A number of different tasks were administered upon the Jetty with the aim of describing significant patterns of response by these people.

The design and inter-correlation of these tasks rests upon several related theoretical presuppositions: 1."culture" is planted "inside our heads" in some largely unknown way and to some largely unknown degree, 2. Shared patterns of response across a common community as measured by symbolic framing tasks are significant indications of "culture" to some unknown degree and in some largely unknown way across a common community of people, 3. both this "sharing" of culture and its psychological correlates are "situated" and rooted in the common setting and group context of the culture bearers' daily lives to some unknown extent and in some largely unknown way.

The tasks were designed with the intention of elucidating in a clearer and more concise manner the nature of the psychological construction of culture and the social pattern of its sharing, with the hope of being able to draw a number of inferences about the cultural context and the magnitude of its force in the lives of the people.

These tasks were not intended as a "description" for the culture of the Jetty nor as a substitute for such description. Though they may touch upon such a manifest level of description at a number of points, the intention is describe response patterns of a sampling of informants to elicit information which may be significant on several different levels of understanding other than ethnographic description or ethological explanation.

Together, these tasks constitute a means of elucidating certain patterns of response in a manner which is relatively free of internal bias, and which then provide an "etic grid" instrument for cultural-symbolic analysis which is multifaceted and virtually inexhaustible in the number of ways it can be used and interpreted. The instrument therefore is potentially highly productive at several levels.

The aim of these tasks has not been to psychoanalyze individuals or to fathom the "subconscious" of a culture (entirely a fiction). Many of the tasks lack any direct normative base which would render them empirically and academically more meaningful in a broader world sense. There was a significant lack of control over the contexts of administration of these tasks--issues which seem to matter more in office, clinical and classroom environments than on the wooden floors of Jetty houses or on metal coffee shop tables.

This issue of "control" over the context is important in understanding the design of the tasks. It is the dilemmas posed by the cultural contexts which largely renders biased the "performance" of such tasks in some "nomothetic" grid of comparison.

Broadly, these tasks have been coraled under the aegis of an alternative theoretical framework which is only interested in these tasks as largely perceptual gestalt-like frames which are capable of elucidating not just any random response, but nonrandom patterns of response which meet certain requirements of statistical significance in at least two ways: first they are capable of eliciting a limited range of similar response sets between any number of people, and, second, they are capable of eliciting a relatively wide, but not unlimited range of variability both within and between these response sets. These type of response patterns I define as symbolic.

The symbolic frame tasks employed in this study fall into several groups: Color, Perception, Basic Things, Projection, Apperception, Drawing, Dichotomous Frames, Incomplete Linguistic Frames, and Grids. Several different kinds of tasks were accomplished in each of these areas of analysis, with varying levels of success. It is beyond the scope of this preliminary analysis to go into any great detail over any single task. Many different kinds of tasks were constructed and tried, with the spirit of freely exploring and experimenting with the possibility of such designs.

It can be said at the outset that all these tasks share certain structural features related to what I call symbolic framing which render them useful for such a study. First, they are relatively semi-structured "frames" which form a figure-ground or figure field relation with the background upon which they are presented. The task of the informant is then to fill in the spaces around these incomplete frames to render them more complete. Sometimes constraints on how to "complete" the frames are imposed, and sometimes it is done relatively free of such external constraint. But the informant is always entirely unrestricted, except perhaps by the context ,to complete the task in the way s/he likes best. It is in this process of "filling in" the spaces of the figure-ground field of the immediate task that the informant draws upon resources that are both psychologically within and contextually without to successfully finish the task.

Different task designs present different kinds of challenges to the informant which are then, at least in theory, capable of evoking or eliciting different patterns of response from different people, because the person is drawing upon different symbolic resources at different levels of meaning both within and without.

The presentation of the results of these various tasks was not intended for the purpose of ultimately explaining how and why the people of the Jetty are who they are. This kind of analysis was intended as a means of describing on different levels of analysis common patterns of response to different kinds of "symbolic framing" techniques. Theoretical exposition is postponed until the concluding chapter. Ultimately, though, explanation of these phenomena is not well in hand. We do not really have a good idea of how culture is organized in our brains, and how are brains may function to organize our cultural worlds. These tasks are steeped more in questions than in theoretical understanding or explanation.

There was an inherent problem in the study in the inability to achieve the degree of overlap in task completion by an only partially willing and receptive Jetty population, or for that matter, a rather unwilling and unreceptive Malaysian nation. Resistance to doing much of anything for me was high. I managed to administer tasks, interview and even talk with only about one third of the total of the small Jetty where we worked. (Total count of different people performing all our tasks was just over 300.) A lot of people did only one or two things, and then would become bored and wander off, never to do anything again. It was fortunate that I was able to entice my "reference" group into cooperation as much as I could, and even this was often disappointingly poor.

The reason for the including a reference group in the design is that some minimal amount of overlap across a wide range of tasks could be assured, such that when sample sizes for a particular task fell below expectations, I could in the last resort rely upon the reference sample to which I could subsequently build.

It was for this same set of reasons, for the sake of assuring standard, reliable performance, minimal control of local context, and individual consistency across the samples, that the "SFB" (Symbolic Framing Battery) was originally designed and piloted on the Jetty and with the reference group. It consists of a single booklet of symbolic framing tasks adapted, arranged and designed in an order, that takes about one half hour to one hour to complete on average. Unfortunately, it also suffered the "fractured samples" due to its successive revision and development in the field. The first sample (N = 30+) soon became supplanted by a second sample of a more complete design (N = 37).

It was hoped that this battery of symbolic frame tasks could be taken across cultural boundaries to be administered to Malay and even Indian samples, as it was to be the cornerstone of a much grander design in the construction of a Malaysian socio-grid. As it was, I emerged "from the field" with a small, insignificant, yet suggestive sample of young English men and women (N =14), and I subsequently have collected another American sample (N =14).For a summary analysis of the SFB see appendix 8. But even now there are major revisions to be made to the SFB itself, which will entail subsequent fieldwork, money and time, to bring to a satisfactory point of presentability.

The reason for collecting these cross-cultural samples has been to examine the central hypothesis that there will emerge significant cross-cultural differences in the inter-correlation patterning of most of the tasks in the booklet which will be indicative of a number of things at a variety of levels. Such a booklet, though simple to administer and score, allows for a wide variety of different forms of analysis and interpretation. If it is fine tuned, it may achieve being able to significantly differentiate psychological, cultural, and even familial or sociological differences between individuals and groups of people.

It can bridge an important gap that has long plagued the field of anthropology. It can demonstrate in an etic, objective, scientifically acceptable manner when and where important cultural or psychological relativities may occur in its patterning of responses. If pushed beyond this level for any single cultural world, it can become the basis for an alternative form of cross-cultural analysis which will allow the plotting of differences between cultural groupings in a more systematic and controlled manner.

It may also allow us to locate individuals or small sub-groupings, or differences between men and women, adults and children, or people born in the 50's and people born in the 70's, or people born and raised in Japan or Korea but living their adult lives in America. It is predictable that people will not fall into clean slots in the spectrum of human possibility this system of analysis and scoring represents, but will come to occupy a discontinuous series of "bands" across the spectrum, much as a spectroscopic signature of light from a faraway star or the electro-phoretic bands of genetic material.

If enough data were collected in this way, cross-cultural, social, and psychological norms could be ascertained for some finished version of the SFB that would then allow its ready employment in a number of areas of education, evaluation, penal reform, etc.

The potential theoretical and methodological value of this SFB should not be underestimated. It provides in a single integrated form a number of different and unique tasks which any research can easily include now as an unencumbering part of their tool kit when they tramp off to the distant unexplored world. It is a set of tasks which does not require being literate to complete, and which does not take too much time or effort to administer and score and, if given the means by computer programming, to analyze in complex ways.

It is difficult to imagine how such a complex and grandiose cross-cultural scheme of research can be built upon the simple fact that two different people from similar cultural backgrounds will tend to consistently choose similar kinds of objects among a hundred such objects on a table, whether it is a table in a laboratory, at a coffee shop, or one marked "50% off" at a Department store, while people of different cultural backgrounds will consistently choose different kinds of things. But these choices and their relative distributions represent clear cut, undeniable, and highly controllable and manipulatable acts which constitute a solid core of statistical, scientific "facts."

But upon these simple facts rests not only the construction of such a complex cross-cultural system but also the validation of a very important theory in understanding the cultural construction of human reality. This theory itself comes in several interrelated components.

The first is the cognitive process of symbolic framing upon which the task designs were based, and which I hold to be integral to the implicit organiztion of meaningful information in the human brain. Symbols are not just emblematic representations or material icons in our external environments. Precisely speaking, these are symbolic stimuli upon which we attach our inner meanings and upon which we depend as objective reference points for the organization of meaning and behavior in our lives. It is perhaps less confusing to refer to symbolisms and symbolizations as those consistent and characteristic internal mental patterns of response and expression to such stimuli in our world.

It has long been accepted that symbols are somehow important in understanding how culture works and also in how culture influences our ways of thinking, but precise linkages or mechanisms between the outer world of symbols and the inner world of meanings has heretofore not been clearly established. The empirical demonstration of such a linkage was implicitly suggested a number of times in the frequency patterning of the responses in the data presented, but no where explicitly stated.

To put it concisely, our minds are somehow organized to function as "symbolic recognition" devices, more clearly, symbolic "resonance amplification" mechanisms which bounce the myriad inputs of rudimentary percepts around in our heads to construct progressively higher organized mental patterns. In this we can see a basic "isomorphism" of symbolic structure, patterning and content between the inner world of the subconscious psyche and the external world of the lived cultural context. The linkage between the inner cognitive model of the world and the culturally organized external world itself are the "gestalt" patterns of the symbolic framing mechanism. Higher order symbolic concepts and associations are constructed from lower-order perceptual information and direct symbolic connections. Another way of phrasing this is to see the mind as a kind of complex "pattern recognition device" that has itself been evolutionarily tied to the very cultural contexts which were of its own construction.

Wishing to avoid the terminology, there have been a central feedback mechanism of culture as a human informational system which has been operating simultaneously upon several levels of reference and analysis--at the individual level of adaptation and perceptual-conceptual functioning, at the social level of cultural organization, and at the broader biological level of human evolution. It is the feedback on the first two levels that informs this study most, while the nature of the feedback on the biological and evolutionary scale of being is beyond the scope, but still relevant.

At the individual level of psycho-cultural functioning there is a sense in which the external context of informational perception provides a relative level of organization or structure or order which is never complete or fore ever static. Holes or gaps of information frequently occur at numerous levels in the perceptual and symbolic processing of such information which it is the facility and adaptability of the human mind to compensate for by filling in with what it "interprets" implicitly as relevant information drawn from its own memory and symbolic material. Too little or too much external structuring of such information can lead to progressively detrimental effects, such that in the first case too many "holes" or gaps are created, and in the second case, too few.

In the first case, the mind tries to repair the holes to reconstruct gestalts with information which is increasingly irrelevant and out of synch with the original patterning. If this occurs persistently over time, the consequence is that the mind is processing information itself which is the consequence of its own failed attempts at cognitive repair, information which may be inherently false or erroneous, of its own construction. Symbolization allows for this possibility. On the other extreme, too much external structuring has the consequence of "deadening" the capacity for the mind to actively interact with its environment, stifling its expressiveness and rendering a mental attitude of mere "responsiveness" that is without a clear sense of gestalt of its own.

Schizophrenia as I have observed it upon the streets of Penang represents just such a negative feedback process of disrepair. The ultimate reasons for such a process occuring are probably multi-factorial. We can cite genetic predispositions, unknown organic acquisitions or physical diseases, substance dependency, early childhood traumatizations, separations and familial confusions, growing social alienation, socio-genic or pyscho-genic stresses, and just the background chaos of a largely self-organized social reality.

But whatever the combinations of factors which may be at work in the background of a person's life, the outcomes remain similar. In filling the gaps of information which occur with increasing frequencies, the schizophrenic becomes increasingly cut off in a world of her/his own manufacture. It comes to have some internal order, but even this sense of self made order is minimal.

The key characteristic of all the schizophrenics observed in Penang are that they are cut off from the external social world at a very fundamental level, that they are organically regressed as evidenced by basic behavioral manifestations, and that they are functioning in a symbolic world that has little direct bearing to the external world. Once the functioning of the brain develops "out of sync" in such a manner, it becomes relatively permanently "derailed" with the possibility of even partial recovery being next to none. The brain has organically reorganized itself in a direction of development which becomes inherent regressive, self-destructive and progressive maladapted to its external contexts.

But what about the cultural context in which this process becomes situated? A schizophrenic's predicament is most noteworthy because of the extreme sense of social isolation and suffering which its individual undergo as absolute pariahs. This is so because practically every facet of their social behavior and identity is affected by their illness to such an extent that they violate every common sense norm, expectation and habit that exists in their parent society.

Such a context provides socially reinforced, externally objectified reference points for the subjective organization of our understandings of the world. We cannot easily separate ourselves from such contexts without undergoing the alienation and "culture shock" which normally attends crossing "boundaries" of social reality.

The context is itself, even the people who compose it, from a strictly realist, materialistic point of view, is merely a large mosaic of purely mechanical devices which function in a more or less iconographic or metaphoric manner when we internalize, identify and apperceptively interpret them as somehow relevant in our own worlds. The background cultural patterning constitutes a clear "cultural gestalt."

It is this cultural gestalt operating at the social level which provides the framework of our internalized understandings. Not all cultural gestalts carve up reality in the same way, and it is upon this principle that the possibility of different frequency patterns and the construction of the symbolic frame tasks depends. Cultural gestalts are not shared in any absolute manner. Sharing may be greater among some communities than others. The distribution of the knowledge across the cultural landscape is always variable and changing as communities coalesce to define themselves, and then disintegrate in the larger stream of Historical events. The principle of shared culture upon which the validity of the symbolic frame tasks rest is itself not an unrelative phenomena, and therefore care must be taken not to push the metaphor of cultural consensus too far in the explanation of human reality.

No human response beyond mere reflex is without its symbolic framework, and no such response, however abstracted or rationalized or made part of a collective social sense of reality, is without an organic, biological factor which is in part an expression of our emotionality. Emotional profiles of individuals, and possibly of "things" like cultures, remains an enigmatic domain of research.

It is at this point that I wish to revisit the Jetty one final time to offer some summary suggestions and interpretations of the patterning that we witnessed there during our study. There is a great deal of cultural consonance and consistency of shared values in the Jetty community. It is one of the few places in Penang remaining where relations are not rendered spurious by the intrusion of industrially oriented values and patterns. It remains a place where not giving face to a member of the community by greeting them with a smile or which a "Lu cha pa boy" is tantamount to a social insult.

Many relatively successful individuals who have moved their families off the Jetty frequently return to it to re-emerse themselves in the ethos of this small world. Though most of the people are unhappy with their poverty and predicament on the Jetty, and would prefer to move away from it, they are also proud of their community and its solidarity, where most doors are always open day and night and their is little concern for theft, and where homes, though hot and often crowded, are also large and comfortable. For an outsider to perpetrate an act of violence or extreme insult to any member of the Jetty would be to provoke an immediate and equally violent reaction by most of the members of the community.

There is a sense that the Chinese there have elaborated a locally situated version of a wider familial model of order which has been extended symbolically, principally through their religion, to incorporate larger relations with the social, natural and supernatural worlds.

There is a sense in which the mother with a cane in one hand and a candy in the other is performing a similar role as the community shaman-turned-baby God who in a state of semi-trance gives candy to the children while cracking his whip with the other hand. The Gods which protect from harm and bless the Jetty people with good fortune in the lotteries or in gambling, can also punish and chastise them for going against the established way and values of the community. In the same cultural gestalt we can see the sense of the Singaporean Government caning an American adolescent for vandalism. So too may the parents whose role it is to protect and nurture their children without restriction, also become strict admonishers of miscreant behavior.

The traditional Chinese order of the universe is itself not without important contradictions. On one hand its extreme paternalistic ethos makes for an strong form of familial authoritarianism which both restricts and gives unrestricted license to certain forms of behavior, such as oral gratification and handling of money. On the other hand, Jetty society is extremely democratic and egalitarian in orientation, and as a monolithic class, is relatively open in terms of its social patterning.

Thus, the Jetty society provides both an entangling social web that individuals can find very comfortable, a web that may reinforce their basic insecurities in relation to the larger world, and at the same time it provides very basic mechanisms and values of familial solidarity of hard work and independence which the individual or the nuclear family can utilize to "Step out" from the Jetty into the larger social world, and which serve to define the basis of Overseas Chinese style 'familial pariah Capitalism" in the Nanyang.

There are in these patterns important differences in the profiles of the men and the women, and the boys and girls of the Jetty seemed locked into two different, and inherently unequal, trajectories which predetermine their adaptive fate in relation to both the community and the larger world. The women in many ways are the most stable and productive elements of the community, and would perhaps make the best change agents to the Jetty world, and yet they are paradoxically caught in a traditionally defined dilemma in which there ability to achieve is fundamentally cut-off by the male prerogative.

It is in the patterning of the children themselves that this study must finally come to rest. There is a sense that the slaps, the insults, and the canning afflicted at an early age create symbolic wounds of the psyche which may fundamentally preclude the possibility of fully differentiated maturation of personality.

In this we can refer to basic field dependency theory and the differences between articulated and "global" personality structures, in which the articulated personality is relatively individually differentiated from the surrounding nexus perceptual relations. "To characterize a system as more differentiated implies, first of all, segregation of self from nonself." (Witkin and Goodenough, 1981: 19-20) .Separate identification and sense of autonomy, an articulated concept of the body as having definite limits and of integrated but different parts, the availability of structures for controlling impulse, and use of specific defenses such as intellectualization, projection and isolation, "rather than relatively nonspecific defenses such as repression and denial". Such differentiation is associated with neuro-physiological specialization of brain function.

Strong peer pressures and closeness of same sex age cohorts from birth, which may extend basically unaltered throughout life, serve to give context to and compensate for these basic insecurities of family life. Children learn and find social identity in a social world in which practically any Uncle or Aunt may be a punishing parent. Patterns of unrestricted oral gratification and impulsivity reflected in a well developed gambling culture, especially among the boys, exaggerate these patterns and basic insecurities of an underdeveloped male ego. Such boys will also be inducted at an early age to the world of shamanism and ritual worship, and later may become the young inductees of local gangs and even larger secret society organizations. The Jetty world provides an alternative social and cultural reality which, within the narrow purview of its local settings, is of far greater symbolic significance to its members than are the relations, or possibilities of such relation, with the wider world.

It would be one thing to say that these basic patterns are strictly the ethnocultural provenience of the proletarian Hokkien Chinese of the Jetty, but it is likely that similar basic patterns are shared across the entire spectrum of "multi-racial" Malaysian society, patterns which may have the paradoxical consequence of both promoting the fundamental ethnic cleavages which so divide the society, of ultimately stifling, frustrating and demoting the best-laid plans for industrial development, and which at the same time may underlie the emergence of a common "Malaysian" culture and character and provide the foundation of genuine national cultural unity--albeit a hard won "unity in diversity".

It can finally be said that Malaysian society, for all its inherent contradictions and inequalities, is not so different from American society or any other. They at least do not implicitly sanction and condone wanton murder in the streets for the sake of industrial profits or protecting the rights of criminals. In Malaysia human health is still a social priority and genuine social right, and medicine is efficacious and available to the most poor, In Malaysia poor people are not stigmatized and victimized by the social system for their poverty, because most Malaysians remain quite poor. Duty, devotion, responsibility, hard work, and the sense of humility that is part of giving face and being "chin chai" are the basic pan-ethnic values of Malaysian culture which deserve our respect and even emulation.

Blanket Copyright, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.

Last Updated: 03/09/05