CULTURE THEORY TILTS TO SEMIOTICS

During the 1960s and early 1970s, discussions of culture theory showed a preoccupation with the idea that cultures are systems of symbols and meanings. At the least, this preoccupation seems to be creating a new subfield of cultural anthropology; it is probably also transforming the aims, methods, and subject matters of cultural anthropology and its relations to other disciplines. Leading anthropologists who have articulated this symbolic conception of culture have given different names to the emerging field or subfield. Lévi-Strauss calls it "structural anthropology" and "semiology"; Geertz, extending Weber, Dilthey, and Schutz, refers to it as "interpretative anthropology"; Schneider simply calls it "a cultural account." In a recently published book, Peacock notes that he and several colleagues introduced the designation "symbolic anthropology" for the new field, while Victor Turner prefers "comparative symbology" as a wider designation to take account of the symbolic genres of advanced civilizations as well as of the ethnographic materials of nonliterate cultures. Turner has also emphasized the need for a processual analysis of symbols in the concrete contexts of social life, in contrast to the formal analysis of symbols as algebraic, logical, or cognitive systems, which Turner regards as characteristic of semiology, semiotics, and linguistics.

I am indebted to Professor Thomas A. Sebeok for the opportunity to present a shorter version of this paper at Bloomington in March 1976. The paper also draws on material from my course on Semiotic Anthropology at the University of Chicago and from my forthcoming book, Man's Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology, to be published by Indiana University Press. I am grateful to Michael Silverstein, Victor Turner, and Paul Friedrich for helpful comments on the paper and to Benjamin Lee for assistance in my course in 1975 and 1976.

Other anthropologists who have contributed to these recent developments of culture theory have not introduced any special designation for the field, but have either aligned themselves with one of the named approaches—Leach, e.g., with Lévi-Strauss's "structural anthropology" and "semiology," Mary Douglas with Victor Turner's "symbology," Margaret Mead with "semiotics,"—or, as in Firth's book on Symbols, have adopted an eclectic attitude toward the different approaches.

In this paper I should like to consider two problems that these recent developments in culture theory pose : (1) Why does the tilt of culture theory to semiotics occur just when it does, in the 1960s and early 1970s? and, (2) What kind of general theory of signs and symbols is likely to prove most fruitful and adequate for a general theory of culture?

The answer to the first question will be found, I believe, both in the preceding developments within anthropological theory and in what was going on outside of anthropology. It is perhaps premature to predict the answer to the second question, but an analysis of some of the issues in dispute between the semiotic and semiological theories of signs should enable us to state a case for a semiotic anthropology and to prefigure some of its contours.

CULTURE AND SOCIETY AS COMPLEMENTARY CONCEPTS

In trying to sort out and understand the recent proliferation of symbolic theories of culture, it is tempting to see in them different expressions of national character or at least of different national traditions in anthropological thought and research. In their joint introduction to the symposium African Systems of Thought, Meyer Fortes and Germaine Dieterlen, the British and the French co-editors, agreed on two major propositions : (1) That there were two broadly contrastive approaches in the symposium papers to the description and analysis of African religious systems. The one approach, characteristic of French ethnography, starts with the total body of knowledge—(the "connaissance")— "expressed in a people's mythology and in the symbolism of their ritual, reflected in their conceptions of man and of the universe, and embodied in their categories of thought, their forms of social organization and their technology, and constituting a coherent logical system." The other approach, characteristic of British social anthropology, "starts from the social and political relations in the context of which ritual, myth, and belief are found to be operative." It "links the body of knowledge and beliefs of a people with the actualities of their social organization and daily life." (2) A second proposition accepted by the British and the French co-editors is that the two approaches are not antithetical but deal with complementary aspects of African religious and ritual institutions. The question then arises as to how these two aspects of African religious systems are interconnected. The editors reported that in the symposium discussion, evidence emerged very clearly "for the way in which myth, ritual, concepts of personality, and cosmological ideas penetrate the social organization of a people and are in turn shaped by the latter" (Fortes and Dieterlen, 1965:4).*

Audrey Richards, in a review of African Systems of Thought ( 1967), sought to pinpoint the social and institutional reasons for the difference between the French and the British approaches. French anthropologists, she pointed out, tend to do their field observations in their brief vacation periods extended over many years, while British anthropologists do theirs in an intensive year or two of fieldwork. These differences in the ways of doing fieldwork, she suggested, helped to explain the French and British contrastive approaches to African religious systems. The French get to know individual informants and their belief systems, while the British concentrate on the functional connections between social actions and institutions.

In his recent book, Symbolism Reconsidered, Dan Sperber also invokes a national character kind of explanation for the French semiological approach: "The Frenchman lives in a universe where everything means something, where every correlation is a relation of meaning, where the cause is the sign of its effect and the effect, a sign of its cause. By a singular inversion, only real signs—words, texts—are said, sometimes, to mean nothing at all" (Sperber, 1974:83).

* The explicit characterization of the difference between the British and the French approaches to the study of ritual and symbolism was introduced and elaborated by Victor Turner (Fortes and Dieterlen, 1965:9-15).

Claiming that "semiologism" is an essential aspect of French culture and ideology but not necessarily of all cultures, Sperber argues that "Lévi-Strauss has demonstrated the opposite of what he asserts, and myths do not constitute a language."

"All these learned terms—signifier and signified, paradigm and syntagm, code, mytheme, will not for long hide the following paradox: that if Lévi-Strauss thought of myths as a semiological system, the myths thought themselves in him, and without his knowledge, as a cognitive system" (Sperber, 1974:84).

Before we become involved in the debate over whether "semiologism" is a French disease, or a British or American disease, a Russian, Polish, or Italian disease, it would be advisable to review the historical and analytic aspects of the culture concept. Such a review, I believe, would also help to clarify Sperber's distinction between semiological and cognitive systems, as well as illuminate the recent tilt of culture theory to semiotics.

In historical perspective, the two contrastive approaches to African religions identified by Fortes and Dieterlen represent a specialized application and transformation of the contrast between society and culture as global, inclusive concepts. The national affiliations of the two concepts, however, have undergone a sea change. The British anthropologist, Edward Tylor, was one of the first to formulate a global concept of culture in his famous definition: "Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society" (Tylor, 1871).

The inclusive conception of society as a social system and synchronic structure, which became a trademark of British social anthropology, derives from Durkheim, Comte, and Montesquieu, as well as Spencer, and the American anthropologist Morgan (Singer, 1968).

The later vicissitudes of these concepts are equally unrespectful of national boundaries: Tylor's culture concept was miniaturized and pluralized by Malinowski in England and by Boas and his students in the United States. As such, it first guided the study of "primitive" and "tribal cultures" and later of "peasant," "urban," "ethnic" and all sorts of "subcultures." The French sociological tradition, on the other hand, not only led to the concepts of social system and social structure in British social anthropology, but also influenced American sociology decisively.

In "The Concepts of Culture and of Social System" (American Sociological Review, 1958), Alfred Kroeber and Talcott Parsons proposed "a truce to quarrelling over whether culture is best understood from the perspective of society or society from that of culture." The historical significance of this proposal is that it marks a public and professional recognition of the shift from the global and intellectually imperialistic concepts of culture and social system to an analytical distinction between the two concepts as quasi-independent, complementary, and interrelated: "We suggest that it is useful to define the concept of culture for most usages more narrowly than has been done in most American anthropological tradition and have it refer to transmitted and created content and patterns of values, ideas, and other symbolical-meaningful systems as factors in the shaping of human behavior and the artifacts produced through behavior. On the other hand, we suggest that the term society—or more generally, social system —be used to designate the specifically relational system of interaction among individuals and collectivities."

By 1958 when the Kroeber-Parsons article appeared, the proposed condominious merger of anthropological and sociological concepts of culture and society was beginning to occur in the work of Raymond Firth (1951), Fred Eggan (1955), and Robert Redfield (1955), among others. In fact, Kroeber himself, who was one of the leading exponents of a global concept of culture that encompassed social relations and social organization, had started to think about a narrower and more differentiated culture concept as early as 1909. As a result of an extended debate with Rivers and then with Radcliffe-Brown over their "sociological" interpretation of classificatory kinship terminologies, Kroeber crystallized a conception of kinship terms as little systems of semantic logic. Almost fifty years after Kroeber made this suggestion, Lounsbury and Goodenough both returned to it in 1956, and developed the method of "kinship semantics," a method from which Goodenough and others extrapolated a general theory of culture as "ethnosemantics" or "ethnoscience" (Singer, 1968; Schneider, 1968).

Rivers and Radcliffe-Brown were similarly stimulated by the debate with Kroeber and with each other to crystallize a conception of kinship systems as social systems that included as components kinship terms and categories, kinship behavior and norms, rights and obligations, as well as rules of marriage and descent. For Radcliffe-Brown this conception of kinship system became an exemplary paradigm for his broader concepts of social system and social structure.

The place of the culture concept in this paradigm remained somewhat ambiguous for Radcliffe־Brown. He was critical of the survival in American anthropology of Tylor's global culture concept and referred to it as "a vague abstraction." He preferred to eliminate that concept altogether. On the other hand, Radcliffe-Brown began to construct a fairly precise concept of cultural system complementary to his concept of social structure as early as his 1937 lectures on "A Natural Science of Society." In the published version of the lectures (1957) he analyzed the concept of culture into three aspects: (1) A set of rules of behavior "which exists in the minds of a certain number of people owing to the fact that they recognize it as the proper procedure," and carry it out in behavior, or "social usages." (2) The existence of certain common symbols and common meanings attached to those symbols—words, gestures, works of art, rituals, and myths are symbols which provide the means of communication between individuals. (3) Common ways of feeling or sentiments and common ways of thinking or beliefs shared by a majority of the people in a society—Durkheim's "collective representations."

These three aspects of culture together make possible a "standardization," or "system," of behavior, sentiment, and belief of individuals in a society. In fact, Radcliffe-Brown uses the term "culture" to refer to just such a standardized system, not to the individual acts of behavior or even to a class of such acts. But Radcliffe-Brown insists that there can be no independent, autonomous science of cultural systems, for the standardization of behavior, sentiments, and beliefs implies a set of relations between persons, or a social structure. "Neither social structure nor culture can be scientifically dealt with in isolation from one another. . . . You can study culture only as a characteristic of a social system" (Radcliffe-Brown, 1957:106-107).

One can read many of Radcliffe-Brown's ethnographic papers— e.g., on joking relations, totemism, the mother's brother and other kinship studies, religion and society, taboo, etc.—as attempts to explore the "functional" connections between culture as collective representations, cultural symbols, rules of behavior, and social usages, on the one hand; and social structures as networks of actual social relations, on the other. In the 1930s, when he was at the University of Chicago, and in the years immediately following at Oxford, Radcliffe-Brown became sufficiently convinced of the fruitfulness and validity of this approach to attempt an explicit general formulation of it in the lectures on a natural science of society and on social anthropology, and in papers on the concepts of function, social structure, kinship systems, the comparative method in anthropology.

For American anthropologists, Radcliffe-Browns methodological views and their ethnographic exemplifications offered a needed alternative to the Boasian eclectic "descriptive integrations" of observed facts and historical reconstructions. As Redfield pointed out in his 1937 introduction to the volume in honor of Radcliffe-Brown prepared by some of his American students, the alternative provided by Radcliffe-Brown consisted not so much in the formulation or discovery of general social laws, as in providing a guide to research: the formulation of general concepts, classification of problems, explicit statement of general postulates and propositions. "The propositions are not to be treated as final but are to be challenged, revised, or abandoned as the investigation into special fact guided by them proceeds" (Redfield in Eggan, 1955:xiii).

Redfield's description of Radcliffe-Brown's American contributions to social anthropology as a generalizing science is both confirmed and extended by his own study of The Folk Culture of Yucatan. And nowhere is Radcliffe-Browns influence more explicit and striking than in the definitions of culture and society as complementary concepts, which Redfield uses in that study. Redfield had in fact formulated explicit definitions of "culture," "society," and "community" as complementary concepts as early as 1941 (in The Folk Culture of Yucatan, pp.14-15). His definition of culture as "an organization of conventional understandings expressed in act and artifact" extends some of Sapir's ideas from his 1931 articles on "symbolism" and "communication," as well as Tylor's charter definition. The definitions of "society" and "community," however, were very close to those of Radcliffe-Brown and show the influence of the latter's presence in the Chicago department from 1931 to 1937. Redfield defined "society" as a network of social relations, and "community" as the territorial group that is characterized by a given culture and society.

While these early formulations of Redfield's formed an integral part of the conceptual framework of The Folk Culture of Yucatan and of his more special concept of "folk" culture and "folk" society, they did not become at that time a stimulus for developing a semiotic theory of culture either in Redfield's thinking or in that of other anthropologists. The interest instead turned to processes of acculturation and other forms of culture change generated by the contact of "folk" cultures and societies with modern, Western urban societies and cultures.

After the Second World War, when Redfield became interested in studying and comparing the "great traditions" of living civilizations, he saw a greater need for anthropologists to work with the humanists on their left than with the natural scientists on their right. What is of special interest for the present story, however, is that in developing a "social anthropology of civilizations," Redfield did not abandon the complementary concepts of culture, social structure, and community or the conception of culture as a system of meanings and values. Rather, he enlarged the scope of their application, and modified their definitions to take account of history, high cultures, and large organized states. He defined a civilization as consisting of a societal structure of communities of differing size, complexity, and interrelations and of a cultural structure of little and great traditions in reciprocal interaction. Such complex structures were not simply conceived as synchronic structures, but were to be traced through their persistences and changes as historic structures. And just as Firth and V. Turner, among others, studied specific social structures through their social organizations in particular places and times, so the societal and cultural structures of civilizations could be studied in the social organization of their cultural traditions in particular centers and networks. The formation, maintenance, and transmission of these cultural traditions were not only "organizations of conventional understandings expressed in act and artifact," but also bodies of knowledge, "more or less pyramidal, more or less multilineal," embodying distinctive world views and value systems, cosmologies and religions. The cultivation and understanding of these bodies of knowledge are socially organized in schools, in churches and sects, in towns and cities, by cultural specialists, literati, and intelligentsia. The French conceptions of culture and civilization as organized knowledge and the British conceptions of society as social structure and social organization found their synthesis in Redfield's conception of civilizations as social organizations of great and little traditions, and of great and little communities (Singer, 1976).

The Kroeber-Parsons article on culture and social system and Redfield's conceptions of the cultural and societal structures of civilizations indicate that by 1958 culture theory, in the United States, at least, had reached a phase of explicit formulation that emphasized the structural, symbolic, and cognitive aspects of the culture concept, and its complementarity with the concept of social structure.

It is noteworthy that Lévi-Strauss, whose work in the 1950s and 1960s was to make anthropology famous for two new isms—"structuralism" and "semiologism"—recognized theoretical affinities with some of his predecessors, whom, in other respects, he characterized as practitioners of a natural science model of empiricism, functionalism, and naturalism. He found such affinities, for example, in Radcliffe-Brown's 1951 paper on totemism and wondered if Radcliffe-Brown realized how radical a departure he had made from his own previous functionalism in developing a theory of totemism that explained the selection of totemic species because they were good to think, not because they were good to eat. Lévi-Strauss even suggested that this out-of-character paper of Radcliffe-Brown's may have been influenced by the development of structural linguistics and structural anthropology in the previous decade, 1940-1950 (Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, pp.89-90).

Meyer Fortes ignored Lévi-Strauss's suggestion; Radcliffe-Brown's 1951 paper on totemism, Fortes (1967) said, covered ground so familiar to his students and colleagues, that its publication caused no stir whatever among them. While Fortes may have underestimated some of the novel features of Radcliffe-Brown's structuralism and of Lévi-Strauss's, I believe that for both, the roots of a structural and symbolic theory of culture, and of society, can be found in the preceding fifty years' development of culture theory, which was sketched in the preceding section. The formulation of such a theory was started by Radcliffe-Brown as early as 1937 and by Redfield in 1941. Elsewhere I have tried to show that both of these anthropologists, and Lévi-Strauss, as well, did not so much abandon the natural science model as they extended and modified it. Humanism did not replace science in the development of a structural and symbolic theory of culture and society; it was incorporated into a transformed philosophy and method of science. That transformation began about 1900 with new developments in the foundations of mathematics, symbolic logic, theoretical physics, and the mathematical theory of communication. Structural linguistics and structural anthropology participated in this transformation, as did social and cultural anthropology (Singer, 1968, 1973, 1976; Jakobson, 1961).

SEMIOTICS AND SEMIOLOGY: A COMPARISON AND A CONTRAST

In his Inaugural Address at the Collège de France in I960, LéviStrauss proposed that anthropology devote itself to the study of signs and symbols, to the science that Saussure called "semiologie." In this address Lévi-Strauss conceives of anthropology as a branch of semiology, "the occupant in good faith of that domain of semiology which linguistics has not already claimed for its own, pending the time when for at least certain sections of this domain, special sciences are set up within anthropology" (Current Anthropology [1966] :114).

Within Saussure's conception of semiology as the study of "the life of signs at the heart of social life," Lévi-Strauss claims for anthropology some of the sign systems mentioned by Saussure—e.g., symbolic forms of politeness, military signals, as well as many others: "mythic language, the oral and gestural signs of ritual, marriage rules, kinship systems, customary laws, certain conditions of economic exchange."

The enumeration is not intended to be exhaustive and, indeed, cannot be in view of Lévi-Strauss's broad perspective on man and anthropology: "Men communicate by means of symbols and signs; for anthropology, which is a conversation of man with man, everything is symbol and sign, when it acts as intermediary between two subjects."

Even stone axes, techniques, and modes of production and consumption, Lévi-Strauss suggests, can be seen as signs, "according to Peirce's celebrated definition, that which replaces something for someone." A certain type of stone axe is a sign because it replaces another tool that another society uses for the same purpose.

Clearly such a semiotic theory of culture implies, and perhaps presupposes, a philosophical anthropology about the nature of man, and an epistemology about how we can know that nature, which are not made entirely explicit in the writings of Lévi-Strauss. The closest he comes to explicit revelation of his position is in the autobiographical travelogue, Tristes Tropiques, in which it turns out that the Western anthropologist's vision quest for "true savages" finds only men—conversing with men. When conversation fails, because men do not know one another's language, there can only be a dumb silence. When conversation across cultures occurs, it does not matter whether we see the flow of communication as going from us to them or in the reverse direction. In this perspective structuralism and structural anthropology provide a method for the analysis of human communication, which Lévi Strauss suggests can be analyzed into a unified theory of the exchange of words, of women, and of goods and services.*

Two years after Lévi-Strauss's Inaugural Address, Margaret Mead, at the Indiana University Conference on Paralinguistics and Kinesics, having listened to the papers and discussions, tried to describe what the conference was about and to suggest a name for the field, "which in time will include the study of all patterned communication in all modalities, of which linguistics is the most technically advanced. If we had a word for patterned communication in all modalities, it would be useful. I am not enough of a specialist in this field to know what word to use, but many people here, who have looked as if they were on opposite sides of the fence have used the word 'semiotics.' It seems to me the one word, in some form or other, that has been used by people arguing from quite different positions."

Despite some expressed preferences for the word communication and some argument about whether semiotics should be restricted to the nonlinguistic aspects of communication, the organizers of the conference and the editors of its proceedings adopted Margaret Mead's suggestion and incorporated it in the title of the conference proceedings as Ap proaches to Semiotics. In addition, one of the organizers and editors, Thomas A. Sebeok, took this same title for a series of volumes published under his editorship by Mouton from 1969 to 1976. In 1976 he started another series, Advances in Semiotics, published by Indiana University Press.†

Semiotics is a plural formed by analogy from semiotic, Peirce's designation for a general theory of the nature and different kinds of signs. Whether, in adopting semiotics as the designation for the study of culturally patterned communication in all modalities, Sebeok and his соeditors were endorsing Peirce's semiotic rather than Saussure's semiology is not certain. Nevertheless, the apparent convergence between Lévi-Strauss's and Margaret Mead's proposals to bring anthropology within a broader interdisciplinary study of patterned communication is striking both in timing and in content. In view of such consensus it may seem like quibbling to raise the question whether the new field should be called semiology or semiotics. Indeed some scholars have been using the terms interchangeably, while others have tried to synthesize the pioneering insights of Peirce and Saussure into a comprehensive and integrated point of view (Eco, 1976; Jakobson, 1967; Sebeok, 1975). Yet there are many issues in dispute between semiotic and semiological theories of signs that need to be clarified at the present time. In culture theory, particularly, the differences between Radcliffe-Brown and LeviStrauss, between Geertz and Lévi-Strauss, between Victor Turner and Leach, between Goodenough and Schneider, for example, are not just the expression of personal or national prejudices but spring from differences in underlying conceptions of cultures and societies as systems of symbols and meanings. It would help to sharpen and clarify these differences, I believe, if the two most influential theories of signs, Peirce's semiotic and Saussure's semiology, were contrasted as well as compared with respect to some features that are especially relevant for culture theory. Such a comparison and contrast between semiology and semiotic need not be based on a comprehensive and historically detailed study of all writers who have used these terms. For purposes of the present discussion it is sufficient to construct an ideal typical comparison based on Peirce and Saussure and on some of their leading descendants.

* Levi-Strauss's application of Peirce's definition of a sign to tools and exchange is consistent with Peirce's teleological logic of Semiosis. Also see Sahlins (1976), Firth (1973).

†For a historical review of the terms semiotics and semiology see Sebeok (1976), Jakobson (1975).

Underlying similarities between Peircean semiotic and Saussurean semiology are important and have been recognized. Both regarded themselves as pioneers opening up a new field, both aimed at a general theory of signs that would deal with all kinds of signs and symbolsystems, and both analyzed the nature of signs in relational and structural terms rather than as "substances" and "things." Both also regarded linguistic signs as "arbitrary" in the sense that the meanings of such signs generally depend on social conventions and usages rather than on any "natural" connections between the signs and the objects they denote.

The major items in the comparison and the contrast between semiotic and semiology are summarized in Table 1.

The differences between semiotic and semiology are equally important and not so frequently recognized.

In spite of the shared aim of both semiotic and semiology to become general theories of all kinds of sign systems, in actual practice the two theories differ in subject matter and method, in specific concepts and "laws," as well as in epistemology and ontology.

The subject matter of semiology tends to fall in the domains of natural languages, literature, myths and legends, and folk classifications. Semiotic, on the other hand, tends to concentrate on the domains of the formalized languages of mathematics, logic, and the natural seiences; on colloquial speech; and on nonverbal communication, human and animal.

Peirce conceived of semiotic as an "observational science," dependent on the observations and experience of everyday life. In this respect it was a philosophical and normative science, a branch of logic in fact, in contrast to the special sciences, both physical and psychical, which depend for their observations on travel, special instruments, and training. Linguistics, ethnology, psychology, and sociology he classified as special psychical sciences, to which semiotic as "a quasi-necessary" doctrine of signs can be applied (Collected Papers 3.427-30).

Saussurean semiology also makes use of logical analysis, but since its subject matter consists of natural languages, its methods are descriptive and empirical rather than purely theoretical and analytic. In Peirce's classification, semiology could be a special science, a kind of generalized linguistics, dependent on special observation and comparison, rather than a philosophical science like semiotic.

These differences in subject matter and method between semiology and semiotic can be summarized in terms of a third important difference: that semiology is language-centered, while semiotic is interested in the process of communication by signs of all kinds—a process Peirce named semiosis.

The language-centeredness of semiology is based on three assumptions: (1) That language is the most important of all sign systems. (2) That all other sign systems presuppose or imply the use of language. (3) That linguistics, as the scientific study of language, offers the best model for the study of all other sign systems (Barthes, 1963; Hymes, 1971; Jakobson, 1971; Lévi-Strauss, 1963).

If these three assumptions are accepted, then a language-centered semiology becomes as broad in scope as Peirce's logic-centered general semiotic, since any kind of sign system, including culture, would then be studied as modeled on language. While this linguistic interpretation of semiology has been seriously proposed by Barthes, among others, the assumptions on which it is based are not self-evident. They need to be taken as hypotheses for discussion and testing, as does the linguistic interpretation of culture.

In one of his letters to Lady Welby, Peirce told her that her concentration on language and on English words was far narrower than his own studies, which "must extend over the whole of general semiotic": "I think that perhaps you are in danger of falling into some error in consequence of limiting your studies so much to language, and among languages to one very peculiar language, as all Aryan languages are; and within that language so much to words" (Welby, Other Dimensions, p.312).

Peirce added that there were only three classes of English words with which he had "a decent acquaintance": "the words of the vernacular of the class of society in which I am placed, the words of philosophical and mathematical terminology," and chemical words—"which can hardly be said to be English or any other Aryan speech, being of a synthetic structure much like those of the tribes of our own brown 'red Indians' " (Other Dimensions, p.313).

In contrast to such a narrow concentration on the meaning of words in one language, Peirce urged a broader science of semiotic that will also study all kinds of signs—including icons, indices, and symbols— and their relations to their objects as well as to their interpretants. Peirce brought the comparative study of linguistic signs in different languages and of equations, graphs, and diagrams within the scope of his general semiotic, but he regarded the different linguistic forms by which a concept was signified, or an object designated, as "inessential accidents" like the skins of an onion. What was essential was that a thought have some possible expression for some possible interpreter (Collected Papers 4.6).

The semiological and the semiotic analyses of signs are both relational and structural. This is quite explicit in both Saussure and in Peirce.

In his search for the basic data for linguistic analysis, Saussure rejected the position that there are given "objects," "things," or "substances" that could serve as the point of departure for linguistics. He insisted instead on the importance of the point of view from which the subject was studied and, in particular, on giving priority to relations: "The more one delves into the material proposed for linguistic study, the more one becomes convinced of this truth, which most particularly— it would be useless to conceal it—makes one pause: that the bond established amongst things is preexistent, in this one area, to the things themselves, and serves to determine them" (quoted in Benveniste, 1971, "Saussure after Half a Century"—italics in the original).

Saussure applied this relational point of view to the analysis of the linguistic sign, which he defined as a relation between an acoustic image and a concept, or, more generally, as a relation between a signifier and a signified (Saussure, Course, part I, chap. 1).

In Peirce's semiotic theory a sign is also defined in relational terms but as a triadic relation rather than a diadic relation, and the definition is intended for any kind of sign, not just for linguistic signs. Peirce's triadic definition of a sign is well known. One version that seems to me especially lucid and succinct is the following: "A sign is in a conjoint relation to the thing denoted and to the mind. If this triple relation is not of a degenerate species, the sign is related to its object only in consequence of a mental association, and depends upon habit. Such signs are always abstract and general, because habits are general rules to which the organism has become subjected. They are, for the most part, conventional or arbitrary. They include all general words, the main body of speech, and any mode of conveying a judgment" (Collected Papers 3.360).

Peirce called such signs "symbols" to distinguish them from signs whose relation to their objects were of a direct nature and did not depend on a mental association. If the sign signifies its object solely by virtue of being really connected with it, as with physical symptoms, meteorological signs, and a pointing finger, Peirce calls such a sign an index. A sign which stands for something merely because it resembles it Peirce called an icon. Geometrical diagrams, maps, paintings, are in this sense icons although they may also have conventional and indexicai features as well.

The difference between a diadic and a triadic definition of the sign leads to other important differences. Benveniste has pointed out some confusions in Saussure's conception of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign because his concentration on the relation between signifier and signified slighted the object denoted, although in reality, "Saussure was always thinking of the representation of the real object (although he spoke of the 'idea') and of the evidently unnecessary and unmotivated character of the bond which united the sign to the thing signified" (Benveniste, 1971, "The Nature of the Linguistic Sign").

Eco, and others, have explained Saussure's slighting of the object as springing from his giving primacy to the study of codes, of langue, over the study of the messages or parole (Eco, 1976:60). It is also possible that Saussure's emphasis on "objects," "things," and "substances" as determined by relations rather than regarding them as preexisting "givens" influenced his attitude towards naming and denotation.

In any case, Peirce, who was a major contributor to the development of a logic of relations, felt no compulsion to omit objects from his definition of a sign. On the contrary, "objects" enter essentially into his definition of a sign and into many of his classifications of signs. "A Sign or Representanten, is a First which stands in such a genuine triadic relation to a Second, called its Object, as to be capable of determining a Third, called its Interprétant to assume the same triadic relation to its Object in which it stands itself to the same Object" (Peirce [Buchler] 1955:100).

I would suggest that Peirce was able to include objects in his relational analysis of signs and sign processes or semiosis because in his logic of relations, or relatives, he regarded objects as whatever was denoted by the subject of a relational statement. If such a statement contained two subjects, the relation was dyadic; if three subjects, then the relation was triadic, if ո subjects, then the relation was n-adic.

From Peirce's logical point of view, the ontological status of the "objects" denoted by the subjects of the statement is the same whatever their number.

Peirce's ontology of "objects" is not, however, simply one of logical or conceivable "objects"—although these are included. His ontology contains as well the "real" objects of the external world in two senses: (1) That such objects are indicated or denoted by the subjects of the statements as indexicai signs. Without the indices we would not know what we are talking about, no matter how detailed our verbal descriptions or graphic our maps and diagrams. A proposition would then become a predicate with blanks for subjects. The object of a sign is "that with which (the sign presupposes) an acquaintance in order to convey some further information concerning it" (Peirce [Buchler] 1955:100; Collected Papers 3.414-24). (2) Peirce distinguishes between the "immediate object" of a sign and its "dynamical object." The latter is the object as it will eventually be determined by a community of scientific investigators, while the "immediate object" is the object that an index calls to the immediate attention of an interpreter. "Look, it's raining!" would usually send the listener to the window to see the immediate object of the statement, while meteorologists' reports would be concerned with the dynamical object (Peirce, ibid.).

The epistemological differences between semiology and semiotic are as striking as their differences with respect to the ontology of "objects." I shall confine my comments on these to the roles of the empirical ego or subject in both theories.

Lévi-Strauss has accepted Ricoeur's characterization of structuralism as "Kantism without a transcendental subject," but neither he nor Ricoeur have indicated the role of the empirical subject. Although LéviStrauss declared in his 1960 Inaugural Address that anthropology is "a conversation of man with man," he has been accused of neglecting just those face-to-face interactions considered essential for fieldwork by many social anthropologists (e.g., Geertz, 1973, "The Cerebral Savage").

Some of Lévi-Strauss's formulations frequently seem to justify such charges. If "the myths think themselves in me" and I do not think them, then there is "decentering" of the empirical ego in structural and semiological anthropology in favor of a centering on signs and symbols.

Fortes (1967) has suggested an interesting interpretation of the difference between Lévi-Strauss and Radcliffe-Brown that bears on this epistemological point. Lévi-Strauss's structural analysis, Fortes says, is "message-oriented" while Radcliffe-Brown's, and that of British social anthropology, is "actor-oriented."

Fortes attributes the source of the general distinction between "message-oriented" and "action-oriented" analysis to an article of Jakobson's. Drawing on Bohr's complementarity principle, and on Ruesch, MacKay, Cherry, and others, Jakobson distinguishes between two kinds of observers; the first of these is outside the system, "the most detached and external onlooker," and having no knowledge of the code, acts as a cryptoanalyst and attempts to break the code through a scrutiny of the messages in Sherlock Holmes fashion.

In linguistics Jakobson regards cryptoanalysis as "merely a preliminary stage toward (the second, which is) an internal approach to the language studies, when the observer becomes adjusted to the native speakers and decodes messages in their mother tongue through the medium of its code" (Jakobson, 1971:575). Such an observer becomes a "participant observer" who is placed within the system.

Fortes undoubtedly saw in the two kinds of observers, the cryptoanalyst and the participant observer, the difference between LéviStrauss and Radcliffe-Brown, respectively, and possibly that between French and British anthropology in general. Jakobson does not himself make such an application of the distinction, although some wellknown criticism of Lévi-Strauss as a poor fieldworker (e.g., by MayburyLewis) and Lévi-Strauss's description of his dramatic silent encounter with the Mundé in Tristes Tropiques would seem to lend plausibility to such criticism.

The dismissal of Lévi-Strauss as a poor fieldworker is much too easy a polemical tactic, as it was when used against Radcliffe-Brown by Firth, Needham, and others. Functionalist social anthropology and participant observation in face-to-face interactions are accepted by Lévi-Strauss, especially as practiced by Mauss and the British school of social anthropology (Lévi-Strauss, 1960). That, however, is for him only the foundation on which to erect a structural and semiological anthropology. Fieldwork provides the empirical data—including native terminologies and texts—from which structural and semiological analysis constructs the unconscious categories and structures behind the level of observed facts. In these constructions the existence of subjects and their face-to-face interactions with one another and the anthropologist are presupposed, but are abstracted from in structural analysis.

In a metaphor reminiscent of Kroeber, Lévi-Strauss calls structural anthropology the astronomy of the social sciences, since it studies societies and cultures at a distance through the telescope, rather than with microscopic observation of face-to־face community studies. In Lévi-Strauss's semiological telescope everything looks like sign and symbol, whose hidden meanings, however, are not observable through a telescope or a microscope. They must be deciphered by the French Sherlock Holmes from the fragmentary empirical clues he finds in primitive myths, masks, and marriage practices.

In Peircean semiotic there is no transcendental ego but there is an empirical ego. Peirce's critique of the prevailing Cartesianism of modern philosophy denied that we have the powers of introspection and intuition, of thinking without signs, of universal doubt. One's self is not a thinking substance whose existence is guaranteed by thinking— Je pense, donc je suis. All knowledge of the internal world is derived from hypothetic inferences from knowledge of external facts. "What passes within we only know as it is mirrored in external objects" ("Pearson's Grammar of Science," Peirce [Buchler], 1955).

Becoming aware of an inner world is a developmental process deriving from observation and experience of the external world and of other people. "We first see blue and red things. It is quite a discovery when we find the eye has anything to do with them, and a discovery still more recondite when we learn that there is an ego behind the eye, to which these qualities belong" (Peirce [Buchler], 1955:308).

The ego exists in and is formed from these interactions with the external world and with other people. It is a phase in the dialogue with others and with oneself. "A person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is 'saying to himself,' that is, saying to that other self that is just coming to life in the flow of time. When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language" ("The Essentials of Pragmatism," Peirce [Buchler], 1955:258).

Eco quotes from one of Peirce's early lectures a passage in a somewhat similar vein to support the thesis that semiotics either defines subjects of semiotic acts in terms of semiotic structures or cannot deal with the empirical subjects at all (Eco, 1976:316). This is an unwarranted conclusion to draw from the Peirce passage as well as from Eco's own preceding acceptance of a Peircean sémiotic. Empirical subjects are included in Eco's definition of the field of semiotics and of the subject matter of his book: "In this book semiotics has been provided with a paramount subject matter, semiosis. Semiosis is the process by which empirical subjects communicate, communication processes being made possible by the organization of signification systems" (ibid.).

Why, given such a definition of semiosis, Eco should place the em pirical subject beyond the semiotic threshold is puzzling. By accepting this limit, Eco seems to think that semiotics "fully avoids any risk of idealism" (ibid., p.317).

Peirce did not exclude the empirical subject from his doctrine of semiotic and yet he avoided an idealistic conception of the self. By locating the existence and development of the empirical ego within the process of communication, external and internal, he laid the foundations for a social theory of language, mind, and self, which was developed by William James, John Dewey, G. H. Mead, C. H. Cooley, J. M. Baldwin, Jean Piaget, Charles Morris, and came to be known as "symbolic interactionism" (Parsons, 1968).

Peirce would probably have accepted a good deal of this theory, for he regarded the dictum of the old psychology "which identified the soul with the ego, declared its absolute simplicity, and held that its faculties were names for logical divisions of human activity" as "all unadulterated fancy." He looked instead to a new psychology whose observation of facts "has now taught us that the ego is a mere wave of the soul, a superficial and small feature, that the soul may contain several personalities and is as complex as the brain itself, and that the faculties, while not exactly definable and not absolutely fixed, are as real as are the different convolutions of the cortex" (Peirce [Buchler] 1955:52).

FOR A SEMIOTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

In retrospect the tilt of culture theory to semiotics and semiology in the 1960s was no accident. It was a logical next step that followed important developments in anthropological theory as well as in other disciplines. By the 1950s some anthropologists and sociologists had recognized and explicitly formulated the concepts of culture and society as complementary, quasi-independent and interconnected systems. This formulation represented a contraction of the long-standing definitions of culture and society as all-inclusive and rival concepts. The more restricted formulations tended to define "culture" as some kind of symbol system, and "society" as sets of social relations among individual actors or among groups of actors. The specification of what kinds of symbols systems cultures were made of and how these were related to social action, to individual personalities, and to ecological conditions began to be explored in the 1960s and 1970s in the work of Lévi-Strauss, Geertz, Schneider, Leach, and Victor Turner, among others. These explorations in culture theory coincide with and draw upon a veritable explosion in the general theories of signs and symbols, and particularly in the semiology of Saussure and in Peirce's semiotic, both of which have become international and interdisciplinary movements.

Lévi-Strauss has acknowledged Saussure as a source for his semiology and structural anthropology, and he also acknowledges Jakobson and Trubetzkoy, structural linguistics generally, nonmetrical mathematics, cybernetics, and the theory of games and much else. The Indiana University Conference on Paralinguistics and Kinesics encompassed a similar sweep of disciplines and specialized developments in psychology, medicine, philosophy of language, ethnology, literary and art criticism, and other fields. This interdisciplinary scope of discussion was also characteristic of the 1960s conferences and publications on semiotics and semiology in the Soviet Union, Poland, France, Italy, Israel, the United States, and elsewhere (Sebeok, 1975).

As a result of these developments culture theory now confronts two major options—whether to become a branch of semiology, as LéviStrauss, Barthes, and Leach have proposed, or to follow a Peircean semiotics, as Margaret Mead, Sebeok, and Geertz have done to some extent. The choice between these options, and the consequences of each choice, can be clarified by an ideal-typical comparison of semiology and semiotics as general theories of signs, as well as through a historical study of their associations with culture theory.

The publication of some of Peirce's letters to Lady Welby and other selections from his writings in the appendixes to Ogden and Richards's Meaning of Meaning brought his semiotic theory to the notice of anthropologists as early as 1923. Malinowski, e.g., whose essay on "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages" was also included as an appendix to the Ogden and Richards volume, adapted the use of Ogden and Richards's semantic triangle, which was a simplified version of Peirce's semiotic triad. Lloyd Warner in turn extended the triangle to his analysis of Murngin totemism (1937) and then to his study of Yankee City memorial and tercentenary ceremonies (1959).

Semiotic tends to develop a theory of signs that is philosophical and normative ("quasi-necessary"), takes as its primary subject matter the formalized languages of logic, mathematics, and the special sciences, with some illustrations from the vernacular. It defines the nature of signs and sign processes in terms of an irreducible triadic relation of sign-object-interpretant, and it includes within this analysis externally real objects as well as empirical subjects or egos. Peirce has made his definitions of the sign and of semiosis sufficiently abstract and general to apply to cases of nonhuman semiosis, if there should be such, as well as to mixed cases of "natural signs" of weather, diseases, etc., where there are no utterers.

At the opposite pole, semiology develops a general theory of signs that tends to be a descriptive and comparative study of "natural Ianguages" and their literatures, oral and written. Defining the linguistic sign in terms of a dyadic relation between signifier and signified, it can find no place within its analysis for either externally given objects or for empirical subjects, although the existence of both empirical objects and egos are presupposed.

Lévi-Strauss's structural analyses of South and North American Indian myths and legends showed the possibilities of a semiological anthropology. He has also proposed application of the approach to other culture domains—kinship and marriage, ritual, economic exchange, cuisine—within a unified theory of communication. Jakobson (1971), who approves of that proposal, also points out that it requires different levels of analysis for different cultural domains. Boon and Schneider (1976) have shown how these different levels operate in Lévi-Strauss's treatments of myth and kinship.

Barthes (1963), Leach (1976), and others have interpreted semiology as a generalized linguistics and have suggested how it can be applied to food, clothes, furniture, architecture, traffic signals, as "Ianguages" and "codes."

Without wishing to deny the fruitful ingenuity of a semiological analysis of culture, or accepting Sperbers criticisms of Lévi-Strauss as a semiologist, I would urge the application of Peircean semiotic to the problems of culture theory. In keeping with Peirce's ethics of terminoiogy, I suggest that we call such explorations "semiotic anthropology." In one important respect, at least, a semiotic theory of signs has a distinet advantage over a semiological theory: it can deal with some of the difficult problems generated by acceptance of the complementarity of cultural and social systems. Because semiology limits itself to a theory of signification and linguistic codes, it cannot deal with the problems of how the different cultural "languages" are related to empirical objects and egos, to individual actors and groups. The existence of such extralinguistic relations is, of course, recognized by semiologists, but the study of them is relegated to other disciplines—psychology, sociology, economics, geography, and history. They do not enter directly and essentially into a semiological analysis.

In a semiotic anthropology, on the contrary, it is possible to deal with such extralinguistic relations within the framework of semiotic theory, because a semiotic anthropology is a pragmatic anthropology. It contains a theory of how systems of signs are related to their meanings as well as to the objects designated and to the experience and behavior of the sign users.

Peircean semiotic is a "pragmatic semiotic," as Morris aptly calls it (1970: chap. II). Morris refers particularly to the important point that "pragmatism, more than any other philosophy, has embedded semiotic in a theory of action or behavior. The relation of a sign to what it signifies always involves the mediation of an interprétant, and an interpretant is an action or tendency to action of an organism" (1970: p.40).

This formulation of the pragmatic aspect of semiotic reflects the extensions added by James, Dewey, Mead, C. I. Lewis, and Morris himself. It has, however, a foundation in Peirce's formulation of the fundamental maxim of pragmatism: "The most perfect account of a concept that words can convey will consist in a description of the habit which that concept is calculated to produce. But how otherwise can a habit be described than by a description of the kind of action to which it gives rise, with the specification of the conditions and of the motive?" (in Morris, 1970:24).

This particular formulation of the pragmatic maxim, as Morris notes, coincides with Peirce's definition of the final interpretant of intellectual concepts and is therefore an essential component of his semiotic. Peirce also distinguishes two other kinds of interpretants, the emotional interpretant, which is a kind of first impression created by the sign in the mind of the interpreter, and the energetic interprétant, which is an interpreter's direct reaction to a sign, expressed in verbal or nonverbal behavior.

There are two other pragmatic features implied by Peirce's semiotic theory of signs: the very definition of a sign in terms of a triadic relation of sign, object, and interprétant includes an essential reference to the sign user. Similarly Peirce's conception of sign processes (semiosis) as a process of growth and development of signs from other signs depends on the persuasive force of signs in the mind of the interpreter.

"Pragmatics" has gotten a bad name in contrast to the more rigorous "syntactics" and "semantics" because it has not until recently been greatly formalized and also because it has been regarded as a vague residual category. As a result, there have emerged two counter tendencies aiming to redefine "pragmatics": (1) as a study of indexicai signs (Jakobson, 1971; Silverstein, 1976), (2) as a formalization of a theory of indexical signs (Montague, 1974). It is to be hoped that these useful recent developments will not lead us to abandon Peirce's broader conception of a pragmatic semiotic or discourage its application to the problems of a semiotic anthropology. For as the reclusive Yankee Yogi explained to Lady Welby, a new scientific field, such as the study of signs, can be best delimited in terms of a community of scholars prepared to devote themselves to that field.

"I smiled at your speaking of my having been "kindly interested' in your work, as if it were a divergence—I should say a deviation—from my ordinary line of attention. ... It has never been in my power to study anything—mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, meteorology, except as a study of semiotic. . . . How . . . rarely I have met any who cares to understand my studies, I need not tell you. . ." (Welby, Other Dimensions, pp.304-305).

"I am satisfied that in the present state of the subject, there is but one general science of the nature of Signs. If we were to separate it into two,—then according to my idea that a 'science'—as scientific men use the word, implies a social group of devotees, we should be in imminent danger of erecting two groups of one member each! Whereas if you and I stick together, we are, at least, two of us. . . . We shall have to try to seduce one of the linguists to our more fundamental study" (Peirce, Collected Papers 8.378).

In the 65 or more years since Peirce wrote these words, the "dialogical" community of scholars devoting themselves to semiotic studies has multiplied many-fold. There are many signs that some members of this community are prepared to explore the application of Peirce's quasinecessary doctrine of signs to the problems of anthropology.

REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. RECENT SYMBOLIC THEORIES OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY

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II. CULTURE AND SOCIETY AS COMPLEMENTARY CONCEPTS

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III. THE GENERAL THEORY OF SIGNS : PEIRCE'S SEMIOTIC AND SAUSSURE'S SEMIOLOGY

I. Philosophical Theories

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Eco, U. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Greenberg, J. H. 1957. "Language as a Sign System." In Essays in Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Tarski, A. 1956. "The Establishment of Scientific Semantics" and "The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages." In Logic, Semantics, and Metamathematics. London: Oxford University Press.

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2. The General Theory of Signs: Linguistic and Literary Theories

Barthes, R. 1970[1963]. Elements of Semiology. Boston: Beacon Press.

Benveniste, E. 1971. Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press.

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Boon, J. 1972. From Symbolism to Structuralism. New York: Harper and Row.

Burke, K. 1966. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Carroll, J. В., ed. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Chomsky, N. 1968. Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

Friedrich, P. 1975. "The Lexical Symbol and Its Relative Non-arbitrariness." In Linguistics and Anthropology: In Honor of C. F. Voegelin, M. Dale Kinkade, Kenneth L. Hale, and Oswald Werner, eds. Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press. Pp. 199-247.

Greenberg, J. H. 1957. Essays in Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Greimas, Α., ed. 1970. Sign, Language, Culture. The Hague: Janua Linguam Ser., Maior 1.

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Jakobson, R. 1975. "Coup d'oeil sur le développement de la semiotique." Bloomington, Ind.: Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies.

Kristeva, J.; Rey-Debove, J.; and Umiker, D. J. 1971. Essays in Semiotics. The Hague: Mouton.

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Silverstein, M. 1972. "Linguistic Theory: Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics." In Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 1, B. J. Siegel, et al., eds. Pp.349-82.

______, ed. 1971. Whitney on Language. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Weinreich, U. 1968. "Semantics and Semiotics." In International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences 14:164-69.

Wells, R. 1967. "Distinctively Human Semiotic." Social Science Information 6:103-24.

IV. FOR A SEMIOTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

Firth, R. 1973. Symbols: Public and Private. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Fortes, M. 1966. "Totem and Taboo." Proceedings of the RAI.

Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

_____. 1974. "From the Natives' Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding." Bull. Amer. Acad, of Arts and Sciences, Oct.

Hymes, D., and Gumperz, J. J., eds. 1970. Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Speaking. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Jakobson, R. 1971. Selected Writings II. The Hague: Mouton. Especially "Linguistics and Communication Theory" (1961), "Linguistics in Relation to Other Sciences" (1967), and "Language in Relation to Other Communication Systems" (1968).

Lévi-Strauss, С. 1963, 1976. Structural Anthropology, vols. I and II. New York: Basic Books.

Malinowski, B. 1923. "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages." In The Meaning of Meaning, С. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, eds. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

Montague, R. 1974. Formal Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Morris, C. W. 1955. Signs, Language and Behavior. New York: Braziller.

_____. 1970. The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy. New York: Braziller.

Munn, N. 1974. Walhiri Iconography. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Peacock, J. 1975. Consciousness and Society. New York: Wiley and Sons.

Sahlins, M. 1976. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schneider, D. M. 1968. "Rivers and Kroeber in the Study of Kinship." In Kinship and Social Organization, W. H. R. Rivers, ed. New York: Humanities Press.

_____. 1976. "Notes Toward a Theory of Culture." In Meaning in Anthropology, K. Basso and H. Selby, eds. Albuquerque: University of New Мехico Press.

Sebeok, T. A. 1972. Perspectives in Zoosemiotics. The Hague: Mouton.

Silverstein, M. 1976. "Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description." In Meaning in Anthropology, K. Basso and H. Selby, eds. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Singer, M. 1972. When a Great Tradition Modernizes. New York: Praeger. Especially "Text and Context in the Study of Hinduism" and "Search for a Great Tradition in Cultural Performances."

_____. 1978. "The Symbolic and Historic Structure of an American Identity." Ethos. In press.

Sperber, D. 1974. Symbolism Reconsidered. London: Cambridge University Press.

Spiro, M. E. 1970. Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Burmese Vicissitudes. New York: Harper and Row.

Staal, J. F. 1971. "What Was Left of Pragmatics in Jerusalem." Language Sciences 14:29-32.

Turner, T. S. 1976. "Narrative Structure and Mythopoesis." Ms.

Wallis, M. 1975. Arts and Signs. Bloomington, Ind.: Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies.

Warner, W. L. 1958[1937]. A Black Civilization. New York: Harper and Row.

_____. 1959. The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans. New Haven: Yale University Press.