Space, Cognition, and Politics:

PART I:

· Relation of Project to Previous Work and to Work in Progress

· Theoretical Stance, Hypothesis, and Methodology

Relation of Project to Previous Work and to Work in Progress.

In my 24 months of residence in Tonga since my first visit in 1991,^{^[1]} I became convinced that it was highly unlikely that Tongan politics would take the form of democracy. Besides, I have come to believe, Tongan political ideas, actions, and engagements are inherently intertwined with the way that Tongans represent spatial relationships linguistically and mentally.

This project is part of a larger enterprise that is rooted in my doctoral and postdoctoral research, as well as in my current work. My analyses of Tongan language concentrated on spatial relationships (Bennardo, 1996, 1999, 2000a,b). Spatial prepositions, directionals, and spatial nouns are used to produce linguistic descriptions of spatial relationships that indicate the choice of a specific point of view on the environment, a frame of reference (see Levinson, 1996, 2003). A frame of reference (FOR) is a set of coordinates (three intersecting axes: vertical, sagittal, and transversal) used to construct an oriented space within which spatial relationships among objects are identified (see Brewer and Pears, 1993). There are three major types of FOR: 1) relative; 2) intrinsic; 3) and absolute (see Levinson, 1996, for a typology of FOR, and Bennardo, 1996, for a revision of that typology). A relative FOR is centered on a speaker and it remains centered on the speaker when the speaker moves, e.g., “The ball is in front of me.” An intrinsic FOR is centered on an object and it remains centered on the object when the speaker or the object moves, e.g., “The ball is in front of the car.” An absolute FOR uses fixed points of reference, e.g. north, south, east, west, as in “The town is south of the river.”

Research conducted in a variety of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural contexts (see François, 2003; Hill, 1982; Hill, 1997; Levinson, 1996, 2003; Ozanne-Rivierre, 1997; Pederson, 1993, 1995; Pederson and Roelofs, 1995, Senft, 1997; Bennardo, 2002b) shows that some speaking communities, culturally defined, exhibit mental and linguistic preferences for certain frames of reference in describing spatial relationships.

The Tongan language differs from Indo-European languages —including English—in the way in which spatial relationships are expressed. Instead of the eighty spatial prepositions used by English (Jackendoff, 1992b:108), Tongan uses only three. Many spatial descriptions are obtained by combining a spatial preposition and a spatial noun. For example, in English we say John is in the house, whereas in Tongan they say ‘Oku ‘i loto fale ‘a Sione “Present at inside house John,” 'i “at” being one of the three spatial prepositions and loto “inside” being a spatial noun. The prepositional phrase 'i loto fale functions as a verb.^{^[2]} In addition, Tongan has five post-verbal directionals that express vertical movement (up and down) and radial movement from or toward a specified center/point (Bennardo, 1999). These latter three (mai, atu, ange) are monolexemic examples of the closed class type (grammatical) whose meanings are expressed by a prepositional phrase in English (e.g., mai, “toward a center/point”^{^[3]}).

When expressing spatial relationships linguistically, Tongans use prevalently the relative FOR (front-back and left-right axes centered on the speaker) in small-scale space (small objects very close to the speaker), but prefer the absolute FOR (fixed points of reference in the field of the speaker, i.e., seaward, landward) to refer to large-scale space (any size objects at some distance from the speaker) (Bennardo, 2000b).^{^[4]} Tongan speakers are the only other documented case—the other is the Hausa (Hill, 1982)—of frequent users of the translation subtype of the relative FOR (an object positioned beyond a tree that is in front of the speaker is considered “in front of ” the tree) in both types of space (Bennardo, 2000b).^{^[5]} When representing spatial relationships in small-scale space in long-term memory, Tongans prefer the absolute FOR. The specific subtype of the absolute FOR that they use I have called “radial” (Bennardo, 1996, 2002a). A fixed point of reference in the field of the speaker is selected and objects are represented as from or toward that point. This preference for radiality does not exclude other forms of representations for spatial relationships.^{^[6]} Specifically, Tongans also use other two types of absolute FORs, seaward-landward and the more well known east-west-south-north one.

After analyzing patterns of culturally salient exchanges such as the fakaafe “meal invitation,” among others, it became clear that social events are organized in a radial manner as well (see Bennardo, 1996:chapter 7). Furthermore, exchange patterns also provide the environment in which that spatial preference can be acquired (Bennardo, 2003; see also Morton, 1996; Nisbett, 2003:37 and 201). Finally, good support for the preferred “radial” mental representation of spatial relationships came from the results of subsequent drawing tasks administered by the PI (Bennardo, 2002a). Maps of the island produced by the villagers living on it showed a radial organization with the major town at the center (not corresponding to the geographic reality).

My research also suggests that radiality (with the specific meaning I have indicated above) exists in the organization of three other Tongan knowledge domains including navigation, religion, and kinship (Bennardo, 1998, 2001, 2000c). The first two, traditional navigation and religion, are rooted in Tongan and Polynesian history and, although not practiced or believed any more, provide important evidence for structural connections among knowledge systems.

First, Polynesian navigation has been described at length (Buck, 1938; Golson, 1963; Lewis, 1964, 1972, 1974; Sharp, 1964a and b; Hilder, 1965; Gladwin, 1970; Finney, 1976; Kyselka, 1987; Feinberg, 1988; Turnbull, 1994). Hutchins (1995), after a review of various interpretations, states:

All navigation computations make use of frames of reference […] Here there are three elements to be related to one another: the vessel, the islands, and the directional frame […] one can have the vessel and the direction frame move while the islands stay stationary (the Western solution) or one can have the vessel and the directional frame stationary while the islands move (the Micronesian solution) […] In the Micronesian case, the directional frame is defined by the star points of the sidereal compass, and the star points are fixed. (1995:92)

In other words, fixed points of reference (star points) chosen in the field of the navigator are later used to compute movement to and from them. I used Hutchins’ conclusions^{^[7]} to argue for a further presence of radiality in a knowledge domain that is one of the most salient in the recent past—the last Tongan navigator died around thirty years ago—and the distant past of Polynesians (Bennardo, 1998).

Second, at the core of traditional Polynesian and Tongan religion is the concept of mana “power” (Handy, 1927; Gifford, 1929; Williamson, 1933). Described either as substance or process (Keesing, 1984; Valeri, 1985), as cause or effect (Hogbin, 1936; Firth, 1940), mana always implies coming into contact with supernatural forces by means of another human being— usually a chief—who acts as mediator. The supernatural ‘power’ radiates out of this person and brings good to individuals, to the land, and to crops if a number of procedures are followed, otherwise misfortune results. Thus, the practice of “binding” and its relationship with the concept of tapu ‘taboo’ can be understood (see Gifford, 1929; but also Shore, 1989). Again, we find radiality as an essential and pervasive concept in the religious domain.

Finally, kinship terminology has been extensively used to access mental organization of knowledge (see Goodenough, 1956; Lounsbury, 1956, 1969; Romney and D’Andrade, 1964; Lehman and Witz, 1974, 1979; Lehman, 1993; Kronenfeld, 1996; but see also Decktor Korn, 1974, 1978). I analyzed the Tongan terminology (a classificatory system) by entering it into an “expert system” called KAES, a computer application developed by Read and Behrens (Read and Beherens, 1990; Fischer, 1994; Read, 1997). This expert system analyzes relationships between kinship terms and extracts the basic logic behind them. It then compares this logic with a likely algebra and determines if the logic is a possible one. Besides, KAES displays the findings graphically. Both results provided uncontroversial verification of the hypothesis that radiality structures the Tongan kinship terminology.

The complete analysis of the Tongan kinship terminology appears in Bennardo and Read (2005). Relevantly, the results indicate that the algebraic focus of the system is not ego. The whole system is rooted on the term tokoua ‘same sex sibling.’ Basically, the Tongan kinship terminology is premised on a principle of radiality common to what indicated in the brief discussion about social exchanges, navigation, and religion. A center (other than ego) is chosen in the field (genealogical space) of the individual, this time the tokoua “same sex sibling,” and other kin positions are described as from or toward that center. Also in kinship, then, I found important indications for a fundamental radial organization of a knowledge domain.

It was at this juncture that I decided to posit radiality as a Tongan cultural model, to look for such an organizational principle in the representations of social relationships, and to investigate the consequences of this possible cultural model for political actions. This decision was also influenced by two other bodies of literature: one about a number of proposals suggesting radiality in many aspects of Eastern^{^[8]} (e.g., Nisbett, 2003), South-East Asian (e.g., Kuipers, 1998), Micronesian (e.g., Ross, 1973), and other Polynesian societies (e.g., Shore, 1996; Herdrich and Lehman, 2002); and one containing current ideas about the content of a “cultural” component-module of the mind (e.g., Jackendoff, 1992a, 1994, 1999; Pinker, 1997; Talmy, 2000b) that is orchestrated around the mental representations of social relationships (i.e., kinship, group membership, dominance).

Theoretical Stance, Research Hypothesis, and Methodology.

Theoretical Stance. The PI builds on Jackendoff’s (1997, 2002) proposal for a modular organization of the mind^{^[9]} and argues for the existence of a relationship—a partial homology in Tongans’ preferential way of organizing knowledge—between the spatial representation module, the conceptual structures module, and the action module (see Talmy, 2000a, b, for a similar proposal). The PI calls this homology a cultural model.^{^[10]}

In everyday conversations when defining their position in the social hierarchy, Tongans often make initial reference to a high status person as a fixed point of reference. Then, they trace their personal position from that person/point. The PI terms this conceptualization of social hierarchy and social relationships “radial.” Thinking radially to locate objects in space implies looking for a fixed point of reference (other than ego) and describing the object to be identified as positioned from/toward that point. The way in which Tongans position themselves socially represent a sub-case of ‘radiality’ as instantiated in a single vector, away from or toward a point.

A cultural model is used to think and reason with (D'Andrade, 1989; Johnson-Laird and Byrne, 1991; Lehman, 2000; Strauss and Quinn, 1997; Quinn, 2005) and consequently the PI proposes that ‘radiality’—as a cultural model—contributes to the generation of some linguistic behavior, some social action, and some political choices. Individual variability in the instantiation of the model is expected (see Keesing, 1987:377; Kronenfeld, 1996:17-20, and 2002; Shore, 1996; Quinn, 2005; Strauss and Quinn, 1997:83; Lehman, 2000, for discussion).

Research Hypotheses. This project is testing the hypothesis that radiality is an important feature of the mental representation of three Tongan mental modules as realized in three knowledge domains such as spatial relationships, social relationships, and political actions. This homology between the internal organization of knowledge in three mental modules can be termed a Tongan cultural model.^{^[11]}

The assumption of radiality as a Tongan cultural model led to three related sub-hypotheses: 1) radiality is pervasive in the organization of Tongan social life. The PI collected data about social networks to test this sub-hypothesis; 2) the radial conceptualization of social relationships is observable in the linguistic production and non linguistic behavior about social relationships and political systems such as monarchy and democracy. The collected data consists of transcripts of semi-structured interviews and results of cognitive tasks (e.g., memory task, sorting task, drawing task); 3) the radial conceptualization of social relationships is observable in political choices in local elections. The data collected included electoral counts and answers to questionnaires about political choices by co-villagers.

Methodology. A fundamental methodological idea threaded together all the data collection. In the same way as maps of an environment drawn by subjects are compared to the geographic reality of that environment (see Gould and White, 1974; Downs and Stea, 1977; Tversky, 1981, 1993, 1996; Golledge, 1999; Bennardo, 2002a), social networks represent the (social) environment or reality against which comparisons are made. The content (linguistic form and linguistic meaning) of the interviews about social relationships and political actions and the results of the analyses of the cognitive tasks are compared to the results of the analyses of the complete social network survey. Partial homologies (e.g., radial and vectorial organization with other than speaker as center or apex) between these types of data are considered indications of specific (e.g., ‘radial’) mental representations of social relationships. Only a few centers/apexes may exist embedded in individuals around which and out of which social and political relationships are organized and represented mentally. Differences between the social network results, the results of the analyses of the linguistic tasks, and the results of the cognitive task may indicate a ‘fracture/distortion’ between social reality (networks) and mental/linguistic representation of that reality. In the same way as for drawing tasks about geographical reality (see references above), these fractures/distortions would be very informative about the Tongan mental world. For example, social network analysis may reveal the centrality of a few villagers, but linguistic data and cognitive task data may indicate a different group of individuals. Thus, this fracture/distortion between the two sets of data would reveal specific mental representations of (partially) perceived social relationships. To exemplify further, while kainga ‘extended family’ may play a relevant role in social networks, economic status (or other) may be more relevant in mentally representing individuals. While other than ego focal individuals may emerge from social network analyses, ego centered representations may emerge from other data.

The social networks data consist of information collected by means of questionnaires (for an example see Burkett, 1998), interviews (for an example see Wellman and Wortley, 1990), and/or structured observations (for an example see Bernard, Killworth, and Sailer, 1980, 1982; Freeman and Romney, 1987) about villagers' perceived and actual frequency of interactions with relatives and/or co-villagers. In our survey, we used all three data collection strategies indicated above: two questionnaires, interviews, and what we have termed indirect observations (repeated interviews with villagers about people [also length and reason] they interacted with during the day previous to the interview). The two questionnaires asked questions about influence and about social support.

The analyses of the social networks data (e.g. estimating cliques, centrality, and density measures) highlight the nature (e.g., radial), structure, and composition of these imagined and actual social interactions in public arenas (Freeman, 1979; Freeman, White, and Romney, 1989; Scott, 1992; Wasserman and Faust, 1994; McCarty, 2002). Radial organizations (star graphs) or vectorial subtypes (line graphs)—always centered on other than ego—can be detected and are expected to be found. The finding of circle graphs, graphs with low and uniform measures of centrality for all members, would undermine the PI’s hypothesis. However, any network structure found will contribute to the overall project of testing the social environment represented by the networks against cognitive, linguistic, kinship, and geographic location data about these same networks (Krackhardt, 1987).

Linguistic data have typically been assigned a privileged place when inquiring into the mind (Chomsky, 1972; Miller and Johnson-Laird, 1976; Dougherty, 1985; Lakoff, 1987; Pinker, 1997; Olivier and Gapp, 1998; Bowerman and Levinson, 2001). The way in which information or meaning is organized and expressed linguistically is regarded as a reflection of mental organization of knowledge (see for example Talmy, 2000a and b; Strauss and Quinn, 1997). The PI conducted interviews in which he inquired about and discussed social relationships, the current political situation (monarchy vs. democracy), and political choices. All interviews were videotaped in order to collect the linguistic, paralinguistic, and contextual features of these events (see Duranti and Goodwin, 1992; Duranti 1997). All these linguistic materials were transcribed in the field with the help of Tongan assistants.

The PI conducted these analyses on the linguistic data. First, a frequency count of lexical items expressing radiality (see D’Andrade, 2005, for suggestions about this type of analysis). The results were compared with similar counts about other types of Tongan texts (written and oral). A higher incidence of occurrence (than in discourse about other topics) was found, especially of the directional atu 2^{^[12]} indicating the movement away or from a person other than the speaker.^{^[13]} Second, the use of metaphors or clichés expressing radiality are being recorded and counted.^{^[14]} For example, “love is giving (the king loves us)” (see Strauss and Quinn, 1997:144; and Quinn, 2005 for the role of metaphors in pointing to cultural models, but see also Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; and D’Andrade, 2005). A large frequency of use of these ‘radial’ metaphors is expected. Third, the discursive structure/organization of the content of the interviews was highlighted (both types and frequency). Discourse radiality may imply a narrative organized around what we term ‘referential nodes.’ A referential node can be an actor or an event from which other actors or events are represented. In network terms, referential nodes should have a higher degree of centrality since they serve as the nodes around which the social space is organized.

In order to investigate the mental representations of social relationships, the PI administered a set of cognitive tasks to all adult villagers. The first involved using mental information about social space—kinship, social relationships, and social networks—while a) sorting a deck of photos of all the adult villagers (pile sort, see Weller and Romney, 1988) and b) drawing one’s social space (drawing, see Bennardo, 2002). No explicit linguistic coding was involved in performing these tasks (at the end of the tasks, though, subjects were asked to provide explanations about their sorting and drawing strategies). The second one, a memory task, involved asking individuals to remember their co-villagers (free listing, see Weller and Romney, 1988). Given the assumption (to be tested) that people first remembered are more prominent, the PI expects the subjects' recall to be skewed toward those few who occupy central positions in the social networks to which the subjects belong (see Weller and Romney, 1988; Ross, 2003). The third one, a constrained free listing, required individuals to provide a list of people to whom one is related for a stated reason, e.g., neighborhood. These tasks create measures that will be used to test one central hypothesis of this project: the extent to which cognitive representations reflect the social structure revealed from the analyzed social network data.

The “Digitized Tonga” Database: In the last four years, the PI engaged in the digitization of the Tongan data already in his possession.^{^[15]} The project consisted of entering in the computer—using the application ArcView GIS—the map of Tonga, detailed maps of specific archipelagoes and islands, detailed maps of specific villages, and a map of the capital town (see http://atlas.lib.niu.edu/tongalayer1.html ). The layout of the village of Houma and its surrounding subsistence plots were digitized. The village has 172 residents, and allows complete demographic data collection. Each house on the map drawn by the PI (Bennardo, 1996:127) was linked to its photo, to a family tree of its residents, to the other houses where the relatives of the residents live, and to the plots cultivated by the house residents and their relatives (Bennardo, Hattman, and Testa, 2001; Bennardo and Schultz, 2003). Some preliminary information (cliques analyses) about social networks was also entered. In 2003, the GIS accurate 2-D world of the northern island of Vava'u and of the village of Houma were 3-D rendered (Bennardo and Schultz, 2003, 2004). The “Digitized Tonga” database is the research tool that resulted from all these activities.

This database offers a unique and unprecedented opportunity to analyze ongoing speech events. Ethnographic/demographic, geographic, and perceptual information can be brought to bear during the analyses of linguistic data (interviews) and social network data. This facilitates the acquisition of insights into the hypothesized cultural model. For example, the houses of the cliques' members can be color coded and their distribution in the village can be displayed. This distribution can be compared with the distribution of kinship groups, cultural groups, and religious affiliation groups. Thus, the relationship between distribution in space, socio-cultural grouping, and social networks can be explored. Furthermore, the database allows digitized clips of the interviews (with English and Tongan subtitles) to be displayed and synchronized with related 3-D views of the village (this part is called “Synchronized Media and Visualization Analysis Tool ” SMVAT). The central visual fields (around 30º) for specific visual takes made by the interviewees are indicated by white semi-transparent cones that extend over the territory for around 150 yards. While running the video clip in SMVAT, at selected points corresponding to a specific linguistic production and a visual take by the interviewee, the cones appear to highlight the extension of the visual take. Thus, a relationship can be established between a visual take and the content of a linguistic expression (see Bennardo and Schultz, 2004, for an example of analysis).

The “Digitized Tongan” database was used extensively during the analyses already conducted of social network data and linguistic data. Both the “Digitized Tongan” database and the SMVAT tool will be used to analyze the results of the 20 interviews about neighborhood composition. The results of similar analyses conducted by using the SMVAT tool were published in Bennardo and Schultz (2004).

PART II:

· Use of Funds

· Completed Data Collections

· Analyses Conducted

· Research Activities to Complete the Project

Use of Funds.

These figures are those I received from the office on campus managing the grant. More details can be obtained by directly contacting the office of sponsored project at NIU.

The following personnel received salary:

Giovanni Bennardo (PI), summer 2004.......................................................... $ 5,000.00

Charles Cappell (Collaborator), summer 2004.............................................. $ 4,900.00

Kurt Schultz (Collaborator), summer 2004.................................................... $ 4,900.00

Lisita Taufa (Graduate Assistant), spring-fall 2005, and spring 2006........... $ 7,358.85

Fringes........................................................................................................... $ 1,771.28

Travel (to Tonga and to Conferences):

Summer 2004: travel, boarding [PI]............................................................... $ 2,500.00

Research permit, assistants, donation to village, NIU Media Services.......... $ 3,725.81

Summer 2005: travel, boarding [PI and Lisita Taufa, GA]............................ $ 4,252.10

Fall 2005 and Winter 2006 [PI, conferences]................................................ $ 1,500.00

Acquisition of Equipment and Material:

Laptop System, Digital Voice Recorder, Disks, CDs, stationary................... $ 3,362.40

Miscellaneous (commodities, promo gifts, toll charges)................................ $ 762.79

Indirect costs ................................................................................................. $ 9,948.45

Total ............................................................................................................. $49,981.29

Completed Data Collections.

The collections of the data were conducted in the village of Houma, a small subsistence community (172 residents), on the northern Tongan island of Vava’u. During the first field trip (one month) in summer 2004, with the help of five local Tongan assistants the PI conducted the following activities:

· administered two questionnaires about social networks (influence and social support) to the whole adult population (95) of the village (see 1 in appendix);

· interviewed all adult villagers about the composition of the village (list villagers out of memory);

· interviewed all adult villagers about political choices of co-villagers in local election of town officer;

· interviewed 18 individuals about the social fabric of the village and about their understanding of the current political (local and national) situation, i.e., monarchy versus democracy (digitally recorded and transcribed) (see 2 and 3 in appendix);

· interviewed all adult villagers to provide at least three terms to fill the gap in a sentence about the king (i.e., the king is the ______ of Tonga) (see Weller and Romney, 1988) to elicit salient metaphors besides those obtained during the semi-structured interviews above;

· collected geographic information: exact measurements of house compounds, roads, and positions of trees—a video of the whole village was also made;

· collected social information, especially kinship and kainga ‘extended family’ compositions;

· took digital photos of all adult villagers to be used for social network cognitive task in 2005.

During the second field trip (one month) to Tonga in summer 2005, with the help of four local Tongan assistants and a Tongan graduate student, the PI conducted the following activities:

· administered again the questionnaire about social networks (influence) to all adult villagers (this rerun of the questionnaire was done to check for consistency by interviewees over time) (see 4 in appendix);

· administered one questionnaire in three different occasions about social networks to all adult villagers (this activity was labeled ‘social network indirect observation’ [SNIO] and required interviewees to report about the people [also length and reason] they interacted with during the previous day) (see 5 in appendix);

· interviewed 24 individuals (chosen randomly from the clusters resulting from the social network analysis on some data obtained in 2004) and asked them to contribute a story that would be an exemplar of the life in the village (radiality is examined as the extent to which villagers more central in the influence structure also more commonly appear as referential nodes in the open-ended narratives) (digitally recorded and transcribed) (see 6 in appendix);

· administered the ‘sorting cards/photos of villagers’ task to the above mentioned 24 individuals to investigate the mental representation of social relationships;

· administered the ‘drawing salient group in the village’ task to the above mentioned 24 individuals to investigate the mental representation of social relationships;

· administered questionnaire about voting preferences of co-villagers (‘election of town officer questionnaire’);

· interviewed 20 individuals about the composition of their neighborhood;

· interviewed two non villagers (a matapule [talking chief] and the most prominent Tongan scholar and founder of ‘Atenisi University in Nuku’alofa [the capital town]) about monarchy and democracy in Tonga (these two interviews convinced the PI of the necessity to conduct more similar interviews).

Analyses Conducted.

The PI with the help of his collaborators conducted the following activities:

· Coded all social network questionnaires responses into sociomatrices (necessary step before they could be analyzed for centrality and other social network measures) with the help of two undergraduate students (Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program, URAP) from the department of sociology;

· conducted extensive network analyses of the influence questions from the full social network data, primarily question SNP1a-b, using UCINET (Borgatti, et al., 2002) and Pajek (Batagelj and Mrvar, 1996); results from the analysis of the first two questions designed to uncover the ‘influence’ structure have produced a 30 page paper to be read at the 2006 Sunbelt conference sponsored by the International Network of Social Network Analysts and work to produce a final draft of this paper is underway with a scheduled date of journal submission the middle of April.

· parsed and analyzed texts of 2004 interviews (frequency of kainga ‘extended family’ mentioned, ‘ulumotu’a ‘head of kainga’ mentioned, and people mentioned). These data were used for a correlation with the results of the social network analyses;

· parsed and analyzed 2004 interviews for major metaphors used;

· parsed and analyzed texts of 2005 interviews (type of story narrated—ranging from ‘whole village’ to ‘small group,’ to ‘kainga,’ to ‘personal’ [ego involved in event]—and people mentioned);

· parsed and analyzed 2004 and 2005 interviews for frequency of directionals (mai, atu, ange) and compared the results with parsing conducted on 2002 interviews and many other oral and written texts already available;

· conducted and analyzed a frequency count of the ‘metaphors for king’ task;

· conducted a frequency count of the ‘election of town officer’ questionnaire (answers to: which candidate for town officer did X co-villager vote for?). These data will be used for a correlation with the results of the social network analyses (see below);

· conducted a frequency count of the ‘memory’ task (answers to: list as many villagers as you can remember). These data will be used for a correlation with the results of the social network analyses (see below);

· updated the ethnographic information file including these headings: age, gender, kainga, ‘ulumotu’a ‘head of family/kainga,’ religion, cultural group, occupation, income, car ownership, and land access. This file was used to run correlations with the results of the social network analyses (see below);

· updated the Digitized Tonga Database: the 3-D rendering of the northern Tongan island of Vava’u was updated; the measurements of the 2-D and 3-D rendering of the village of Houma were both updated and relevant vegetation (trees and major bushes) was inserted; a number of video clips from the interviews were inserted in SMVAT for analyses.

Research Activities to Complete the Project.

By comparing the ‘data collected’ and the ‘analyses conducted’ sections above, it can be seen that there is a number of analyses still to be completed on available data:

· parse and analyze 2005 interviews for major metaphors used. The results of the previous analyses on 2004 interviews will speed up this process insofar as relevant metaphors have already been highlighted;

· analyze results of the ‘sorting cards/photos of villagers’ task. These analyses will reveal major categories/concepts used in sorting as well as saliently mentally represented village groups thus enhancing our understanding of the mental representation of social relationships;

· analyze results of the ‘drawing salient group in the village’ task. These analyses will reveal the composition of salient social groups for each interviewee,^{^[16]} besides, specific drawing strategies may be implemented to reveal a spatial relationship between these groups such as the expected ‘radial’ fashion (see Bennardo, 2002);

· analyze frequency counts of the ‘election of town officer’ questionnaire. This analysis will provide a picture of the perceived voting preferences of the villagers to be compared with the available real voting count for the town officer election. Besides, a picture will emerge of each individual with a perceived voting preference about which co-villagers show a consensus ranking from moderate to high. These results as well will contribute to obtain insights into mental representations of social relationships;

· analyze frequency counts of the ‘memory’ task. Given the assumption that people first remembered are more important to the individual performing the task, these analyses should reveal salient mental organizations of social relationships of the village (see Weller and Romney, 1988; Bennardo, 1996: chapter 7);

· parse and analyze interviews about neighborhood. These analyses will contribute relevant insights into the conceptual construction of a salient part of the social relationships domain, that is, the concept of neighborhood. Here as well supporting evidence for the hypothesized fundamental structuring of this domain is expected.

In collaboration with Dr. Cappell, the PI will continue the analyses of the social networks data:

· First, the social support questions (summer 2004, see 1 in appendix) will be analyzed along the same lines as the influence questions have thus far. Comparisons of the distinct social and influence networks will be made (regression and correlation analysis) and tests for a composite network structure across all of the social network questions will be conducted, to learn to what extent a single representation of a synthetic social network is feasible.

· Second, we need to validate temporally the influence structure of the village by analyzing the two additional network questions collected in the summer of 2005 (4 in appendix). This will give us a chance to test hypotheses regarding the stability of the influence network over time, one of the few such opportunities in anthropological social network analysis made possible by NSF funding.

· Third, once a set of validated measures of the overall network structure and actors’ structural positions are obtained, we will compare network derived measures of social position and structure with independently measured and indicators derived from interviews, narrative interviews, and cognitive tasks (e.g., memory, sorting, drawing) that will reveal the referential roles villagers play. These empirically verifiable correlations will test hypotheses about the extent of isomorphism between the position villagers have in village networks and their position in the socio-cultural maps villagers use to explain, describe, and interpret the village structure and life. The proposed analysis should make a contribution to understanding the link between social structure and social cognition. A typical hypothesis of this sort is derived from the stories villagers were asked to tell about their ‘village.’ In this question protocol, the villager can start and continue the story by using any ‘referential nodes.’ The position and frequency with which villager’s names appear in these narratives gives us an indication of how ‘central,’ or in parallel language how ‘radial’ each villager is. The test of the extent of the radiality model will be made by regressing the narrative ‘referential node or radiality score’ on the social network centrality scores, controlling for measures of social and cultural capital.

We expect that a series of tests of hypotheses of this sort will lead to well grounded inferences about the isomorphism of the radiality model in social, linguistic, and cultural domains. Thus, the hypothesized cultural model would be subject to thorough testing.

Finally, to integrate the effect of the importance of the spatial linguistic patterns found in the cultural system, we will test hypotheses about the isomorphism of geographical coordinates, especially the geographic and population centrality of villagers (obtained by using the Tonga Digitized Database), the spatial linguistic representations, the social network positions (centrality), and their cognitive and linguistic representations. The hypothesis of “weak spatial priority” posits that where radial cognitive representations prevail in a domain (space), radial forms in other cultural and social domains will be prevalent; spatial linguistic and social network structures should exhibit comparable centrality. The hypothesis of “strong spatial priority” posits that several major cultural models will reflect a radial structure consistent with that derived from the cognitive spatial models active in the group, a more direct isomorphism, hence strong correlations between the villagers’ positions in all derived network structures and the villagers’ positions in the spatial radial structure. The PI has already explored the extent to which radiality exists in navigation, religion, kinship terminology, and language (Bennardo, 1999, 2000, 2001; Bennardo and Read, 2005). He has furthermore argued that patterns of culturally salient events such as exchanges and the fakaafe ‘meal invitation,’ reflect a radial structure (Bennardo, 1996:chapter 7).

PART III:

· Preliminary Findings

· Dissemination and Publication of Results

· Conclusion

Preliminary Findings.

These are the major findings yielded by the analyses:

· The results of the parsing of written, oral, and interviews (2202, 2004, 2005) texts for frequency of Tongan directionals found a significant correlation (loglinear and Poisson regression analysis) between type of texts and directionals and indicated a higher use of mai 2^{^[17]} in 2004 interviews (about social relationships) and of atu 2 in all interviews, thus supporting the research hypothesis (on December 4^th, 2005, the PI read a paper written about these findings at the 104^th Annual Meetings of the AAA in Washington, DC and submitted it to Oceania);

· The results of the analysis conducted on 2005 interviews show a preference for ‘whole village’ type of stories (41.1 %) over any other type with the ‘personal’ stories (ego involved in event)

Northern Illinois University