Cultural Organization and General Expectations

The schemata that commonly serve Swahili as bases for getting medical treatment have components that are extrinsically connected to one another. People use general expectations about advisers as a connection between the

understandings that they are ill and need treatment and those that hold treatment is available and can be obtained from a specific source. Since "cultural organization" refers to the relations among shared understandings, in the extrinsically based schema, the general expectations take over the part played by the intrinsic relations (of the sort used by chess players in deciding on moves) in organizing the elements in that schema.

Nor is organization through statuses involved only in extrinsically based schemata. Some organization derives directly from understandings about understandings (Swahili proverbs sometimes express these) wherein doing or being one thing is said to be better or more important than being or doing something else. A substantial part of establishing relations among understandings, however, is due to the functioning of statuses and their constituent roles in determining what is appropriate, what is more and less important, and, as already seen, what is likelier to be approved by whom. This depends mainly on the significance of evaluation in the relationship, so understandings whose guidance leads to behavior that is positively evaluated by partners in multiplex relationships thereby have a quality affecting their desirability and choice other understandings do not have.

A rather extreme example of the choice among understandings immediately guiding behavior can be seen in an aspect of the relationship between Swahili mothers and daughters. A woman cooking in her kitchen, for example, can sometimes be heard to direct strong insults to her own daughters.^[18] Women tell me that they would not use such insults on their peers or even the daughters of their peers but that with their own daughters such behavior is acceptable and they are not despised by anyone, including the daughter, for using them (Swartz 1990b ). The mother-daughter role involves, inter alia, the understandings that the mother status occupant is dominant, that mother's abuse of a daughter "means nothing," and that daughters accept their mothers' behavior, even if it is harsh, as "instruction."

What goes together with what and what does not, that is, one of the relations among guiding understandings, is established according to statuses and the expectations they have in various roles. Without organization to indicate which understandings can and cannot be used together, what comes first or last, and what is more salient than what, the elements of culture are useless in guiding behavior. The main base for this organization is the expectations in the statuses, and this is as true for general expectations as for specific ones. However, general expectations have effects that specific expectations do not.