as a cause of deception as it changes the way people think and their social behaviors. The answers of other participants, who stated what X is doing, can be interpreted in a similar direction. They emphasized the circumstances and his desire, which explains his behavior, rather than characterizing him as a person. This resonates with everyday experience during fieldwork: when somebody took food, tools or other things from somebody else, the ethnographer was often astonished that people got very angry about what happened, yet did not blame the person or accuse him or her of possessing negative character traits. For example, a young man once stole cooked food that an older woman had put aside to be eaten in the evening. This is thought of as extremely bad, disrespectful behavior, and the woman’s family got very angry. But, even when they found out who it was, the incident was explained in terms of circumstances (he had been drinking, and become hungry) rather than by character deficits in the young man. Mostly, deception, stealing, and violent behavior were quickly forgotten and had few consequences for the evaluation of the person in the future. One respondent even blamed Y because he should find out himself about the money and not rely on X giving it to him.
The question on how fellow Wampar would reply (B3) was answered by 10 participants. Those who did answer the question in the intended way were split: three replied that other Wampar would give the same answer and four replied that they would evaluate the situation in different ways. A woman made very clear (like some participants after the first scenario), that “lifestyle” has changed; she said: “Everybody follows his wife only and does not share anymore (
In general, the findings from the first part of the study were informative with regard to the sociocultural dimension of the task (i.e., the attitudes and expectations involved or activated), but less so in terms of information search: while we did obtain data on the content of causal explanations, obtaining data on the processes involved in causal reasoning was more difficult.
The causal explanations used in the helping scenario corresponded partly with what we had anticipated, based on our (anthropologically informed) picture of Wampar society and the ongoing changes in their life-style (see Socio-Cultural Context). Reciprocal relations are the links in the chains constituting the fundamental relations of social networks. The principles of balanced and generalized reciprocity are internalized early in life and these thematize many types of action. Interestingly many Wampar are very aware of the transformation of intentions and motivations that has accompanied their increased integration into market economy: nowadays some Wampar actively try to avoid or curtail the reciprocal obligations that had been central to their community
In many answers, money is itself assigned a causal role in social behaviors and their transformation. The desire for money and things is here a causal force, which is less located in the weakness of a person – following the notion of a ‘personality’ (
The change of social relations and the attendant diversification of values was another topic repeatedly raised by participants. Therefore making claims about social behaviors and the reasons behind them among “the Wampar” has become even more difficult than it might have been in former times. Reflection by many Wampar on specific changes of values and behavior facilitates discussions about shared (and non-shared) desires, beliefs and reasons for social interactions. Our scenarios and the related questions were starting points for discussion, although more detailed and committed discussions happened in informal situations and in small groups of people who know each other well.
Although it is clear when people’s exclamations express their own moral attitude with a very general evaluative response,
The dominant strand of research on causal cognition is basically concerned with the processes of perception, learning, and reasoning about abstract causal relations (
Investigating the extent to which relational dependencies are shaped by information on social categories such as kinship was one prime goal of this task. In particular, we had assumed that participants would be interested in collecting information that they considered relevant for an account of the event, thereby revealing salient categories. However, to accurately evaluate a person, relation, or situation by systematically collecting information was not an aim of any of the participants – at least not in the way we expected. Rather they used examples from their own social environment to make sense of the scenario (cf.
The main goal of Part 2 was (a) to investigate further what defines and maintains relationships between people, especially kin (e.g., emotional closeness, physical substances, commensality, or sharing of food, growing up together, teaching and socialization, or procreation), and (b) to scrutinize what Wampar saw as causes of emotions and subsequent actions relevant to moral evaluations such as punishment. In order to evoke such evaluative responses, we crafted two fictive scenarios, one involving incest and one patricide, which are likely to be areas of strong moral feelings and evaluations. In the course of this study, however, it became clear that the (intense) discussion on the first scenario would take too much time to follow this up with a second round. This section is therefore confined to the incest scenario.
The same participants were interviewed as in the first study, except for the schoolboy and a man of 35 years, with whom the interview was interrupted (thus rendering a total of
The task focused on one target scenario revolving around incest prohibition in several versions with changing types of kin, each followed (ideally) by a set of 10 questions. The basic scenario described a situation in which close relatives of opposite sex feel attracted, have intercourse and have a child together. The first version featured a mother and her son:
“A young man was stolen as a baby and taken to a distant town, where a family adopted him. He grew up as a son of the family. He never learned anything about the family into which he had been born. One day, when he was grown up, he came to his birth village. Here, he happened to meet his still young mother, who was a widow. The two fell in love, she got pregnant and they had a child. People found out that they were related. There were many heated discussions about what had happened and everybody started talking about it. What do you think people said?”
The second version exchanged sister for mother and was not read out in its entirety, but was just repeated with the main information staying the same.
Moral evaluations and their sharedness
What do you think the people of the village are saying? (And what might his/her relatives think/say?)
How do the man and his mother [sister] respond when they are confronted with what other people say?
How would you say the man and the woman feel about what happened?
Is the son [mother/brother/sister, respectively] a good or bad person? Are they equally so? If so why?
Essentialist notions of persons and their relations
The story states that they did not know they were related; do you believe that? Would it be possible to recognize relatives you have never met before? Would they have intuitively felt that they are related?
Do you think it is possible that the young man became more similar to his adoptive family than to the one into which he was born?
What characteristics do you expect the baby to have?
Practical consequences of moral evaluations
Do you think the baby should be adopted by somebody who lives a long way from the village?
Will this child become a bad/good or unsuccessful/successful man as an adult? Why?
Do you think the young man should stay in the village or leave?
In each section, participants sometimes gave no answer or answered earlier questions, when confronted with a new question and vice versa; this is discussed below.
It was planned to read all scenarios (and variations of them) in the same order to each participant, each followed by the same series of questions. It turned out, however, that only the first version of the (first) scenario could be read in its original version. A second reading with variations (i.e., with different kin relationships between the partners) or about a new topic (i.e., the originally planned second scenario) would have been too long and boring for the participants. For example, participants grew impatient when asked to listen to the same initial sentences again as the ethnographer tried to test the variations in kin relations. Accordingly, she changed the procedure for the second round and only asked informally how the participant would react if the protagonists were related differently.
The first scenario was read to all participants, and the first question was always the same for all participants. The following questions had to be modified, simplified, and adjusted to the conversation for reasons discussed below. However, the gist of the questions remained the same; they were only less differentiated and repetitive. For example, it did not make sense to differentiate between the general gossip and what close relatives said, so that the second part of the first question was left out. Sometimes participants thought either the interviewer did not listen attentively enough or did not understand their answer if she asked “the same” – in fact slightly modified – question again, which irritated and annoyed some participants and made them impatient.
Participants’ responses are presented in the same order of the three groups.
The first question (Qu.1, see
Responses on moral evaluations and their sharedness (cluster I).
Response categories (with concrete responses) | Frequency |
|
---|---|---|
In numbers | In % | |
Assessment as bad behavior | 14 | 56.0 |
Concern with practical implications | 4 | 16.0 |
People’s opinions will be diverse, some indifferent | 3 | 12.0 |
It doesn’t matter anymore | 2 | 8.0 |
Focus on positive aspects | 2 | |
25 | 100.0 | |
They were ashamed/felt bad | 9 | 69.2 |
They will stay together | 3 | 23.1 |
They did not worry | 1 | 7.7 |
13 | 100.0 | |
Positive (because they did not know) | 4 | 50.0 |
Negative | 3 | 37.5 |
It doesn’t matter anymore | 1 | 12.5 |
8 | 100.0 |
One example shows that the interpretation of answers needs to be understood in terms of the particulars of the everyday life. A woman first said that everybody in the village would get angry, and then exclaimed: “It must be LOVE! They should marry.” She used the English word ‘love,’ unlike any other participant. She answered the second question (what the couple thinks about the gossip), and added, “They won’t worry about gossip and won’t follow what other people say.” When asked about her own evaluation of their behavior, she replied: “They are happy because they do not listen what others say. He must have come back to the village with lots of money.” Her statements painted an unusual picture of an intense love story. It turned out that she interpreted our scenario in terms of her favorite Nigerian (“Nollywood”) soap opera
The question how the couple felt about what other people said (Qu.3) was answered (except in the above described case) by most participants consistently: that they felt ashamed, “bad” or “sorry.” With respect to their own evaluation (Qu.4), participants were split (three replied that mother and son are bad people, because what they did was wrong; four said that they are good people, they did not know, what they were doing).
We also wanted to probe how participants conceptualize the relatedness between mother and child and asked if the two could have known that they were related (Qu.5, see
Responses on essentialist notions of persons and their relations (cluster II).
Response categories (with concrete responses) | Frequency in numbers |
---|---|
Yes | 4 |
No | 4 |
Don’t know/cannot know | 1 |
9 | |
Yes (even if only behaviorally) | 3 |
Not sure/no answer to the question | 7 |
10 | |
He will be good | 6 |
He will be bad | 1 |
Depends on the strength of parents’ belief | 1 |
Don’t know/cannot know | 2 |
10 |
To find out how belonging creates similarity or difference, and changes the quality of relations, we asked if the boy might have become like his foster family (Qu.6). Two respondents answered “yes” but did not clarify in which ways, one said his
The next question focused on the child of the incestuous relationship and what characteristics it might have (Qu.7). Answers to this question showed the highest agreement between participants
In respect to how the baby should grow up (Qu.8, see
Response categories (with concrete responses) | Frequency in numbers |
---|---|
With the parents | 5 |
With the mother | 2 |
Should be adopted/move away | 3 |
10 | |
Move away to the town where he grew up | 3 |
Separate | 3 |
Follow their own feelings | 1 |
Stay together in the village | 1 |
It doesn’t matter anymore | 1 |
9 |
The variation featuring a brother and his sister as incestuous partners (X2) provoked interesting responses, with an increased number of participants ready to emphasize their relatedness by blood. Two participants rated the case as bad as that in the first story, while three said it is much worse than incest between mother and son. All five reasoned that the love between mother and child is stronger in the mother/son-version and that their blood is, in the case of real siblings (opposed to cousins or parents and their children), even more similar or identical.
The general evaluation of the events described in the scenario (assessed with the first cluster of questions) was unanimously negative. With regard to the involved persons, however, the moral evaluations diverged. Half blamed the couple (some more specifically the woman), while the other half said that the couple was not responsible because they did not know the truth. Notably, many participants shifted focus from why this happened to practical solutions for the outcome, and some refused to make any attributions whatsoever. In terms of attribution theory, the first two types of responses reflect distinct tendencies: one the tendency to personally blame the actors involved, and the other the tendency to consider mitigating circumstances such as lack of knowledge.
The third type of responses appears to be linked to a widely reported disavowal of interest in reasons and responsibility for action in the societies of the Pacific and other parts of the world (for an overview, see
This raises an important question: are reasons and causes for behavior really
As in Part 1, the results of Part 2 indicate changes in the morality of kinship among the Wampar, but they also underline the difficulty of controlling the social setting well-enough to investigate cognitive responses formally (reproducibly) and effectively. Most respondents were influenced strongly by known cases in their social world. In addition to the case of “Bubu-Dadi” and his offspring, other instances of controversial marriages (for instance, between classificatory siblings
The question of kin relations was answered in many different ways. Wampar ideas about the transmission of physical, mental, and moral qualities from parents to children are vague. Many still explain that blood determines children’s affiliation to the lineage and clan of their father (as one participant in our sample explicitly did). However, most of them add that many exceptions exist and that nobody is really sure how corporeal inheritance works. Some ideas may still be based on Wampar conception theories that
Most participants reasoned that an incestuous relationship between siblings would be much worse than one between mother and son who, on Wampar views, do not share blood even though the relationship remains forbidden, because she has carried and given birth to him. Some tendencies in the evaluations of behavior and reasoning processes behind it are worth mentioning. Aspects of family values and gender relations have been articulated in several statements: if one of the partners is to be blamed, it is the woman and not her son. She should have inquired about his background before beginning a relationship, and it was assumed that she would be more likely to feel that this is her child, because of a special bond between mother and child. This also resonates with pragmatic problems Wampar emphasized: who would look after her and the child? And how are the child and his parents placed in the kinship system? The degree of sharedness of evaluations of relations and sociality among Wampar is another important aspect. Even from a small number of interviews the dimensions of sociocultural change and its consequences have become obvious in the diversity of answers from participants and their reflections on this period of social transformation. Wampar seem to support
It is widely agreed that, ideally, adequate psychological/cognitive testing requires cross-cultural research (
The local conditions to test our planned study on sociality and causality among the Wampar were ideal. The village people are used to having ethnographers who stay for long periods, and ask many different kinds of questions. For instance, the ethnographer had conducted some cognitive tasks on smells during earlier fieldwork (
It was difficult to get Wampar to sit down and talk
One option for dealing with this problem might be to consider collective sessions as a richer source of relevant discussions and results (and one that might generate more interest and commitment to begin with). However, while this might be a better strategy for grasping local understandings in the pilot phase, it would exacerbate difficulties in data analysis and interpretation within and between cultures were it used for the main study. Given the comparatively small population size, such collective sessions would severely affect sample size – even more so when different versions of the same story had to be discussed with different people or groups of people (between-subjects).
For cognitive psychologists in lab settings, employing tasks like the one used here presents almost no practical issues, even if it takes considerably longer than an hour. When working with the Wampar, however, it became clear that participants could not, or did not want to, concentrate for longer than maximal 30 min. This was particularly obvious in Part 2, where respondents began to confuse persons in the scenario about incest (e.g., the child stolen and taken to town with the child of the incestuous relation), ceased to listen carefully, and even when they understood the questions, did they prefer to talk about different topics (such as the actual case of “Bubu-Dadi,” other people they know or differences between living in town and the village). To be crystal-clear, this is
This difficulty points toward the more general challenge of how to design tasks in a manner that they appeal to and hold the attention of the people with whom we work. Finding a domain (such as other people’s behavior) and scenarios (such as helping, deceiving, or incest) that are of sufficient interest is a step in this direction, but – as the difficulties faced in our study reveal – only a first step. It may turn out that the abstract examples, and perhaps the set of questions used to structure conversation, did not scaffold the kind of engagement we hoped it would. As ethnographic knowledge is not sufficient, in and of itself, to predict which aspects of a task would be appealing to people, pretesting remains essential – and that implies pretesting in every single cultural context in which the study is to be conducted.
Related to the problem of task duration is the problem of similarities across task variants, especially when, as in the versions of our scenarios, they were planned simply to substitute one pair of kin with another, or aimed at being more or less explicit with some aspects. Participants clearly lost interest in listening to the “same” story several times. They became impatient and the use of otherwise entertaining stories became a chore. Especially
More fundamental than the practical problems are concerns with the understanding of the situation and the way the answers match the questions. Attempts to figure out what the researcher has in mind is generally an issue, and perhaps even more so with psychological experiments—where participants expect concealed purposes—than in fieldwork situation once a relationship of trust has been established. But the unfamiliar interaction still requires reconstruction of a common ground for the conversation to be sensible, and this may interfere with the intention of the task (e.g.,
An example that looks simple,
Several of the answers contain formulations which are sometimes difficult to interpret, including, for example, the simple utterance “I don’t/cannot know” (
When we asked, for example, what other Wampar would answer if asked the same question, the aim was to access participant’s ideas about shared (and minority) views relevant to behavior. In many cases participants answered, but did not switch perspective; instead they repeated their own opinions and expanded on them. This was not always explicated in their answers, but an impression created in the interviewer, thus highlighting how difficult it can be to assess whether participants actually try to change perspective. When asked about gossip in the incest scenario, for example, many participants continued to think and talk about their own evaluations rather than giving opinions of fellow villagers. Inter-individual differences in the willingness or experience in perspective-taking are an issue as well, especially in cases where participants simply repeated the story (rather than explaining it), shifted perspective from other’s assumed opinion to one’s own, or assumed that the researcher’s fictive story actually was meant as a placeholder for a real event. Participants often referred to their own life-world and personal situation rather than to the scenarios we presented. In a face-to-face community, the micro-politics of relations can rarely be entirely set aside.
Some participants added ideas to the scenarios, which they found important, but which made it difficult to compare them to other answers. For example in the scenario on the incest taboo they speculated on whether the boy earned a lot of money in town.
“We cannot draw conclusions about reasoning processes from the
To give one example from Part 2: when we asked for the characteristics of the baby of the incestuous relationship we aimed at ideas about causal relations between immoral behavior and later events/outcomes. Some participants seemed to assume that the ethnographer meant the specific children of “Bubu-Dadi” (because the ethnographer is interested in interethnic marriages and kin relations) and responded that the child would be okay, meaning mainly “healthy.” Others assumed the question referred to general Christian values, perhaps triggered by the helping/deception scenarios which address topics also discussed at church meetings; according to this frame of interpretation the child is a gift of God, which makes it
This highlights the well-known problem of inter-individual differences, due to the personal histories and/or personalities of participants. These are particulars and this issue raises questions about the relationship between psychological universals and particular cultural contexts.
Cross-cultural research, even when anthropologically informed, is an intricate enterprise. In a challenging paper,
With the approach taken for the current study, this was exactly what was strived for. In order to investigate how people understand and account for the behavior of others conditional upon their relationships, the point of departure was
In this context, we wish to explicitly acknowledge a suggestion made by one of our reviewers. As the reviewer stressed, we need to find ways that allow the research to scaffold and enhance the participants’ capacity to report on the processes that govern their considerations. A significant contribution by the ethnographer is thus to illuminate what the participants will be drawn to, what materials are familiar yet multiply interpretable, and what specific ways to representing social life are relevant to the queries at hand. In other words, relationality, historicity, and contextuality need to be accepted as fundamental to any human intention and action (see also
In our own study, we tried to investigate how Wampar people draw inferences about social interactions. The prime goal of our study was thus
However, Laidlaw also stresses that – while basic (universal) processes cannot explain complex behavior – their understanding is still an important pre-condition for good general understandings of behavior. In this line, we propose that it is indispensable to try to solve the problems arising when different theoretical and methodical traditions raise meaningful questions and attempt to answer them (for a compelling discussion of both the complications and the inevitability of cross-disciplinary collaboration, see also
Cognitive science needs anthropology in order to substantiate any claims for the universality of cognitive processes (e.g.,
While the necessities of long-term fieldwork, interdisciplinary processes of developing a methodology and careful cross-cultural testing of methods contradict the political economy of research funding and the academic market, rising to this challenge is the only promising way for real progress in this field.
The members of the working group on “Causality and Sociality” developed the study concept and the tasks. BB collected and analyzed the data; AB assisted in the analysis. BB and AB wrote the paper.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
This work was made possible by Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld in setting up the research group “The Cultural Constitution of Causal Cognition.” The Research Commission of the University of Lucerne supported fieldwork in PNG. The manuscript benefitted from contributions by Penny Brown, Don Gardner, John Gatewood and York Hagmayer, as fellow members of the working group “Causality and Sociality,” which was part of the research group “The Cultural Constitution of Causal Cognition” at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld (organized by AB and Sieghard Beller). The research group provided a very stimulating environment and forum for discussions of methodological problems in empirical research on causality in social interactions.
This fieldwork tied in with previous fieldwork among Wampar in Gabsongkeg by the first author (1997, 1999/2000, 2002, 2003/04, and 2009), and continued a research agenda inspired by the ethnographic work of Hans Fischer, begun in the 1950s. Fischer had conducted fieldwork in Gabmadzung in 1965, and then in Gabsongkeg in 1971/72, 1976, 1988, 1990, 1993, 1997, 1999/2000, 2003/04, and 2009. In 2009/2010, Doris Bacalzo and Tobias Schwörer did research in Dzifasing, and Heide Lienert, Christiana Lütkes, Rita Kramp, and Juliane Neuhaus worked in different Wampar villages (
When we write about “the Wampar,” the reader should keep in mind that “Wampar” have not always been a bounded social unit with its own territory. There have been kin groups fighting against each other and moving through the mountains and the Markham Valley. As in other parts of Papua New Guinea “ethnicity is based on continua of cultural difference in a population crisscrossed by flows of people” (
We understand by ‘morality’ collectively sanctioned rules, beliefs and central values that inform the everyday considerations of actors encountering choices and ambivalence in social interactions. These considerations are contextual and relational. Accordingly, we use morality here interchangeably with ethics.
That he refused to answer more questions was astonishing, as the boy is otherwise not shy, but very talkative and shares his opinions even on matters which are usually topics for adults. It is, however, in line with some of our other findings and will be discussed below.
The ethnographer had the strong impression that this man gave all answers in a way which should correct his negative image and the anticipated critique of his manners, which circulated among Wampar.
This was especially a vital lesson to learn for shop owners in the villages who wanted not to give all their goods away to kin, but be able to start a small
A variation of the scenario with a father marrying his daughter, which we had planned as well, was abandoned because it would have been even closer to a real incest case, which people referred to frequently.
Many unmarried Wampar women have illegitimate children; they usually live with their parents or a sibling, some have an independent household. That means her needs and the needs of the children (food, school fees) have to be fulfilled by the kin group.
This might be due to a specific case which the question led many participants to assume was the ethnographer’s real interest. That actual case might also explain why people reacted less shocked by the narrative on incest than we assumed they would be. During the interviews, it emerged that a Wampar widower married to a woman of another ethnic group just had a fourth child with her, and that, in fact, the woman was his daughter. This widely believed rumor also influenced responses to questions about the offspring of such incestuous relations. Some participants said that “
A 2009 investigation into preferred marriage partners revealed cases of relationships that were seen as incestuous according to Wampar norms. In recent discussions about good and bad marriages, and relations between siblings and cousins, the differentiation between cross and parallel cousins has become less important in norms and practices. As kin-term usage tends to move away from Wampar norms to
Even the German nationality of the ethnographer might have had an influence, as the first Lutheran missionaries were German, and although the difference between missionaries and anthropologists is known, there might still be social desirability bias in this answer.