Transcript Chapter 13 - Amazon Web Services

Chapter 13:
Symbols, Structures,
and the “Web of Significance”
© 2014 Mark Moberg
• Idealism: human behavior is governed by beliefs, meanings, and values
that are often independent of the material conditions of life.
• French structuralism: according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, culture arises
from the structure of the human mind, which creates binary oppositions:
i.e. the mind is structured to think in terms of opposites. Cultural practices
(kinship systems, ritual, mythology, and even cuisine) can be “de-coded”
to reveal these underlying oppositions. L-S identifies a number of universal
contrasts found in all cultures: sacred–profane, man–woman, self–other,
and most importantly nature–culture. Sherri Ortner developed a structural
analysis of what she called the “universal” subordination of women to men.
She argued that women’s consignment to reproduction and the home
reflects their affinity for “nature,” while men’s command of technology
and commerce aligns them with “culture.” (Note the arbitrariness of this
classification: one could argue that since women socialize babies into
culture-bearing adults that their affinity lies with “culture.” In his analysis
of media advertising, Ingersoll inverts Ortner’s formulation, equating the
world outside the home with “nature” and the home itself with “culture”.)
© 2014 Mark Moberg
• Symbolic anthropology: Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner were among the
first to challenge the materialist trends of the 1960s–1980s. They contended
that anthropologists who relegate meaning to “superstructure” fail to
appreciate the powerful motive force of symbols in daily life. What Harris
might describe as an “etic behavioral act”—the smudging of a cross on one’s
forehead at Ash Wednesday—cannot help us understand why this simple
gesture may cause a believer to dissolve in tears. The ash represents in
concise form the central aspects of Christian experience: sin, redemption,
death, and resurrection. Geertz argued that the goal of anthropological
writing should be “thick description,” consisting of highly detailed,
novelistic descriptions of individual scenes of action. This brings the reader
into greater appreciation of how symbols provide guideposts for action, and
represents a complete break from anthropological conventions emphasizing
detachment and 3rd-person narration. Given that such accounts may be
second- or even third-order interpretations, materialists are troubled by
symbolic anthropology’s disregard of replicability: whose “textual analysis”
of culture is correct, and moreover, whose text is left out of the account?
William Roseberry argued that Geertz’ famous analysis of the Balinese
cockfight omitted the experience of village women—who were relegated to
the outskirts of the match—as well as a rising tide of political conflict that
would soon emerge in a brutal military coup. Like most materialists,
Roseberry is troubled by the fact that symbolic anthropology produces
interpretations of culture that cannot be verified, observing that there is a
critical difference between documenting peoples’ lives and interpreting
literary texts.
© 2014 Mark Moberg
• Ethnoscience: ethnoscience was developed by a number of American
anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s out of frustration with the
unsystematic way anthropological data were gathered. Rather than
imposing western cultural categories on ethnographic data, ethnoscientists
sought to render descriptions that employed the mental categories of native
informants. This perspective was heavily influenced by the Sapir–Whorf
hypothesis, which contended that perceptions of reality are contingent on
the language used to describe the world. Ethnoscience focuses on the terms
used by native speakers for a particular semantic domain (i.e. any realm of
perception for which members of a culture have a working terminology,
such as kinship terms, plants, colors, parts of the body, diseases, etc.).
Terms are then elicited to produce a taxonomy that presumably reflects
how native speakers view that domain. Although ethnoscience promised a
systematic method for identifying a given culture’s emic view of reality, its
practitioners soon realized that its assumptions of cultural consensus were
unrealistic: i.e. two or more informants from the same culture may generate
taxonomies that do not coincide. As later postmodernists claimed, our
knowledge and perceptions are heavily influenced by our identity and
social position, which may well be why interest in ethnoscience waned
with the postmodern turn.
© 2014 Mark Moberg