Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

480 Chapter 17
every day that we’ve never heard before and somehow we manage to decode
them. We don’t have a list of sentences in our heads. Instead, we learn a list
of rules for making words and for putting words together into sentences.
Some rules are phonological. Consider this sentence: ‘‘He worked for two
bosses at the same time.’’ We don’t pronounce the word ‘‘bosses’’ as if it were
‘‘bossiss’’ (rhymes with the second syllable in ‘‘practice’’). That would violate
the phonological rule that demands voicing of sibilants (like the final s in
bosses) after vowels like the i (read: barred-i or barred-eye) in ‘‘bosses.’’
When you add voice to the s sound, it becomes a z sound.
Some rules are syntactic. We don’t say ‘‘He is writing book’’ because that
violates the English syntactic rule that requires an article (either ‘‘the’’ or ‘‘a’’)
before the noun ‘‘book.’’
And some rules are semantic. We don’t say ‘‘busy, purple forests dream
indignantly’’ because, even though the syntax is correct, that would violate
semantic rules about the kinds of things that can be busy or purple or that can
dream. It is, however, the prerogative—even the mandate—of poets to concoct
new images by violating just these rules.
Phonology, syntax, and semantics are increasingly complex sets of rules for
building sensible utterances. Schema analysis takes this rule-based explanation
of behavior a step further. Everyday life—to say nothing of special situations,
like major rituals—is just too complex for people to deal with one scene
at a time. There must be, the reasoning goes, some rules—a grammar—that
help us make sense of so much information. These rules comprise schemas
(Casson 1983:430).
Schemas, or scripts, as Schank and Abelson (1977) called them, enable culturally
skilled people to fill in the details of a story. We often hear things like
‘‘Fred lost his data because he forgot to save his work.’’ We know that Fred’s
forgetting to save his work didn’t actually cause him to lose his data. A whole
set of links are left out, but they are easily filled in by listeners who have the
background to do so.
When you buy a car, you expect to bargain on the price, but when you order
food in a restaurant you expect to pay the price on the menu. You know that
you are supposed to tip in certain kinds of restaurants and that you don’t tip
at fast-food counters. When someone you hardly know says, ‘‘Hi, how’s it
going?’’ they don’t expect you to stop and give them a complete run-down on
how your life is going these days. If you did launch into a peroration about
your life, you’d be acting outside the prevailing schema—breaking frame, as
Erving Goffman put it (1974). When people do that, we react viscerally and
wonder ‘‘How the heck did they get in here with all the sane people?’’
When many people in a society share a schema, then the schema is cultural.
How can we learn about cultural schemas? Most anthropologists do this by