ABSTRACT
The term “cultural models” exhibits some variability in the anthropological literature. Some people use it to speak of culturally-based individual schemas, while others use it in a stronger sense to refer to distributed collective structures. A cultural model of action (CMA) provides a model for doing something. Specific examples of these models can be something like Schank and Abelson’s “scripts”, except that CMAs never seem to totally specify a situation’s actions, and so always require some additional working out. A useful way to think about the shape or form of CMAs is as scenes, scenarios, or story lines. CMAs, as known and remembered action structures, are consistent with an episodic view of memory – episodic. CMAs, like all cultural models on which people base their individual understandings or action, have the same kind of collective reality that we have seen in the grammar of language.
