The chimpanzee Washoe has died. Probably one of the most famous non-human individuals, Washoe, along with several other individual apes, played an important role in ape language and communication research.
Washoe learned around 250 American Sign Language word signs. Though there is debate about the extent to which Washoe could be regarded as using language, the research involving her helped clarify commonalities and difference in human and chimpanzee communication, as well as the qualities of chimpanzee cognition.
An article about Washoe can be found here.
Showing posts with label signs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label signs. Show all posts
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Monday, March 26, 2007
Race and Public Monuments in Pensacola, Florida
The following was originally presented as a paper to an annual meeting of the Gulf South History and Humanities conference:
As with most cities, public monuments litter the landscape of downtown Pensacola. This is nothing new. Monuments and monumental architecture more broadly have always been a feature of urban landscapes. As signs representing the past, monuments can serve the interests of elites, and on occasion others, in shaping public memory, discourse about the past, and indirectly identities and discourse about the present.
The public monuments of Pensacola are mainly of two types: those which commemorate the achievements and the memory of particular individuals, such as Andrew Jackson, who had something to do directly with Pensacola history, and a more recent type, those commemorating the memory of generic groups of individuals, such as Vietnam veterans at the Wall South, a replica to Washington, D. C.’s Wall, or the Missing Children’s Memorial. Two particular monuments stand out as different, representing individuals who, while related to broad regional processes and events which clearly affected Pensacola, were not associated with Pensacola specifically, and never actually set foot in Pensacola: Martin Luther King, Jr. Plaza and its bust to MLK, and Lee Square (actually a circle) and its monument to Robert E. Lee and other “national” figures of the Confederacy.
The obvious commonality between the two monuments is that the two are tied (albeit in quite different ways) to the often troubled history of race and racism in the southeastern United States generally and in Pensacola specifically, even if there is more going on as well. In fact, if we look at the monuments in relation to one another, they say more about race than was perhaps intended.
The monument to Lee sits within a traffic circle on Palafox Street (a main street in downtown Pensacola) at the peak of North Hill. The monument itself consists of a four-sided marble pedestal, atop which is placed a column with a sculpture of a Confederate figure atop the column, which makes for a typically phallic monument. The monument is surrounded by trees, largely obscuring it from view when passing by. At the same time, the site is relatively inaccessible to pedestrians, not being located at a light for safe access. The overall impression when passing by is of circulating around something important – yet something secluded, protected – sacred even. In certain ways, Lee Square is similar to Lee Circle in New Orleans. That monument, similar in basic appearance though much larger in scale, is also located within a traffic circle along a major street offering one of the main entryways to downtown. It is not so inaccessible to pedestrians, nor is it secluded from view by trees. It is, still, separated in another way, by its base being situated atop a still larger pedestal which must be surmounted by a flight of steps, so that the inclination of the pedestrian simply walking past on St. Charles is to simply circulate around the monument without directly approaching it.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Plaza in Pensacola is located just a few blocks from Lee Square at the base of North Hill. It is hard not to look at this tableau - Robert E. Lee atop a tall pedestal atop North Hill looking down towards, i.e. looking down upon, the much smaller monument to MLK - as an icon of race relations in the city – and indeed I see no reason not to interpret the juxtaposition in exactly that way, even if there is more going on as well. MLK Plaza is located within the median of Palafox St.., with a bust of King upon a small pedestal, and low brick walls funneling the pedestrian/viewer towards the bust. From the perspective of the passing motorist (and in Pensacola one is almost always a motorist, almost never a pedestrian), the monument and plaza are a small affair, easy to miss while driving by, in contrast to Lee Square where it is impossible not to notice that one is passing by something of importance – even while that something is largely secluded from the gaze. Once noticed, though, - if noticed - MLK Plaza is much more visible, that is, more open/vulnerable to the penetrating gaze.
These monuments are about race in a variety of ways, and not just as iconic metaphors of race relations and racism in Pensacola. Ironically, they say something significant about race relations through their utter avoidance of overt mentions of race. At MLK plaza, the only inscription (aside from a plaque listing primary donors) quotes from King’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech from December 11, 1964, “Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.” This is certainly a sentiment worthy of commemoration, and it further stands as a reminder that King was not only a leader and hero for black Americans – though he was that – but also a leader and hero for all. At the same time, though, if you didn’t already know much about King and his struggles, you leave the monument with no additional knowledge about King and his struggles.
The monument at Lee Square, being by far the larger of the two, bears more inscriptions, one on each face of the pedestal. On the front face of the monument (that is, the side visible when one is facing Lee atop the monument) is the main dedication: “The uncrowned heroes of the Southern Confederacy, whose joy was to suffer and die for a cause they believed to be just. Their unchallenged duration and matchless heroism shall continue to be the wonder and inspiration of the ages.” Continuing around the monument, one encounters on the next face the following dedication: “Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America. Soldier, Statesman, Patriot, Christian. The only man in our nation without a country, yet 20 million people mourn his death.” On the third face: “Stephen R. Mallory, Secretary of the Navy of the Confederate States of America. ‘Tis not mortals to command success; But we’ll do more sempronius, we’ll deserve it.’” Finally, on the fourth face, the one inscription relating to a Pensacolian: “Edward Aylesworth Perry, Captain of the Pensacola ‘Rifles,’ Colonel of the 2nd Florida Regiment, General of the Florida Brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia. Among the 1st to volunteer in the defense of his adopted state. Faithful in every position to which his merit advanced him. His life and deeds constitute his best monument.”
As with the King memorial, the issue of race per se is occluded from the Civil War context being memorialized (that is, being promoted as a particular form of public memory). There is the slightest tinge of defensiveness in noting that the uncrowned heroes of the confederacy joyously suffered and died for a cause they “believed” to be just, but overall, the memorial sets out to glorify the inspiring nobility of the lost cause of the Confederacy. Through a variety of significations, memorials can attempt to promote or critique dominant (or other) discursive constructions in the public memory (and the same could be said of museums, the other main repository of public signs of the past). Here, the construction is one of nostalgia for the nobility and honor of the lost cause of the Confederacy, with any mention of the relevance of slavery carefully censured. Given the prominence of place (though site selection was also clearly driven by the presence of a Confederate Redoubt on the site during the Civil War) and the obvious investment of resources necessary to construct the large marble monument, Lee Square was an embodiment of dominant discursive constructions at the time of its dedication in 1891. It clearly still has a great deal of power for some local residents today, as seen with annual salutes to Lee and Stonewall Jackson held at the site by the local Stephen Mallory chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, as well as a small trophy that had been left at the site with the letters “CSA” hand-etched upon it which I encountered left behind at the site on a recent visit. Similarly, when encountering numerous white southerners, both in Pensacola and throughout the Southeast, with T-shirts or bumper stickers displaying a currently controversial symbol, the Confederate Battle Flag, along with slogans, such as “Heritage, Not Hate,” I take them to be sincere, in the sense that theirs is a nostalgia for a better time (which never existed) characterized by noble values and honor, that is nostalgia for a discursive construction like that represented at Lee Square and not for an actual social and economic system based largely in slavery and human misery. (But then there was the bumper sticker reading, “If I had known, I would have picked my own cotton,” or the restaurant somewhere in northern Georgia named the Kountry Kooking Kitchen [with the K, K, and K boxed off in diamonds lest you miss the point].)
MLK Plaza, dedicated in 1993, represents a more recent and widely accepted construction – one which is not the polar opposite of that at Lee Square, but instead one which attempts to censure the Confederate legacy every bit as much as the nostalgic constructions of the Confederacy attempt to censure the associations of the Confederacy with slavery. Instead, a benevolent universal humanism is embraced – a laudable thing in itself, while at the same time, the very real social fissures of race which continue to be produced are occluded. The two monuments together index (by omission rather than intent) an important quality of race relations and racism in Pensacola. In virtually every interaction between blacks and whites, race is a factor shaping the interaction and racial inequality continues to be reproduced, but as with these signs of public memory, almost never is it mentioned. In fact, though the monuments assiduously avoid any mention of slavery or of the racism which MLK and the civil rights movement addressed, the fact that they are icons of regional/national figures rather than local individuals belies the pain of racism and of addressing/speaking about racism in the monuments’ displacement from the particulars of Pensacola even when commemorating the Confederacy or the civil rights movement.
As important as these monuments are in illuminating aspects of race relations and racism in Pensacola and beyond, it is not solely race which is signified. They are also about class, and as with race, they largely function by occluding important aspects of class relations. For starters, nostalgia for the lost cause of the Confederacy depends upon an erasure of the class dynamics amongst whites of the antebellum South. Many, if not most, of the southern whites nostalgic for the Confederacy had ancestors with little stake in the economic system of slavery or the political and economic interests of the Confederacy. Further, nostalgia for the better days of the noble Old South is based in part in the class dynamics of today, based in the anxieties of working class white southerners in a time when working class Americans generally often feel rightfully anxious.
With King, the issue of racism and the civil rights movement is occluded, though much to the credit of the monument designers, the plaza does stress important positive aspects of King’s legacy and it probably can be assumed that very few passersby will be unaware of King’s crucial involvement in the civil rights movement and the struggle for racial equality. King’s writings and actions with regard to class and class inequality are similarly occluded – and perhaps to a greater degree because it cannot be so easily assumed that passersby will be previously aware of King’s writings and actions addressing class as much as racial inequality towards the end of his life. As Michael Eric Dyson has pointed out, in most versions of the lives of both King and Malcolm X, the trend of both men’s actions and words towards the ends of their tragically short lives was towards working across racial lines to address not just racial inequality but also class inequality and exploitation generally. If it is painful and threatening to deal with race and the continued social production of racial inequality, it seems to be that much more painful and threatening to move across race lines and address class inequality simultaneously, and it is not surprising that class is largely absent from public memory and commemoration.
These monuments are also about gender. The men being commemorated are just that – men. Martin Luther King and Robert E. Lee are tokens of the Great Man, embodying qualities such as honor, nobility, strength, and dignity (albeit in different ways) which are also often gendered qualities, symbolically associated with masculinity. Their masculinity is represented iconically in different ways, however, bespeaking the different ways and different contexts within which they embody characteristics of ideal masculinity.
Lee’s monument is a (stereo)typically phallic one, whose importance is reinforced through the forced circulation around him. The monument in its relation to circulating traffic provides a barrier to approach, and as discussed above, is largely hidden from view by a ring of trees grown tall over a century. This provides a spatial and visual ambiguity to interpretation, appropriate for the ambiguity of the Confederate legacy in public memory. On the one hand, the relative difficulty of approach alongside the seclusion from view reinforces the monument as sacred site and Lee as the Great Man, and as a typical Great Man difficult to approach and largely masked from the penetrating gaze. On the other, at the same time that when passing by one cannot help but notice that one is skirting around something of importance, this same difficulty of approach and seclusion from view of the monument itself meshes with attempts to erase the Confederate legacy from public memory.
The phallic icon is a typical component of monuments to Great Men and heroes, while with other sorts of historical figures or instances, monuments often take on other forms, such as the Wall in Washington, D.C. commemorating veterans of the Vietnam War and its replica, the Wall South in Pensacola, or the Holocaust Memorial in Boston – cases where there is a felt need to remember the tragic deaths of individuals en masse, but where there is no heroic triumph or even lost cause perceived as great. With King, we clearly have a Great Man, generally characterized as noble, strong, courageous, and dignified, but also a non-typical Great Man, associated also as he is with nonviolence – making him in my book an admirable token of the Great Man type, if we must have Great Men. One would expect, then, a non-typically phallic monument, and MLK plaza provides just that, and as with Lee Square, it is one whose meaning is ultimately ambiguous. King’s monument is still basically phallic in shape, even if on a less grand scale than Lee’s monument. In contrast to Lee Square, MLK Plaza offers a setting with easy access, overall visual openness, and a disembodied bust. On the one hand, the monument is penetrated by the gaze and as phallic icon, the bust as disembodied head is a castrated or emasculated one. On the other, the monument, by resisting the more obvious and clear phallic image of the Lee memorial, resists also the incarnation of King as Great Man with strength in the form of dominance. At the same time that use of space may evoke a sense of vulnerability, it also emphasizes the specific qualities of dignity and nonviolent resistance in the face of injustice – a theme which is occluded from the monument in other ways, but which is indexed here in the use of space and the disembodied representation of King himself. Either interpretation is possible, as are combinations of the two, and that is ultimately where I wish to end, with meaning open, for my intent has not been to criticize (I think that there is much that is overwhelmingly positive with MLK Plaza), but to provoke and open up to contestation the construction of public memory.
As with most cities, public monuments litter the landscape of downtown Pensacola. This is nothing new. Monuments and monumental architecture more broadly have always been a feature of urban landscapes. As signs representing the past, monuments can serve the interests of elites, and on occasion others, in shaping public memory, discourse about the past, and indirectly identities and discourse about the present.
The public monuments of Pensacola are mainly of two types: those which commemorate the achievements and the memory of particular individuals, such as Andrew Jackson, who had something to do directly with Pensacola history, and a more recent type, those commemorating the memory of generic groups of individuals, such as Vietnam veterans at the Wall South, a replica to Washington, D. C.’s Wall, or the Missing Children’s Memorial. Two particular monuments stand out as different, representing individuals who, while related to broad regional processes and events which clearly affected Pensacola, were not associated with Pensacola specifically, and never actually set foot in Pensacola: Martin Luther King, Jr. Plaza and its bust to MLK, and Lee Square (actually a circle) and its monument to Robert E. Lee and other “national” figures of the Confederacy.
The obvious commonality between the two monuments is that the two are tied (albeit in quite different ways) to the often troubled history of race and racism in the southeastern United States generally and in Pensacola specifically, even if there is more going on as well. In fact, if we look at the monuments in relation to one another, they say more about race than was perhaps intended.
The monument to Lee sits within a traffic circle on Palafox Street (a main street in downtown Pensacola) at the peak of North Hill. The monument itself consists of a four-sided marble pedestal, atop which is placed a column with a sculpture of a Confederate figure atop the column, which makes for a typically phallic monument. The monument is surrounded by trees, largely obscuring it from view when passing by. At the same time, the site is relatively inaccessible to pedestrians, not being located at a light for safe access. The overall impression when passing by is of circulating around something important – yet something secluded, protected – sacred even. In certain ways, Lee Square is similar to Lee Circle in New Orleans. That monument, similar in basic appearance though much larger in scale, is also located within a traffic circle along a major street offering one of the main entryways to downtown. It is not so inaccessible to pedestrians, nor is it secluded from view by trees. It is, still, separated in another way, by its base being situated atop a still larger pedestal which must be surmounted by a flight of steps, so that the inclination of the pedestrian simply walking past on St. Charles is to simply circulate around the monument without directly approaching it.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Plaza in Pensacola is located just a few blocks from Lee Square at the base of North Hill. It is hard not to look at this tableau - Robert E. Lee atop a tall pedestal atop North Hill looking down towards, i.e. looking down upon, the much smaller monument to MLK - as an icon of race relations in the city – and indeed I see no reason not to interpret the juxtaposition in exactly that way, even if there is more going on as well. MLK Plaza is located within the median of Palafox St.., with a bust of King upon a small pedestal, and low brick walls funneling the pedestrian/viewer towards the bust. From the perspective of the passing motorist (and in Pensacola one is almost always a motorist, almost never a pedestrian), the monument and plaza are a small affair, easy to miss while driving by, in contrast to Lee Square where it is impossible not to notice that one is passing by something of importance – even while that something is largely secluded from the gaze. Once noticed, though, - if noticed - MLK Plaza is much more visible, that is, more open/vulnerable to the penetrating gaze.
These monuments are about race in a variety of ways, and not just as iconic metaphors of race relations and racism in Pensacola. Ironically, they say something significant about race relations through their utter avoidance of overt mentions of race. At MLK plaza, the only inscription (aside from a plaque listing primary donors) quotes from King’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech from December 11, 1964, “Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.” This is certainly a sentiment worthy of commemoration, and it further stands as a reminder that King was not only a leader and hero for black Americans – though he was that – but also a leader and hero for all. At the same time, though, if you didn’t already know much about King and his struggles, you leave the monument with no additional knowledge about King and his struggles.
The monument at Lee Square, being by far the larger of the two, bears more inscriptions, one on each face of the pedestal. On the front face of the monument (that is, the side visible when one is facing Lee atop the monument) is the main dedication: “The uncrowned heroes of the Southern Confederacy, whose joy was to suffer and die for a cause they believed to be just. Their unchallenged duration and matchless heroism shall continue to be the wonder and inspiration of the ages.” Continuing around the monument, one encounters on the next face the following dedication: “Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America. Soldier, Statesman, Patriot, Christian. The only man in our nation without a country, yet 20 million people mourn his death.” On the third face: “Stephen R. Mallory, Secretary of the Navy of the Confederate States of America. ‘Tis not mortals to command success; But we’ll do more sempronius, we’ll deserve it.’” Finally, on the fourth face, the one inscription relating to a Pensacolian: “Edward Aylesworth Perry, Captain of the Pensacola ‘Rifles,’ Colonel of the 2nd Florida Regiment, General of the Florida Brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia. Among the 1st to volunteer in the defense of his adopted state. Faithful in every position to which his merit advanced him. His life and deeds constitute his best monument.”
As with the King memorial, the issue of race per se is occluded from the Civil War context being memorialized (that is, being promoted as a particular form of public memory). There is the slightest tinge of defensiveness in noting that the uncrowned heroes of the confederacy joyously suffered and died for a cause they “believed” to be just, but overall, the memorial sets out to glorify the inspiring nobility of the lost cause of the Confederacy. Through a variety of significations, memorials can attempt to promote or critique dominant (or other) discursive constructions in the public memory (and the same could be said of museums, the other main repository of public signs of the past). Here, the construction is one of nostalgia for the nobility and honor of the lost cause of the Confederacy, with any mention of the relevance of slavery carefully censured. Given the prominence of place (though site selection was also clearly driven by the presence of a Confederate Redoubt on the site during the Civil War) and the obvious investment of resources necessary to construct the large marble monument, Lee Square was an embodiment of dominant discursive constructions at the time of its dedication in 1891. It clearly still has a great deal of power for some local residents today, as seen with annual salutes to Lee and Stonewall Jackson held at the site by the local Stephen Mallory chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, as well as a small trophy that had been left at the site with the letters “CSA” hand-etched upon it which I encountered left behind at the site on a recent visit. Similarly, when encountering numerous white southerners, both in Pensacola and throughout the Southeast, with T-shirts or bumper stickers displaying a currently controversial symbol, the Confederate Battle Flag, along with slogans, such as “Heritage, Not Hate,” I take them to be sincere, in the sense that theirs is a nostalgia for a better time (which never existed) characterized by noble values and honor, that is nostalgia for a discursive construction like that represented at Lee Square and not for an actual social and economic system based largely in slavery and human misery. (But then there was the bumper sticker reading, “If I had known, I would have picked my own cotton,” or the restaurant somewhere in northern Georgia named the Kountry Kooking Kitchen [with the K, K, and K boxed off in diamonds lest you miss the point].)
MLK Plaza, dedicated in 1993, represents a more recent and widely accepted construction – one which is not the polar opposite of that at Lee Square, but instead one which attempts to censure the Confederate legacy every bit as much as the nostalgic constructions of the Confederacy attempt to censure the associations of the Confederacy with slavery. Instead, a benevolent universal humanism is embraced – a laudable thing in itself, while at the same time, the very real social fissures of race which continue to be produced are occluded. The two monuments together index (by omission rather than intent) an important quality of race relations and racism in Pensacola. In virtually every interaction between blacks and whites, race is a factor shaping the interaction and racial inequality continues to be reproduced, but as with these signs of public memory, almost never is it mentioned. In fact, though the monuments assiduously avoid any mention of slavery or of the racism which MLK and the civil rights movement addressed, the fact that they are icons of regional/national figures rather than local individuals belies the pain of racism and of addressing/speaking about racism in the monuments’ displacement from the particulars of Pensacola even when commemorating the Confederacy or the civil rights movement.
As important as these monuments are in illuminating aspects of race relations and racism in Pensacola and beyond, it is not solely race which is signified. They are also about class, and as with race, they largely function by occluding important aspects of class relations. For starters, nostalgia for the lost cause of the Confederacy depends upon an erasure of the class dynamics amongst whites of the antebellum South. Many, if not most, of the southern whites nostalgic for the Confederacy had ancestors with little stake in the economic system of slavery or the political and economic interests of the Confederacy. Further, nostalgia for the better days of the noble Old South is based in part in the class dynamics of today, based in the anxieties of working class white southerners in a time when working class Americans generally often feel rightfully anxious.
With King, the issue of racism and the civil rights movement is occluded, though much to the credit of the monument designers, the plaza does stress important positive aspects of King’s legacy and it probably can be assumed that very few passersby will be unaware of King’s crucial involvement in the civil rights movement and the struggle for racial equality. King’s writings and actions with regard to class and class inequality are similarly occluded – and perhaps to a greater degree because it cannot be so easily assumed that passersby will be previously aware of King’s writings and actions addressing class as much as racial inequality towards the end of his life. As Michael Eric Dyson has pointed out, in most versions of the lives of both King and Malcolm X, the trend of both men’s actions and words towards the ends of their tragically short lives was towards working across racial lines to address not just racial inequality but also class inequality and exploitation generally. If it is painful and threatening to deal with race and the continued social production of racial inequality, it seems to be that much more painful and threatening to move across race lines and address class inequality simultaneously, and it is not surprising that class is largely absent from public memory and commemoration.
These monuments are also about gender. The men being commemorated are just that – men. Martin Luther King and Robert E. Lee are tokens of the Great Man, embodying qualities such as honor, nobility, strength, and dignity (albeit in different ways) which are also often gendered qualities, symbolically associated with masculinity. Their masculinity is represented iconically in different ways, however, bespeaking the different ways and different contexts within which they embody characteristics of ideal masculinity.
Lee’s monument is a (stereo)typically phallic one, whose importance is reinforced through the forced circulation around him. The monument in its relation to circulating traffic provides a barrier to approach, and as discussed above, is largely hidden from view by a ring of trees grown tall over a century. This provides a spatial and visual ambiguity to interpretation, appropriate for the ambiguity of the Confederate legacy in public memory. On the one hand, the relative difficulty of approach alongside the seclusion from view reinforces the monument as sacred site and Lee as the Great Man, and as a typical Great Man difficult to approach and largely masked from the penetrating gaze. On the other, at the same time that when passing by one cannot help but notice that one is skirting around something of importance, this same difficulty of approach and seclusion from view of the monument itself meshes with attempts to erase the Confederate legacy from public memory.
The phallic icon is a typical component of monuments to Great Men and heroes, while with other sorts of historical figures or instances, monuments often take on other forms, such as the Wall in Washington, D.C. commemorating veterans of the Vietnam War and its replica, the Wall South in Pensacola, or the Holocaust Memorial in Boston – cases where there is a felt need to remember the tragic deaths of individuals en masse, but where there is no heroic triumph or even lost cause perceived as great. With King, we clearly have a Great Man, generally characterized as noble, strong, courageous, and dignified, but also a non-typical Great Man, associated also as he is with nonviolence – making him in my book an admirable token of the Great Man type, if we must have Great Men. One would expect, then, a non-typically phallic monument, and MLK plaza provides just that, and as with Lee Square, it is one whose meaning is ultimately ambiguous. King’s monument is still basically phallic in shape, even if on a less grand scale than Lee’s monument. In contrast to Lee Square, MLK Plaza offers a setting with easy access, overall visual openness, and a disembodied bust. On the one hand, the monument is penetrated by the gaze and as phallic icon, the bust as disembodied head is a castrated or emasculated one. On the other, the monument, by resisting the more obvious and clear phallic image of the Lee memorial, resists also the incarnation of King as Great Man with strength in the form of dominance. At the same time that use of space may evoke a sense of vulnerability, it also emphasizes the specific qualities of dignity and nonviolent resistance in the face of injustice – a theme which is occluded from the monument in other ways, but which is indexed here in the use of space and the disembodied representation of King himself. Either interpretation is possible, as are combinations of the two, and that is ultimately where I wish to end, with meaning open, for my intent has not been to criticize (I think that there is much that is overwhelmingly positive with MLK Plaza), but to provoke and open up to contestation the construction of public memory.
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
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.
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