Preface

Symbolic Framing Reconsidered

by Hugh M. Lewis

When traveling to the field in Penang, Malaysia, to do dissertation research in comparative anthropology, I had a fairly specific set of research goals in mind, though I lacked the necessary background experience in what proved to be a fairly exploratory, and I believe, revolutionary approach to comparative research in Anthropology. I had come to focus upon the somewhat esoteric theoretical challenge of the anthropology of knowledge. The key question was how exactly does symbolism articulate cognitively in the human brain/mind, in a way that explains the importance of symbolic behavior in socio-cultural contexts. Surprisingly, in spite of the mountain of published articles, this problem had never been exactly asked in terms of field research or clearly answered, though a great deal of research in anthropology and psychology has already been done that pointed in the right direction.

I independently adapted a variety of projective, perception and other types of methods for the sake of conducting structured interviews in some field setting. I wanted to gather cross-cultural samples between Malay, Indian and Chinese ethnocultural groupings, but political obstruction by the Malays and cultural closure by the Indians proved impossible for me to overcome without adopting what I considered to be probably unethical means, which prevented my attempting to further access these communities.

What is presented within these pages are the first-hand results of the analysis of close to 14,000 pages of field data that were primarily generated over an 8 to 9 month period of time, based upon a set of samples derived principally from the Jetty community under study, and secondly from a larger sample of Hokkien informants in the wider Georgetown community. I did get a handful of tasks from Malay and Indian informants, but these were not substantial enough to be included in this study and were therefore left out. Even so, just superficial observation  of these few tasks revealed significant differences of overall pattern.

Development of this form of analytical study progressed rapidly in the first few months of fieldwork, leading to repeated refinement and development of the basic tasks, and eventually to the compiling of different kinds of tasks into a battery that I called the SFB (Symbolic Framing Battery) This battery was implemented to facilitate who did what and to make the overall study more consistent. Analysis of the SFB also proved relatively straightforward compared to the requirements of analyzing thousands of separate data sheets collected from different individuals at different times and places.

Subsequent to this main study, I accomplished a cross-cultural sample from a set of 20 British students (all from various parts of England) who were residing in Penang at the time, ranging in ages from about 20 to 30 years. When I returned to the US, I collected a third sample of about 17 Americans from a very broad range of backgrounds.

The results presented in these pages were based upon a preliminary first pass analysis of the data. Specifically, the symbolic framing battery that was  developed in three successive editions on the Jetty (the first two editions were left unanalyzed) was analyzed in a comparative fashion in as many different dimensional categories as could be obtained from the analysis of the completed batteries.  First pass analysis primarily compared results of performance of various tasks based on categories and types of tasks, and the inter-correlation analysis performed between these types and categories of tasks. A second pass analysis was called for the main study that would have compared the inter-correlation pattern based upon a grouping of tasks across different individuals and ages sets and other basic differences like gender, educational background, etc. To some extent, the Symbolic Framing Battery allowed a standardization of tasks that permitted both first and second pass analysis in a more consistent manner, and that subsequently allowed partial automation of this analysis with an integrated database that was constructed with Microsoft Excel.

The results of these tasks I take to be remarkable for the significant and consistent patterns of variation they demonstrated at multiple levels of analysis. This, compared to the relative ease of task-taking performance and the logistics of this kind of analytical research, makes symbolic framing a truly powerful approach to comparative research that has applicability in a wide number of areas of study. If it were combined with a kind of socio-grid analysis that depended upon observational protocols in naturalistic, culturally defined behavioral settings, it would become even more powerful an approach to doing fieldwork, especially in complex settings as represented in urban contexts.

By the end of 1995, I had developed two other batteries, the Symbolic Differential Battery, or SBD, and the Symbolic Analysis Battery, (SAB) with the aim of getting at a more refined understanding of age and group differentiation of symbolic framing pattern based upon various types of tasks. By the end of 1995, work on this area had ceased after graduation with the doctorate in August of 1995. The last work undertaken was upon inter-correlation analysis, which was a derivative methodology relating directly to the analysis of these tasks. As a white male American anthropologist with a fairly scientific approach, employment in Academia proved to be an impossible prospect. If my skin were any other shade than white, it would have been an entirely different story altogether.

I did not pick up the trail once again in this line of research for another two years, until 1998. Between 1996 and 1998 I became involved in the Robidoux research in Wyoming which was mostly archival, genealogical and ethnohistorical. I sojourned to China in the summer of 1998 with the intention of furthering post-doctoral research in this area, and I therefore carried with me the basic materials from my various batteries and the basic tasks. The first semester there at a small teacher's college proved too busy to conduct significant symbolic framing research, except that I did resolve in the course of the semester a basic issue underlying these tasks that related to the visual and possible auditory nature of patterning recognition and alternative information channels.

This issue related to the use of symbolic framing in the analysis of aural recognition problems. Up until that point, most of the tasks were either visually based with a structured linguistic complement that entailed visual recognition on some implicit level. The question was how to define symbolic framing procedures within a purely temporal framework presented by aural processing and pattern recognition in speech and sound. This problem proved to be operationally compatible with the theoretical question of second-language acquisition in English that I was then confronting with my Chinese students. Searching for a breakthrough, I decided to give my students a series of surprise vocabulary quizzes in preparation for their mid-term examinations. I realized that the students were visually dependent in their learning of English through text-books, having no real natural language models for learning through an auditory channel except some tapes and listening to the radio, neither of which modes allowed spontaneous feedback or were very productive in the long run. Visual dependency served therefore as a learning handicap to more natural language acquisition that in its most basic form is oral and therefore also aural in nature and pattern.

Upon analysis of the results of the vocabulary quizzes, I recognized a familiar response pattern I had seen many times before in the analysis of other kinds of symbolic framing tasks in terms of the errors made of vocabulary, and the breakdown of the listening mode in pattern recognition capabilities with increasing, and increasingly ambiguous inputs. This led to a breakthrough in adapting symbolic framing methods to purely aural procedures based upon simple speaking and listening without intermediary visual cues, and to the development of a set of oral based exercises designed to facilitate aural language development of English speakers. It became apparent that short-term and working memory, as well as deeper memory processes, were directly tied to this aural pattern recognition problem. Working in a second language entailed a cognitive rewiring of these basic mechanical operations of the brain within a pattern-recognition framework. For the last half of the first semester I applied these methods methodically and consistently, and half-successfully to the reorganization of my teaching, and believe that I made some significant progress by the end of the first semester. 

In the second semester, reconsidering my entire approach and the shortcomings of the methods as I originally designed them, I applied more "dynamic" and active methods in the second semester, progressively bringing students into active oral-aural participation in English at all levels, until, by the end of the second semester, some rather surprising results were obtained from the majority of my students.

Of course, the theory of symbolic framing does not depend upon its demonstration in ESL teaching, but this framework did provide a useful means for applying, adapting and extending this kind of research to real world problem sets. In the middle of the second semester, once my experimental classes were under way and the students new what to expect, I turned my attention increasingly to gathering a significant sample of my standard symbolic framing methods that were visually based. In this manner, I had collected a number of dichotomous inventories, color tasks, drawing, perception and even a few inkblot tasks. I had constructed a new battery derived from my previous batteries, and I was just about to take this to a copy shop to have it printed for all my students (a sample of about 160 persons that were fairly evenly distributed across the whole of Henan province), when the American bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Eastern Europe occurred.

This unfortunate incident couldn't have happened at a worse time. We were confined to our apartment for about a week until classes resumed normally. The student reaction in general, organized by student unions and by hidden communist party leaders, was quite strong and aggressive. The consequence was to destroy my ability to effectively teach in an experimental manner for the remainder of the semester and to further my fieldwork in the manner I was intending to do. Furthermore, my work had increasingly attracted the attention of the authorities. Though I had implicit permission to do the work, I had been up to that point obstructed, and even discouraged, from its promotion or actual application. Fearing the worst, with other extenuating circumstances arising in the background as well that cannot be openly mentioned within this context, I decided it was best to destroy most of the data I had collected, which was about box full of miscellaneous things.

This was most unfortunate turn of events, as even preliminary results of the various kinds of tasks showed consistent patterns that were remarkably different than anything I had seen before, with either the Hokkien samples from Penang or from the English or American samples that I had previously collected. The pattern appeared even more intensively elaborated than the British pattern, at least in some ways that seemed more compulsive and contextually dependent, but it did not otherwise resemble the English pattern. Color choice derived from a number of students was completely different than anything found with the Americans, British or Hokkien Chinese. Surprisingly to myself, red and violet did not emerge in the first or second place categories on almost any of the tasks. Blue, green, white and pink emerged repeated in the first place, but in an altogether different combination than would have been expected from previous samples. Color pyramids were dramatically different than anything expected or experienced before, and were quite interesting.

The inkblots, derived from the Lewis inkblots I had developed while in Penang, were quite remarkable and effective in results that showed an extreme intensification of detail in part-whole and edge patterning, but relatively low whole gestalts. Furthermore, there appeared remarkable pathognomic and plant-animal type responses, as well as environmental or nature-location type responses.

Though I failed in my original purpose due to unexpected circumstances, due to unforeseeable circumstances that made impossible any further progress on my symbolic framing methods at the time, the China experience was not a total loss as it permitted an advancement of methods both in terms of its addition to temporal-based aural pattern recognition and to an entirely new sample that yielded dramatic and remarkable results when compared to my earlier samples of Chinese, British and Americans.

Part of the difficulty in furthering this form of study has been very strong resistance by American academics and their administrative directors, as well as by basic social prejudice from most Americans in general. I do not know if it is purely territoriality and paradigmatic perspective, or a basic incredulity that accompanies an ambiguous social identity in American society, or perhaps some combination of both. When I returned from the field in 1995, I did not expect this kind of reaction or resistance, which was strongly mixed and ambivalent. Surprisingly, the only psychologist on my committee, a cognitive psychologist, was quite pleased and interested with the results, compared to the linguist or the psychiatrist who voiced skepticism.

The methods have tremendous efficacy, productivity and applicability to a broad range of developmental and analytical areas of comparative research. They well warrant further in-depth work to render them more refined and useful for science and humanity.

Have I answered thereby my original research question, which was the problem of the mechanism of symbolic articulation between the human brain/mind and the socio-cultural context within which learning, interaction and behavior normally and naturally take place? I would say that I have partially answered this question in a satisfactory and empirically consistent manner. Symbolic framing empirically elicits and evaluates patterns of response that are consistent within cultural groupings and consistently and significantly different across these boundaries. It is difficult to explain why we do the kinds of things we do in the way that we prefer to do them, though these choices are unconsciously conditioned by our cultural constraints and contexts far more than we may realize or would probably be willing to admit. Of course, individual preferences and patterns vary widely regardless of cultural or other background differences, but to some extent these variations can be controlled for and occur within larger boundaries. 

Most of this patterning is not obvious to the doer of the tasks. It cannot be obvious as attention to such detail would interfere with normal adaptive functioning. Indeed, this is the entire point, as too much obsessive preoccupation with choices and reasons is maladaptive and neurotic. A complete breakdown of Symbolic framing mechanisms of the brain is basically psychotic. Many street-people I observed during the course of the fieldwork in Penang showed obvious patterns of being fundamentally "disconnected" from their environments such that their brains were manufacturing their own independent patterns.

Symbolic framing behavior facilitates and promotes adaptation of human beings in complex contexts that tend to be symbolically loaded, whether we acknowledge or attend to stimuli or not. Such patterning should be expected to be especially important and prevalent in contexts, like Penang, that are inherently plural, chaotic, and fast changing due to acculturative modernization and urbanization. And the direct, efficient reasons why a person or group of people choose consistently one way versus some alternate cannot ultimately be explained. But neither can the saliencies and consistencies of the pattern be statistically or empirically denied, and they appear to point to subconscious operations of the human brain that are at work in some complex, chaotic and only partially determined manner.  Much work needs to be done before symbolic framing methods, that are rooted in an applied gestalt theory of psychology, can be adapted successfully in the world and applied in alternative ways to specific problem sets, such as second language acquisition mentioned previously.

The second issue of tremendous import in the understanding of symbolic framing methods is the implication that they, and their theoretical evaluation, holds for the understanding of the effects and role of culture in the daily lives of people. Cultural patternings occur across different samples, and can dramatically affect how people organized things and respond to their environment. Frequencies of patterns found in different societies can in part be explained by the function that cultural patterning plays in the everyday background of people's lives, helping people to cognitively negotiate and navigate their complex worlds. To give to culture an empirical basis that is statistically evident in everyday life, as elicited from a number of alternative tasks that can be assumed to be objective and unbiased, is to confer a sense of power and direction for culture as something that has scientific substance and great significance for all people, and for our understanding of human reality in general.