The Green Bag: The Uses of Ambiguity in Eliciting Covert Cultural Assumptions

Abstract

It often seems that human behavior is determined more by the implicit existential assumptions of a social group than by overtly stated "reasons" and goals. Therefore, it is important to develop methodologies for explicating covert assumptions. For example, the delivery of human services would be enhanced if the meaning systems of the delivering agencies were studied along with the cultural assumptions of client groups. This paper reports the field testing of a method for using ambiguity as a tool in eliciting information about covert meaning systems. A "stranger" wearing a green bag sat with a college class for two meetings. Then, at a recorded debriefing session, students told us how they had experienced her presence. As they emerged through inductive ordering of these materials, the foci of our informants' concerns specified the necessary and sufficient conditions for beginning an interaction in Anglo society: Is it human? What sex is it? What will it do? The findings are interpreted to mean that our version of social ambiguity indeed reached the level of implicit cultural assumptions. A number of more practical applications are suggested for research on the various ingroups and interfaces within large bureaucracies, and in community studies.