Conclusion

I have presented three basic techniques for eliciting data concerning cultural domains. The freelist technique is primarily used to elicit the basic elements of the domain. The pilesort and triad tasks are used both to elicit similarities among the items, and to elicit attributes that describe the items. In addition, I have touched on the use of multidimensional scaling to graphically illustrate the structure of the domain, and locate each item's position in that structure.

Implicit in these data collection and analysis techniques is a distinctive notion of cultural domain as a system or network of items related by families of links (semantic relations). Thus, a cultural domain has internal structure, and it is the position of items within this structure that distinguishes the items from each other and gives them their unique meanings. Viewing domains in this manner emphasizes their fundamental similarity to other systems, such as economies, societies, ecologies, machines, and brains. Consequently, I would suggest that to obtain additional tools for studying cultural domains we should look to those disciplines that have explicitly conceptualized their objects of study as systems or networks. In particular, I would recommend the techniques of social network analysis, which are reviewed by Scott (1991).