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Interpretative Anthropology and Symbol Formation In
this week’s readings each author examines the way an emblem, event,
cultural process or a specific example from a cultural repertoire of
forms represents significant aspects of a particular culture and the
way these processes can be read similarly to the way in which a text
is read. For example, Geertz, in Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese
Cockfight, develops the thesis of ‘saying something of something,’
(Geertz, p. 448) using the elaborate ritual of Balinese cockfighting
as an example to show the many ways cockfighting represents profound
aspects of Balinese culture. In their articles Durkheim, Hunt and Barton
similarly examine the way cultural forms serve as emblems to represent
sociocultural undercurrents or unique sociocultural patterns. In many
ways, however, these authors’ examinations of cultural forms as text
render these forms immobile or represent them as symbolically static
or fixed. In this paper I want to argue that understanding cultural
processes in terms of textual analysis fossilizes the cultural processes
which the authors are examining and does not provide an approach to
understanding the way the bodymind or bodyminds that are involved are
producing the symbols, cultural forms or the words they do, as well
as the underlying code influencing how these expressions may vary. The
work of researchers such as MIT linguist Steven Pinker help to explicate
the way in which the instinctive tendency to produce language enables
people to play with words and create varied and various cultural forms,
thus recasting the question of reading specific cultural processes as
text, in terms both dynamic and potentially causal. Geertz develops the theme of
metaphor in anthropological interpretation in examining the role that
Balinese cockfighting plays in Indonesia. He identifies it as an art
form, which embodies other meanings and which makes daily life easier
to ‘read’ in its ‘produced’ form than in its unrendered one. Like any art form – for that, finally, is what we are
dealing with – the cockfight renders ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible
by presenting it in terms of acts and objects which have had their practical
consequences removed and been reduced (or, if you prefer, raised) to
the level of sheer appearances, where their meaning can be more powerfully
articulated and more exactly perceived. (Geertz, p. 443) Geertz identifies the cockfight as a way of representing status arrangements within the community and as a self-expression of community identity. What sets the cockfight apart from the ordinary course
of life, lifts it from the realm of everyday practical affairs, and
surrounds it with an aura of enlarged importance is not, as functionalist
sociology would have it, that it reinforces status discriminations .
. . but that it provides a metasocial commentary upon the whole matter
of assorting human beings into fixed hierarchical ranks and then organizing
the major part of collective existence around that assortment. Its function,
if you want to call it that, is interpretive: it is a Balinese reading
of Balinese experience, a story they tell themselves about themselves.
(Geertz, p. 448) He develops an argument originating in anthropological
functionalism suggesting that not social mechanics but instead social
meanings are at stake in looking at cultural forms as text. To put the matter this way is to engage in a bit of
metaphorical refocusing of one’s own, for it shifts the analysis of
cultural forms from an endeavor in general to dissecting an organism,
diagnosing a symptom, deciphering a code, or ordering a system – the
dominant analogies in contemporary anthropology – to one in general
parallel with penetrating a literary text. If one takes the cockfight,
or any other collectively sustained symbolic structure, as a means of
“saying something of something” (to invoke a famous Aristotelian tag),
then one is faced with a problem not in social mechanics but social
semantics. For the anthropologist, whose concern is with formulating
sociological principles, not with promoting or appreciating cockfights,
the question is, what does one learn about such principles from examining
culture as an assemblage of texts? (Geertz, p. 448) By arguing that a semiotic perspective offers more
significant understandings of Balinese society, and by extension social
processes, than a functionalist one, he develops a Durkheimian approach
concerning the ways emblems come to represent groups. In the process,
however, Geertz contributes and produces, to some degree, social symbolic
processes as static texts. Durkheim described the way
in which emblems, especially for so-called ‘primitive groups,’ represent
a common collectivity. Thus the totem is before all a symbol, a material expression of something else. But of what? It expresses and symbolizes two different sorts of things. It is the outward and visible form of what we have called the totemic principle or god. But it is also the symbol of the determined society called the clan… (Durkheim, p. 236) For Durkheim, a group’s response to these symbols shapes
a group’s ritual identity. He describes the way the process works in
biological terms suggesting that the response to symbols are transferable
‘contagiously.’ This transference of sentiments comes simply from the
fact that the idea of a thing and the idea of its symbol are closely
united in our minds; the result is that the emotions provoked by the
one extend contagiously to the other. (Durkheim, p. 251) For Durkheim, like Geertz, a group’s totem or sign seems to embody a static or unchanging quality in the cultural form. Durkheim writes that Thus social life, in all its aspects and in every period
of its history, is made possible only by a vast symbolism. (Durkheim,
p. 264) He doesn’t, however, examine the processes or underlying
manner in which so-called ‘primitive groups,’ or especially individuals
in these groups, shape symbols or representations, thus seeming to imply
that the symbols or the collectivity does the shaping, which may only
be partially true. Durkheim’s theoretical approach also doesn’t seem
to examine the way an individual may shape symbols or words, which then
influence the group’s emblem. Similarly, Hunt and Barton
use Marie-Antoinette and Roman gladiatorial events as symbols or emblems
to unpack meanings of historical socio-cultural processes. For Hunt,
Marie-Antoinette represents the expression and resolution of a new ideological
challenge in post-revolutionary France. For Barton, Roman gladiatorial
events represent the two worlds of victim and redeemer and serve as
symbols of Roman life embodying the idea that Romans lived in both worlds.
But while both these interpretations offer interesting analyses of the
cultural significance of specific cultural representations in a history,
both also examine less the ways in which these symbols and representations
were generated and on what principles. Steven
Pinker’s work, which argues that language is instinctive and that the
code for it is universal in humans and modular, offers a model for understanding
the way in which language works and thus, potentially, the way in which
cultural expressions are generated. Such an approach potentially rewrites
the way interpretive anthropology as textual analysis understands cultural
forms, from static to dynamic, variable processes. In conclusion, an analysis
of the interpretation of cultural forms and word formation, which rests
on textual analysis, as I understand it from the above readings, implies
a stasis of the material interpreted and doesn’t seem to consider how
bodyminds produce such forms. Interpreting cultural forms based on an
understanding of the way the mind produces language offers new insights
into the way symbolic forms are shaped based on dynamic, variable code. References
Hunt,
Lynn, ed. 1991. “The Bad Mother." In Eroticism and the Body
Politic. Baltimore.
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