The following is a draft for a presentation to the Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting next week. It incorporates revised material from two posts below, “Measurement and Interpretation: Let us Speak no more of Quantitative and Qualitative Research” from March 10 and “Southern Drinkways” from February 20.
I have long thought that the division between quantitative and qualitative research was a false divide. There is neither pure quantitative nor pure qualitative research. There is always a qualitative element in quantitative work – you might be counting things, but the choice of what’s relevant to count is an inescapable qualitative decision. Likewise, there’s always a quantitative element in any qualitative research, even if only in the rudimentary sense that it makes a difference whether there’s a lot of something or only a little, whether something is always occurring, occurs every day, or once a year.
In rethinking my own approach to ethnographic methods following attendance at a National Science Foundation supported summer seminar on mixed qual-quant ethnographic survey methods taught by William Dressler and Kathryn Oths, I have begun more and more to think that the use of the terms distracts from rather than facilitates scholarly communication and would be better replaced by an emphasis on measurement and interpretation. Many social scientists, when asked, pay lip service to the notion I outlined above that there is no pure quantitative or qualitative research, but then go on acting as if there were. This, I think, is done largely uncritically and at least partly (if not largely) out of mutual contempt for number-fetishizing quant types and muddle headed, fuzzy thinking qual types. If we chucked the qual and quant labels, perhaps we could better focus on things that all decent research has in common (whether everyone knows it or not): measurement and interpretation.
Measurement: There is no immeasurable
A lot of “qualitative” social scientists, including most cultural anthropologists (including myself much of the time), tend to be wary of “quantitative” research because they perceive it as ignoring things that are not easily counted and uncritically or simplistically counting things that seem easy to count. Frankly, a lot of “quantitative” work does do these things, though there’s also a lot that doesn’t. What could be better recognized by some quant types is the interpretive nature of choosing what to count, but what qual types could recognize is that we’re all engaged in measurement. There are phenomena that are not easy to count, but there are no observable phenomena that are not measurable.
There are different sorts of measurement. Some things can only be measured in fairly basic and imprecise terms – the binary measurement of the simple presence or absence of a phenomenon or trait, or rough measurement of quantity, e.g. something is absent, present in small quantity or frequency, or present in high quantity or frequency. Other things can be very precisely measured. So, highly “qualitative” ethnography involves measurement just as much as the most “quantitative” of quantitative sociological research. Once we recognize that we’re all involved in measuring, we all ought to measure things as precisely as possible – sometimes that might involve quantification and in other cases might simply involve notation of the presence or absence of something. There’s no reason to be wary of measurement, but good reason to be wary of measurement that is less precise than it reasonably could be or purports to be more precise than it can be.
Interpretation: What’s the Significance of Statistical Significance?
As with measurement, all research involves interpretation whether we realize it (or like it) or not. I alluded above to the interpretive quality of measurement – knowing what it makes sense to measure is an interpretive maneuver. Further, it is always necessary to interpret the results of measurement. (Just as quant researchers are often more aware than qual of the need to measure, qual researchers are often more aware of this fact than quant.) Measurements, and even basic analyses, alone never mean anything, e.g. an analysis indicating statistical significance of a set of data doesn’t indicate at all what the meaning of the data is. There’s no reason to be wary of interpretation, but good reason to be wary of uncritical interpretation not based on sound logical argumentation and good measurement or of interpretation by those not aware they are engaging in interpretation.
Rethinking Ethnographic Methods
What this has done for me is to free up my thinking about research methods in relation to styles of scholarly thought. Like many cultural anthropologists, my ethnographic methods training was mainly in highly qualitative participant observation – which is a fine set of methods to use for many research purposes. But now, rather than approaching any topic as a “qualitative cultural anthropologist” and attempting to fit participant observation to any and every topic at hand, I have begun to think of myself more as a researcher with anthropological interests and to ask myself what methods will work best and how I might best measure and interpret data for a specific research question.
Cultural Models of Drinking
Here I will present material from an ongoing research project conducted by myself and my colleague in the Department of Health Education at the University of West Florida, Dr. Debra Vinci. In this project we are interested in students’ cultural models of drinking and related activities, contexts, and concepts, and we are interested in this as a topic of interest in and of itself and as an applied anthropological subject, where we hope that our research will contribute to a safer campus for students and contribute to efforts to reduce risks of dangerous drinking patterns among students.
I should first address two issues before proceeding to what we have found so far: First, what do I mean by cultural models? And Second, what do I mean by drinking and related activities, contexts, and concepts?
By cultural model I mean something akin to what Sherry Ortner discusses as cultural schemas. In her discussion, she argues that culturally significant schemas are built up out of important cultural symbols, and certainly anthropologists have long focused on symbols as something that makes humans unique and as the basic building block of culture, though this alone doesn’t explain how culturally important symbols are related to one another nor to practice. C.S. Peirce’s discussion of the argument as one particularly complex type of symbol built up out of more basic symbols is useful here. The argument, as Peirce defines it, “is a sign whose interpretant represents its object as being an ulterior sign through a law, namely, the law that the passage from all such premises to such conclusions tends to the truth.” Or, as he puts it elsewhere, the argument is a sign of reason, building upon propositions to enact overarching logical systems (which is to say that argument involves theorization broadly understood) and is always composed of simpler symbols (specifically rhematic and dicent symbols). Culture, I would argue, is not just the learned and shared lifeways of minimalist definitions of culture, but also an all encompassing mesh of symbols, premises, and arguments. The argument, for human culture, is akin to what Ortner calls key scenarios or cultural schemas. She defines these “as preorganized schemes of action, symbolic programs for the staging and playing out of standard interactions in a particular culture. In her own analysis of Sherpa Buddhism in Nepal, she identifies such a cultural schema (Rivalry, Acquisition of a Protector, Defeat of the Enemy, Departure of the Loser) which recurs in Sherpa myth and ritual and which provides a prototype for culturally typical interaction situations – which is to say that (using Clifford Geertz’s terminology) cultural schemas or arguments provide both “models of” and “models for” cultural action, and further that culturally significant arguments or cultural models are grounded in practice and simultaneously function to ground practice.
What do I mean by cultural models of drinking and related activities, contexts, and concepts? Essentially, we are interested in ascertaining the basic assumptions and premises of students’ conceptualization of drinking, places associated with drinking, behaviors typically associated with drinking, and notions of responsibility or irresponsibility with relation to drinking. Further, we are interested in how such basic premises are related and combined to form larger arguments or cultural models. We are also interested in how the models represented in our data collected from a particular setting (A Southern setting, a student sample, a medium size university setting [with large proportions of commuter and “non-traditional” students], a small to medium size city [and a military and tourist town – and not so much a college town]) relate to other, potentially overlapping contexts.
There are a variety of methods and techniques that could have addressed this research topic, but given the primary interest in understanding the key terms and premises of students’ models and conceptualizations of drinking, methods that could directly elicit such material seemed clearly most useful.
Methods for initial data collection
The first stage of this project (and the one which I will report on here) involved the collection of free lists from 101 students from three classes at the University of West Florida, two sections of Introduction to Anthropology (46 and 33 students – chosen for convenience, but also because of the representation of many different student major interests in the classes) and one section of an upper level nutrition and health course (22 students – chosen again for convenience, but also for contrast – this was a course with mainly upper division students with an interest in nutrition and health, and who had already been asked in a variety of ways to think critically about health and nutrition, including alcohol related issues, in class). Students were asked to generate five free lists: 1.Types of alcoholic drinks or beverages; 2. Types of places or settings in which people drink; 3. Activities people engage in when drinking; 4. The characteristics of someone with a drinking problem; and 5. The characteristics of someone who drinks responsibly.
Interesting Trends and Reactions
Drinking Discourse and Drinking Behavior
Overall, the results of the first list are consistent with the findings of two other surveys that have been conducted on the University of West Florida campus that indicate that the vast majority of UWF students either do not drink or drink infrequently and in low quantities. To be more accurate, the surveys find that students claim to not drink or not drink in high frequency or quantity. The relationship between students’ discourse about their drinking and their drinking behavior (or lack thereof) is clearly something difficult to ascertain, though this freelisting exercise offers at least a slightly different window on the situation. A small handful of students provided us with frighteningly comprehensive lists of drink types (so, in fact much of the variety of items listed came from just a few students), but the rest provided much shorter lists (generally 10 – 15 items at most) with mostly general categories of drink that many non-drinking children would probably be familiar with from simply having grown up in the culture. This, of course, is still another example of drinking discourse and doesn’t prove that most UWF students in fact do not drink or do not drink much (i.e. the lists don’t indicate clear lack of familiarity with drinking, but they also don’t indicate clear familiarity with drinking), but it also is consistent with those other findings and doesn’t give any contradiction to students when they respond to surveys indicating low frequency and quantity of drinking.
Drinking and Food
This and the following examples address the relationship between public health discourse and students’ discourse in the ways in which students’ conceptions and expressions of thought on drinking correspond (or do not) to institutional messages.
In some ways, many students clearly associated drinking with eating. Fourteen students mention eating as an activity associated with drinking (with three more mentioning dinner), and “eating contexts” were even more associated with drinking – with restaurants mentioned by 25 students as a setting associated with drinking (and 11 more mentioning “at dinner” or “at a dinner” as settings). At the same time, “eating before drinking” was listed by only two students as an attribute of responsible drinkers (with both in the upper level nutrition and health course). This is not so surprising given the (understandable) greater emphasis in public health campaigns on not drinking and driving, though at the same time, eating before and during drinking is often mentioned in public health campaigns, brochures, etc., as one strategy to reduce potential dangers of overconsumption of alcohol. This pattern of associating eating with drinking in one set of domains, but not within the context of thinking of responsible or appropriate behavior, is possibly the result of one message being swamped by another (and in this case more important) one.
Drinking and Sex
In one way, students clearly associate sex and drinking. Aside from dancing, sex was mentioned by the largest number of students as an activity associated with drinking. At the same time that sex is clearly part of the model of drinking generally, responsible sexuality does not seem to be a significant part of students’ model of responsible drinking. “Promiscuity” was mentioned by one student as a trait of those who drink irresponsibly, and one student mentioned “Has condoms” as a characteristic of someone who drinks responsibly. This, and the previous example to a lesser extent, is indicative of the fact that as we engage in further research to fine tune our understanding of students’ cultural models of drinking, we will almost certainly be dealing not with a single or unitary model, but multiple overlapping models.
Irresponsibility and Responsibility
Possibly the most interesting example of the existence of overlapping but not identical models concerns the freelists of traits of irresponsibility and responsibility. For the most part, these appear as opposing domains – which is what I expected – in the sense that items frequently listed in one domain tend to show up in similar frequency in opposite form in the opposite domain. The major exception to this has to do with drinking and driving. Students have clearly absorbed the message that not driving drunk and/or having a designated driver are responsible thinks to do when drinking: Doesn’t drink and drive (36), chooses a designated driver beforehand (24) were common responses. When it comes to what makes a person irresponsible, though, drunk driving seems to have fallen out of consideration - only five students mentioned anything to do with drunk driving or not having a designated driver as being a characteristic of someone drinking irresponsibly.
Ongoing Research
The goal of this first stage of research was to elucidate the common terms of students’ models of drinking, which it has done. A second stage of research will ascertain relationships between the terms to understand the shape of the larger model(s). Those items commonly listed in the free lists were used to produce cards (with one item listed on each card) to be sorted by another sample of 30 students, with students in my Applied Anthropology course conducting this research. The results from this stage of research are still being tabulated and will be analyzed using non-metrical multi-dimensional scaling techniques to provide a “map” of the relationships between sorted terms. This in turn, along with the results of another ongoing survey, will be used to develop a fine tuned survey to ascertain degree of cultural consensus on various elements of the model.
Showing posts with label cultural schema. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cultural schema. Show all posts
Friday, March 23, 2007
Monday, February 26, 2007
Bertrand Russell's Chicken: Sign Experience and the Human Mind
In a discussion of the foundations and limitations of inductive reasoning, the great British philosopher Bertrand Russell presented one of my favorite philosophical anecdotes (1959:63):
"Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken…The mere fact that something has happened a certain number of times causes animals and men to expect that it will happen again. Thus our instincts certainly cause us to believe that the sun will rise to-morrow, but we may be in no better a position than the chicken which unexpectedly has its neck wrung."
Certainly we humans engage more often than we would care to think in such chicken-headed thinking. There is much in common in the conceptual process between humans and other animals. There is also much that is different. Russell’s anecdote provides a useful analogy to introduce students to the concept and limitations of inductive reasoning, but unless I misjudge my chickens, this is not actually induction but instead a different sign experience, or semiosis, with limitations that are analogous to the limitations of induction. More on that later. Here instead I raise the question, what is it that makes human thought distinct?
Anthropologists since at least Leslie White (1949; 1959) have focused on the symbol and symbolic thought as the thing which distinguishes humans from other animals, including chimps and other non-human primates. This is not a bad first approximation. There is no evidence to date of chimpanzees or bonobos using symbols or clearly engaging in symbolic thought in the wild. Laboratory experiments are another story, however. There is evidence in ape language experiments of great apes sometimes using symbols and even arranging them in combination in basic syntactic combinations. Further, there is contentious evidence that some extinct hominids, such as Neandertals, may have used some symbols some of the time. We are not the only creatures with the capacity for symbolic thought, though we do seem to be the only ones whose social contexts are pervaded by symbol and language use.
In order to proceed to a more sophisticated analysis of the situation, we need a more subtle instrument than simply the distinction between symbol and sign – and this for two sorts of reasons. First, symbolic anthropologists, including first order scholars like Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, and Victor Turner, have often lumped as “symbols” signs which are more properly iconic or indexical (see the discussion in Daniel 1984 on this point). Second, and more to the point here, if it is not symbol use per se which distinguishes us, but certain sorts of symbolic thought, then we need a more elaborate classificatory system in order to make such distinctions.
Here, the work of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce is helpful in providing a fuller typology than other semiotic schemes. For Peirce, the sign is “something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” (1992: 11). Unlike the Sausserean conception of the sign as dyadic – comprised of signifier and signified, the Peircean sign is tryadic (something which has certain advantages that are beyond the scope the present discussion), comprised of the sign/representamen – the sign vehicle which stands for something else, the object – which is not a material object in the world, but the idea of an object (corresponding more or less to paradigmatic meaning), and the interpretant – the syntagmatic or contextual interpretation of the object by somebody or something.
Peirce further classified signs into three trichotomies: first on the basis of type of sign or representamen, that is the form of the sign vehicle itself (qualisign, sinsign, and legisign); second on the basis of the relationship between representamen and object (icon, index, and symbol); and third on the basis of the relationship between representamen and interpretant (rheme, dicent, and argument). Any given sign can be classified simultaneously on the basis of all three trichotomies. This yields a system which is frankly over-elaborate for most purposes, but particular elements of it are useful and even essential for certain analyses.
The distinction that has been most useful to scholars and is probably most familiar is that between icon, index, and symbol. The icon is a sign which signifies through some sort of systematic relationship or similarity to the object signified. This can include straightforward cases such as pictographic representation, or more complex cases such as diagrams or metaphor. The index is a sign which signifies through calling attention to the object signified, through pointing or contiguity, including straightforward cases such as the index finger pointing to an object and less straightforward cases such as metonymy. The symbol is a sign which signifies purely through convention. Though symbolic anthropology has tended to focus on highly complex symbols in ritual context, a more mundane (and quantitatively significant) example of symbolic use would be the words we use so habitually, all of which signify by convention.
The other two trichotomies are less familiar and perhaps more difficult. With the first, a qualisign is an individual quality taken as a sign of an object. As quality, it can only be experienced and function as sign in the actual manifestation (which could be physical or mental) of the quality, which is to say that qualisigns only ever function as such in manifestations of themselves alongside other qualisigns which together form an individual instance of something which might itself function as a sign of something (perhaps itself). This individual instance of something which is comprised of bundled qualities or qualisigns and which functions as a sign is the sinsign. As individual instance, the sinsign may function as a sign of a unique object, or more likely, it may be an individual token of a general type or law. This sign of general type or law is the legisign. A sinsign which is a token of a legisign will partake of or manifest the law-like or typic aspects of the legisign of which it is a token, while at the same time being itself comprised of multiple qualisigns. Here it should be noted that all symbols, as conventional and law-like, are legisigns. Thus, the third trichotomy will be of greater concern for our purposes here.
The rheme is one which signifies merely qualitative possibility to the interpreter, that is, the interpretant is one of qualitative possibility. The dicent, or dicisign, signifies actual existence or entails some sort of proposition about the relation of the object signified to the surrounding world, which is to say that the dicent enmeshes the object within a basic syntax relating it to other objects. The argument, as Peirce puts it, “is a sign whose interpretant represents its object as being an ulterior sign through a law, namely, the law that the passage from all such premises to such conclusions tends to the truth” (1992: 27). Or, as Peirce puts it elsewhere, and as E. Valentine Daniel (1984) echoes, the argument is a sign of reason, building upon propositions, or dicents, to enact overarching logical systems, which is to say that the argument involves theorization broadly understood, and is always comprised of symbols.
The combination of trichotomies yields three types of symbol: the rhematic symbol, dicent symbol and argument. A rhematic symbol “is a sign connected with its object by an association of general ideas in such a way that its replica calls up an image in the mind, which image, owing to certain habits or dispositions of that mind, tends to produce a general concept” (Peirce 1992: 26). Peirce’s example is a common noun, but words in general, as well as other linguistic paradigmatic units (that is, morphemes), fit the bill as well, so long as it is understood that the rhematic symbol is the word or morpheme as such, and not its use within a specific context.
A dicent symbol, which Peirce also refers to as an ordinary proposition, “is a sign connected with its object by an association of general ideas, and acting like a rhematic symbol, except that its intended interpretant represents the dicent symbol as being, in respect to what it signifies, really affected by its object, so that the existence or law which it calls to mind must be actually connected with the indicated object” (1992: 26-27). Thus, to the extent that the dicent symbol, where good examples would be ordinary propositions, sentences and other syntagmatic units in language, is seen as meaningful about the world, it is a special sort of dicent indexical legisign insofar as it points to those aspects of the world to which it corresponds, though doing so through conventional signs, that is, symbols. This echoes the correspondence theory of truth in the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1922), though as Wittgenstein later concluded (1958), there is more to language than mere correspondence to the world, and so we find with the argument.
Again, an argument “is a sign whose interpretant represents its object as being an ulterior sign through a law, namely, the law that the passage from all such premises to such conclusions tends to the truth.” This building upon premises (which are themselves dicent symbols) to the construction of conclusions and truth systems can take several different forms, including those concatenations of propositions producing conclusions referred to in the vernacular of philosophy as “arguments,” and which work through the logical principles of deduction, induction, or abduction. Arguments can also take such forms as mathematical formulae or myth structure.
Chimps and other apes show themselves capable of using rhematic and dicent symbols in laboratory experiments when they combine basic word-signs to form rudimentary propositions. The formation of arguments – deductive syllogisms, inductive generalizations, or any other combination of premises to build generalizable frameworks for interacting with the world – seems, at least on current evidence, to be the province of humans alone.
This brings us to culture, which I would argue is not only the learned and shared lifeways of minimalist definitions but also an all encompassing mesh of symbols, premises, and arguments, where cultural arguments are built up of rhematic and dicent symbols. The argument, for human culture, is akin to what Sherry Ortner calls key scenarios or cultural schemas (1973; 1989). She defines these “as preorganized schemes of action, symbolic programs for the staging and playing out of standard interactions in a particular culture” (1989: 60).
In her own analysis of Sherpa Buddhism, Ortner identifies such a cultural schema, Rivalry, Acquisition of a Protector, Defeat of the Enemy, Departure of the Loser (1989: 72-73), which recurs in Sherpa myth and ritual and which provides a prototype for culturally typical interaction situations – which is to say, using Geertz’s terminology (1973), such schemas provide models of and models for cultural action. Further examples from the ethnographic literature and cited by Ortner include Edward Schieffelin’s identification of a recurring and orienting cultural scenario of opposition and reciprocity among the New Guinea Highland Kaluli (1976), or the work of Geertz in Negara (1980) or Marshall Sahlins in Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981), where (Ortner 1989: 60):
"One finds the notion that there are cultural patterns of action, cultural dramas or scenarios, that reappear over time and that seem to order the ways in which people play out both conventional and historically novel social encounters. In Negara, Geertz talks of the reconstruction of forms and the 'transcriptions of a fixed ideal.'"
Sahlins writes of a scripted cosmological drama (1981: 17; quoted in Orter 1989: 61):
"At the great annual Makahiki festival, the concept of political usurpation is set in the context of a cosmological drama. The lost god-chief Lono returns to renew the fertility of the land, reclaiming its own, to be superceded again by the ruling chief and the sacrificial cult of Ku. Now Captain Cook’s second visit to the Islands coincided with the annual return of Lono, and the treatment of Hawaiians accorded him to the prescribed sequence of ritual events in the Makahiki Festival."
Of course, here Gananath Obeyesekere (1992) critiques Sahlins (as well as Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America [1984]) as falling into a western cultural schema through which is attributed to “natives” a tendency to perceive Westerners as divine. Sahlins (1995) counter-critiques Obeyesekere, arguing first that Obeyesekere is wrong about Sahlins’ work. But the fact that Obeyesekere might be wrong about Sahlins or Todorov in particular does not mean that he has not noticed something significant about western cultural arguments. Sahlins presents another sort of counter-argument as well, arguing that many times post-colonial scholars like Obeyesekere or Edward Said (1979) operate within something like a cultural schema of their own – which is not to say that they’re wrong about western “Orientalism” per se, but that their arguments are framed as part of a schema with certain (often unstated) premises about the nature of “natives” and western academic discourse. What all of this amounts to is that culture never consists of a single overarching argument, but a patchwork of arguments or schemas, some contradictory, which altogether pervade nearly all aspects of human life in any given context.
But what of Bertrand Russell’s wrung-neck chicken? I argued above that the chicken was not really engaging in induction or argument. That is, Russell’s chicken was not engaged in inductive generalization or argument based on dicent symbols (propositions, premises) in turn based on rhematic symbols (words). Instead, like Pavlov’s dog, after continued contiguity between farmer and feed, the chicken was conditioned to perceive farmer as indexing feed – and not a wrung neck. But before we get too big for our britches, we should remember that though argument might be what distinguishes us and even pervades our social contexts, much of what we do semiotically is quite similar to zoosemiosis. Even in our habitual use of symbols of all types, we use words in ways that are also largely metaphoric or metonymic. In fact, we depend on this. To the extent that we encounter our arguments or cultural schemas as grounded in the world, it is through their simultaneous functioning to index and connect us to the world. Further, though words are symbols because they are conventional signs, our use of them and especially learning of them is largely through conditioned association, which is to say that though we are clearly distinct in some ways from other animals, we can still be pretty chicken-headed.
SOURCES CITED
Daniel, E. Valentine
1984 Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Geertz, Clifford
1973 Religion as a Cultural System. In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
1980 Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Obeyesekere, Gananath
1992 The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ortner, Sherry
1973 On Key Symbols. American Anthropologist. 75: 1338-1346.
1989 High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Peirce, Charles S.
1992 Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs. In Introducing Semiotics: An Anthology of Readings. Marcel Danesi and Donato Santeramo, eds. Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press.
Russell, Bertrand
1959 The Problems of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sahlins, Marshall
1981 Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Island Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
1995 How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, For Example. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Said, Edward
1979 Orientalism. New York: Vintage.
Schieffelin, Edward
1976 The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Todorov, Tzvetan
1984 The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. New York: Harper and Row.
White, Leslie
1949 The Science of Culture. New York: Grove Press.
1959 The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome. New York: McGraw Hill.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
1922 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. New York: Routledge.
1958 Philosophical Investigations. Third Edition. New York: Macmillan.
"Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken…The mere fact that something has happened a certain number of times causes animals and men to expect that it will happen again. Thus our instincts certainly cause us to believe that the sun will rise to-morrow, but we may be in no better a position than the chicken which unexpectedly has its neck wrung."
Certainly we humans engage more often than we would care to think in such chicken-headed thinking. There is much in common in the conceptual process between humans and other animals. There is also much that is different. Russell’s anecdote provides a useful analogy to introduce students to the concept and limitations of inductive reasoning, but unless I misjudge my chickens, this is not actually induction but instead a different sign experience, or semiosis, with limitations that are analogous to the limitations of induction. More on that later. Here instead I raise the question, what is it that makes human thought distinct?
Anthropologists since at least Leslie White (1949; 1959) have focused on the symbol and symbolic thought as the thing which distinguishes humans from other animals, including chimps and other non-human primates. This is not a bad first approximation. There is no evidence to date of chimpanzees or bonobos using symbols or clearly engaging in symbolic thought in the wild. Laboratory experiments are another story, however. There is evidence in ape language experiments of great apes sometimes using symbols and even arranging them in combination in basic syntactic combinations. Further, there is contentious evidence that some extinct hominids, such as Neandertals, may have used some symbols some of the time. We are not the only creatures with the capacity for symbolic thought, though we do seem to be the only ones whose social contexts are pervaded by symbol and language use.
In order to proceed to a more sophisticated analysis of the situation, we need a more subtle instrument than simply the distinction between symbol and sign – and this for two sorts of reasons. First, symbolic anthropologists, including first order scholars like Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, and Victor Turner, have often lumped as “symbols” signs which are more properly iconic or indexical (see the discussion in Daniel 1984 on this point). Second, and more to the point here, if it is not symbol use per se which distinguishes us, but certain sorts of symbolic thought, then we need a more elaborate classificatory system in order to make such distinctions.
Here, the work of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce is helpful in providing a fuller typology than other semiotic schemes. For Peirce, the sign is “something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” (1992: 11). Unlike the Sausserean conception of the sign as dyadic – comprised of signifier and signified, the Peircean sign is tryadic (something which has certain advantages that are beyond the scope the present discussion), comprised of the sign/representamen – the sign vehicle which stands for something else, the object – which is not a material object in the world, but the idea of an object (corresponding more or less to paradigmatic meaning), and the interpretant – the syntagmatic or contextual interpretation of the object by somebody or something.
Peirce further classified signs into three trichotomies: first on the basis of type of sign or representamen, that is the form of the sign vehicle itself (qualisign, sinsign, and legisign); second on the basis of the relationship between representamen and object (icon, index, and symbol); and third on the basis of the relationship between representamen and interpretant (rheme, dicent, and argument). Any given sign can be classified simultaneously on the basis of all three trichotomies. This yields a system which is frankly over-elaborate for most purposes, but particular elements of it are useful and even essential for certain analyses.
The distinction that has been most useful to scholars and is probably most familiar is that between icon, index, and symbol. The icon is a sign which signifies through some sort of systematic relationship or similarity to the object signified. This can include straightforward cases such as pictographic representation, or more complex cases such as diagrams or metaphor. The index is a sign which signifies through calling attention to the object signified, through pointing or contiguity, including straightforward cases such as the index finger pointing to an object and less straightforward cases such as metonymy. The symbol is a sign which signifies purely through convention. Though symbolic anthropology has tended to focus on highly complex symbols in ritual context, a more mundane (and quantitatively significant) example of symbolic use would be the words we use so habitually, all of which signify by convention.
The other two trichotomies are less familiar and perhaps more difficult. With the first, a qualisign is an individual quality taken as a sign of an object. As quality, it can only be experienced and function as sign in the actual manifestation (which could be physical or mental) of the quality, which is to say that qualisigns only ever function as such in manifestations of themselves alongside other qualisigns which together form an individual instance of something which might itself function as a sign of something (perhaps itself). This individual instance of something which is comprised of bundled qualities or qualisigns and which functions as a sign is the sinsign. As individual instance, the sinsign may function as a sign of a unique object, or more likely, it may be an individual token of a general type or law. This sign of general type or law is the legisign. A sinsign which is a token of a legisign will partake of or manifest the law-like or typic aspects of the legisign of which it is a token, while at the same time being itself comprised of multiple qualisigns. Here it should be noted that all symbols, as conventional and law-like, are legisigns. Thus, the third trichotomy will be of greater concern for our purposes here.
The rheme is one which signifies merely qualitative possibility to the interpreter, that is, the interpretant is one of qualitative possibility. The dicent, or dicisign, signifies actual existence or entails some sort of proposition about the relation of the object signified to the surrounding world, which is to say that the dicent enmeshes the object within a basic syntax relating it to other objects. The argument, as Peirce puts it, “is a sign whose interpretant represents its object as being an ulterior sign through a law, namely, the law that the passage from all such premises to such conclusions tends to the truth” (1992: 27). Or, as Peirce puts it elsewhere, and as E. Valentine Daniel (1984) echoes, the argument is a sign of reason, building upon propositions, or dicents, to enact overarching logical systems, which is to say that the argument involves theorization broadly understood, and is always comprised of symbols.
The combination of trichotomies yields three types of symbol: the rhematic symbol, dicent symbol and argument. A rhematic symbol “is a sign connected with its object by an association of general ideas in such a way that its replica calls up an image in the mind, which image, owing to certain habits or dispositions of that mind, tends to produce a general concept” (Peirce 1992: 26). Peirce’s example is a common noun, but words in general, as well as other linguistic paradigmatic units (that is, morphemes), fit the bill as well, so long as it is understood that the rhematic symbol is the word or morpheme as such, and not its use within a specific context.
A dicent symbol, which Peirce also refers to as an ordinary proposition, “is a sign connected with its object by an association of general ideas, and acting like a rhematic symbol, except that its intended interpretant represents the dicent symbol as being, in respect to what it signifies, really affected by its object, so that the existence or law which it calls to mind must be actually connected with the indicated object” (1992: 26-27). Thus, to the extent that the dicent symbol, where good examples would be ordinary propositions, sentences and other syntagmatic units in language, is seen as meaningful about the world, it is a special sort of dicent indexical legisign insofar as it points to those aspects of the world to which it corresponds, though doing so through conventional signs, that is, symbols. This echoes the correspondence theory of truth in the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1922), though as Wittgenstein later concluded (1958), there is more to language than mere correspondence to the world, and so we find with the argument.
Again, an argument “is a sign whose interpretant represents its object as being an ulterior sign through a law, namely, the law that the passage from all such premises to such conclusions tends to the truth.” This building upon premises (which are themselves dicent symbols) to the construction of conclusions and truth systems can take several different forms, including those concatenations of propositions producing conclusions referred to in the vernacular of philosophy as “arguments,” and which work through the logical principles of deduction, induction, or abduction. Arguments can also take such forms as mathematical formulae or myth structure.
Chimps and other apes show themselves capable of using rhematic and dicent symbols in laboratory experiments when they combine basic word-signs to form rudimentary propositions. The formation of arguments – deductive syllogisms, inductive generalizations, or any other combination of premises to build generalizable frameworks for interacting with the world – seems, at least on current evidence, to be the province of humans alone.
This brings us to culture, which I would argue is not only the learned and shared lifeways of minimalist definitions but also an all encompassing mesh of symbols, premises, and arguments, where cultural arguments are built up of rhematic and dicent symbols. The argument, for human culture, is akin to what Sherry Ortner calls key scenarios or cultural schemas (1973; 1989). She defines these “as preorganized schemes of action, symbolic programs for the staging and playing out of standard interactions in a particular culture” (1989: 60).
In her own analysis of Sherpa Buddhism, Ortner identifies such a cultural schema, Rivalry, Acquisition of a Protector, Defeat of the Enemy, Departure of the Loser (1989: 72-73), which recurs in Sherpa myth and ritual and which provides a prototype for culturally typical interaction situations – which is to say, using Geertz’s terminology (1973), such schemas provide models of and models for cultural action. Further examples from the ethnographic literature and cited by Ortner include Edward Schieffelin’s identification of a recurring and orienting cultural scenario of opposition and reciprocity among the New Guinea Highland Kaluli (1976), or the work of Geertz in Negara (1980) or Marshall Sahlins in Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981), where (Ortner 1989: 60):
"One finds the notion that there are cultural patterns of action, cultural dramas or scenarios, that reappear over time and that seem to order the ways in which people play out both conventional and historically novel social encounters. In Negara, Geertz talks of the reconstruction of forms and the 'transcriptions of a fixed ideal.'"
Sahlins writes of a scripted cosmological drama (1981: 17; quoted in Orter 1989: 61):
"At the great annual Makahiki festival, the concept of political usurpation is set in the context of a cosmological drama. The lost god-chief Lono returns to renew the fertility of the land, reclaiming its own, to be superceded again by the ruling chief and the sacrificial cult of Ku. Now Captain Cook’s second visit to the Islands coincided with the annual return of Lono, and the treatment of Hawaiians accorded him to the prescribed sequence of ritual events in the Makahiki Festival."
Of course, here Gananath Obeyesekere (1992) critiques Sahlins (as well as Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America [1984]) as falling into a western cultural schema through which is attributed to “natives” a tendency to perceive Westerners as divine. Sahlins (1995) counter-critiques Obeyesekere, arguing first that Obeyesekere is wrong about Sahlins’ work. But the fact that Obeyesekere might be wrong about Sahlins or Todorov in particular does not mean that he has not noticed something significant about western cultural arguments. Sahlins presents another sort of counter-argument as well, arguing that many times post-colonial scholars like Obeyesekere or Edward Said (1979) operate within something like a cultural schema of their own – which is not to say that they’re wrong about western “Orientalism” per se, but that their arguments are framed as part of a schema with certain (often unstated) premises about the nature of “natives” and western academic discourse. What all of this amounts to is that culture never consists of a single overarching argument, but a patchwork of arguments or schemas, some contradictory, which altogether pervade nearly all aspects of human life in any given context.
But what of Bertrand Russell’s wrung-neck chicken? I argued above that the chicken was not really engaging in induction or argument. That is, Russell’s chicken was not engaged in inductive generalization or argument based on dicent symbols (propositions, premises) in turn based on rhematic symbols (words). Instead, like Pavlov’s dog, after continued contiguity between farmer and feed, the chicken was conditioned to perceive farmer as indexing feed – and not a wrung neck. But before we get too big for our britches, we should remember that though argument might be what distinguishes us and even pervades our social contexts, much of what we do semiotically is quite similar to zoosemiosis. Even in our habitual use of symbols of all types, we use words in ways that are also largely metaphoric or metonymic. In fact, we depend on this. To the extent that we encounter our arguments or cultural schemas as grounded in the world, it is through their simultaneous functioning to index and connect us to the world. Further, though words are symbols because they are conventional signs, our use of them and especially learning of them is largely through conditioned association, which is to say that though we are clearly distinct in some ways from other animals, we can still be pretty chicken-headed.
SOURCES CITED
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