Culture beneath discourse: a conceptual model for analyzing nondeclarative cultural knowledge

Sociology has increasingly drawn on concepts from the cognitive sciences to better theorize and measure culture, particularly nondeclarative personal culture beneath the level of conscious awareness. Despite several advances, these “cognitive cultural” concepts are drawn on selectively, and limited work has attempted to assemble them into a coherent framework, leading to conceptual murkiness and ambiguous use of terms like “schema.” This article synthesizes literature on culture and cognition to develop a conceptual model of four interrelated but distinct types of cultural knowledge beneath the level of explicit discourse. Drawing on emergence theories, the author theorizes how these types relate to each other, as well as to discourse and public culture. The utility of the model is then illustrated using the empirical case of American religious understandings. These types of cultural knowledge have distinct qualities and, consequently, distinct roles in influencing thought, speech, and action. Assembling them into a coherent framework can improve scholarly accounts of how culture influences important substantive outcomes, how culture and cognition interact, as well as methods for studying nondeclarative cultural knowledge.