Transmission by Simplex Relationships and Its Limits

Clearly, advice is also given and accepted in simplex relationships. The practitioner-patient relationship is an example of this. Here acceptance, when it occurs, is usually on the basis of the specific expectation that the practitioner knows about illness and can make useful recommendations. In order for the patient to continue to accept the practitioner's advice, however, the patient must see acceptable results, that is, the specific expectations in the relationship call for particular things to happen within a relatively limited time span.

The general expectations vital to multiplex relationships do not call for highly specific returns, and the time spans involved in exchanging whatever is exchanged may be quite long. A mother who sends a son or daughter to a practitioner whose treatment does not help as soon as the patient thinks it should is, nevertheless, quite likely to be asked for advice again. The patient is likelier to abandon treatment from the practitioner than advice from the parent. The "pay-off" in multiplex relationships is quite different from that in simplex relationships, making the former far more resilient in most cases.

Moreover, the general expectations in multiplex relationships provide a far broader scope for the relationships than is found in simplex relationships. Parents or neighbors are consulted because they are expected to be committed to one's interests as much or more than because of the breadth of their command of understandings.

Simplex relationships do serve to transmit unshared understandings in the way seen for Swahili medical care, but their "reach" is limited and their "cost" is high. Simplex relationships, by definition, begin and end in a single domain, and their specific expectations are all within that domain. One does

not have a relationship with a medical practitioner, if the only role is practitioner-patient, outside the domain of medicine. This relationship can be part of a broad transmission of the effects of understandings to those who do not share them by those who take themselves to have benefited but only if the links in the chain of transmission that follow it are the general expectations in multiplex relationships.

Generally, simplex relationships cannot serve to make cultural organizations effective in the way multiplex relationships can and do. A practitioner may study and practice Galenic medicine because of understandings in other domains which make the balance understandings in that scheme attractive to him, but his ability to bring people to accept the kind of medicine he practices depends more on the actual results they believe he achieves than on his advocacy of the scheme.

In a multiplex relationship, the partner's enthusiasm, which may be based in her being struck by the inherent "rightness" of the balance, or some other, understanding does matter in that her advice is followed not so much because of the qualifications she has for giving the advice but more because of her understood commitment. If a mother wants a child to consult an herbal doctor, a central reason for following the advice is that she gave it. General expectations do not call for specific results, nor are they based in understood command of specific understandings. Their broad and vital part in cultural dynamics is mainly a consequence of these two facts.

The effects of general expectations in the operation of patterns and in the transmission of the results of unshared cultural elements suggest that these broad expectations have effects beyond the relationships in which they occur. In fact, through their central part in multiplex relationships and the broad consequences of these relationships for the social life of the community, they play an important part in the operation of social structure as a whole. These broad expectations not only bind together spouses, parents and children, neighbors, and many others who "mean" a great deal to one another but also play a central part in making the whole culture effective. Their contribution to the community's whole social structure is particularly critical.