ABSTRACT
As I see it, “culture” designates a cognitive system, that is, a set of “propositions,” both descriptive (e.g., “the planet earth sits on the back of a turtle”) and normative (e.g., “it is wrong to kill”), about nature, man, and society that are embedded in interlocking higher-order networks and configurations. Cultural and noncultural propositions differ in two important dimensions. First, cultural propositions are traditional, that is, they are developed in the historical experience of social groups, and as a social heritage, they are acquired by social actors through various processes of social transmission (enculturation) rather than constructed by them from their private experience. Second, cultural propositions are encoded in collective, rather than private, signs (indices and icons, to employ Peirce’s distinctions, as well as symbols). Hence, they exist and (in the first instance) are discoverable by anthropologists in the collective representations of social groups without their having to probe for them in the private representations of social actors (though, as I shall soon argue, many of them are also found there, albeit in a different form). This is not to say that cultural statements, rules, values, norms, and the like are always stated in propositional form, for clearly they are not, but that they are susceptible of statement in that form.
