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Symbolic Anthropology Symbolic Anthropology Victor Turner (1920 Symbolic Anthropology • Examines symbols & processes by which humans assign meaning. • Addresses fundamental Symbolic anthropology questions about human social life, especially through myth & ritual. ANTH 348/Ideas of Culture • Culture does not exist apart from individuals. • It is found in interpretations of events & things around them. Symbolic Anthropology Victor Turner (1920-1983) • Studied with Max Gluckman @ Manchester University. • Culture is a system of meaning deciphered by • Taught at: interpreting key symbols & rituals. • Stanford University • Anthropology is an interpretive not scientific • Cornell University • University of Chicago endeavor . • University of Virginia. • 2 dominant trends in symbolic anthropology • Publications include: • Schism & Continuity in an African Society (1957) represented by work of British anthropologist • The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (1967) Victor Turner & American anthropologist • The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes Among the Ndembu of Zambia Clifford Geertz. (1968) • The Ritual Process: Structure & Anti-Structure (1969). • Dramas, Fields, & Metaphors (1974) • Revelation & Divination in Ndembu Ritual (1975) Social Drama Social drama • • Early work on village-level social processes among the For Turner, social dramas have four main phases: Ndembu people of Zambia 1. Breach –rupture in social relations. examination of demographics & economics. 2. Crisis – cannot be handled by normal strategies. • Later shift to analysis of ritual & symbolism. 3. Redressive action – seeks to remedy the initial problem, • Turner introduced idea of social drama redress and re-establish • "public episodes of tensional irruption*” 4. Reintegration or schism – return to status quo or an • “units of aharmonic or disharmonic process, arising in conflict situations.” alteration in social arrangements. • They represent windows into social organization & values . • In both types of resolutions symbolic displays demonstrate the • These episodes lay bare tensions in the social fabric & are recurrent actors’ unity in the form of rituals. features of social life. • Can be viewed as units of social process that have a beginning, middle, • In Turner's theory, ritual is a kind of plot that has a set & end . sequence which is linear, not circular. *a sudden, often violent appearance of something. 1 Rites of Passage Victor Turner • Turner was also influenced by work of folklorist Arnold • Symbols are by nature van Gennep, Rites of multivocalic: Passage (1909). can have multiple meanings • Van Gennep saw subject to different theserituals as marking interpretations . changes in rights and construction of meaning occurs obligations. in specific , dynamic contexts of social process. • According to Van Gennep, these rituals have 3 • Turner shared Durkheim’s Arnold van Gennep, 1873-1957 view that the social order principle stages : depends on rituals and 1. rites of separation ceremonial performances. 2. margin or limen (i.e., threshold) 3. aggregation . Communitas Communitas • Turner saw liminal stage as crucial with regard to • “In a situation that is temporally process of regenerative renewal. liminal and spatially marginal, the neophytes or passengers in a • Experience of liminality yields communitas protracted rite of passage are ideal view of culture stripped of status and authority – purely spontaneous and self generating. in other words removed from a social structure which is ultimately • Communitas is opposed to structure, as antimatter is maintained and sanctioned by opposed to matter... power and force – and further linked to a homogenous social • Turner believed that exposure to or immersion in state through discipline and communitas is an indispensable human social ordeal... Much of what had been requirement. bound by social structure is liberated, noticeably the sense of comradeship and communion, in brief, of communitas .” Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) Publications • Undergraduate English major, then • philosophy, finally anthropology. The Religion of Java (1960) Ph.D. (in anthropology) from • Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Harvard, 1956. Ecological Change in Indonesia (1963) Taught @ University of Chicago 1960- • 1970, Institute for Advanced Studies, Peddlers and Princes: Social Change and Princeton, New Jersey 1970 – 2006. Economic Modernization in Two Indonesian • Discernible theoretical shift – early Towns (1963) to late career – culminating in • The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) semiotic approach. “Man is an animal suspended in webs • • Primary advocate of American of significance he himself has spun, I take Local Knowledge: Further Essays on culture to be those webs.” Interpretative Anthropology (1983) brand of symbolic anthropology. http://www.thirteen.org/bigideas/ • Like Turner for British geertz.html • Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ancest anthropology but he calls it ors/geertz.htm (1988) “interpretive anthropology ”. 2 Clifford Geertz • Geertz rejects reified notions of Clifford Geertz culture as superorganic (Kroeber, White). • Cultural anthropology is an interpretive rather • Also rejects a view of culture as than experimental science. patterns of behavior (RB) & idea • “Man is an animal suspended in webs of that culture is located in mind (LS). significance and culture constitutes those • Advocated a semiotic approach – webs.” study of symbols and their • Explication comes from “ thick description ” – meanings. careful analysis of ethnographic detail. • Culture is public because meaning • Goal is to interpret multiple levels of meaning is public. attached to human sociocultural • Culture is a context within which phenomenon. social events can be described. Thick description • Culture, like an onion, consists of layers. • Outer layer is level of explicit culture . what people primarily associate with culture visual reality of behavior, clothes, food, language, housing, etc. • Middle layer consists of norms & values held by community. What is considered right & wrong (norms) or good & bad (values). • Norms are often external & reinforced by social control. • Values tend to be more internal than norms. • Values & norms structure way people in a particular culture behave. • But they are not visible, despite their influence on what happens at observable surface. • Inner layer is level of implicit culture . Core consists of basic assumptions , series of rules and methods to deal with regular problems that it faces. They are so basic that, like breathing, we no longer think about how we do it. For an outsider these basic assumptions are very difficult to recognize . Thick Thick description description • This interpretation is not predictive, nor verifiable. • Four characteristics of ethnographic description • Primarily descriptive approach – does not yield much 1) It is interpretive . in way of theoretical formulations. 2) It is interpretive of the flow of social discourse . 3) Interpreting consists of trying to rescue the “said” • In his article, Thick Description , Geertz claims that of such discourse from its perishing occasions and fix the object of study (culture) is one thing; the study of it in perusable terms. it (anthropology) is another. 4) It is microscopic . • Anthropological writings are themselves, • Aim is to draw large conclusions from small but very interpretations – our own interpretations of what our densely textured facts to support broad assertions about role of culture in informants are up to, or think they are up to . construction of collective life by engaging them exactly with complex specifics . 3 Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight • “Fighting cocks… is like • “Like any art form… the playing with fire only not cockfight renders ordinary, getting burned. You everyday experience activate village and kin comprehensible by group rivalries and hostilities but in ‘play’ presenting it in terms of acts form, coming dangerously and objects which have had and entrancingly close to their practical consequences the expression of open removed and been and direct interpersonal reduced… to the level of and intergroup sheer appearances, where expression… but not quite, their meaning can be more because, after all, it is powerfully articulated and ‘only a cockfight’” more exactly perceived.” Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight • “To put the matter this way … shifts the analysis of cultural • “What sets the cockfight apart from the forms from an endeavor in general to dissecting an organism, ordinary course of life, lifts it from the diagnosing a symptom, deciphering a code, or ordering a realm of everyday practical affairs, and system – the dominant analogies in contemporary surrounds it with an aura of enlarged anthropology – to one in general parallel with penetrating a importance is not, as functionalist literary text. sociology would have it, that it reinforces status discriminations… but that it If one takes the cockfight, or any other collectively sustained provides a metasocial commentary upon symbolic structure, as a means of ‘saying something of the whole matter of assorting human something’… then one is faced with a problem not in social beings into fixed hierarchical ranks and mechanics but social semantics. then organizing the major part of collective existence around that For the anthropologist, whose concern is with formulating assortment. Its function , if you want
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