Cognitive Aspects of Culture

Of the three dimensions of culture, the cognitive one is the hardest to notice in your own culture, precisely because it is neither visible like a tool nor spelled out like a rule. Cognition here means the shared way a group makes sense of the information reaching it from the world -- recognising your own phone's ringtone in a crowd, instantly reading a political cartoon, knowing without being told what a particular gesture means. Because this kind of knowledge is so taken for granted by insiders, it rarely gets stated explicitly; it simply operates in the background of everyday perception.

How this cognitive knowledge is stored and passed on differs sharply between literate and non-literate societies. In literate societies, a great deal of shared understanding gets written down and preserved in books, documents, libraries and archives, so that it can be consulted rather than remembered. In societies without a strong written tradition, legend and lore are instead committed to memory and transmitted orally, often by specialist practitioners who are trained to recall and narrate them at rituals or festivals. The scholar Walter Ong, in his study of orality and literacy, pointed out that unwritten material tends to have distinctive features: it repeats itself often, to make it easier to remember and recite, and its audience tends to be more actively engaged with the performance than readers are with an unfamiliar written text, which typically grows more elaborate once it is put into writing. …