Folk Explanations Research Articles

How the mind explains behavior: folk explanations, meaning, and social interaction

The dual nature of behavior explanation: a tool of social cognition and an instrument for managing social interaction.

Representations of illness among the elderly in Mexico City

To examine the principle sociocultural characteristics of the illness experience in a group of senior citizens diagnosed with hypertension, diabetes, and arthritis, a total of 50 subjects over 60 years old were selected to answer an open-ended questionnaire. Using intentional non-probabilistic sampling, 25% of the sample were randomly selected, and semi-structured interviews were conducted. All individuals in the study are covered by social security institutions and receive medical care at a clinic located in southeastern Mexico City. Explanations for antecedents, causes, symptoms, and treatment of the illness relate to the individual social context. Although these seniors provided folk explanations for the causes of their illnesses, they treat themselves with a combination of biomedical and herbal resources. The authors conclude that it is necessary to analyze how the elderly live with chronic illness in order to propose effective measures to improve their quality of life and provision of health care services.

Music, Experience, and History

Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience. By Harris M. Berger. Hanover, N.H.: The University Press of New England, 1999. 336 pages. $22.95 (paper). Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans. By Daniel Cavicchi. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 222 pages. $18.95 (paper). Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience. By Steve Waksman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. 373 pages. $27.95 (cloth). WHEN JIMI HENDRIX ASKED HIS AUDIENCE IN 1967 IF THEY WERE "EXPERIENCED," his word gestured toward a widely shared belief that listening to rock music now mattered--that it was now more than just fun (though it was still that) because it offered new and useful ways of being in and knowing the world. 1 Similarly, when Bruce Springsteen famously observed in 1984 that "we learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school," 2 he was voicing a deeply held conviction that rock music was instructive--not just entertaining--and that it provided its young listeners with what Kenneth Burke called "equipment for living." 3 While the truth of such claims may seem obvious to rock fans, most academic scholars of popular music and popular culture have dedicated themselves to demonstrating their falsehood, or at least their naïveté. [End Page 165] The first twenty years or so of popular music study were dominated by the Frankfurt School assumption that popular culture purveys false consciousness to a mass society caught up in a deluded quest for the unattainable satisfactions promised by capitalism. 4 This monochromatic skepticism toward pop music prevailed until the mid-1970s, when scholars at the School for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England started to construct a more complex understanding of the subject. Influenced by Saussurian semiotics as filtered through the work of Roland Barthes, and as well perhaps by their own exposure to rock subcultures and the 1960s counterculture, they sought to uncover threads of "authenticity" woven into the blanket of a duplicitous hegemony. But working within a Marxist paradigm of popular culture as an instrument of social control, and cognizant of the ever-expanding reach of market forces into virtually all aspects of everyday life, they could imagine authenticity only as a slender residue of "resistance" to capitalism. 5 Rock music was no longer all bad, but the qualities that redeemed it were few, fragile, and, in essence, political. Recently, however, historians and critics of rock have tried to base their analyses of rock not so much on a priori theories of culture and society as on observed and recorded data about the way rock fans themselves understand their participation in music. These scholars are concerned with rock not just as a means of resistance but more broadly as an expressive form that does varied things for its audience. 6 This move toward the point of view of the rock audience is a difficult one to make. It is still hard for many in cultural studies to give up the idea that the masses are stumbling through a dense fog of false consciousness illuminated here and there by gleams of theory emanating from the academy. Indeed, as the author of one of the books under review here has noted, "It is generally expected in the Western university that ordinary people should learn about the world from the intellectual theories of academics," not that academics could "learn much about the world from the folk explanations of ordinary people." 7 But along with these temperamental difficulties come more daunting methodological ones. And looming behind these is the larger question of whether relatively theory-free description of a cultural phenomenon can do more than produce a kind of verbal facsimile of it. Nonetheless, reading recent efforts to account for experience as it is experienced, one has the sense of being present at a turning point in cultural studies, a moment [End Page 166] when creative efforts are being made to include within the...

Conceptual structure and social functions of behavior explanations: beyond person--situation attributions.

The traditional approach to studying behavior explanations involves treating them as either person causes or situation causes and assessing them by using rating scales. An analysis of people's free-response behavior explanations reveals, however, that the conceptual distinctions people use in their explanations are more complex and sophisticated than the person-situation dichotomy suggests. The authors, therefore, introduce a model of the conceptual structure of folk behavior explanations (the network of concepts and assumptions on which explanations are based) and test it in 4 studies. The modes and features of behavior explanations within this conceptual structure also have specific social functions. In 2 additional studies, the authors demonstrate that people alter distinct features of their explanations when pursuing particular impression-management goals and that listeners make inferences about explainers' goals on the basis of these features.

A Counterfactual Theory of Causal Explanation

We commonly explain certain occurrences in the natural world, on the basis of a shared stock of information available to the non-specialised layman as well as to the natural scientist. That shared stock of information is our folk physics. The snow melted because spring had finally come; the car was wrecked because it was hit by a bus; the match lit because it was struck. Such explanations are, or appear to be, causal explanations. Many of our other folk explanations may be noncausal explanations, but I consider only the former sort. I assume, following Davidson, that laws are strict, i.e., exceptionless. If it is a deterministic law that Fs are Gs, then every F without exception must be a G. If it is a stochastic law that Pr(G, F)=p, where O<p<1, then, for any finite sample, s, it may well be that the proportion of Fs in s which are Gs may not be exactly p. However, as one examines Fs indefinitely, the proportion which are found to be Gs will tend to p, and in the limit, the proportion of Fs which are Gs will be

Polygyny as myth. Towards understanding extramarital relations in Lesotho.

The nature and extent of "bonyatsi" (marital infidelity) in Lesotho is presented through the images of population. Because the practice is not morally normative, it cannot be readily explained as part of an earlier custom or as arising from the exigencies of dependency on migrant labor, but as images of the past which are regarded as their own "traditional extramarital relations." This gives meaning and cultural continuity to the present practice, and legitimizes the experience without condoning it. Thus there can be ideological control over a practice which was the result of political economic constraints. The account is in the tradition of rehumanization of ethnography and relates folk explanations to notions of the past. It is based on the author's experiences in Lesotho from the early 1970s to the 1980s. The exercise exemplifies Malinowski's notion of myth as social charter and Spiegel's idea that reformulated traditions are a response to changes in modern practices. Extramarital relations appeared widespread throughout Lesotho, and Bonyatsi individuals could be easily identified in Qacha's Nek villages where the author lived. The practice was recognized as a normal state of affairs only in private rather than in a public forum. Folk songs made reference to it. Bonyatsi is the abstract form, while nyatsi means paramour of any gender and linyatsi is the plural. The definition is one of a relationship, which may be longterm, between already married persons. Gifts may be exchanged between linyatsi, but this is different from the prostitute, who is an unattached woman who loves anyone anytime usually in urban areas, or botekatse (prostitution). The origins of bonyatsi were explained as being part of the Creation and a feature of all human social life. The ministers explained that the practice was a result of labor migration that might last for as long as 2 years. Women argued that this absence of regular sexual intercourse created severe psychological effects such as stopping the blood flow or losing one's sanity. There was an element of inevitability. Births were not uncommon. Other explanations are given as part of polygyny where a husband had access to other women; this was important during abstinence periods after a birth. The practice of clientship among chiefs was another, explanation, or exchange of wives for favors among chiefs. Political alliances were sometimes formed in this manner to establish friendly relations. The story of Moshoeshoe is related. Not all that was permissible is explained.

Male homosexuality and spirit possession in Brazil.

This paper examines the relationship between male homosexuality and the Afro-Brazilian possession cults in Belém do Parà. After a discussion of the literature follows a description of the cults' beliefs, rites and social organization. Male sex roles are then discussed and the two categories, bicha and man, analyzed. It is noted that there is no term which is equivalent to the western category of "homosexual" in this taxonomic system. After putting forward folk explanations for the presence of many bichas in the cults, an analysis is put forward of the social rewards available to bichas within these cults, and the structural relationship between homosexuality and these regions in terms of their congruent marginality vis-à-vis "normal society."

The meaning of nervios: a sociocultural analysis of symptom presentation in San Jose, Costa Rica.

The foundation of the symbolic tradition in medical anthropology is the examination of a patient's experience of a category of illness. The interpretation of folk explanations of etiology and nosology provides insight into the cultural definition of what constitutes an illness, how and why an illness is labeled, and how the afflicted individual should be treated. Further, the analysis of sociocultural meaning emerges as a critical theoretical contribution to our understanding of health and culture. Allen Young in his article "Some Implications of Medical Beliefs and Practices for Social Anthropology" suggests " that if we want to learn the social meaning of sickness, we must understand that 'signs,' whatever their genesis, become 'symptoms' because they are expressed, elicited, and perceived in socially acquired ways" (1976: 14). He further states that some categories of sickness are particularly interesting in that they enable people to organize the illness event into an episode that has form and meaning (1976: 19-20). Nervios is an example of a symptom that has acquired a special sociocultural pattern of expression, elicitation and perception in San Jose, Costa Rica. The empirical study of symptom presentation in general medicine and psychiatric outpatient clinics describes the patients who present the symptom and their associated attributes and explanations of the symptom's occurrence. The meaning of nervios is then discussed within a social interactional and symbolic framework.

Joe Blackbear’S Story of the Origin Of the Peyote Religion

A folk explanation of certain aspects of peyote ritual and paraphanalia is offered in terms of an origin myth.There is a story from long ago about the origin of peyote. It goes back to the time the Indians were fighting each other. On the other side of New Mexico, a group of Indians were camped and they were attacked by other bands. The mountains therewereveryhigh. The tribe that was attacked got scattered, There was just one woman and her boy left.