Culture as Symbol, part I

1. Example I: Witchcraft “reloaded”
1.1. Women with “more freedom” and “economic income” are accused of witchcraft
1.2. Are the terms “more freedom” and “wealthier” used by anthropologist or the natives?
1.3. Symbolic elements are involved: how are “women” with more money and freedom interpreted.

Family : Subsistence : Normal : Good : Secular : Male

Non-Family : Non-subsistence : Abnormal : Evil : Mythical : Female

2. Example II: Pastoralism vs. Hunting
2.1. Many Massai in Kenya make a living by raising cattle (drinking and selling milk).
2.2. The Massai people who are blacksmith or hunters are looked down upon.
2.3. Pastorialism vs. hunting

	Pastoralism	Hunting
Animal life	protecting	Killing
Consumption	milk	Meat
Purity	clean	Bloody

	Pastoralism	Hunting
Animal life	dignified	Degrading
Consumption	clean	Dirty
Purity	conserving	Polluting

2.4. A binary opposition hidden in people’s mind-set and language.
2.5. Culture is a deep structure (symbolic).

3. Claude Levi-Strauss: structuralist anthropology

3.1. Anti-social Darwinism:
-Civilized people and savages share a similar structure of mind (The Savage Mind)

3.2. Critique of functionalism
3.2.1. Etic or emic?
3.2.2. How come do we or they have these institutions and functions?

3.3. A rationalist approach
3.3.1. Knowledge does not come out of the empirical world directly.
3.3.2. Cognition and thought are the basis of society.
3.3.3. Living cultures are not “out there” but in thinking and language.
3.3.4. The only commonality between “we” and “they” is “reason”.
3.3.5. According to Levi-Strauss, reason is symbolic and poetic.
3.3.6. Human beings impose intellectual order onto their living environment.

3.4. Semiotics
3.4.1. Signified and Signifier
3.4.2. The meaning of sign is defined not by a correspondent object (identity), but by its differences from others.
3.4.3. Language (structure) and speech (element)
3.4.4. We are investigating language (structure) rather than speech.

3.5. The elementary structures of kinship system

3.5.1. What is kinship?
Example: Why do Chinese people address their mother's brother and their father's brother differently?
("Alliance": Mother's brother's sons and daughters are potential marriage partners)
("Taboo": Father's brother's sons and daughters are not marriage partners)

3.5.2. The basic structures of kinship
-Elementary, intermediate and complex kinship systems.
-The elementary structure of kinship is cross-cousin marriage
-There are three types of elementary kinship:
*Bilateral cross-cousin marriage
*Matrilateral cross-cousin marriage
*Patrilateral cross-cousin marriage

3.5.3. Two structural features of Kinship system:
-Kinship is based on the alliance between two families.
-The alliance is built upon exchange of women.

3.5. Culture as an unconscious symbolic structure: myth

3.5.1. Example I: Binary opposition of myth
-A myth about human beings acquired honey while they were still animal
-A myth extols hunting and gathering

Nature	Culture
Honey	Cooked food
Promiscuity	Cross-cousin marriage

3.5.2. Example II: Metonym（轉喻） and Metaphor（隱喻）

Magic with “hair”

Hair --------------->Body

(metonymic)

Destroying hair==============>Hurting body

(metaphoric)

3.5.3. Myth as lived relations

4. Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger

4.1. Culture as rationality: "A central part of my argument was that rational behaviour involves classification, and that the activity of classifying is a human universal."

4.2. One of the most basic classification is taboo on purity/impurity

4.3. No single item is dirty apart from a particular system of classification in which it does not fit.

4.4. Our concept of dirt is not simply defined by our knowledge in hygiene; instead, it emerges "out" of order/system of sacredness or purity

4.5. Example: Douglas' analysis of Hebrew's taboo on pig
-Pig is found abominable by Hebrew.
-Pastorship:
God's convenant with His people<==>The people's relation to their flocks and herds
-The dietary law: Cows, sheep and goats are sacrificed on the altar and killed in kitchen.
-The system of sacredness: God-people-herds and flocks (domesticated ruminates)
-Pigs, as non-ruminates, are abominable animal and food, out of the order

5. Critique of structuralism
5.1. Solipsism
Culture is reduced to an individual's cognitive mind

5.2. Culture is rational structure? How about emotion?

5.3. A-historical

6. Reflection on race

6.1. Is race "natural and separate divisions" based on "physical differences"?

6.2. Evidence from the analysis of genetics

6.3. "Physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them."

6.4. The invention of "race" in the 18th century: a colonial classification

6.5. This colonial classification becomes a worldview

Further readings:
"The Structural Study of Myth" and other structuralist ideas