Signs and Society

Richard J. Parmentier

Description

Brilliantly articulating the potent intersections of semiotic and linguistic anthropology, Signs and Society demonstrates how a keen appreciation of signs helps us better understand human agency, meaning, and creativity. Inspired by the foundational contributions of C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, and drawing upon key insights from neighboring scholarly fields, noted anthropologist Richard J. Parmentier develops an array of innovative conceptual tools for ethnographic, historical, and literary research. His concepts of "transactional value," "metapragmatic interpretant," and "circle of semiosis," for example, illuminate the foundations and effects of such diverse cultural forms and practices as economic exchanges on the Pacific island of Palau, Pindar's Victory Odes in ancient Greece, and material representations of transcendence in ancient Egypt and medieval Christianity. Other studies complicate the separation of emic and etic analytical models for such cultural domains as religion, economic value, and semiotic ideology. Provocative and absorbing, these fifteen pioneering essays blaze a trail into anthropology's future while remaining firmly rooted in its celebrated past.

Acknowledgments
Part I: Foundations of Peircean Semiotics
1. Semiotic Anthropology
2. Charles S. Peirce
3. Representation, Symbol, and Semiosis: Signs of a Scholarly Collaboration
4. Peirce and Saussure on Signs and Ideas in Language
5. Troubles with Trichotomies: Reflections on the Utility of Peirce's Sign Trichotomies for Social Analysis
6. Semiotic Degeneracy of Social Life: Prolegomenon to a Human Science of Semiosis
Part II: Critical Commentaries and Reviews
7. Representing Semiotics in the New Millennium
8. The World Has Changed Forever: Semiotic Reflections on the Experience of Sudden Change
9. Description and Comparison of Religion
10. It's About Time: On the Semiotics of Temporality
11. Anthropological Encounters of a Semiotic Kind
12. Two Marxes: Evolutionary and Critical Dimensions of Marxian Social Theory
Part III: Comparative Perspectives on Semiosis
13. Money Walks, People Talk: Systemic and Transactions Dimensions of Palauan Exchange
14. Representing Transcendence: The Semiosis of Real Presence / With Massimo Leone
15. The 'Savvy Interpreter': Performance and Interpretation in Pindar's Victory Odes / With Nancy Felson
List of References
Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• General officer
• Anthropology
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 03 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253025142
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

SIGNS AND SOCIETY
SIGNS AND SOCIETY
Further Studies in Semiotic Anthropology
Richard J. Parmentier
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Richard J. Parmentier
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02481-7 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02496-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-02514-2 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
For Nancy Felson
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part I: Foundations of Peircean Semiotics
1 Semiotic Anthropology
2 Charles S. Peirce
3 Representation, Symbol, and Semiosis: Signs of a Scholarly Collaboration
4 Peirce and Saussure on Signs and Ideas in Language
5 Troubles with Trichotomies: Reflections on the Utility of Peirce s Sign Trichotomies for Social Analysis
6 Semiotic Degeneracy of Social Life: Prolegomenon to a Human Science of Semiosis
Part II: Critical Commentaries and Reviews
7 Representing Semiotics in the New Millennium
8 The World Has Changed Forever: Semiotic Reflections on the Experience of Sudden Change
9 Description and Comparison of Religion
10 It s About Time: On the Semiotics of Temporality
11 Anthropological Encounters of a Semiotic Kind
12 Two Marxes: Evolutionary and Critical Dimensions of Marxian Social Theory
Part III: Comparative Perspectives on Semiosis
13 Money Walks, People Talk: Systemic and Transactional Dimensions of Palauan Exchange
14 Representing Transcendence: The Semiosis of Real Presence / With Massimo Leone
15 The Savvy Interpreter : Performance and Interpretation in Pindar s Victory Odes / With Nancy Felson
References
Index
Acknowledgments
T HE ESSAYS IN this volume were all written while I was a member of the Department of Anthropology at Brandeis University, and so I first thank my departmental colleagues who over the past quarter-century have made our hallway such a warm and supportive academic home. I have been fortunate to have had expert critical feedback on these essays by scholars from many different disciplines and institutions, especially Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, St phane Breton, Ward Goodenough, Nina Kammerer, Paul Kockelman, Kyung-Nan Koh, Janet McIntosh, Kathryn Morgan, Ryo Morimoto, June Nash, Sally Ann Ness, Nigel Nicholson, Susan Petrilli, Frank Reynolds, Peter W. Rose, Benson Saler, and Michael Silverstein. I particularly thank Nancy Felson and Massimo Leone, fellow members of the Editorial Board of Signs and Society , who coauthored two of these essays and kindly agreed to have them reprinted here. I gratefully acknowledge the support of Susan Birren, dean of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis, who approved my sabbatical leave for 2015-2016, which made possible the completion of two of these essays and the preparation of the volume. I also thank Asif Agha and Michael Silverstein, who replaced me as editor of Signs and Society during my sabbatical.
The chapters in this volume have been revised from their original presentation and publication forms and are reprinted here with permission.
SIGNS AND SOCIETY
PART I
F OUNDATIONS OF P EIRCEAN S EMIOTICS
1
Semiotic Anthropology
Fields of Signs
The domain of semiotic anthropology is considered to be the results of empirical research carried out by anthropologists (in all subfields) that makes use of concepts and methods associated with the tradition of scholarship labeled semiotics or semiology. Semiotic anthropology is not a formal subdiscipline of anthropology; it is not a school of anthropological thought; and it is not confined to researchers affiliated with particular academic institutions or national traditions. To some degree semiotic anthropology emerged as a correction and refinement of symbolic or interpretive anthropology or structural anthropology (Mertz 1985). In addition to the study of linguistic and written codes, anthropologists have employed semiotic notions in the analysis of cultural signs, such as pictorial representations and images, dress and bodily adornment, gesture and dance, spatial organization and the built environment, ritualized behaviors (taboo, divination, and performance), exchange valuables, and food and cuisine. Although anthropology has played a relatively minor role in the development of the larger discipline of semiotics, which is dominated by literary studies, it was an anthropologist, Margaret Mead, who coined the modern label at an interdisciplinary conference at Indiana University in 1962. In her summary comments Mead discussed the possibility of a new term:
Which in time will include the study of all patterned communication in all modalities, of which linguistics is the most technically advanced. If we had a word for patterned communication modalities, it would be useful. I am not enough of a specialist in this field to know what word to use, but many people here, who have looked as if they were on opposite sides of the fence, have used the word semiotics. It seems to me the one word, in some form or other, that has been used by people arguing from quite different positions. (Mead 1964, 275)
Like all aspects of contemporary research in semiotics, semiotic anthropology is heir to two dominant intellectual strands stemming from the work of American scientist and mathematician Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) and Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Peirce and Saussure did not know of each other; much of their writing on semiotics or semiology is fragmentary and took decades to become widely available, and neither discussed strictly anthropological topics with any specificity.
Peirce developed an innovative reformulation of valid scientific reasoning by viewing both human thought and natural processes as following the inferential logic of signs, or semeiotic. For Peirce, the universe was perfused with signs that stand for or represent their objects and that determine further interpretant signs, which in turn represent the relationship between signs and their objects. Refusing to take natural language as the model semiotic system but recognizing the special character of conventional linguistic forms (which he called, following Aristotle, symbols), Peirce subdivided the opposed traditional category of natural signs (Greek semeion ) into icons, which resemble their objects in some formal way, and indexes, which are spatially or temporally contiguous with their objects.
A sign endeavors to represent, in part at least, an Object, which is therefore in a sense the cause, or determinant, of the sign even if the sign represents its object falsely. But to say that it represents its Object implies that it affects a mind, and so affects it as, in some respect, to determine in that mind something that is mediately due to the Object. That determination of which the immediate cause, or determinant, is the Sign, and of which the mediate cause is the Object may be termed the Interpretant. (Peirce CP 6.347)
Of the three Peircean grounds relating signs and objects, only symbolic conventionality requires the interpretant to supply the linkage between sign and object, although nothing actually functions as a sign unless it is interpreted to be a sign of some sort. Peircean symbols are, thus, irreducibly triadic; but symbols can communicate information about their objects only by embodying icons and can successfully point to the external world by embodying indexes, which anchor the contextual flow of signs (or semiosis) so that potential interpreters can bring their collateral knowledge to bear on the objects being represented. A scientist of international stature and a strong exponent of the pragmatic theory of truth, Peirce was not at all sensitive to the imperfections and limitations of cultural sign systems, even preferring to employ as a calculus for reasoning his own artificial system of existential graphs. In thinking about both the linguistic and graphic diagrammatization of inferential thought, Peirce insisted that the particular form of symbolization is irrelevant to the constitution of meaning and that a language is usable to the degree that its system of formal representation transparently mirrors the process of valid logical inference (Parmentier 1994c, 42-43). Of considerable impact in contemporary semiotic anthropology are passages in which Peirce suggests that, since all thought is in signs, a thinking person is not very different from a sign and, furthermore, that the interior process of thought does not differ in principle from dialogical communication between people.
There is no element whatever of man s consciousness which has not something corresponding to it in the word; and the reason is obvious. It is that the word or sign which man uses is the man himself. For, as the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, provides that man is a sign; so, that every thought in an external sign, proves that man is an external sign.