Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Culture beneath discourse: a conceptual model for analyzing nondeclarative cultural knowledge

  • Original Article
  • Published:
American Journal of Cultural Sociology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Sociology has increasingly drawn on concepts from the cognitive sciences to better theorize and measure culture, particularly nondeclarative personal culture beneath the level of conscious awareness. Despite several advances, these “cognitive cultural” concepts are drawn on selectively, and limited work has attempted to assemble them into a coherent framework, leading to conceptual murkiness and ambiguous use of terms like “schema.” This article synthesizes literature on culture and cognition to develop a conceptual model of four interrelated but distinct types of cultural knowledge beneath the level of explicit discourse. Drawing on emergence theories, the author theorizes how these types relate to each other, as well as to discourse and public culture. The utility of the model is then illustrated using the empirical case of American religious understandings. These types of cultural knowledge have distinct qualities and, consequently, distinct roles in influencing thought, speech, and action. Assembling them into a coherent framework can improve scholarly accounts of how culture influences important substantive outcomes, how culture and cognition interact, as well as methods for studying nondeclarative cultural knowledge.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. I follow the convention in literature on cognitive semantics of capitalizing names for image schemas (Johnson 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999).

  2. Directed by Christian Smith at the University of Notre Dame and funded by Lilly Endowment Inc. More information on study design and analysis can be found in Smith et al. (2020).

References

  • Archer, Margaret. 1995. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Archer, Margaret. 2010. Routine, Reflexivity and Realism. Sociological Theory 28 (3): 272–303.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Barber, Kristen. 2016. Styling Masculinity: Gender, Class, and Inequality in the Men’s Grooming Industry. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bedau, Mark A. 1997. Weak Emergence. In Philosophical Perspectives: Mind, Causation, and World, ed. J. Tomberlin, 375–399. Malden: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bell, Daniel. 1980. The Winding Passage: Sociological Essays and Journeys 1960–1980. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bennardo, Giovanni, and Victor de Munck. 2014. Cultural Models: Genesis, Methods, and Experiences. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Benzecry, Claudio E. 2011. The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City: Anchor Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bhaskar, Roy. 1975. A Realist Theory of Science. Leeds: Leeds Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blair-Loy, Mary. 2001. Cultural Constructions of Family Schemas: The Case of Women Finance Executives. Gender and Society 15 (5): 687–709.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blau, Peter M. 1981. Introduction: Diverse Views of Social Structure and Their Common Denominator. In Continuity in Structural Inquiry, ed. P.M. Blau and R.K. Merton, 1–23. Beverly Hills: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bloch, Maurice. 2012. Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Boroditsky, Lera. 2000. Metaphoric Structuring: Understanding Time through Spatial Metaphors. Cognition 75 (1): 1–28.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Boroditsky, Lera, and Michael Ramscar. 2002. The Roles of Body and Mind in Abstract Thought. Psychological Science 13 (2): 185–189.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Buckley, Walter. 1967. Sociology and Modern Systems Theory. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cerulo, Karen A. 2002. Culture in Mind: Toward a Sociology of Culture and Cognition. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cerulo, Karen A. 2010. Mining the Intersections of Cognitive Sociology and Neuroscience. Poetics 38 (2): 115–132.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cerulo, Karen A. 2014. Reassessing the Problem. Sociological Methods & Research 43 (2): 219–226.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cerulo, Karen A. 2018. Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-Making, and Meaning Attribution. American Sociological Review 83 (2): 361–389.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coleman, James S. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Coulson, Seana. 2006. Conceptual Blending in Thought, Rhetoric, and Ideology. In Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives, ed. G. Kristiansen, M. Achard, R. Dirven, and F.J. Ibáñez, 187–208. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • D’Andrade, Roy. 1995. The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Damasio, Antonio. 1994. Descartes’ Error. New York: Penguin Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Damasio, Antonio. 2010. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York: Vintage Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • de Laat, Kim, and Shyon Baumann. 2016. Caring Consumption as Marketing Schema: Representations of Motherhood in an Era of Hyperconsumption. Journal of Gender Studies 25 (2): 183–199.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • DiMaggio, Paul. 1997. Culture and Cognition. Annual Review of Sociology 23: 263–287.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dodge, Ellen, and George Lakoff. 2005. Image Schemas: From Linguistic Analysis to Neural Grounding. In From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics, ed. B. Hampe, 57–91. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Stuart E. Dreyfus. 1999. The Challenge of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment for Cognitive Science. In Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, ed. G. Weiss and H.F. Haber, 103–120. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Du Bois, W.E.B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co.

    Google Scholar 

  • Durkheim, Émile. 1964 [1894]. The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Free Press.

  • Ecklund, Elaine Howard, Jared L. Peifer, Virginia White, and Esther Chan. 2017. Moral Schemas in Articulation and Intuition: How Religious People Evaluate Human Reproductive Genetic Technologies. Sociological Forum 32 (2): 277–297.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Edgell, Penny, and Kathleen E. Hull. 2017. Cultural Schemas of Religion, Science, and Law in Talk About Social Controversies. Sociological Forum 32 (2): 298–320.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Elder-Vass, Dave. 2010. The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure, and Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Evans, Jonathan St, and B. T. . 2008. Dual-Processing Accounts of Reasoning, Judgment, and Social Cognition. Annual Review of Psychology 59: 255–278.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Farrell, Justin. 2011. Environmental Activism and Moral Schemas: Cultural Components of Differential Participation. Environment and Behavior 45 (3): 399–423.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2008. Rethinking Metaphor. In Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, ed. R. Gibbs, 53–66. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Foster, Jacob G. 2018. Culture and Computation: Steps to a Probably Approximately Correct Theory of Culture. Poetics 68: 144–154.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Francescotti, Robert Michael. 2007. Emergence. Erkenntnis 67 (1): 47–63.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Frye, Margaret. 2017. Cultural Meanings and the Aggregation of Actions: The Case of Sex and Schooling in Malawi. American Sociological Review 82 (5): 945–976.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Grady, Joseph E. 2005. Image Schemas and Perception: Refining a Definition. In From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics, ed. B. Hampe, 35–55. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Greve, Jens. 2012. Emergence in Sociology: A Critique of Nonreductive Individualism. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 42 (2): 188–223.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Holland, Dorothy, and Naomi Quinn. 1987. Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Humphreys, Paul. 1996. Aspects of Emergence. Philosophical Topics 24 (1): 53–70.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Humphreys, Paul. 2008. Synchronic and Diachronic Emergence. Minds and Machines 18 (4): 431–442.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hunzaker, M.B. Fallin., and Lauren Valentino. 2019. Mapping Cultural Schemas: From Theory to Method. American Sociological Review 84 (5): 950–981.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hutchins, Edwin. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ignatow, Gabriel. 2003. “Idea Hamsters” on the “Bleeding Edge”: Profane Metaphors in High Technology Jargon. Poetics 31 (1): 1–22.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ignatow, Gabriel. 2004. Speaking Together, Thinking Together? Exploring Metaphor and Cognition in a Shipyard Union Dispute. Sociological Forum 19 (3): 405–433.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ignatow, Gabriel. 2007. Theories of Embodied Knowledge: New Directions for Cultural and Cognitive Sociology? Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 37 (2): 115–135.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ignatow, Gabriel. 2009a. Culture and Embodied Cognition: Moral Discourses in Internet Support Groups for Overeaters. Social Forces 88 (2): 643–669.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ignatow, Gabriel. 2009b. Why the Sociology of Morality Needs Bourdieu’s Habitus. Sociological Inquiry 79 (1): 98–114.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jacobs, Ronald. 1996. Civil Society and Crisis: Culture, Discourse, and the Rodney King Beating. American Journal of Sociology 101 (5): 1238–1272.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jerolmack, Colin, and Shamus Khan. 2014. Talk is Cheap: Ethnography and the Attitudinal Fallacy. Sociological Methods & Research 43 (2): 178–209.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, Mark. 2005. The Philosophical Significance of Image Schemas. In From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics, ed. B. Hampe, 15–33. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Kaidesoja, Tuukka, Matti Sarkia, and Mikko Hyyryläinen. 2019. Arguments for the Cognitive Social Sciences. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 49: 480–498.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kim, Jaegwon. 1999. Making Sense of Emergence. Philosophical Studies 95: 3–36.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kimmel, Michael. 2005. Culture Regained: Situated and Compound Image Schemas. In From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics, ed. B. Hampe, 285–311. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Kövecses, Zoltán. 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Kövecses, Zoltán. 2015. Where Metaphors Come From: Reconsidering Context in Metaphor. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Kurakin, Dmitry. 2020. Culture and Cognition: The Durkheimian Principle of Sui Generis Synthesis vs. Cognitive-Based Models of Culture. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 8 (1): 63–89.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lamont, Michèle, and Ann Swidler. 2014. Methodological Pluralism and the Possibilities and Limits of Interviewing. Qualitative Sociology 37 (2): 153–171.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Leschziner, Vanina. 2015. At the Chef’s Table: Culinary Creativity in Elite Restaurants. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Lewes, George Henry. 1875. Problems of Life and Mind. London: Trübner & Co.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lizardo, Omar. 2013. Re-conceptualizing Abstract Conceptualization in Social Theory: The Case of the “Structure” Concept. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 43 (2): 55–80.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lizardo, Omar. 2017. Improving Cultural Analysis: Considering Personal Culture in its Declarative and Nondeclarative Modes. American Sociological Review 82 (1): 88–115.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lizardo, Omar, Brandon Sepulvado, Dustin S. Stoltz, and Marshall A. Taylor. 2020. What Can Cognitive Neuroscience Do for Cultural Sociology? American Journal of Cultural Sociology 8 (1): 3–28.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mandler, Jean M., and Christóbal Pagán. Cánovas. 2014. On Defining Image Schemas. Language and Cognition 6 (4): 510–532.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Martin, John Levi. 2010. Life’s a Beach but You’re an Ant, and Other Unwelcome News for the Sociology of Culture. Poetics 38 (2): 229–244.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mast, Jason L. 2020. Representationalism and Cognitive Culturalism: Riders on Elephants on Turtles All the Way Down. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 8 (1): 90–123.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McDonnell, Terence E. 2014. Drawing Out Culture: Productive Methods to Measure Cognition and Resonance. Theory and Society 43: 247–274.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McDonnell, Terence E., Christopher A. Bail, and Iddo Tavory. 2017. A Theory of Resonance. Sociological Theory 35 (1): 1–14.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mill, John Stuart. 1851 [1843]. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. London: J.W. Parker.

  • Norton, Matthew. 2020. Cultural Sociology Meets the Cognitive Wild: Advantages of the Distributed Cognition Framework for Analyzing the Intersection of Cognition and Culture. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 8 (1): 45–62.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pagis, Michal. 2010. From Abstract Concepts to Experiential Knowledge: Embodying Enlightenment in a Meditation Center. Qualitative Sociology 33 (4): 469–489.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Parsons, Talcott. 1949 [1937]. The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press.

  • Patterson, Orlando. 2014. Making Sense of Culture. Annual Review of Sociology 40 (1): 1–30.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Polanyi, Michael. 1958. Personal Knowledge. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pugh, Allison J. 2013. What Good are Interviews for Thinking About Culture? Demystifying Interpretive Analysis. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 1 (1): 42–68.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Quinn, Naomi. 2005. Finding Culture in Talk: A Collective of Methods. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Quinn, Naomi. 2018. An Anthropologist’s View of American Marriage: Limitations of the Tool Kit Theory of Culture. In Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology, ed. N. Quinn, 139–184. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Rotolo, Michael. 2020. Religion Imagined: The Conceptual Substructures of American Religious Understandings. Sociological Forum 35 (1): 167–188.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sato, Manami, Amy J. Schafer, and Benjamin K. Berger. 2015. Metaphor Priming in Sentence Production: Concrete Pictures Affect Abstract Language Production. Acta Psychologica 156: 136–142.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sawyer, R. Keith. 2001. Emergence in Sociology: Contemporary Philosophy of Mind and Some Implications for Sociological Theory. American Journal of Sociology 107 (3): 551–585.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sawyer, R. Keith. 2003. Improvised Dialogues: Emergence and Creativity in Conversation. Westport: Greenwood.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sawyer, R. Keith. 2012. Response to “Emergence in Sociology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 42 (2): 270–275.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Setchi, Rossitza, and Obokhai K. Asikhia. 2019. Exploring User Experience with Image Schemas, Sentiments, and Semantics. IEEE Transactions of Affective Computing 10 (2): 182–195.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sewell, William H. 1992. A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation. American Journal of Sociology 98 (1): 1–29.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shore, Bradd. 1998. Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning. Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Christian. 2016. The Conceptual Incoherence of “Culture” in American Sociology. The American Sociologist 47 (4): 388–415.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Christian, Bridget Ritz, and Michael Rotolo. 2020. Religious Parenting: Transmitting Faith and Values in Contemporary America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Philip. 2020. The Neuro-Cognitive Turn in Cultural Sociology: From 1.0 to 2.0. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 8 (1): 1–2.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sperry, R.W. 1991. In Defense of Mentalism and Emergent Interaction. The Journal of Mind and Behavior 12 (2): 221–245.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stephan, Achim. 1999. Varieties of Emergentism. Evolution and Cognition 5 (1): 49–59.

    Google Scholar 

  • Strauss, Claudia, and Naomi Quinn. 1997. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Summers-Effler, Erika, Justin Van Ness, and Christopher Hausmann. 2015. Peeking in the Black Box: Studying, Theorizing, and Representing the Micro-Foundations of Day-to-Day Interactions. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 44 (4): 450–479.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Swidler, Ann. 1986. Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies. American Sociological Review 51 (2): 273–286.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Swidler, Ann. 2001. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Teller, Paul. 1986. Relational Holism and Quantum Mechanics. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 37 (1): 71–81.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thibodeau, Paul H., and Lera Boroditsky. 2013. Natural Language Metaphors Covertly Influence Reasoning. PLoS ONE 8 (1): 1–7.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vaisey, Stephen. 2009. Motivation and Justification: Toward a Dual-Process Theory of Culture in Action. American Journal of Sociology 114 (6): 1675–1715.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vaisey, Stephen. 2014. The “Attitudinal Fallacy” Is a Fallacy: Why We Need Many Methods to Study Culture. Sociological Methods & Research 43 (2): 227–231.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vaisey, Stephen, and Margaret Frye. 2019. The Old One-Two: Preserving Analytical Dualism in Cognitive Sociology. In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, ed. W.H. Brekhus and G. Ignatow, 101–114. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wacquant, Loïc. 2004. Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, Lawrence E., and John A. Bargh. 2008. Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth. Science 322 (5901): 606–607.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Winchester, Daniel. 2016. A Hunger for God: Embodied Metaphor as Cultural Cognition in Action. Social Forces 95 (2): 585–606.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wood, Michael Lee, Dustin S. Stoltz, Justin Van Ness, and Marshall Taylor. 2018. Schemas and Frames. Sociological Theory 36 (3): 244–261.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wuthnow, Robert. 1994. Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America’s New Quest for Community. New York: Free Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1997. Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the Culture Workshop at Notre Dame and to the editors and anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on various drafts of this paper.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Notre Dame, 4060 Jenkins Nanovic Hall, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA

    Michael Rotolo

Authors
  1. Michael Rotolo
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael Rotolo.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Rotolo, M. Culture beneath discourse: a conceptual model for analyzing nondeclarative cultural knowledge. Am J Cult Sociol 10, 432–460 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-021-00135-0

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-021-00135-0

Keywords

Search

Navigation