Turner 1968 Sociological Inquiry

Sociological Inquiry 38 (Spring): 121-134

Parsons Concept of Generalized Media of Social Interaction and its Relevance

for Social Anthropology

I.

TERENCE S. TURNER Cornell University

The concept of generalized symbolic media of social interaction was introduced by Parsons five years ago in his two articles on the concepts of power and influence.l I believe that it represents a theoretical development of the first importance, which has received much less attention-particularly in my own field of social anthropology-than it deserves. The purpose of the present paper is to review and criticize the concept itself and t o point out its relevance t o certain problems in social anthropology.

THE CONCEPT OF A GENERAJAZED SYMBOLIC MEDIUM OF SOCIAL INTERACTION It will be useful to begin the discussion

with a short critical summary of the generalized medium concept.a

A. Medium, code, and message: generalized media as symbolic stmctures and as mechanisms of interaction

A generalized medium of interaction, in Parsons scheme, is a symbolic mechanism which is manipulated by actors in order to influence the behavior of other actors so as to get results in interaction.

The prototype and most highly developed example of generalized media of social interaction is language. Language is a mechanism for influencing the behavior or attitudes of others by presenting them with symbolic counterparts of the concrete things or relationships to which the symbols refer, ar- ranged into meaningful patterns according to the rules of a syntactic code. As a symbolic medium of communication, language involves two fundamental aspects, code

Talcott Parsons, On the Concept of Influ- ence and Rejoinder to Bauer and Coleman, Public Opinion Quarterly, 27 (Spring, 1963a), pp. 37-62 and 83-92. Talcott Parsons, On the Concept of Political Power, Proceedings of the American Philosoohical Society. 107 (No. 3), 1963b, pp. 232-262.

This summary will be based on Parsons 1963a and 1963b puss& and notes from lectures by Parsons on the generalized media concept at Harvard in 1964. Page citations will be made only for direct quotations.

(the system of elements. and rules for com- bining them, through which communicable meanings are encoded and understood) and message (specific linguistic communications or utterances conveying particular meanings).

Money, power, and influence are specialized languages of social interaction and provide further examples of generalized media. Of these, money serves as Parsons principal theoretical model.

The distinction is made in classical economic theory between moneys aspect as measure of value, in which capacity it constitutes a code of standardized categories for measuring and expressing economic value, and its aspect as a medium of exchange, in which capacity it serves as the vehicle of particular economic transactions. Parsons treats these two aspects of money as analogous to the code and message aspects of language. It should be made clear that, from the point of view of Jakobson and Halles formulation of the code and message concepts upon which Parsons draws, both the normative framework of syntactic rules and institutions of the monetary system and the lexicon of symbolic monetary tokens that comprise the meaningful elements of which monetary messages are composed, are parts of code. The message aspect properly refers to the specific semantic contents of individual transactions or communications, as symbolically conveyed by particular com- binations of symbolic tokens. Parsons uses

~ ~

3R~man Jakobson and Morris Halle, Funda- mentals of Language, Paris: Mouton, 1956, p. 5.

122 SOCIOLOGICAL INQUIRY

relationship between actors as well as simply of needs of individual actors or properties of objects. I would go so far as to say that for the symbolic structure of generalized media, this relational aspect is the most important of all. To return to the example of money, economic utility represents a mode of relationship between social actors- that mode in which they assume the roles of buyer and seller towards each other. A given amount of money in this sense symbolizes the quantity of utility a seller is prepared to relinquish to a buyer. Money as a generalized medium of social interaction, in these terms, works because it is itself a generalized symbolic model of the social relationship (or system of relationships) of transaction in the mode of values and interests (economic utility) that it represents. By model I mean a generalized representation of a relationship which is manipulated as if it were epistemologically, causally, and/or operationally prior to any specific instance of the relationship.

Generalized media, then, represent symbolic models of social relationships involving a particular mode of communication or transaction. Such models constitute systems of symbolic tokens which function as objective correlatives of the relationship they symbolize. Their social usefulness (that is, their ability to mediate the relevant class of transactions) depends on their acceptance as such by the actors involved. The actors acceptance of the medium as a legitimate objective correlative in this sense depends on their confidence in its convertibility into real, intrinsically valuable or meaningful commodities or relationships of the type to which the medium symbolically refers.

The individual actors confidence in the convertibility or exchangeability of the symbolic tokens of the medium for real assets (in the terms of Parsons monetary analogy) is one of two grounds of trust any symbolic medium must have in order to function. The other stems from the complementary level of the structure of symbolic codes and media. This is the collective dimension, through which the medium and

the term medium to refer to the symbolic tokens of the code (its lexical aspect), sometimes in their generalized capacity as parts of code, and sometimes in their capacity as units of message.

A second distinction drawn from classical economics is that between value in use and value in exchange. Money as a symbolic medium lacks value in use, i.e. intrinsic utility, but as a medium of exchange it constitutes a means of access to intrinsically useful goods. This value in exchange it possesses precisely because it symbolizes value in use, i.e. the generalized property of utility. The generalized symbolic property corresponds to the measure of value aspect previously mentioned.

B. Institutional and definitional prerequisites

In order for a symbol or category of symbols to function as a generalized medium in social interaction, Parsons asserts that there must be specific definition and institutional acceptance in four basic respects. The four respects Parsons lists fall together into two pairs, corresponding to two levels of the structure of the code or framework of the system. First, there must be a category of value, of respects in which needs of the acting units are at stake. Second, as this implies, there must be a corresponding category of interest, of properties of objects in the situation of action that are important in the light of these values. Objects here may refer both to other actors who are parties to a transaction. or entities, commodities, or relationships which constitute referents of the symbols of the medium and are transacted or communicated about through the medium.

Money conveniently illustrates these two properties. As we have seen, it symbolizes utility or economic value, which is a category of needs of actors. But utility is also a category of properties of objects in the situation of action that are of interest in terms of the category of needs of actors symbolized by the medium.

There is an extremely important point left implicit in Parsons exposition of this set of propositions. This is that what is symbolized by the medium is a category of

Parsons, 1963a, op. ci., p. 41.

SThis formulation derives from Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation, Harper Torchbook ed., 1960, pp. 23-24, 78, 89-90.

PARSONS CONCEPT

the individuaI transactions it mediates are tied into the structure of society as a whole. At this level, every symbolic medium rests upon a normative framework, which regulates the use of the medium by actors, and a definition of the situation, which specifies the class of objects that may be transacted through the use of the medium and the social arenas within which such transactions can take place. These features represent the third and fourth institutional prerequisites of generalized media. The grounding of trust in the medium at this level derives from the consensus of the actors involved that the medium shall be reciprocally acceptable in all relevant transactions.

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C. Degrees of freedom in interaction generated by symbolic media

The advantage of generalized media from the viewpoint of both individual actors and society as a whole is an enormous gain in the flexibility and volume of transactions or messages that can be communicated with respect to the mode of interests of actors that are at stake. Parsons makes this point through a comparison of money systems with barter, in which he shows how generalized media gain degrees of freedom for the system in four ways. In the first place, there is freedom of ifem: in a barter system, actors must trade their goods for whatever other specific items are available, but in a system in which goods and services are exchanged for money, a far greater variety of items is potentially available in exchange for a commodity or service of a given value. Second, there is freedom of source: money allows access to a variety of sources of goods or services which might not, under barter conditions, desire to exchange their wares for anything ego has to offer. In the third place is freedom of time: in a barter situation, an actor who relinquishes control over some good or service must take in exchange some equivalent that happens to be available at the time of the transaction, whereas money confers the opportunity of waiting until its holder wishes to use the purchasing power it represents on another occasion. Finally, there is freedom of the terms of exchange: because of his freedoms of time and source, the actor is free to

accept or reject terms of exchange with respect to which he would have little choice in a barter situation.

It is the generalized, symbolic aspect of the medium, its capacity to serve as a generalized reference to any object definable within the appropriate situation and category of value, and its consequent lack of attachment to any specific object or set of objects of intrinsic value, that makes possible this flexibility in the system. The symbolic value of the medium is guaranteed and supported in the last analysis by the consensus or mutual trust of the actors who use it.

D. Dynamic and systemic properties The consensus and reciprocal trust of

actors that makes it possible for them to use the medium in specific transactions with each other also maintains the collective structure of the medium (its institutional code or normative framework). Gen- eralized media operate as a kind of feed- back system, linking the level of individual transactions between acting units and the level of collective or institutional structure by means of a circulating system of tokens or symbols which themselves reflect the structure of the transactional relationship that they mediate. By linking the two levels within a single framework, symbolic media generate a far greater degree of volume capacity and flexibility in the mode of transaction they represent, from the standpoint of the individual acting unit, than would be possible on the basis of reliance on intrinsically effective barter transactions. This increment in flexibility and volume is only made possible, however, by the individual acting units surrendering a portion of their independence and individual unit security to the collective system, in the form of commitments to the consensus that underwrites the acceptability of the medium and the assumption of the risks and obligations this entails.

The increments of collective integration and flexibility generated by symbolic media, together with the much greater volume of transactions that follows from these consid- erations, create new possibilities for the con- centration and expansion of the total transactional capacity of the medium at the system level, on the analogy of bank credit


or monetary management. Together with this potential for system expansion, however, go the concomitant dangers of in- flationary (medium depreciation) and de- flationary (system contraction) phenomena.

II. THE RELEVANCE OF THE GENERALIZED MEDIUM CONCEPT FOR SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND VICE VERSA

A. Another look at the relationship between generalized media, barter, and ascriptive gift prestation

One of the most interesting problems raised by Parsons analysis of generalized media is that of what relationships, if any, exist between the category of generalized symbolic media and other forms of symbolic behavior. How far, in other words, may the analytical properties of generalized media isolated by Parsons hold true for other categories of social relations and cul- tural symbolism? The question can per- haps best be considered by beginning with the one case in which Parsons himself has treated it: namely, the problem of the relationship between monetary exchange, barter, and gift prestation as found in primitive societies.

I use the term gift prestation here to refer to the class of phenomena whose generic properties and common incidence in primitive societies were pointed out by Mauss in his classic study, The Gifta The fundamental principle of the prestation, according to Mauss, is that, although it and the counter-prestation it normally calls forth, take place under a voluntary guise, they are in essence strictly obligatory. The parties to the exchange are often corporate groups rather than human individuals, or else individuals acting as repre- sentatives of collective groups or relationship categories. The items given, bestowed, or exchanged in such cases are, furthermore,

assistance, women, children, dances, and feats; and fairs in which . . . the circulation of weal& is but one part of a wide and enduring contract. e

Maws emphasized that the phenomenon of trade and markets, in the sense of systems of barter exchange for economic purposes, were universal phenomena and existed side by side with gift prestation (as in the above- mentioned fairs). He nevertheless stressed the differences between the two forms of exchange. Gift prestation, in his view, constituted a direct expression of the fundamental principles of social solidarity: reciprocity and its corollary, the division of labor. Its purpose was the maximization of the solidarity between the parties to the exchange, rather than the net economic gain of either. The non-economic character of the exchange was borne out by the purely symbolic value of many of the items exchanged, and the ritual character and setting of many prestations. The obligatory nature of the three aspects of the prestation complex-giving, receiving, and repaying- stemmed from the gifts essential character as a symbolic expression of social solidarity. Not to give, not to receive, or not to repay was equivalent to rejecting the bond of solidarity, of common membership in the same system of social relations. For this reason, the sanction for failure or refusal to meet any of these three fundamental obligations was commonly open feud or warfare.

Parsons makes extensive use in his analysis of the contrast between barter exchange, in which intrinsically valuable goods must be directly exchanged for each other, and money transactions, in which the substitu- tion of a symbolic medium of interaction for intrinsically valuable goods in exchange makes possible increased degrees of freedom in the system of economic exchange. On a few occasions, he mentions gift prestation in primitive societies, as an example of the limiting case of restriction of degrees of freedom in exchange (since not only the roles of giver and receiver, but also the items to be exchanged, and frequently the

. . . not exclusively goods and wealth . . . and things of economic value. They exchange rather courtesies, entertainments, ritual, military

time and place of exchange as well, tend to

degrees of freedom in exchange as his criterion of evolutionary progression, Par-

be more or less rigidly prescribed). With

*Marcel Mauss, The Giff, translated by Ian

Ilbid.. p. 3. Cunnison, Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1954.

81bid., p. 3.

PARSONS CONCEPT 125

sons thus arrives at the evolutionary se- quence, gift prestation-barter-monetary system. It is not my purpose here to dis- pute the validity of this criterion, nor its conceptual basis, the Gemeinschaft-Gesell- schaft continuum. There are certain implicit CorolIaries in Parsons evolutionary handling of fie three forms of exchange, however, which must be challenged.

Parsons interest in considering gift prestation, barter, and monetary exchange in an evolutionary perspective is of course in comparing the properties of systems of exchange that rely on symbolic media with systems relying only on intrinsic values in exchange, of which barter furnishes the type case. Appropriately enough, from the standpoint of his theoretical interests, Par- sons concentrates almost exclusively on the money-barter contrast, and gift prestation is only rarely brought into the discussion. Yet the implication remains of an evolutionary parallelism between the development toward greater flexibility in exchange and the elaboration of the symbolic ap- paratus of exchange. The problem with this is, of course, that gift prestation is also a highly symbolic medium, and has less in common with barter in this respect than monetary systems. It could be described as a symbolic medium for transmitting a single message, since the content of the message, the relationship between giver

and receiver, and often the time, place, amount, and frequency of the prestation are fixed by tradition and ritual formulae. In the sense that it lacks the degrees of freedom in exchange associated with generalized symbolic media like money, it could be called a restricted symbolic medium. It possesses nonetheless a generalized component which gives it a structure resembling a generalized symbolic medium in all other essential respects. As a collectively institu- tionalized symbolic model of a key social relationship, it incorporates all the institutional prerequisites of a symbolic medium in Parsons terms: a normative framework and definition of the situation which regulate a transaction mediated by symbolic tokens, whose meaning embodies a category of interests or values of actors and a corresponding category of properties of objects. The institutionalization of the pattern at the collective level is made a

6

focus of social consensus, guaranteeing the transaction and often imbuing it with ritual importance. The symbolic medium of the gift prestation itself mediates between this level of collective consensus and values and the level of the individual transaction, at which the interests of the giver and recipient are directly concerned: even the feed- back property of generalized symbolic codes as two-level structures is thus preserved in gift prestation.

This mediation between the collective level of social consensus and the level of the relationship between the individual partners to the prestation is, in fact, the main point of the gift. Gift prestation functions as a symbolic device for focusing the whole force of the collective consensus, which in a generalized medium like money is mediated in such a way as to support or legitimize a great variety of potential transactions, on a single, determinate relationship: that between the partners to the prestation. This relationship, as anthropological field work has repeatedly shown, is usually one of vital importance to the structure of the society concerned and, in a more direct sense, to an individual actors field of social relations and group affiliations. The nature of this importance corresponds to the intrinsic value of exchanges mediated by generalized symbolic media. Gift prestation is, in short, l i e generalized symbolic media, a symbolic device for guaranteeing the intrinsic value of an exchange and the relationship it expresses

terms of a collective, reciprocally binding consensus.

The discussion of gift prestation so far has shown that Parsons class of generalized symbolic media shares many of its basic properties with at least one other class of symbolically mediated social relations, one that happens to be of great importance among societies traditionally studied by anthropologists. The result has been to call in question Parsons implicit assumption that the development of generalized symbolic codes for the mediation of social relations is directly correlated with the development of degrees of freedom in exchange. In place of Parsons one-dimensional frame of reference, running from gift prestation through barter (primitive Gesellschaft, lack- ing symbolic mediation) to money (sophisticated, symbolically mediated Gesellschaft),


I would suggest that gift prestation, considered as symbolically mediated Gemein- schaft. constitutes an additional dimension

the direction of Gesellschaft and individual manipulation they may be, are always to some extent devices by which society as a

Gemeinschaft (no degrees of freedom) Gesellschaft

gift I money I symbolic non-symbolic barter I

-a point of triangulation as it were-of Parsons analytical scheme.

From the vantage point of such a two- dimensional frame of reference, many symbolic media, including Parsons cases of power, influence, and generalized commitments, can be immediately recognized as falling somewhere toward the middle of the dimension connecting restricted symbolic media like gift prestation on the one hand and money as the type case of generalized symbolic media on the other. They are, in other words, more bound up with determinate social relationships, with transactions whose content can vary only within rela- tively narrowly prescribed limits, than money. Like money, however, their generalized symbolic character functions to invest the relationships and transactions they mediate with the prestige and authority of the collective. The triangular conceptual scheme we have suggested allows the simi- larities between such media and money to be specified without neglecting the important differences in degrees of freedom between them.

In so doing, this scheme provides a potential corrective to the individualistic emphasis of Parsons exposition of the functions of generalized media. It is clear that in primitive gift prestation the emphasis is not on how individual actors can manipulate the medium to get results from other actors by affecting their behavior in particular ways. I t is, rather, on the standardization of the relationship between the actors according to a collectively imposed pattern. Generalized Gesellschaft media like money obviously have a high manipulative potentiaI, but they also have a strong resid- ual unmanipulative component, analogous to the collective regulating function which is dominant in gift prestation. Generalized media, in short, no matter how specialized in

whole imposes certain forms and limitations on the transactions in which they are used.

B. The applicability of the symbolic medium concept to phenomena of primitive social organization: some concrete examples

Gift prestation is only one of a numerous array of symbolic media of social relations that have been discovered by anthropologists in primitive societies. I shall give some examples drawn from the Kayapo, a Central Brazilian tribe among whom I recently carried out field research: in order to clarify some of the points made above about gift prestation, and also to suggest the wide variety of social structural phenomena that can be subsumed under the rubric of the generalized medium concept.

1. The traditional Kayapo village is cir- cular in form, with one or more rings of uxorilocal extended family houses surround- ing an open central plaza, in the Eastern and Western halves of which stand two large mens houses. The mens houses are the domiciles of boys and young men of the younger two mens age-sets (between the ages of approximately 8 and 21) and the meeting places of the mens societies, to which belong men of the mature mens age grade. To each mens house is attached a set of womens societies, also stratified on the basis of age into a senior and junior group. The mens houses and their respectively attached womens societies constitute the moieties of Kayapo society.

The only stable and culturally defined groupings based on kinship are the uxori-

9A total of 14 months was spent in the field between Sept. 1962 and April 1966. The research was supported by NIMH grant no. M-6030 and a supplementary grant from the Harvard Central Brazilian Research Project.

PARSONS CONCEPT

local extended family household and the nuclear family.

Uxorilocality is not based on lineal reckoning, as in a matrilineal-matrilocal household. I t is a relational criterion which dictates that the female offspring of a family do not move out of their natal household at any point in their life cycles, whereas men must take up residence with their wives once they have consummated their marriages by fathering a child. Since marriage is largely village endogamous, the residence rule does not involve a major spatial movement for men: its significance lies i n its symbolic role within the normative structure of social relations.

Males are inducted into a mens house at the age of about 8 by a ceremonial sponsor called a substitute father (bam kaak). The sole criterion of eligibility for this role is that the man in question be a non- relative (me-ba-item). The boy becomes a member of the substitute fathers mens house, and hence of the moiety it represents. Moiety membership for men is thus based on symbolic patrifiliation, but explicitly dissociated from patrilineal or any other genea- logical kinship criteria. It is possible for a man to change his moiety membership at will if for any reason he feels discontented with his current situation.

Women are similarly inducted into the womens society associated with one or the other mens house by a substitute mother. Their moiety affiliation may later be ad- justed to correspond with that of their husbands.

The moieties are not exogamous, and have no connection with the determination of marriage choices. There is, however, a relationship between moiety structure and marriage, since the principle by virtue of which the womens societies are associated with one or the other mens house is that women must join the society on the same side of the plaza as the mens house of their husbands. The bisexual moiety groupings of the two halves of the village plaza thus consist of husbands and wives: they are, as it were, ex post fucto endogamous moieties based on symbolic parallel filiation. Conflicts which arise in the case of women, when the ceremonial substitute mother has inducted a woman into one moiety and the woman subsequently marries a man of the

127

other moiety, are resolved by the womans changing her membership to the womens society of the opposite side of the plaza.

There is also a close relationship between the internal structure of the moieties and marital status. The moieties are internally stratified on the basis of a system of age grades. A boy remains a resident of the mens houses until he consummates his marriage by begetting a child. In the course of his residence in the mens house, when he attains puberty, he is initiated. The initiation ceremony, which is again under the sponsorship of his substitute father, is also a marriage ceremony and stresses the role of a&al ties in his attainment of social adulthood. Upon the birth of his first child, he moves out of the mens house into his wifes household, and simultaneously grad- uates to the age grade of me kra-re, which may be translated fathers (literally, men with children). Metriculation to the fathers age grade enables him to join one of the mature mens societies, membership in which is incumbent upon, and open only to, men of the fathers age category. The father category is itself further stratified into me kra-nure, or recently married fathers, and me kra-kramti (those with many children or men who have attained the age or position of fathers-in-law in their afbal households). The members of the latter age category are the leading orators and political figures of the community, and dominate the affairs of the mens societies, which are themselves the dominant political entities in Kayapo social organization and the focus of adult male social activities.

The structure of the moieties, both with regard to the symbolic marriage bonds between the mens and womens groupings, and to their recruitment criteria and internal age stratification, is obviously closely correlated with the key stages and relationships in the life cycle of the individual as related to the development cycle of the domestic group.

Some balance must be struck in any uxorilocal system between the extent to which a man is dissociated from the household of his mother and the extent to which he is integrated into that of his wife. The Kayapo moiety and mens house system, as we have seen, strongly emphasizes marriage at the expense of consanguineal bonds to the natal


to his own father, and the second phase his assumption of the status of husband and father in his own right; for the latter is institutionally defined as the culmination of the long process of mens house residence and initiation throughout which the substitute father acts as the boys sponsor.

2. Social structure as symbolic medium The description of the moiety and age-

group system given above has brought out the tight correlation between the impact of recruitment to the moieties and age groups and the patterning of kin relations on the domestic group level. It is, of course, precisely because the structure of the moiety system reflects the structure of the domestic group cycle so closely that it is able to affect it. to channel and shape it as it does. Taken as a whole, the moiety and age group system constitutes a generalized synchronic model of the diachronic process of trans- formation and adjustment of domestic group relations through which each individual member of society must pass in the course of his life cycle. It represents a generalized extrapolation of the crucial features of an individual egos shifting field of kinship relations, projected onto the collective level to provide the institutional framework of the community as a whole. The resulting system of communal institutions, as we have seen, functions in a way that has the effect of continually recreating and perpetuating the particular configuration of domestic group relations of which it is a symbolic projection.

Specifically, each major stage in the de- velopmental cycle of the domestic group requires the adjustment of the relationship of any individual group member to any other in terms that imply an inverse adjustment to a complementary status. The status of a new husband/father coming into the household is stressed at the expense of the connection of the outgoing wifes brother/mothers brother to the same household. The attenuation of a young sons relationship to his father is offset by the emphasis on the same fathers relationship to his incoming son-in-law. The separation of a boy from his natal household is balanced in the next phase of the cycle by his incorporation in his affinal household. The female corollary of this is to emphasize

household. The emphasis on a f i i t y is obviously directly correlated with the emphasis on paternity for men (as embodied in the criterion for promotion to the mature mens societies and age grade), since it is the birth of children which in Kayapo eyes represents the real consummation of a marriage. It also is the beginning of the process whereby an incoming male a f i e trans- forms himself into a consanguineal member of his wifes household, a process which is consummated when the new son-in- law finally becomes, in his own turn, a father-in-law.

The emphasis on a mans a fha l connection to his wifes household through his paternal ties to his children requires a counterbalancing attenuation of his ties to his natal household, in order for him to be able to make a sufficient transference of allegiances to his wifes household, as well as to make way for his sisters incoming husband. But here a potential conflict develops. The more paternal bonds are stressed as the corollary of uxorilocal marriage, the more problematical it becomes to pry boys away from their fathers and natal households in the next stage of the cycle in order to get them securely married into other households. The more emphasis is placed on paternal bonds for incoming husbands in an uxorilocal system, the more it becomes necessary to undercut the sons filial bond to his father to enable him to repeat his fathers pattern in his own wifes household.

To this structural paradox the Kayapo moiety institutions of the mens house and the substitute father afford an elegant solu- tion. The substitute father undercuts the boys ties to his real father, both by removing him physically from his home to the mens house and through the symbolism of his ersatz paternal relationship and the rites associated with it, which are replete with symbols of attenuation of his relations with his parents and kinsmen.

On the other hand, the symbolic father symbolizes the social emphasis upon the achievement of paternal status as the central attribute of adult manhood. In so doing he becomes the conductor of the sociological alternating current which is the essence of the Kayapo male life cycle, the first phase of which is the severance of the boys relation

129 PARSONS CONCEPT

a mature womans status as wife at the expense of her consanguineal ties to her parents and siblings. All of these adjust- ments are, of course, different manifestations of a common principle, that of stressing afFinal or marriage relationships over consanguineal or blood relationships in the domestic group relations of adult members of the community. All of the complementary pairs of relationships cited in the above list, in other words, can be regarded as manifestations of the basic dyadic opposition of consanguineal vs. /affinal relationships. One member of each pair is emphasized at the expense of the other by means of the symbolic and pragmatic impact of recruitment into the moiety system and promotion from age-grade to age-grade within it. The recruitment criteria for the moieties and age grades, as we have seen, always correspond to the stressed member of a pair of complementary relationships that is of crucial importance in the life cycle of the individual, in terms of his position in the domestic group system at the time of recruitment.

A vital attribute of the Kayapo and all other moiety systems is that it is impossible for a given individual to belong to both moieties at the same time. Recruitment to a given moiety thus implies exclusion from the other, so that ego is aligned on the basis of the recruitment relationship with his sponsor in a moiety category whose solidarity is defined in terms of its exclusive relationship to the complementary category.

This pattern reflects the essential structure of relationships in the development cycle of the domestic group, which, as we have seen, consists of stressing alignment with one of a pair of complementary relationship categories to the relative exclusion of the other at each step in the cycle. The actual relationship categories involved vary with the sex and age of ego, but the entire series of dyadic oppositions takes on unity and coherence as an expression of the general complementary opposition between the principles of consanguinity and affinity, which is manifested also in the opposition of natal and afba l households which underlies each of the particular status contrasts of the series. In the same way, the moiety structure serves as the constant point of reference and unifying principle of the series of age

groups, whose recruitment criteria always correspond to the stressed member of the pair of complementary relationship categories that determine the alignment of per- sons at the corresponding age level in the domestic group system.

Both with respect to its structural form and the concrete particulars of its recruitment criteria, the moiety and age group system could on these grounds be described as a generalized symbolic model of the system of domestic group relations. This model characteristic, by virtue of which the moiety complex incorporates in itself an integrated template or blueprint of the structure of the domestic group cycle, enables it to serve as a dynamic device which acts in such a way as to maintain the balance of afinal as opposed to consanguineal relations of the system it symbolizes and reflects. In the terminology of generalized symbolized media, the moiety system is a symbolic code; it serves as a syntactic framework for the transmission of a single message (or, more precisely, a related set of messages expressing the same content in different symbolic terms suited to different points of the individual life cycle). The message con- cerns the maintenance of a certain balance between consanguineal and afha l relations in the domestic group cycle. The symbolic medium by which the message is trans- mitted is made up of the recruitment criteria of the moieties and age groups and the rites de passage associated with them.

The system of Kayapo communal institutions can, from this point of view, easily be interpreted in terms of Parsons four institutional prerequisites for generalized media. There is a category of interests of actors at stake (the adjustment of kinship relations in the course of the domestic group cycle and the individuals life cycle), and a corresponding category of properties of objects relevant to these interests (the status attributes of kinsmen in the relevant domestic group contexts). The definition of the situation, specifying which objects can be referred to by the symbolic tokens of the medium and how, when and in what social contexts, is provided by the system of rites de pmsage that regulates admission to the moieties and age groups and by the recruitment criteria of the groups themselves. The normative framework regulating the


manner in which the symbolic tokens are used and what messages they can be made to transmit is likewise provided by % ritual system and the norms governing the communal institutional structure.

Taken as a whole, the moieties and age groups on the one hand and the domestic groups on the other clearly constitute a two-level feed-back system, in which particular instances of adjustment in domestic group relationships are invested, through the medium of collective ritual, with the weight and authority of the community as a whole, physically embodied in the communal moieties and age groups themselves. I t is, on the other hand, only through the constant feeding of individuals into the communal institutional structure as a result of the continual succession of such individual tran- sitions and their associated rites de passage that the moieties and age groups are main- tained in being. Each level of the system depends on the other.

3. Ritual name prestation Complementing, and, as it were, cross-

cutting the system of moieties, age groups, and the rites de passage which regulate access to them, is an elaborate system of ritual prestations which forms the major focus of Kayapo ceremonialism. The main element of this system is a special class of personal names. These names can only be transferred from a category of kinsmen that includes the maternal uncle and both maternal and paternal grandfathers to a category including sororal nephews and grandchildren on both the sons and daughters sides, for male names, and the corresponding female categories (paternal aunt and grandmothers to fraternal niece and granddaughters) for female names. Transference of ritual names can only take place at the end of a ceremony which lasts for two or three months and involves the entire community. The immediate parents of the name-receiving children are respon- sible, during this period, for providing food for those who dance in the collective rituals (all males who have attained the age of induction into the mens house and the boys paternal aunts, in male naming ceremonies, and the corresponding female age categories and a girls maternal uncles in female w - ceremonies). The parents secure the assist- ~ _ _ ___ ~~ .

ance and contributions of their respective relatives for this task. The name-bestowing uncle or aunt is exempted from the respon- sibility to contribute and also from participation in any of the ceremonial activities connected with the naming.

Names, as I mentioned, are only the most important of a large class of ceremonial prerogatives and items of ritual para- phernalia passed down between the same categories of kinsmen. There is a general belief in the close affinity and effective identity of the name-bestowing and name- receiving categories. The kinship term used by the name-bestowing category for the name-receiving category of both sexes literally connotes sameness or identity with the speaker, and the transference of personal names from the one category to the other is itself a major expression of the theme of identification of the older category with the younger. Significantly, there is a strict prohibition against a childs parents or their parallel siblings (who are addressed by the same kinship term as the biological parents) bestowing either personal names or any other items in the associated category or ritual prestations on their own children.

The symbolic significance of this complex of ritual prestations emerges clearly when it is placed in the context of the system of relationships centered around the changing relations between parents and children in the development cycle of the domestic group described above. The categories of kinsmen (i-nggt and kwa-tuy) who bestow names and ritual wealth are precisely those which are separated in the course of the development cycle, not only from the junior category of nephews, nieces and grandchildren (tab-djuh) to which the names are actually passed, but more importantly, from the parents of these children (the cross- sex siblings or children of the name givers). I t is the parental kinship categories, as we have seen, who figure most prominently in the symbolic moiety and age-grade relationships and the associated rites de passage. The naming ceremonies, by asserting the identity of the polar-reciprocal categories of name-givers and receivers, in a manner that requires great effort and sacrifice by the latters parents to secure the collective legitimation of the naming relationship, serve to mend the breach between the cate-

PARSONS CONCEPT 13 1

prestation, constitute both the most obvious symbols of that breach, and also, through their common relationship to both the name- bestowing category of kinsmen and their own parents, the natural foci for reconciling and adjusting the attenuated relationship). The individual name-giving transactions, however, can take place only within a collective structure involving a definition of the situation (the context of communal ritual required for legitimizing the transference of a ritually prestigious name) and a normative framework (the rules regulating participation in the rites, the inability of parents to name their own children, the relationship of the parents to the ritual celebrants whom they must feed after each performance, etc.).

Each of the prestations involved in the naming ritual (the prestation of the name itself, and the parents gifts of food to the men or women of the community at large who dance in the ceremonies on behalf of their child) signalizes the establishment of a particular social relationship. They thus illustrate the point made in the last section that gift prestation is a symbolic medium for transmitting a single, determinate message. The coupling of these two prestations, representing different relationships, in a single overall ritual code structure demonstrates the way in which such restricted media may be utilized to com- municate something about the relationship between the different relationships symbolized by the prestations. The naming ceremonies also provide examples of how symbolic gift prestation functions to invest particular interpersonal relationships with the prestige and legitimacy of communal consensus and authority: the name-givers bestowing a name on his nephew or grandson is made to depend on collective rituals involving the entire community.

4. Conclusions The preceding analysis of Kayapo social

institutions represents an attempt to extend the interpretation of gift prestation as a symbolic medium of social interaction to certain widespread forms of primitive social organization: the age set system and the moiety system. I would suggest that other primitive institutional structures could be reanalyzed in similar terms, just as the anal-

gory of name-bestowers and that of the parents opened by the shifting relations of the domestic group cycIe.

I have argued that the moieties themselves constitute a symbolic code whose structure reflects the cleavage between the relationship categories to which I have just referred. It is therefore important to note that in the great majority of the collective rites associated with name prestation, the moieties are merged in a common body of dancers, which tends to be subdivided across moiety lines on the basis of age grades. It is important that the naming ceremonies are always focused in the center of the village plaza, at the maximum distance from the dwelling houses around the periphery; no part of the rites occurs within the houses of the children to be named. This spatial focus serves to underline the sociological fact that the fissure opened by the domestic group cycle between the parental and name-giving categories can only be bridged in terms of the communal structure embodied in the moieties and age groupings of the central plaza. It is the operation of this system of collective institutions, as we have seen, which emphasizes the cleavage between the name-receiving children and their parents, on the one hand, and the name-giving categories on the other.

Kayapo name-giving, a form of gift prestation as defined in the previous section, functions as a symbolic medium of social interaction in Parsons sense. The prestation itself, in its symbolic form and in the manner of its giving, constitutes a symbolic model of the social relationship between the categories of reIatives who are parties to the prestation as donors and recip- ients. The rituals of name bestowing, moreover, comprise symbolic models of the relationship between the name-bestowing categories and the parents of the name- receiving children. The symbolic medium (the names and allied symbolic prestations) embodies a category of ways in which the interests of actors are at stake (healing the social breach opened in the course of the domestic group cycle) and a category of properties of objects that are of interest (the social affiliations of children, which, as offspring of the mamage which is the root cause of the breach between the categories of consanguineal kinsmen involved in the


on the others. For each, in short, the relationship remains partly ambiguous, out of control, and insecure with respect to his own subjective interests.

Symbolic media represent objective, collectively standardized models of the crucial ambiguous features of such relationships. The objective, concrete symbolic tokes of the medium can be accepted in the same terms by all involved parties. As objective standards, media help to neutralize the ambivalent, intersubjective component in the definition of transaction that is not fully under the control of any party. By virtue of this clarifying, standardizing function, and because of the collective guarantee of convertibility into whatever categories of real assets are at stake, symbolic media actually become far more suitable and flexible instruments of manipulation and expression of individual interests by both parties.

A symbolic medium thus enables individual actors to relate to each other by relat- ing to a common collectively defined and guaranteed object, which is objective in the same terms for both of them. Since this symbolic object refers to a model of their common relationship, it is able at the same time to reflect the subjective interests and orientations of each. The symbolic medium, in other words, makes objective for both actors aspects of their common relationship which are subjective from the standpoint of each in relation to the other. By so doing, it provides a stable (because collectively guaranteed) framework in terms of which each actor can define his interests relative to the other, and simultaneously serves as a device for standardizing the individual behavior and subjective orientations of actors in key relationships according to collective norms. From the standpoint of society as a whole, it is far more practicable and efficient to channel communal sanctions and support through a standardized system of symbolic tokens and institutions than to try to bring collective norms and values directly to bear on every instance of social interaction of a particular type, without the aid of a mediating symbolic system.

b) The collective level The imposition of regular patterns on key

relationships in the social structure, which

ysis of ritual name prestation presented above could be extended to other forms of ritual symbolism. These undertakings must, however, be left for other studies. The time has come to ask the question: so what? What, more precisely, does the analysis of gift prestation and Kayapo social structure as symbolic media in Parsonian terms reveal about the properties of generalized symbolic media?

The general discussion of gift prestation and the specific example of the Kayapo have demonstrated that primitive social institutions can be conceived as symbolic codes and media functioning on two levels: that of the individual actor participating with other actors in a given social transaction, and that of the system as a whole. These functions may be set out in general terms as follows.

a) The level of the individual actor First, it should be pointed out that each

of the instances of generalized media mentioned by Parsons, and the examples of gift exchange and Kayapo social-structural media I have put forward in the latter part of this paper, are oriented to social situations characterized by some form of am- biguity, ambivalence, or conflict. At the very least, they are situations in which the actors interests take the form of complementary opposites (e.g., buyer-seller, communicator-communicatee. etc.). The relationships involved ordinarily occur em- bedded in a miscellaneous welter of conflicting circumstances. Since important interests are often involved in such circumstantial associations, the isolation of the essential, general features of the relationship in question for the purpose of consummating the transaction would often be difficult or impossible for any single actor.

Each actor in a relationship in which the ends of the actors involved are complementary, ambivalent, or conflicting, has a built-in motive to impose his own definition of the situation on the other parties, in order to maximize his own benefits from the interaction in ways that may or may not accord with the subjective interests of the other parties. No single actor, however, except in rare and special cases, will have the power to impose his own definition of the relationship completely or consistently

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has been shown to be one effect of symbolic media of interaction, is a basic requirement for any social system, and symbolic media, for the reasons given above, are the most efficient devices for achieving this result. It has been shown what a central role such media play even in societies at the Kayapo level. Besides the basic function of providing a standardized framework for crucial categories of social relationships, symbolic media typically serve as the means of articulating different categories of relations with each other to form integrated systems (an example is the way in which the Kayapo system of name prestations complements and reinforces the balance of domestic group relations that is the foundation of the moiety and age group system). Finally, the generalized symbolic structure thus created has properties pecul- iar to its own level of organization, which create for the society a new range of organ- izational possibilities (and problems). It is here that Parsons credit expansion, in- flation, and deflation come in.

c) Generalization and degrees of freedom

Symbolic media such as the Kayapo naming system and moiety system clearly lack the degrees of freedom of item, source, time, and terms that Parsons stresses as criteria1 attributes of generalized symbolic media. It might, as I suggested earlier in the discussion of gift prestation, be more appropriate for this reason to call them restricted symbolic media to distinguish them from generalized media like money. There is, however, a sense in which symbolic media like gift prestation and moiety systems are generalized and possess degrees of freedom, which gives them a structure resembling Parsons generalized symbolic media in all other essential respects. Any symbolic model of a social relationship that is integrated into the normative code of the society wins both for the system as a whole and for the individual actors within it a measure of independence from reliance on any given instance of the relationship in question. The generalized form of the relationship is preserved by the medium and its associated code as part of the social structure of the community. I t applies uni- formly and continually, that is, regardless of

the particular time, item, or source involved. Any symbolic medium, in short, is generalized with respect to the individual instances of the category of behavior it mediates, however restrictedly that category may be defined and its terms of interaction regulated. Generalization in this sense is inherent in the symbolic relationship itself.

Generalization and degrees of freedom in this elementary sense are the foundation of the properties Parsons discusses under these terms with reference to money, power and influence. I would maintain that the difference, though large in degree, is not a difference of kind, but simply a question of the elaboration of the potential already present in rudimentary form in primitive forms of symbolic media such as gift prestation and social structures of the Kayapo type. I would therefore argue that the Kayapo naming system and moiety structure could with justice be called generalized symbolic media. This point is es- sentially a development of one I made earlier in connection with the diagram in which I attempted to represent the relationship between gift prestation, money, and barter. At that point I remarked that such generalized media as power and influence fall somewhere between money and gift prestation in their degree of generalization. Such media, like the Kayapo moieties and name prestations, are tied more closely to symbolic models of specific status relationships than the generalized buyer-seller relationship that is the reference of the monetary system.

The foregoing general formulation of the functions of generalized symbolic media, although based on examples drawn from a primitive society, then, holds true in essential respects for sophisticated media like the monetary systems of complex industrial societies. Consideration of primitive cases has helped to reveal the irreducible degree of generalization implicit in the symbolic component of the media, as well as the un- generalized model component, analogous to Durkheims non-contractual element of contract, in the symbolic media of modem societies.

The two levels of functions of symbolic media as I have set them out above correspond roughly to the two levels of

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the structure of media in Parsons origi- nal model (the level of individual actor interests and transactions and the level of collective institutionalization). The power of the generalized medium concept as an analytical tool largely derives from the way that it focuses attention on the feed-back relationship between these two structural and functional levels as they affect each other through their mutual involvement in

SOCIOLOGICAL INQUIRY

dynamic social processes. I have attempted to demonstrate by the analysis of several examples that this approach is capable of throwing new light even on such classical anthropological problems as gift prestation and moiety organization. I believe. however, that the potential applicability of the concept in social anthropology is far wider than even these examples would indicate.

Documents

Turner 1968 Sociological Inquiry