This volume represents an interdisciplinary effort that has brought together anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists who study human cognition. In recent years, cognitive scientists from these three fields and others have converged in the study of knowledge, its organization, and its role in language understanding and the performance of other cognitive tasks.

Here, we present a cultural view. We argue that cultural knowledge – shared presuppositions about the world – plays an enormous role in human understanding, a role that must be recognized and incorporated into any successful theory of the organization of human knowledge. As we summarize in the introductory chapter, cultural knowledge appears to be organized in sequences of prototypical events – schemas that we call cultural models and that are themselves hierarchically related to other cultural knowledge. This volume, then, is an interdisciplinary investigation of cultural models and the part they play in human language and thought.

Earlier versions of most of the chapters in this volume were assembled and presented at a conference held in May 1983 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. However, to think of the book as a conference volume would be to fail to appreciate its history, which goes back some time before the Princeton conference. As histories should, this one has a lesson. It tells how, under felicitous circumstances, institutional support can enable scientific collaboration even across disciplinary boundaries.