Event Structure Models from Ethnographic Data

We present a new method of modeling ethnographic descriptions. The method draws on recent anthropological and sociological developments in ethnography and receives its technical foundation from production system models in cognitive science. We display models as graphs to show logical relations among events, and we use models as grammars to generate acceptable sequences of concrete and abstract events. We illustrate the approach in a detailed analysis of approachavoidance play in the peer culture of nursery school children