Cameroon, where I did fieldwork, it shows great respect on some
occasions. Concepts are different, but there is a general template of
FACE and actions that can make people lose it. You have to learn the
local rules, but note how easy it is to produce inferences once you are
given the rules. For instance, once told that sitting in a person's lap is a
mark of respect, you can infer that it cannot be done all the time, that
it is probably absurd to do it with small children, that you will offend
people if you fail to do it when it is expected, and so forth. Such infer-
ences are easy because you already have a template for such concepts.
[45]EPIDEMICS OF CULTURE
Templates are one of the devices that allow minds to reach similar
representations without having a perfect channel to "download"
information from one mind to another. The child now thinks that
walruses deliver live cubs. I happen to think so too, and you probably
have the same idea, and so does, say, Mrs. Jones. But it is very
unlikely that we all received precisely the same information about
walruses in the same way. What is far more likely is that we extracted
this similar information by inference from very different situations
and from different statements made by people in different ways. We
nonetheless converged on similar inferences because the animal tem-
plate is the same in the child, you, me and Mrs. Jones (I will show in
another chapter how we know this to be the case). In fact we might all
converge on this same notion even if the information the child, you, I
and Mrs. Jones had received was totally different.
As I said above, the fact that individual minds constantly recombine
and modify information would suggest that people's concepts are in
constant flux. But then why do we find similar representations among
members of a particular social group? The mystery is not so difficult
to solve once we realize not just that allmental representations are the
products of complex inferences—so there is indeed a vast flux and
myriad modifications—but also that some changes and inferences tend
to go in particular directions, no matter where you start from. Infer-
ences in the mind are in many cases a centrifugal force, as it were, that
makes different people's representations diverge in unpredictable
ways. If I spend a whole day with my friends, going through the same
experiences for hours on end, our memories of that day will probably
diverge in a million subtle ways. But in some domains inferences do
WHATISTHEORIGIN?