Schemas or scripts, two terms used in cognitive psychology to mean very similar things, are really one big concept. An example often given of a schema in an industrialized society is ‘going to a restaurant’; or rather, what one can normally expect to happen if one goes to a restaurant. Such a stereotypical sequence is, of course, never exactly what happens in any particular instance, but the knowledge of such a schema enables one to cope efficiently with the various events which occur in any particular instance or to understand stories of what happened when particular people went to a restaurant on a particular occasion. Schemas represent the knowledge which is taken for granted in order that one can pay attention to the less predictable aspects of life.
As a number of anthropologists have noted, schemas therefore represent the fundamentals of culture, and some writers have attempted to integrate the insights concerning schemas which come from psychology with more traditional anthropological concerns (Holland and Quinn 1987). Some writers (e.g. Strauss and Quinn 1994) have linked schema theory with the theory called connectionism which argues that habitual knowledge is stored and retrieved in ways which make it different in kind from the folk understanding of what knowledge is. As a result, these writers have argued that anthropologists have represented cultural knowledge in a way that is fundamentally misleading.
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