Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

482 Chapter 17
The most important finding in Hutchins’s account, though, is not the fact
that the Trobrianders have a schema for dealing with property disputes and
that their schema—with its matrilineal clans and pokala exchange, and so
on—is very different from our own. Hutchins shows that, within their schema,
the Trobrianders use the same logic as we would use in coming to a decision
in a dispute. This implies that the rules of logic are universal and it lays to
waste the idea that technologically primitive peoples are not up to the abstract
logic that Westerners are so proud of inventing (ibid.:128).
The American marriage schema. Naomi Quinn interviewed 11 American
couples about marriage. The couples came from different parts of the country.
Some were recently married, others were married a long time. And they represented
various occupations, education levels, and ethnic and religious groups.
Each of the 22 people were interviewed separately for 15 to 16 hours, and the
interviews were transcribed.
Quinn has analyzed this body of text to discover the concepts underlying
American marriage and to show how these concepts are tied together—how
they form a cultural schema, shared by people from different backgrounds
about what constitutes success and failure in marriage (Quinn 1982, 1987,
1992, 1996, 1997).
Quinn’s method is to look for metaphors in rhetoric and to deduce the schemas,
or underlying principles, that could produce those metaphors. For
instance, Quinn’s informants often compared marriages (their own and those
of others) to manufactured and durable products (‘‘It was put together pretty
good’’) and to journeys (‘‘We made it up as we went along; it was a sort of
do-it-yourself project’’). And when people were surprised at the breakup of a
marriage, they would say things like ‘‘That marriage was like the Rock of
Gibraltar’’ or ‘‘It was nailed in cement.’’ People use these metaphors because
they assume that their listeners know that cement and the Rock of Gibraltar
are things that last forever.
The method of looking at metaphors as indicators of schemas was developed
by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (2003 [1980]), but Quinn goes further.
She reasons that if schemas are what make it possible for people to fill
in around the bare bones of a metaphor, then the metaphors must be surface
phenomena and cannot themselves be the basis for shared understanding. She
tries to understand how metaphors group together and finds that the hundreds
of metaphors in her enormous corpus of text all fit into just eight classes: lastingness,
sharedness, compatibility, mutual benefit, difficulty, effort, success
(or failure), and risk of failure.
The classes of metaphors, the underlying concepts, are linked together in a
schema that guides the discourse of ordinary Americans about marriage. Here
is Quinn’s understanding of that schema: