Folk Models Research Articles

Conceptions of Dementia in a Multiethnic Sample of Family Caregivers

Understanding variability in conceptions of dementia in multiethnic populations is important to improve care and guide research. The objectives of this study were to describe caregiver conceptions of dementia using a previously developed typology and to examine the correlates of conceptions of dementia in a multiethnic sample. This is a cross-sectional study conducted in Boston and the San Francisco Bay area. Participants were a convenience sample of 92 family dementia caregivers from four ethnic/racial groups: African-American, Anglo European-American, Asian-American, and Latino. In-depth, qualitative interviews explored the caregivers' ideas about the nature and cause of dementia (i.e., explanatory models). Explanatory models of caregivers were categorized as biomedical, folk, or mixed (folk/biomedical). Quantitative analyses examined the association between ethnicity and other caregiver characteristics, and explanatory model type. Overall, 54% of caregivers, including 41% of Anglo European Americans, held explanatory models that combined folk and biomedical elements (i.e., mixed models). For example, many families attributed Alzheimer's disease and related dementias to psychosocial stress or normal aging. Ethnicity, lower education, and sex were associated with explanatory model type in bivariate analyses. In multiple logistic regression analysis, minority caregivers (P<.02) and those with less formal education (P<.02) were more likely to hold mixed or folk models of dementia. Although minority and nonminority caregivers often incorporated folk models into their understanding of dementia, this was more common in minority caregivers and those with less formal education. Further research on cross-ethnic differences in a larger, more-representative sample is needed.

Battery Park City

The authors report on an ethnographic study of Battery Park City in summer 2002, less than 1 year after 9/11. They sought to understand the impact of the disaster on this affluent residential enclave across the street from Ground Zero. The research team used rapid ethnographic assessment procedures (REAP), a productive yet relatively inexpensive rapid assessment methodology. The methods included participant observation, on-site interviews with a range of residents, and interviews with public officials and community leaders. The authors evaluate their data within a framework of hypothesized alternative “folk models” through which residents interpreted the rapid community change. Some friends and neighbors had left permanently, and many newresidents arrived the following winter and spring in response to strong rent incentives. Findings include a rise in community activism, lingering fear, and a significant fissure in the community between residents who had survived the disaster and the many new residents.

Vygotsky’s mediational psychology: A new conceptualization of culture, signification and metaphor

The idea of mediation of elementary mental functions by “psychological tools” or “signs” was introduced and formulated by Vygotsky. The main purpose of this paper is to review some of the important aspects of Vygotsky’s mediational/semiotic psychology as they relate to the concepts of signalling, signification, and culture. It has been suggested that as a matrix reflecting many aspects of life, culture “creates special forms of behavior, modifies the activity of mental functions and adds new stories to the developing system of human behavior.” Culture regulates behavior through generating some “models” which may be reflected in different modes of representations as folk models and metaphors.

Conceptions of Risk in the Lives of Club Drug-Using Youth

This paper describes current patterns of club drug use and local conceptions of risk among New York City area youth. The data is drawn from a NIDA-funded ethnographic study of club drug initiation among “Bridge and Tunnel” youth. The paper entails an examination of the harmony and discontinuity between folk models of risk within this population and professional models of risk. The author explores how club drug-using youth conceive of risks related to club drug use, specifically ecstasy, and how such conceptions compare and contrast with current professional models of risk. These conceptions of risk are crucial to understand, as they form an informal logic by which club drug practices are guided. Ultimately, the author examines how the relationship between folk models and professional models might inform health promotion efforts targeting youth.

Human factors and folk models

This paper presents a discussion of the susceptibility of human factors to the use of folk models. The case of automation-induced complacency is used as a guiding example to illustrate how folk models (1) substitute one label for another rather than decomposing a large construct into more measurable specifics; (2) are immune to falsification and so resist the most important scientific quality check; and (3) easily get overgeneralised to situations they were never meant to speak about. We then discuss the link between models and measurements, where the model constrains what can be measured by describing what is essential performance, and where the model’s parameters become the basis for specifying the measurements. We propose that one way forward for human factors is to de-emphasize the focus on inferred and uncertain states of the mind, and shift to characteristics of human performance instead.

On Choosing a Fieldsite for Health Related Research

As anthropologists interested in applying our research to the improvement of health and quality of life, we often find ourselves in places rife with poverty, violence and environmental degradationnot to mention corruption, scandal and controversy. This can make our job not only heartbreaking, but difficult to carry out. This paper briefly addresses how the selection of a fieldsite for ethnographic research should be based on more than local health issues alone. Failure to make a careful consideration of broader factors that contribute to the focus of one's study can interfere with the success of research. I discuss two field experiences to illustrate this point. The first is research that I attempted to carry out in Chiapas, Mexico. The second example is from research conducted in Zimbabwe. Both projects involved traditional medicine and a great deal of controversy. Only one was successful. The ultimate goal of my work in Chiapas was to contribute to a more detailed picture of indigenous environmental knowledge by characterizing the relationship between Mayan perceptions of the medicinal plants they ingest and perceptions held by scientists who study these plants in a laboratory. More specifically, my research was designed to answer the question: Do the Tzeltal Maya share folk models of medicinal plant actions and do these models reflect the biological activities of compounds found in such plants? I planned to work in the Tzeltal community of Ch'ixaltontik, which is a tiny hamlet in the municipality of Tenejapa. The idea was to elicit folk models of medicinal action for a set of common medicinal plants that could be compared with the scientific literature. I was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to do this research. I also received some funding from the Maya International Collaborative Biodiversity Group (Maya ICBG)2 project to translate my findings into Tzeltal. Translating my data and results into Tzeltal would have helped the people of Ch'ixaltontik make claims to their intellectual property and give them leverage to determine what kind of medicinal plant research may take place in their community. The controversy in this case has to do with the politics of medicinal plant research in Highland Chiapas. Drs. Brent and Elois Ann Berlin and their students have studied Mayan medicinal plants in the region for over 20 years. Unfortunately, their most recent project-the Maya ICBG-caused a torrent of argument and misunderstanding. The Maya ICBG was supposed to be a five-year project that would study Maya ethnomedicine, inventory the flora of Highland Chiapas and screen common medicinal plants for biological activities. The project was also designed to develop sustainable, culturally appropriate income-generating opportunities for the Maya. Finally, it was intended to be a model for doing ethnobotanical drug discovery fairly. That is, with the explicit aim of sharing benefits equally with indigenous communities. The drug discovery portion of the project attracted the attention of human rights groups who assumed that because the project was funded by the American government it had to be another example of corporate interests out to exploit indigenous people. When the regional Mayan traditional healers association (known by the acronyms OMIECH and COMPITCH) publicly protested the Maya ICBG, activists from the United States and Canada (led by the now defunct Rural Advancement Foundation International) rushed to their aid. The healers, with the help and encouragement of these activists, accused the Maya ICBG of stealing their specialist medical knowledge. It did not seem to matter that the Berlins were interested in the medical knowledge of everyday people and had the unanimous support of numerous Mayan communities in the region. Neither the activists nor the healers cared that the researchers had convinced their corporate partner to give a quarter of all potential profits to the highland Maya and developed means to equitably distribute these profits throughout the region. …

Folk Constructions of Syphilis in an African-American Community in Houston, Texas

This paper analyses folk constructions of syphilis in a predominately African-American community in Houston, Texas. In-depth interviews with 17 African-Americans were conducted to describe the folk models of syphilis present. Interviews centred on prevalence transmission, risk, personal protection and detection, relationships and expectations for the future. Physical appearance, the earwax test, the match test and the smell test were used to 'detect' syphilis infection. Respondents conflated the symptoms of several STDs including syphilis, gonorrhoea, herpes and chlamydia into a single class. The study findings indicate miscommunication regarding STD information and use of different models (folk vs. medical) to explain risk of infection and prevention. The use of folk constructions in syphilis interventions would provide a better understanding of the community's knowledge and perceptions of STDs and a better focus for future education and prevention programmes.

The Farcical Mosaic: The Changing Masks of Political Theatre in Contemporary India

Political theatre has often relied upon farce and satire to make a veiled but effective critique of political trends. In contemporary India, however, political theatre is facing a new challenge in trying to find ways to "out-farce" a political arena that already has become inherently farcical. There are two special challenges addressed here. The first comes from the state of Kerala in southwestern India, where a self-styled progressive state government in the hands of the Communist Party has come under attack by critical play-wrights for ossifying into orthodoxy and complacency. The second challenge centers on the difficulties faced by playwrights who have turned toward so-called indigenous or folk models of theatre to voice their critiques. Since the national government in Delhi has tried to utilize the symbols of an invented indigenous past to establish its legitimacy, critical theatre often finds itself applauded and even co-opted by the very political forces against which it has directed its dissent. This article examines the difficulties of establishing a "pure" space for political theatre in contemporary India and offers as a conclusion a possible path toward resolution.

Explorations of Class and Consciousness in the U.S.

In the United States there are both classes and a folk model that denies their existence. I explore some anthropologists' and sociologists' conceptualizations of class and folk models of class. I then discuss the salience of elements of these folk models that Katherine Newman outlined as meritocratic individualism for some lawyers, paralegals, and support staff in a legal agency and for some service sector union stewards. I conclude that there are powerful forces in the United States that operate against folk models that recognize class, among them, the structuring of everyday workplace experience by law and administrative practice that operate against the recognition of class. The same is even more true of academics, and that situation provides the experiential basis from which some scholars perpetuate counterfactual folk models of individualism in their academic analysis.

Carrying Capacity's New Guise: Folk Models for Public Debate and Longitudinal Study of Environmental Change

Current public debates about the environment often assume a clear relationship between resource availability and population growth: more people mean fewer resources. Over the past 3 decades scholars in the social and natural sciences have disassembled the notion of carrying capacity to demonstrate that relationships between humans and their ecosystems are more open fluid and complex than the concept allows. Despite scholarly recognition of the problems with carrying capacity the term and its underlying logic endures. By reframing the concept as a folk model the authors continue to highlight ecological relationships and advance arguments for conservation but also acknowledge the complexity of human-environment links which formal applications of carrying capacity ignore. (authors)

Carrying Capacity's New Guise: Folk Models for Public Debate and Longitudinal Study of Environmental Change

Current public debates about the environment often assume a clear relationship between resource availability and population growth: more people mean fewer resources. Over the past three decades, scholars in the social and natural sciences have disassembled the notion of carrying capacity to demonstrate that relationships between humans and their ecosystems are more open, fl uid, and complex than the concept allows. Despite scholarly recognition of the problems with carrying capacity, the term, and its underlying logic, endures. By reframing the concept as a folk model, we continue to highlight ecological relationships and advance arguments for conservation, but also acknowledge the complexity of human-environment links which formal applications of carrying capacity ignore.

Thoughts about thought

This article compares verbal expressions for mental activity across a wide range of languages, extracting thereby a general framework for “folk models of thinking” that can be related to Whitehead's processual analysis of cognition. The core concepts examined are “understanding”, “knowing”, “remembering”, “thinking”, and “meaning”. It is argued that this domain is essentially organized along metonymic lines, as revealed by prevailing patterns of polysemy, although common metaphoric relationships are also widely observed. The metonymically—and causally—related subdomains correspond largely to natural experiential divisions, whereas metaphor is more language specific and varied. The status of “thinking” as an indivisible “basic” category is discussed.

Language constructs of animals and men in two cultures: Czech vs. English similes with animals in comparatum

People in all cultures perceive the world through culturally shared models transmitted largely by language. The study presented here represents an attempt at the construction of two different folk models implementing the HUMAN IS AN ANIMAL metaphor in corpora of similes from two languages, Czech and English. The points discussed are the following: 1) General outline of Czech and English metaphoric faunae. 2) Observation of animal referents as to their symbolic values and their potential for functioning as human models. 3) Discussion of one particular animal, the dog. The evaluation of the data is largely based on the proportional relations arguing that the quantitative aspects reveal the degree of productivity, and therefore salience, of the involved elements

What Is Wrong With An Art Forgery?: An Anthropological Perspective

Art forgeries, together with a variety of other objects that come within the scope of this article,' such as high-quality commercial reproductions and works by minor artists mistakenly attributed to major artists, present both philosophers and historians of art with a singular and seemingly intractable problem. And that is, if the qualities that are admired in works of art are among their directly perceptible properties, as both Western folk models and the dominant theories in the philosophy of art suggest, why should a work that was once thought to be a masterpiece be disvalued aesthetically when it is found to be a forgery (or a fake, etc.)? By "disvalued aesthetically" I mean forgeries are removed from display in museums, they cease to be the subject of admiring critical discourse, and if put on the market they bring only a fraction of what they would if they had been by the persons (or from the periods) to whom they were formerly attributed.2 My interest in this topic does not derive directly from the philosophical or art-historical literature but from having done anthropological fieldwork in a society that takes a radically different approach to the cultural and aesthetic

Folk theories, models and economic reality: A reply to Williams

In this article, I argue that Williams's sceptical view about the value of economic models expressed in 'The philosophy of economic modelling: a critical survey' [South African Journal of Philosophy, 18(2): 223–246, this issue], and widely shared amongst philosophers of science, is not warrented. Williams's error, I maintain, lies in his failure to adequately distinguish, (a) between theories in general and what he calls 'folk theories', and (b) between the different roles that models play in different sciences. With respect to (b), I suggest that Williams fails to recognize that scientists who lack the ability of physicists to constrain theorizing through rigorous controlled experiments must generally do a good deal of work investigating theories by means of models solely designed to test their formal implications, before further models with potentially direct applicability to the world can even be developed. Williams's central mistake, I argue, lies in confusing models of the first sort with models of the second.

What Is Wrong with an Art Forgery?: An Anthropological Perspective

Art forgeries, together with a variety of other objects that come within the scope of this article,' such as high-quality commercial reproductions and works by minor artists mistakenly attributed to major artists, present both philosophers and historians of art with a singular and seemingly intractable problem. And that is, if the qualities that are admired in works of art are among their directly perceptible properties, as both Western folk models and the dominant theories in the philosophy of art suggest, why should a work that was once thought to be a masterpiece be when it is found to be a forgery (or a fake, etc.)? By disvalued aesthetically I mean forgeries are removed from display in museums, they cease to be the subject of admiring critical discourse, and if put on the market they bring only a fraction of what they would if they had been by the persons (or from the periods) to whom they were formerly attributed.2 My interest in this topic does not derive directly from the philosophical or art-historical literature but from having done anthropological fieldwork in a society that takes a radically different approach to the cultural and aesthetic

Russian Emotional Expression

This article examines Russian "emotional ideology" as reflected in the Russian language, and especially in the Russian collocational system. Colloquial collocations involving the human body, seen as an organ of emotional expression, are the focus for comparing folk models of the body and emotion in Russian and Anglo cultures. A theory of "cultural scripts" forms the basis of generalizations from the linguistic evidence.

Health beliefs and folk models of diabetes in British Bangladeshis: a qualitative study

Objective: To explore the experience of diabetes in British Bangladeshis, since successful management of diabetes requires attention not just to observable behaviour but to the underlying attitudes and belief systems...

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF SECOND LANGUAGE PRODUCTION

ESL learners' introspective accounts of perceived underlying second language production processes are explored for the discovery of folk models which may impact on pedagogy. The pervasive image which seems to surface is a translation schema with a subcomponent of conscious grammar rule application. Current communicative teaching approaches may be at odds with the expectations generated by this mental framework.

The Skipper Effect Debate: Views from a Philippine Fishery

The debate over the "skipper effect" encompasses two issues in the maritime anthropological literature: whether a skipper's skill plays a statistically significant role in explaining variation in catch size among boats and whether folk models of the role skippers play in fishing success explain what statistical models cannot. This article reviews the theoretical debates about the skipper effect and contrasts the cultural and economic context of North Atlantic fisheries with a purse seine fishery for mixed tropical species in the Philippines. Whereas most North Atlantic studies have struggled to identify variables that represent a captain's fishing skill, we argue that a boat's mean catch per trip and the number of crew both serve as reliable, indirect measures of a skipper's skill in this region. We attribute the absence of an ideology of the skipper effect to the limited competition for skippers in kin-based, petty commodity forms of production.