Symbolic or Interpretive Anthropology 1960s –1970s general reevaluation of cultural anthropology as a scientific enterprise From function to meaning

Symbolic or Interpretive Anthropology

1960s –1970s general reevaluation of cultural anthropology as a scientific enterprise

From function to meaning

away from materialist theories towards idealist theories

shift toward issues of culture and interpretation and away from grand theories

increased emphasis on the way in which individual actions creatively shape culture

Greater emphasis on meaning in definitions of culture

Symbolic anthropology: not a tightly organized or clearly bounded ‘school’...

a loosely-conceived ‘project’ of a variety of anthropologists of varied intellectual antecedents who see the decoding of public symbols as being the key activity of anthropological analysis...

three main theoretical sources: Durkheimian sociology

Sapir and emic theory

psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Jung, Róheim, Betelheim)

Raymond Firth Meyer Fortes

Victor Turner Mary Douglas

Sherry B. Ortner Monica Wilson

Gregory Bateson Gilbert Lewis

Barbara Babcock Paul Rabinow

Renato Rosaldo Barbara

Meyerhoff

Terence S. Turner Milton Singer

Maurice Bloch Robert A. Paul

Marilyn Strathern James Fernandez

SYMBOLIC ANTHROPOLOGISTS

Since symbolic anthropology is not an organized “school”, there are no hard-and-fast dogmas or principles

Most “symbolicists” would however agree on these two points:

culture is, fundamentally, a symbolic system and so analysis of cultural symbols provides the natural point of entrée into a cultural universe

If culture is symbolic then it follows that it is used to create and convey meanings since that is the purpose of symbols. If meanings are the end products of culture then understanding culture requires understanding the meanings of its creators and users

“Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take cultures to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning”. (Geertz 1973:5)

Victor Turner

Scottish social anthropologist, 1920–1983

student of Max Gluckman at Manchester

1950-54 fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia

early work in conflict structuralism — Schism and continuity in an African society [1957]...

later work in pilgrimage theory, “experiential anthropology”, and performance theory

but central career interest = symbolic anthropology

The forest of symbols* (1967)

The drums of affliction (1968)

Chihamba: the white spirit (1969)

The ritual process: structure and anti-structure (1969)

Dramas, fields, and metaphors: symbolic action in human society (1975)

Process, performance, and pilgrimage: a study in comparative symbology (1979)

Blazing the trail: way marks in the exploration of symbols (with Edith Turner) (1992)

* collected early papers, including “Symbols in Ndembu ritual” [reading for this course]

VICTOR TURNER KEY MONOGRAPHS IN SYMBOLIC ANTHROPOLOGY

ZIMBABWE

MOZAMBIQUE

NAMIBIA

ANGOLACONGO-KINSHASA

MA- LAWI

TANZANIA

NDEMBU

“MATRILINEAL BELT”

CENTRAL BANTU

(WEST)

MONGO

LUBA

NORTHWESTERNBANTU

EQUATORIALBANTU

SOUTH- WESTERN

BANTU

MIDDLE ZAMBEZI BANTU

• typical society of the “Matrilineal Belt”:

matrilineal descent

virilocal postmarital residence

• shifting cultivation on poor savanna land

• impermanent villages:

new villages continually reforming

ambitious headmen seek to attract villagers away from their present headmen (“big man” political process)

• individual continually being pulled in opposing directions by conflicting matrilineal loyalties and ties based on Fa-So relationship

• lots of ritual Lots

NDEMBU

Social dramasIn Schism and Continuity in African Society (1957) Based on his fieldwork among the Ndembu

Social dramas were recurrent units of social life

exist as a result of the conflict that is inherent in societies.

social dramas have "four main phases of public action, accessible to observation"

•breach,•crisis,•redressive action, and •reintegration.

The first phase is "signalized by the public, overt breach or deliberate nonfulfillment of some crucial norm regulating the intercourse of the parties" (ibid.).

Once a breach occurs "a phase of mounting crisis supervenes" in which the breach widens and extends the separation between the parties.

The crisis stage has "liminal characteristics, since it is a threshold between more or less stable phases of the social process" (Turner, 1974:39).

The third phase of redressive action occurs to limit the spread of the crisis with "certain adjustive and redressive mechanisms

Social dramas

The redressive phase is the most liminal because it is in the middle of the crisis and the resolution.

It is in this phase that the liminal ritual may be enacted to resolve the crisis and provide an opportunity for the final phase of reintegration to occur.

The reintegration phase involves the resolution of the conflict by reintegrating the disturbed group into society or by the "social recognition and legitimization of irreparable schism between the contesting parties"

this four-phase model fits into van Gennep's phases of rites of passage.

Breach and crisis correspond to van Gennep's separation phase, redress aligns with the transition phase of rites of passage and reintegration represents van Gennep's incorporation phase

Arnold van Gennep

MUKANDA

Ndembu circumcisers with knives

Photos from Victor Turner: “Mukanda: the rite of circum-cision.” In: The Forest of Symbols

Gate to mukanda bush. Childhood clothes left on gate

Novicesdaubedwith clay

LEFT: hut where novices sleep in the mukanda bush BELOW: iron pot in which thenovices’ porridge is cooked

Novices receiving instruction from elders

Masked figure (Chizaluki) representing the authority of the ancestors

Last day ofmukanda: initiates don new clothes and dance in public for first time as men

RITUAL SYMBOLS

Turner not concerned with all possible symbolism. All social groups have some symbolism, down to couples and dyads. Turner is mainly concerned with ‘cultural’ symbols or (in his term) ‘ritual’ symbols

Ritual symbols = a small number of objects which have more or less generally shared meanings within a community of interpretation (‘culture’)

• Milk Tree for Ndembu

• Cross for Christians

• Norwegian flag for Norwegians

• wedding garland for Greeks

PROPERTIES OF DOMINANT RITUAL SYMBOLS

1. CONDENSATION: Many things & actions are represented in a single iconic formation

“Non-literate people have every incentive to economize on

their use of information storing messages. Since all

knowledge must be incorporated in the stories and rituals

which are familiar to the living generation, it is of immense

advantage if the same verbal categories, with their

corresponding objects, can be used for multiple purposes.”

Edmund Leach, “Ritualization in Man, in relation to

conceptual and social development.” Royal Society of

London. Philosophical Transactions. Series B. 251:403-08.

1966


2. UNIFICATION: Many disparate significata are interconnected & unified by virtue of the common possession of certain analogous qualities

analogy = the mechanism whereby many significata are able to be condensed in one dominant symbol


3. POLARIZATION: The symbol typically possesses two distinct poles of meaning, one normative (moral rules of society) and the other sensory (natural and physiological process)

All that is quintessentially “Ndembu” is transmitted from mother to child, and so thedominant symbol of cohesion and continuityis symbolized by milk and the female breast

The sensory pole is ‘gross’ and may be expected to arouse emotions (breast, penis,blood, semen, tears)


Polarization = the linkage between the conscious or ideological aspects of symbols and the emotional aspects...

e.g. why certain acts (profanation, incest, shedding of blood) instantly trigger emotional responses

This linkage is clearly a learned response (behavior)

TURNER: criticizes Sapir & psychoanalytically oriented writers for ignoring the ideological pole in favor of the emotional


4. POLYVALENCE — Dominant symbols do not just have one meaning (A = B) but are invariably ‘polyvalent’ or ‘polysemic’, and link into many domains of the culture and at a variety of levels

DECODING RITUAL SYMBOLS

external form andobservable

characteristics

interpretations ofritual specialists &

lay persons

significant contextsworked out by the

anthropologist

Ritual symbols can be decoded by triangulating between three main bodies of information:


lay persons


anthropologist

e.g. dominant symbol usedin girls’ puberty rite, thelatex exuded by a particulartree = milk = fertility = mo-therhood = the continuity of lineages in a matrilineal society = the unity & equality of all Ndembu


‘SIGNIFICATA’

operational meaning


characteristics

exegetical

Positional

ARROW: Diplorrhyncus condylocarpon, the Milk Tree

A `milk tree' growing in the compound of a Senior Chief in southern Zambia. Regarded as feminine by the inhabitants of the compound, the milk tree twines as a palpable dependent on its deciduous `masculine' host.

Many Bantu peoples strongly associated this tree with womanhood because of the thick white, milk-like sap which the live wood exudes when cut. the blood-red sap of the so-called `

A fresh cut in the milk tree showing the milky white sap that gives the tree its common name

A fresh, bright scarlet cut on a `blood tree' in Kangaba, Mali

marked that wood as masculine


lay persons


anthropologist


Get the “official” and the lay perspective:document any possiblelayering of meanings,from exoteric to esoteric

operational meaning


characteristics

exegetical

Positional


lay persons


anthropologist


in some specific ritual contexts, Milk Tree =

• unity of women

• the novice herself

• loss of child by mother

operational meaning


characteristics

exegetical

Positional


lay persons


anthropologist

classic contrast betweenwhat people sayand what they do — e.g., despite the ide- ology of Ndembu unity, actually the Milk


Tree implies certaincleavages in Ndembusociety

in some specific ritual contexts, Milk Tree =

• unity of women • the novice

herself • loss of child by

mother

operational meaning


characteristics

exegetical

Positional

...in the Nkang’a ritual, each person or group in successive contexts, sees the milk tree only as representing her or their own specific interests and values at those times. However the anthropologist, who has previously made a structural analysis of Ndembu society, isolating its organizational principles, and distinguishing its groups and relationships, has no particular bias and can observe the real interconnection and conflict between groups and persons. What is meaningless for an actor playing a specific role may well be highly significant for an observer and analyst of the total system.

On these grounds, therefore, I consider it legitimate to include within the total meaning of a dominant ritual symbol, aspects of behavior associated with it which the actors themselves are unable to interpret, and indeed of which they may be unaware...Victor Turner, “Symbols in Ndembu ritual”

Erockson & Murphy 2001: 364

By including esoteric meanings, Turner departs from earlier theorists of symbolism, for whom only the exoteric meanings (shared by everyone) were truly “public symbolism” (Nadel, Wilson)

But esoteric meanings are a significant part of most knowledge systems...

are particularly clear in Central African initiation systems...

• at various points in initiation ceremony, the novice is presented symbolically encoded information...

• memorized by rote — much of the symbolism is undisclosed & will never be formally disclosed

• however even by the end of the bush school, some novices will have figured out by context, or by recognizing an image presented earlier in a song learnt later

• those who show a talent for grasping the more elusive meanings become the officiating priests, witchdoctors, and bush school instructors of future generations

• thus the populace sorts itself out in various strata of intellectual and/or spiritual “depth”

most people content to live in a universe of signs and symbols whose meanings are known to others, but not them

a self-selected few become guardians of the society’s symbolic resources

OTHER KEY CONCEPTS IN TURNER’S APPROACH TO RITUAL SYMBOLISM

1. liminality — extensive elaboration of van

Gennep’s notion of liminality in rites of passage

2. communitas & structure — ‘structure’ inherently

hierarchical & liminality inherently

communal/egalitarian

Documents

Symbolic or Interpretive Anthropology 1960s –1970s general reevaluation of cultural anthropology as a scientific enterprise From function to meaning