Cultural anthropology has always been uneasy about its status as a science. Physical anthropologists and archeologists have generally been comfortable with the scientist's epistemology and methods. But the paradoxical stance of “participant-observer” that cultural anthropologists often assume in the study of culture is very different from the formal testing of hypotheses with quantitative data. Rather than causal explanation, cultural anthropology has often aimed at what philosophers have called verstehen, a translation and interpretation of one cultural world by another. The humanistic tradition of cultural analysis aims at simulating the perspective of another, providing an account that is “experience-near” in contradistinction to the “experience-distant” explanations associated with generalizing science.

Over the last two decades, the culture wars have been especially debilitating in cultural anthropology. No path to a truce has emerged. If anything, the differences separating positive science and critical humanism have only hardened, while a number of departments of anthropology have split under the weight of mutual intolerance. The scientific study of culture, while clearly a minority position in the field, got new life in 2002 from the founding of the Society for the Anthropological Sciences, an association dedicated to supporting studies of culture with a strong emphasis on the methods and theories of natural science.

The publication of Giovanni Bennardo's book is a signal event in this recent efflorescence of scientifically grounded cultural anthropology. Bennardo's study of culture and cognition in the Polynesian archipelago of Tonga is an immensely ambitious study of what he calls “a foundational cultural model” governing Tongan worldview and everyday cognition. Bennardo's work takes its inspiration from contemporary cognitive anthropology and its attempt (borrowing from schema theory in cognitive psychology and, less directly, from Ruth Benedict's (Reference Benedict1934) classic work on patterns of culture) to study culture as a set of “models” at once social and cognitive. Whereas much of the work in cultural models theory (including my own) relies on observational intuition backed by discourse and symbolic analysis, Bennardo approaches Tonga more like an experimental economist. To test the psychological salience of his hypothesized cognitive models Bennardo performs a large number of controlled experiments with his Tongan subjects. Accordingly, the book is replete with tables and abstract diagrams emerging from his many data sets, attempting to demonstrate the psychological reality of the master spatial model—what he terms the radial model—that he suspects underlies much of Tongan thought and action.

In Bennardo's view, this radial foundational model does a remarkable amount of work in shaping Tongan thought and is ubiquitous in Tongan language, thought, and society. Bennardo is relentless in empirically building his case for this radial model as underlying a vast array of experiential domains including spatial cognition, kinship terminology, linguistically based directional concepts, public rituals and gatherings, conceptions of power, conceptualization of social networks, notions of possession, and conceptions of time.

His remarkable analyses in part confirm my own analyses of radial models in Samoan culture and thought. But there are some key differences between our analyses. I had proposed for the closely related Samoans not one but two distinct kinds of master models (what I called foundational schemas) based on logically and perceptually different kinds of dualism (Shore Reference Shore1982, Reference Shore1996:ch. 11, 12) . One was based on a radial structure (similar to Levi-Strauss's concentric dualism) and the other was binary (similar to Levi-Strauss's diametric dualism; Levi-Strauss Reference Levi-Strauss1967). I proposed that these models suggested a key distinction in Samoan thought between egocentric and allocentric perspectives on social experience.

For the Tongan case Bennardo collapses the two kinds of dualism into a single notion of the radial model. Moreover, he characterizes this model as nonegocentric. In other words, he concludes that key social and spatial orientations in Tonga are based on a center in ego's field that is displaced from ego. On the one hand, this displacement of ego in favor of a high-ranking or sacred center makes sense in the highly stratified Tongan society, and is an important insight that may well be equally relevant to other parts of Polynesia. But on the other hand, either something is missing in Bennardo's univocal account of Tongan orientational models, or else Tongans are crucially different from their Samoan cousins in totally sidelining egocentrically grounded modes. It might be noted here that Samoans combine the Tongan notion of chiefly rank with a complex notion of achieved power that creates an ethos that combines deference to power and the center with an unmistakable achievement orientation and personal assertiveness that seems to be alien to Tongans (Goldman Reference Goldman1970, Shore Reference Shore, Feinberg and Ann Watson-Gegeo1995).

Linguistic data on Samoan reveals this complexity. Samoan modeling of formal and intimate relationships by subtle gradations of lexical and phonological speech registers clearly represent for individuals the dynamics of their changing relationship to others. These models built into basic linguistic competence in Samoan are clearly egocentrically based, and do not fit well in Bennardo's framework, which recognizes only radial models with nonegocentric foci.

In Ch. 10 Bennardo notes that Tongan drawings representing spatially key social relations generally exclude the representation of ego. He concludes, “[P]articipants did not regard it as necessary to insert ego in their drawings. Thus ego must be backgrounded in their representations of social relationships as compared to other-than-ego” (307). But egocentric representations will almost never represent ego as an external component of a model. I would suggest in at least some of these cases that ego is not backgrounded so much as encapsulated as an unmarked and taken-for-granted center in a social network. Only an allocentric model would allow an individual modeling her relationships to represent herself as an ego. Bennardo's account does not consider this potentially important distinction between and egocentric and allocentric models of spatial and social relations. Tonga may simply be different from Samoa in its modeling of space and social relations, but it would be interesting to know if we have here a cultural difference or an incomplete analysis.

Bennardo's study will surely become a classic in both Polynesian studies and cognitive anthropology. An impressive amount of data collection and analysis has gone into this book, suggesting the many advantages of bringing a positivistic frame of mind to cultural analysis. It also clearly reveals the tradeoffs involved in such a formalistic approach to culture. In almost 350 pages, there is remarkably little in the way of detailed, experience-near accounts of Tongan life. Tongan mind is much on display in these pages, but not Tongan voices. So one gets the “logic” of Tongan thought, but also misses the flavor of Tongan life that great interpretive ethnography can convey.

Language, space, and social relationships is compelling and often impressive in its empirical and theoretical rigor. But for these very reasons it is also not an easy or especially engaging read for those looking to experience Tongan life through Bennardo's eyes. In his attempt to be thorough and clear about a subject that is inherently abstract and difficult, Bennardo's prose can sometimes be ponderous and repetitive. And there are sections of the book where compulsive formalism seems to run amok. Ch. 8, “Radiality and the Tongan kinship terminology”, subjects Tongan kin terms to an astoundingly dense mathematical analysis in an attempt to find the algebraic algorithms that underlie Tongan kin terms. To me, the insights gleaned from this analysis do not justify the labor involved in reading (or writing!) the chapter. Having waded through what seemed like endless and almost unreadable prose, it struck me that the conclusions that Bennardo is able to draw from the belabored analysis are fairly obvious to those of us familiar with Polynesian kin terminologies, and could easily have been summarized in a simpler and more accessible form. And I was not convinced by the end of the chapter that the generative structures proposed for Tongan kin terms actually reveal a radial foundational model isomorphic with Tongan spatial perception.

Like most landmark works, the many virtues of Bennardo's book are inevitably the “over-side” of its limitations. Language, space, and social relationships was clearly not conceived as anything like traditional ethnography or to provide an experience-near evocation of Tongan life. Bennardo's goals remain clearly in the tradition of positive science—data collection and hypothesis testing using a wide variety experimentally collected data. In its limited but still considerable ambitions, ‘book sets a new standard for scientific ethnography. Its empirical and analytical rigor represents a resounding rejoinder to those who would argue that anthropology cannot be an empirical science or that culture does not exist. The book makes a brilliant and challenging case for the power of cultural-models theory in cultural anthropology. And for those of us who do cognitive anthropology, the book surely raises the bar for what counts as empirical testing and validation of our hypotheses. Bravo.