“The Time of the Sign”
Beyond Structural Anthropology
Discipline cultural scientists never seem to tire of writing about the problem of imposing our analytical categories on the things we study and thereby failing to understand the things in themselves. This warning places ethnographers and critics under great pressure to tell stories of authentic cultural experiences, to testify that they did not fail to understand the “true” existence, the “essence” of “their” people, “their” historical period, “their” text. We are not trying to deny the possibility of caring about and getting to know cultural productions other than one’s own. But we have taken an opposite position, on the side of the cultural productions themselves, which we see as originating as addresses to cultural others. Further, we are suggesting that the pressure to get to the heart of culture has introduced into the discipline humanities and social sciences a division that propels them ever further away from one another and from their subject matter areas. This fragmenting division separates cultural studies into conservative, particularistic versions of culture on the one hand and studies of the creative activities that occur on the fringes of culture on the other. By a perverse logic that is typical of disciplined thought, when we are discussing our own cultural achievements, we refer to the creative energies on the fringes as the avant-garde or the “cutting edge.” Referring to cultural others we speak of inauthenticity, disorganization, co-optation, absorption, and ruin.
We have thus far discussed the question of immanence and self-deception from an abstract and theoretical standpoint, showing in chapter 1 how the appearance of the sign vitiates disciplined attempts to get “to the things themselves” (see also D. MacCannell 1973). In chapter 3 we noted the theoretically illusory quality of immanence of meaning and the way it establishes a mythical base for modern social relations. In this chapter we want to discuss some of the consequences the quest for immanence has had on our disciplines and suggest some new working styles that are produced by an alternate, semiotic approach to the same materials.
Comment on Anthropology
Anthropology is a dialectical tension of center and periphery. During the most recent phase of anthropology’s development, the center has been the positive pole of the dialectic. The system of Western values, of which anthropology is a part, reached its full expansion, and at the same time, our ethnographic descriptions of non-Western peoples attained their highest refinement.1 These two developments would seem to cancel each other out. We know this is the hope of some anthropologists, whose entry into the field is motivated as much by a desire to question their own culture as to learn the secrets of another. But the hoped-for mutual cancellation has not happened in fact. Once relocated in an alien culture at the edge of their own world, anthropologists are required by their discipline to make a textual preservation of the core of cultural values, key symbols, and central themes they find there. Operating in this way, anthropology has built a bulwark around our civilization, a cultural equivalent to the Maginot Line or the Great Wall, a frame of tightly described, “unchanging” little societies that mark the limits of our “Western” world.
We do not wish to be read as suggesting that this structural sublimation of the rest by the West was intentionally produced by anthropologists. It was the result of a larger movement of history. At the level of individual research and writing, it appears as an accident involving the entire community of scholars who inadvertently defined their own culture not by ethnographic observation but by opposition to the “primitive” world. Now anthropologists are beginning to see themselves as agents of the Western system and to read their own acts as signs of a disturbed political consciousness.2 But this kind of reflexive self-understanding remains limited to a few anomalous reports and journals that oppose themselves to the mainstream. This particular binary opposition generates liberal assessments like Charles de Gaulle’s comment that the only real issue in the world is the global conflict of European whites versus the colored peoples. Interestingly, this opposition is always resolved hierarchically and rationally or rather than mythically (a/b→c).
In the former headquarters of anthropological thought, in Cambridge, Columbia, Chicago, and Berkeley, one finds little review of anthropological symbols and themes as applications of modern values.3 Once again, the center is set above the periphery by transference of creative energies to the front lines, while holding controlling techniques and assumptions above critical examination.4
For several decades, then, anthropology has “stabilized” the perimeter of our world, at least on paper, by constructing models of the bordering cultures, models that are subject to our scientific manipulation.5 On assuming the Chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France, Lévi-Strauss remarked:
One of the peculiarities of the small societies which we study is that each constitutes, as it were, a ready-made experiment, because of its relative simplicity and the limited number of variables required to explain its functioning.... By comparison with the natural sciences, we benefit from an advantage and suffer an inconvenience; we find our experiments already prepared but they are uncontrollable. It is therefore understandable that we attempt to replace them with models, systems of symbols which preserve the characteristic properties of the experiment, but which we can manipulate. [1967:25-26]
In other words, anthropological research paralleled and extended on a symbolic level the real historical campaign to stabilize the Third World by linking Western political and economic thought to manipulate foreign policy and eventually to military intervention.6 Of course, the lesson of the last decade is that we can no longer assume that the center automatically dominates the periphery in any area of social life. The reversals suffered by the West in South East Asia and the Middle East are only the most visible signs of a total reorganization of modern life that is changing everything from communities and domestic relations to academic disciplines.7
ETHNOSEMIOTIC THEORY AND THE “NEW ETHNOGRAPHY”
In the current confrontation of the “rest vs. the West,” the structures that are emerging on a multi-cultural plane—such as the movements within the Western middle class to adopt traits from remote cultures—seem to us to be the most complex and interesting. In this chapter, we argue that the aesthetic, moral, and other interpretative codes that are necessary for communication between cultures in multi-cultural systems are the growing historical base for a new anthropology we are calling ethnosemiotics.8 The name is less important than the new form of inquiry and understanding designated by it: specifically a reversed polarity for anthropology which aims in the direction of a synthesis of center and periphery. We see in this synthesis, if accomplished on a historical and concrete cultural level, not merely the possibility for adaptation and survival but for transcendence, that is, the potential to develop new forms of society.
Ethnosemiotic studies include (1) research on the production of culture as interpretation motivated by social differences;9 (2) turning existing anthropological insight derived from the study of remote groups back onto our own social life; and (3) continued discovery of new perspectives on “Third” and “Fourth World” peoples which have developed alongside of, often in opposition to, the official anthropological version.10 This type of anthropology is establishing itself, not always in the traditionally strong graduate departments, as a sometimes unruly, always energetic new force.
During the same period of the initial appearance of the New Ethnography, semiotics invaded anthropology as a series of reports written in a formidable, self-conscious, technical language.11 Semiotic discourse with anthropology hid, or rather it did not disclose, its revolutionary program at least to the extent that the theoretical, historical, and logical relations between semiotics and the New Ethnography have gone unnoticed. By now, it should be clear even to intellectual bystanders that semiotics has seized and secured the periphery. It is not, however, readying itself to take over the center of anthropology or the center of culture as its domain. Rather, it is designating the periphery as the positive pole of the anthropological dialectic, and it is developing in the interstices between cultures and between disciplines.
There are theoretical as well as political reasons for the precise form of the recent rapid development of semiotic anthropology, or ethnosemiotics. Consider Charles S. Peirce’s (1955:88-89) search for meaning in differentiation, movements, ambiguity, and tension:
[T]hat which particularly characterizes sudden changes of perception is a shock.... Now this shock is quite unmistakable. It is more particularly to changes and contrasts of perception that we apply the word ‘experience’. We experience vicissitudes, especially. We cannot experience the vicissitude without experiencing the perception which undergoes the change It is the compulsion, the absolute constraint upon us to think otherwise than we have been thinking that constitutes experience.... This is present in even such a rudimentary fragment of experience as a simple feeling. For such a feeling always has a degree of vividness, high or low; and this vividness is a sense of commotion, an action and reaction, between our soul and the stimulus. [I]n the endeavour to find some idea which does not involve the element of struggle, we imagine a universe that consists of a single quality that never changes....
Note that Peiroe’s negative characterization of an “unchanging universe consisting of a single quality” corresponds to a pre-semiotic ideal of “primitive” societies as discrete, undifferentiated, and timeless.
Without apologizing for the historical distortion, we have suggested that Jean-Jacques Rousseau provided us with the clearest post-structural vision.12 Rousseau asserts that one of our highest cultural achievements, language, and poetic language in particular, originates in absolute human difference. All the elements of Peirce’s analytic of meaning (shock, difference, a new experience, commotion of feelings, emergence of ideas) are found in this famous passage in Rousseau’s (1966:13) Essay on the Origin of Language:
Upon meeting others, a savage man will initially be frightened. Because of his fear he sees the others as bigger and stronger than himself. He calls them giants. After many experiences, he recognizes that these so-called giants are neither bigger nor stronger than he. Their stature does not approach the idea he had initially attached to the word giant. So he invents another name common to them and to him, such as the name man, for example, and leaves giant to the fictitious object that had impressed him during his illusion. That is how the figurative word is born before the literal word, when our gaze is held in passionate fascination; and how it is that the first idea it conveys to us is not that of the truth.13
The domain of ethnosemiotics is the study of interpretations that are generated by cultural differentiation. When cultures change or collide with one another or when their illogicality is exposed, the shocks and disjunctions lead to creative activities: explanations, excuses, accounts, myths. (We are using creative here in a non-evaluative way—the bringing into being of something new, a new evil as well as good, a new weakness as well as strength.) These interpretations, if accepted at the group level, may themselves eventually become aspects of culture: that is, they may form into a substantial basis for cultural differences that must be interpreted in turn. This is the ongoing synthesis of center and periphery, the engine of perpetual cultural production. Close attention to these matters in concrete cultural contexts leads automatically to a radical transformation of ethnographic method, which has already begun. In the New Ethnography, interpretation, which at one time was almost forbidden, is promoted to a central position, and ethnographic description, once central, is displaced to the status of the framework for interpretation. Increasingly, one finds that anthropologists of the generation following Lévi-Strauss, Victor Turner, and Clifford Geertz are working the edges between the differentiations of culture, interpreting the interpretations they find there.
From the standpoint of the New Ethnography and ethnosemiotics, it is especially ironic that some anthropologists should continue to cling so tightly to the notion of the “noble savage” and the myth of cultural authenticity as existing elsewhere. The concrete conditions of anthropological fieldwork have always located ethnographers on the edges, fringes, and borders of cultures. They work detached from their own group, never fully accepted into the group they are studying. From a Rousseauian standpoint, ethnographers are automatically situated to know culture in the process of its becoming if they would but remind themselves that they are in the same situation as the “savage”: “... so he invents another name common to them and to him, such as the name man, for example....” Still, some persist in the belief that ethnography is an authentic reproduction of an original culture, not merely a member of a class of cultural productions. The New Ethnography and ethnosemiotics are conscious of themselves as method, a way of framing up culture, and they are aware of the colleagueship of many others in this process. Interpreting culture may be the only social freedom we have ever possessed. Ethnosemiotics understands that culture is not natural in the way that a geological formation is natural; it can never be authentic; it dies at precisely the moment it stops questioning its own existence.
An appealing recent example of the New Ethnography is Jean-Paul Dumont’s The Headman and I, which is a reflection of his field experience among the Panare.14 When Dumont moved in with the Panare, they called him an “Americano.” Rather than accepting this as a harmless fiction, Dumont insisted that he was a Frenchman who wanted to study their language, something the Panare did not understand or accept. In trying to explain that he was not from America, Dumont found out that, for the Panare, Americano had only trivial geographical connotations and was really their term for missionary, a discovery that only served to increase his frustrations and his desire to enlighten the Panare about his true identity and purpose.
The emotional and methodological intensity of this moment stems from Dumont’s insight that his understanding of the Panare and their culture is necessarily a reciprocal function of their understanding of him and his culture. As often happens in these situations, the breakthrough occurred by an accident that Dumont seized upon, motivated, as he put it, “by a practical and spontaneous thought that ... Lévi-Strauss would call ‘savage’ ” (1976:13). For several days, the men of the village had been making palm leaf ornaments for a ritual headdress and cape. The finery was made during the day, worn at a night ceremony, and discarded the next morning. On one of these days, watching the men make the ornaments, Dumont thought he saw a peculiar variant in which the Christian cross motif appeared. He asked about it. The Panare, shy at first, eventually admitted that they were, in effect, re-cycling Christian sacred symbolism in a lightly ironic way. What is most interesting about their admission is their interpretation of Dumont’s reaction to it. For it was then that they realized, as a result of their own skills in ethnosemiotic interpretation, that because Dumont did not take the sign of the cross any more seriously than they did, because he did not become angry or moralistic, he must have been telling the truth all along: he was not an “Americano.”
Dumont has aligned ethnographic performance with ethnographic experience, re-centering both on the intersection of cultures. His study is electric with naturally occurring interpretations (his, the Panare’s, other’s) that arc across cultural differences. There is a great deal of potential in this research design, a great deal more than in conventional ethnography, for the production of knowledge that is valuable in the modern world as it evolves in the direction of a single system. But it should not go unremarked that the goals of traditional ethnography are not necessarily suppressed by this approach. It was only after the Panare became genuinely curious about Paris and French family structure that they began to explain in detail the intricacies of their own to Dumont. In sum, Dumont has provided us with an ethnosemiotic of a system of synchronic differentiations (himself and our culture, the Panare and their culture, the Creoles who live in the region of the Panare) and the ways these differentiations form the meaning of Panare life and the anthropological field experience.
In another of the new ethnographies, Paul Rabinow has explicated a complex series of diachronic differentiations. Rabinow’s (1975) Symbolic Domination is foremost a study of Sidi Lahcen, a Moroccan village in the Atlas Mountains—but one also senses there the quiet presence of Sartre and Ricoeur. Sidi Lahcen claims both its name and divine grace from a minor Muslim saint who lived in the seventeenth century. Rabinow pulls the Moroccans’ interpretation of their own situation into the center of the ethnography before developing his analysis. He found that a continuing, literalistic interpretation of religious beliefs, during a history of complex socio-political change (e.g., the nineteenth-century change to a French legal system), was plunging these people ever deeper into raging alienation.15 According to Rabinow (1975:99), “the symbolic formulations which are the vehicles of meaning changed much less rapidly than did the material conditions.... This is a source of both the continuity and profound malaise and disharmony in Moroccan society.” It is worthwhile to render this structure as a formula in order to manipulate it theoretically: Alienation (A) is produced when the material conditions (MC) change more rapidly than cultural symbolism (CS).
Rabinow does not go as far as one might wish in following his Sartrean impulses back to their Marxist roots; to the negation of alienation in revolution (R). He has, however, opened some interesting theoretical possibilities via the simple inversion of the structure he describes:
Or, cultural symbolism that changes more rapidly than material conditions leads to revolution. To have moved beyond ethnography in this way would have carried Rabinow and the people of Sidi Lahcen outside the framework of their Moroccan experience, a move Rabinow, at least, was unwilling to make.16 Still, there was a close brush here between revolutionary and ethnographic praxis—something that often happens in the new ethnography.
D. MacCannell selected tourists for his research topic because they intentionally violate and transcend cultural unity and isolation.17 They are time travelers and space travelers par excellence, and they like to think of themselves as having a privileged point of view for the interpretation of historical and social phenomena. In other words, he followed the tourists both in the empirical, and in the scholarly, sense of basing his work on their semiotic of cultural differences. He found them to be less disciplined than anthropologists are supposed to be, but more dispersed and better financed. He even found some anthropologists among them. From following them he learned a great deal about the self-images traditional groups construct for tourists (and anthropologists) and the ways tourists interpret these images. Now we are beginning to study some of the ways touristic imagery influences group structure: the ways Amish and Basques have transformed themselves into a traditional-group-for-others, for example, or the ways Eskimos interpret the sculpture they make for sale to tourists.18
The new ethnography that we have been citing has departed from the heart of culture in order to attend to historical disruptions and the relations between groups.19 In other words, it is ethnography that has been re-located and fundamentally re-designed for the modern collective experience, an ethnography of difference. An extensive series of ethnosemiotic studies would stand in sharp contrast to the aggregation of discrete cultural analyses we now have. Such a series would follow the contours of the evolving system of relationships between cultures and reproduce the emerging global cultural synthesis as it is occurring. The work involves comparison, but not mere comparison of the sort that is accomplished by the free play of Western theoretical imagination. Rather, it involves the study of living comparisons—the concrete communication and interpretive links between groups. Some of the implications of this transformation can be grasped by viewing the United States from a post-ethnosemiotic standpoint. Far from being a wasteland, as it appears in the current ethnographic atlas, it would be one of the richest areas for research on the ways the different peoples interact with one another in their arts, folklore, and politics, and the effect of these interpretations on the life of the groups.20 Some groups, for example, Middle Americans and the Establishment, are pure products of interpretation.
The Roots of Ethnosemiotics in Anthropology
Tendencies toward a general theory of cultural differentiation surface from time to time in exciting and anomalous texts on interstitial phenomena and intercultural relations. Foremost among these are Marcel Mauss’s (1967) study of The Gift and Robert Redfields’s (1941) comparative community studies in Yucatán. Mauss and Redfield went beyond merely aggregative comparison of the sort that can now be routinely performed by manipulating the Human Relations Area Files and began to explicate the general form of the communicative relationship between groups. Lee Drummond has brought this line to its highest degree of refinement in his recent studies of Carib ethnicity. Their comparative ethnographic investigations are technically pre-semiotic in that they are cultural analogues to the situation described by Peirce and Rousseau on philosophical and literary levels.
The greatest barrier to the continued development of ethnosemiotic theory is the idealized anthropological version of its subject matter, which holds it to be small-scale, unchanging, isolated, primitive societies. Mauss’s most quoted remarks on anthropological subject matter and methods make him appear to have fully embraced the prevailing rhetoric of cultural isolation. For example, Merleau-Ponty (1964:115) quoting Mauss approvingly, states: “ ‘What is true,’ Mauss writes, ‘is not a prayer or a law but the Melanesian on such and such an island....’” In the same paragraph where the famous sentence appears, Mauss (1967:78-79) placed greater emphasis on “complex beings,” “organized societies and their sub-groups,” and collective “ideas and sentiments as interpretations” and “motive forces.” Mauss sketched the outlines of a general ethnosemiotic theory in The Gift; but he also made it possible for us to ignore it by attending exclusively to his remarks on cultural integrity.
The same could be said for Redfield except that he had an almost perverse tendency to deflect attention away from his own most important contributions. Redfield (1953:12) wrote: “The precivilized society was like the present-day primitive society in those characteristics—isolation, smallness, homogeneity, persistence in the common effort to make a way of living under relatively stable circumstances....” Red-field’s great insight, of course, was that the sort of reflective self-consciousness that is so evident a feature of modern civilization cannot have emerged in isolated, culturally homogeneous communities. He analyzes the relationship between folk and urban centers in the same way that structural linguists would eventually come to analyze the relationship of subject and predicate—as the basis for the liberation of the subject from the immediate situation and the use of the imagination to create new cultural worlds.21 Redfield does not carry his speculations as far as we are suggesting we should carry ours, to the point of asking if culture itself is a form of reflexive self-consciousness (interpretation) which requires differentiation and relations between communities and groups.
We have only gone so far as to arrive, once again, at Rousseau’s position—that there is only one culture of which the various “cultures” of the world are but partial expressions. This is the view which is more or less explicit in all semiotic anthropologies in structural anthropology, for example.22 Recall that Lévi-Strauss (1967:16) used no less an occasion than his assuming the new Chair of Anthropology at the Collège de France to advance the claim that anthropology is only a subfield of general semiotics. One would expect a decline of the particularistic view of culture to occur with increasing acceptance of structuralism. Echoing Redfield on the theme of global synthesis, Lévi-Strauss (1967:24) writes: “Existing societies are the result of great transformations occurring in mankind at certain moments in prehistory and an uninterrupted chain of real events relates these facts to those which we can observe.” When we give structural anthropology a close reading, however, rather than discovering the expected decline in the particularistic viewpoint, we find that the tension between particularism and the “family of man” has reached a crisis stage.
Lévi-Strauss himself is determined to advance the notion that primitive societies are absolutely different from modern societies—that they are isolated, undifferentiated, timeless monads; that they function almost purely as objects of anthropological research. He writes: “the social facts which we study are manifested in societies each of which is a total entity, concrete and cohesive” (1967:24, his emphasis). “In a word,” Lévi-Strauss (1967:47) continues, “we might define these societies as ‘cold’ in that their internal environment neighbors on the zero of historical temperature.” The idea of the Total Social Fact, which is so supple and heuristic in Mauss’s expression of it, has here been literalized, concretized, and perhaps killed-off. And, it should be added, quite selfishly on Lévi-Strauss’s part, for he hardly had time to refill his pen before he began to violate assumptions of cultural totality as they had never before been violated, not even by Mauss.
Here is one of the most troublesome of the dilemmas facing anthropologists today. Lévi-Strauss claims, we think justly, for the most part, to have devised methods that permit us to transcend the limits of Western science in our understanding of cultural others. In Mythologiques, (1970,1973) guided alternately be hermeneutics and semiotics, his interpretation moves with absolute freedom between the myths without concern for the so-called totality of the groups in which they were found. But, as the critics have reminded us (de Man 1967: 46-47; Derrida 1967a: 414ff.), Lévi-Strauss’s viewpoint remains close to that of Western science in that the final interpretation of the myths, though not quite that of an external observer, is still presented as having a life of its own, independent of both scientific subject and ethnographic object. Lévi-Strauss’s great contribution is that he faces these problems squarely and attempts to solve them.23 Now the struggles between inside and outside, center and periphery, the West versus the rest, which have been so long repressed by the academic conscience, are out in the open.
ETHNOSEMIOTICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY
This run of events, which has already begun and is profoundly disturbing the field of anthropology, faces many real obstacles ranging from unsolved, complex theoretical and methodological problems to conservative discipline politics. There are also some pseudo-obstacles. Foremost among these is the opposition of structuralism and semiotics to phenomenology. Apparently this opposition is the product of some squabbling that took place among French academics during the early 1960s.24 Lévi-Strauss (1968:61) may have started it with these famous lines in Tristes Tropiques, read and taken to heart by every anthropologically bound French high school student from 1956 onward:
I stood out against the new tendencies in metaphysical thinking which were then beginning to take shape. Phenomenology I found unacceptable, in so far as it postulated a continuity between experience and reality....
This anti-phenomenological position is both understandable and correct when viewing some of the social research of existentialists, ethnomethodologists, and sociologists who follow Alfred Schutz, Harold Garfinkel, and Peter Berger. Their work often is anthropologically naive in that it mingles psychology and culture in an un-thought-out (they would say “taken for granted”) fashion. However, if Lévi-Strauss intended his remarks to cover the full potential of phenomenology as it was originally expressed by Husserl, the tack he and others have taken eventually rests on forced distinctions. Husserl wrote a semiotic integral to his phenomenology, just as Charles S. Peirce wrote a phenomenology (he sometimes referred to it as “Phaeneroscopy”) integral to his semiotic. Semiotics and phenomenology in their original and fullest expressions are the two sides of the question of meaning.
Nowhere does Husserl make the mistake that Lévi-Strauss claims is endemic to phenomenology, that is, the postulation of a continuity of meaning. The phenomenological epochē is a methodologically imposed break with our familiar acceptance of things as they are, a detachment that is designed to throw the essence of consciousness into sharp relief. Moreover, according to Husserl (1962:96-100), it is only by means of this break, suspension, or bracketing of the familiar world that consciousness becomes accessible to itself. Such an operation cannot be claimed to have been properly performed unless it can be turned back onto ethnographic, literary, aesthetic, and other materials: in other words, considering only the anthropological, unless it throws both consciousness and the essential properties of everyday life into sharp relief.
They set out in opposite directions: Lévi-Strauss rigorously gearing his anthropology to the realm of the cultural; Husserl just as rigorously holding to his goal of radical philosphical reflection. But the world of thought is round and extremes meet. Lévi-Strauss’s search for the universal characteristics of consciousness carries him into the same unfamiliar territory that Husserl discovered in his search for transcendental intersubjectivity.
As we suggest in the next chapter, the most straightforward way to wrap these matters up and move beyond Husserl and Lévi-Strauss, continuing in an ethnosemiotic direction, is to approach cultural differentiation itself as the first epochē or epoch, in our collective transcendental journey.25 Cultural texts that treat the same materials from different angles produce, more or less automatically, by their simple juxtaposition, a shock, and at least a momentary awareness of the arbitrariness of all cultural codes. Cultural differentiation corresponds precisely to the phenomenological epochē in that it simultaneously detaches us from the world of familiar affairs and throws this world and our thought about it into sharp relief. Note that while this is an acceptable statement from the standpoint of general semiotic theory, it contains an assumption that would be highly problematical to some phenomenologists, those who locate consciousness in the individual psyche. The statement is based on the assumption that culture is a form of consciousness, or is a being that we can live within without consciousness of it, by the simple expedient of letting it be our consciousness for us, until something happens that shocks everything out of alignment.26
BEYOND ETHNOGRAPHY
“Beyond” is not here intended to suggest that ethnography is dead—only that it should be possible to build upon it and reconstruct the discipline(s) on a meta-ethnographic basis. Movement beyond ethnography is concomitant with a recentering of research on interpretation and communication links between cultures and the emergence of a semiotic of transcultural materials.27 The field of anthropology, insofar as it has used the aggregate of ethnographies as its data base, has always been meta-ethnographic “in-itself.” But it has had little awareness of its organization “for-itself,” that is, of its place in history, until the recent appearance of the theoretical viewpoints discussed in this chapter. The most complete illustration of the results of this theoretical combination and movement is still the Mythologiques but there are other meta-ethnographic tendencies on the margins of anthropology.
The Ethnography of Modernity
Students who are attempting to arrive at a basic and holistic understanding of modern societies, who approach a complex structure not as an aggregate of little societies (urban villages, for example), but as a phenomenon sui generis, necessarily operate on a meta-ethnographic level. In this regard, we would again call attention to the works of Erving Goffman, which can be used to illustrate more than one point.28 Goffman has provided us with the best ethnography of modernity we have while rigorously staying on the margins of several disciplines: sociology, anthropology, linguistics, ethnology. His work is a charmed combination of three basic elements: (1) a phenomenology, (2) a semiotic, and (3) unusual savvy about social organization that permits him to dart and weave through class, status, power, ritual, kinship, morality, occupation, etiquette, ethnicity.29 The semiotics and phenomenology in Goffman’s works are at a crude state of development when judged from the standpoint of standards now being established by technicians in these areas. But this only serves to better illustrate the potential that resides in their combination. Goffman’s phenomenology, when it is working, can convey to us a sense of ourselves because he has suspended or bracketed everyday experience in his descriptions of it, rendering it accessible to analytical consciousness. These descriptions are interconnected by a practical semiotic of social appearances. The linkages established in this way, while originating on an empirical level, do not reproduce either a geographically bound community or a conceptually bounded class. They express the genetic capacity of social life to reproduce itself through interpretation and to assume different forms.30
Comparative Studies of Third-World Communities
Another organized research program, little known and less understood, which is semiotic (although not phenomenological) and metaethnographic, is Frank Young’s comparative studies of Third-World communities. This work, which apparently received financial support in inverse proportion to its recognition in the field of anthropology, began in Mexico in the 1950s and eventually extended itself to other areas of Latin America, Asia, Africa, the United States, and to ethnic solidarity and liberation movements.31 The original study (reported in Young and Young 1960 and elsewhere) is a comparison of twenty-four villages designed to show the relationship between the form of their interactions with one another and their internal structure. The research design is similar in most technical respects to comparative studies using the Human Relations Area Files. The difference is that the Youngs generated their own original ethnographic profiles, selected a system of communities that had formal ties with one another, and focused on the structure of the network as much as on the organization of the component communities. (All these points are illustrated in Young 1964.)
The theoretical component of this work was arrived at inductively outside of the semiotic mainstream but predictably it was formulated in semiotic terms. In a (1966:46) summation of the work to that point, Young wrote: “social change is construed as symbolic transactions and transformations, and the important variables in understanding the dynamics are the information processing capacities of the communities and the communication strategies they use.” In his more recent work (Young 1976) he appears to be moving from the conventional sociological notion that “groups produce symbols” to the semiotic and/or phenomenological idea that groups are signs. The innovations here are twofold: (1) symbolic interaction is reconceived as operational between groups and communities, not merely between individuals, and (2) relatively stable and highly predictive measures of group-level communication processes have been constructed. Again, this work is at a relatively crude stage of development, but the ground has been broken for a semiotic of macrostructural change.
These examples diverge greatly from conventional one anthropologist-one group-one book approaches to ethnography. The descriptions of particular groups, situations, and communities are located from the beginning in a wider context of comparison and interpretation. And, as ethnography is made perhaps more important in these comprehensive systems of interpretation, the role of the ethnographer is simultaneously effaced. The ethnographic performance becomes the groundwork for the analysis that follows. In Dean MacCannell’s own current research on 650 California towns, the ethnographies are not written by anthropologists but by machines and institutions. Freeways, for example, are a form of writing about California communities. They appear on aerial photographs as a drunken cursive and they describe power relations better than we do.32 They only require an interpreter who has taken the trouble to learn their language.
A Final Word about the “Political Dimension”
Ethnosemiotics, located as it is between groups, occupies precisely the same ground which is also referred to as the “political arena.” Insofar as power is a part of the vocabulary of interpretation at the group level, ethnosemiotic analysis is political analysis. It can be seen immediately, however, that we must be prepared to extend the framework of conventional political science beyond organized politics, beyond class, occupation, and community structure, into the relations between cultural phenomena. And going still further, once we have taken leave of the heart of culture and relocated our studies on the furthest perimeters, we must be prepared to discover revolutionary activity at every turn.
Revolution is used here in the widest possible sense, to incorporate the fights for self-determination that are occurring on a cultural plane. Consider, for example, the opposition we can witness right now between fiction and reality, which is shaping the modern world in the same way that the opposition between the classes shaped the industrial world. The arts are developing consciousness of themselves in the socio-cultural change process; the film medium in particular is striving to become political ethnography.
Clearly it is time for us to leave this field to occupy higher ground. Whether this move is eventually read as an advance or a retreat will be determined by our skill at interpreting these events, by our ethnosemiotic skills. As we have already suggested, these skills are still most developed and evident in the writings of J. J. Rousseau. Recall some remarks Lévi-Strauss has made:
Rousseau is our master and our brother, great as has been our ingratitude towards him; and every page of this book [Tristes Tropiques] could have been dedicated to him, had the object thus proffered not been unworthy of his great memory. For there is only one way we can escape the contradiction inherent in the notion of the position of the anthropologist, and that is by reformulating, on our own account, the intellectual procedures which allowed Rousseau to move forward from the ruins left by the Discours sur l’Origine de l’Inégalité to the ample design of the Social Contract.... He it is who showed us how, after we have destroyed every existing order, we can still discover the principles which allow us to construct a new order in their stead. [1968:389]
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