Copyright © 2013 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution. Discourse Theory 191 at the American Museum of Natural History in Binford, L. R., & Binford, S. R. (1968). New perspectives New York City, Wissler arranged collections and in archaeology. Chicago, IL: Aldine. exhibits according to this spatial classification. Childe, V. G. (1957). The dawn of European civilization An important difference with the German diffu- (6th ed.). London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul. sionists is that in Wissler’s culture area concept the (Original work published 1925) distribution of cultural traits is primarily seen as Daniel, G. (1964). The idea of prehistory. Harmondsworth, the result of an adaptation to environmental condi- UK: Penguin Books. tions. This idea became important to much subse- Graebner, F. (1905). Kulturkreise und kulturschichten in quent anthropological and archaeological research Ozeanien [Culture circles and culture strata in Oceania]. in America, especially the New Archaeology Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 37, 28–53. ———. (1911). Methode der ethnologie [The method of founded in the 1960s by Lewis Binford (1931– ethnology] (Kulturgeschichtliche Bibliothek, Series 1, 2011). At the same time, Binford and his school Vol. 1). Heidelberg, Germany: Winter. criticized diffusionists for their atomistic view Kroeber, A. L. (1940). Stimulus diffusion. American of culture—the idea of diffusion was replaced in Anthropologist, 42(1), 1–20. European archaeology by systems thinking as rep- Menghin, O. (1931). Weltgeschichte der steinzeit [World resented, for example, in Colin Renfrew’s “culture history of the stone age]. Vienna, Austria: Schroll. process model.” Despite an interest in spatial pat- Schmidt, W., & Koppers, W. (1937). Handbuch der terns, the emphasis of the culture process model methode der kulturhistorischen ethnologie [Handbook was on local evolution in explaining cultural on the method of the culture-historical ethnology]. change. In the 1990s, scholars like Andrew Sherratt Münster, Germany: Aschendorff. (1946–2006) developed the idea of “punctuation,” Sherratt, A. G. (1997). Climatic cycles and behavioral or rapid, revolutionary change, and the associated revolutions: The emergence of modern humans and the notion of “centricity,” a concept that includes the beginning of farming. Antiquity, 71, 271–287. idea of diffusion. More recently, the poststructural- Wissler, C. (1917). The American Indian: An introduction ist rediscovery of the significance of materiality and to the anthropology of the New World. New York, NY: interculturality has opened up new perspectives for Oxford University Press. dealing with such issues, without repeating the ear- lier mistakes. The flaws of the diffusionist approaches con- sisted, above all, in the object-like approach toward DISCOURSE THEORY culture, an obsession with origins, and the concen- tration on abstract “influences” and “flows” of Discourse theory denotes broadly the study of aspects cultural traits. But combined with the more recent of language and communication distinct from lin- concepts of agency and of practice, these flaws may guistic structure. Most theories of discourse none- be overcome. They may help direct our interest to theless examine the relation of language to structure. the actual contextualization of cultural forms and to In fact, during the 20th century, many debates in possible shifts of meaning. anthropology, and the social and human sciences more generally, centered on the relation between Ulrich Veit the discursive and structural aspects of social life. Through these debates, and especially through the See also Binford, Lewis R.; Cultural Transmission; scholarship that critiqued structural anthropology Culture Area Approach; Ethnohistory; Frobenius, and linguistics, poststructural approaches to dis- Leo; Graebner, Fritz; Historical Particularism; Kroeber, Alfred L.; Lowie, Robert; Smith, Grafton course have taken root in anthropological theory Elliot; Wallerstein, Immanuel and methodology. Poststructuralist approaches continue to influence the trajectories of anthropo- logical thinking about discourse. This entry first Further Readings describes the structuralist account of signs, associ- Ankermann, B. (1905). Kulturkreise und kulturschichten in ated especially with Ferdinand de Saussure, and then Afrika [Culture circles and culture strata in Africa]. recaps some poststructuralist critiques. The critiques Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 37, 54–90. reviewed are from influential French theorists, and Copyright © 2013 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution. 192 Discourse Theory then from the linguistic anthropological tradition analytic construct. He characterized this construct that maintains closer ties to linguistic structuralism. as “virtual,” meaning this state does not exist in sociohistorical reality, where change and variation are constant. Discourse in Structural Linguistic Theory A final important dualism for Saussure was that Until the 1980s, the term discourse was used in linguistic structure is a bipartite system of differences, anthropology with the same meaning common with basic units he called signs. Each sign involves a in structural linguistic analysis. Linguistic theory form, or signifier, and a related concept, or signified. takes the sentence as the limit of grammatical rela- The English phonic form tree is an example of a sig- tions and, in contrast, uses discourse to denote the nifier, while its signified is found by seeing how this manner in which words, expressions, and sentences form functions in sentences (not in utterances). In are put to use in a particular context to produce linguistic analysis, the signified is very different from meaningful communicative behavior. “Sentences” a dictionary definition of a word. In fact, in this here are understood as abstracted from their con- abstract analysis, the signified is discovered by find- text, while the use of linguistic units in context is ing the difference marked by the sign, in its ability to generally called an “utterance.” The utterance can combine with other forms. For instance, the signified be a single word or a sentence long, or a very long, of “tree” might be roughly expressed as “common complex communicative form, like a whole book. noun, count noun, inanimate,” and so on. Saussure Discourse utterances are understood to have prin- was interested in debunking various theories that ciples of coherence that are distinct from the gram- posited that signifiers were somehow naturally matical coherence of sentences. Understanding related or determined by what they signified, which how an utterance coheres involves considering led him to emphasize that the relation between signi- how the parts of an utterance relate to each other fier and signified is “arbitrary.” By “arbitrary,” he and the context. In linguistics, the terms discourse meant that the system of differences between signi- analysis or discourse function are generally used fier and signified is entirely a social convention, one for these issues. that works because there is a group of speakers that The distinction between grammatical sentence continue to use it in their daily discourse. Due to and discourse utterance is based on the highly the complexity of the system, Saussure doubted that influential work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand the group of speakers could actually gain awareness de Saussure. Saussure’s final courses were pub- of it in such a way as to change it intentionally. In lished posthumously by his students in 1916 as his analytical construct, human intentionality and the Cours de linguistique générale (Course in agency, like concrete events of interaction (parole), General Linguistics). These lectures are still con- remained outside the description of linguistic struc- sidered essential for understanding language as an ture proper. This way of constructing the object of abstract structure (langue in French), including the linguistics meant that discourse remained a residual symbolic quality of producing meaning. Saussure or external phenomenon. distinguished the study of linguistic structure from In anthropology, the question has been whether speaking in context that uses the signs of language these dualistic assumptions for modeling a syn- (parole in French). The theoretical dualism of langue chronic structure can be applied to the study of and parole (or structure and use) is one of many other salient cultural patterns, including discursive dualisms that were then incorporated into anthro- ones. Saussure himself thought that his theory of pology’s interpretation of structuralism. Another of abstract langue could be a model for studying utter- Saussure’s important dualisms is the idea that, when ances. Most famously, in the mid-20th century, abstracted from contexts of use, a language can Claude Lévi-Strauss applied some of Saussure’s be described as a stable and closed system, a state methodology to analyze myth (as well as to analyze that exists at a single point in time or “synchrony.” kinship). With myth, Lévi-Strauss recognized that Synchrony is opposed to “diachrony”—that is, the he was dealing with an object distinct from langue, changes that happen to that language between dif- and yet he sought to set out the basic units of myth ferent synchronic states. For Saussure, modeling a as a system of differences. Such studies became a language’s structure as a synchronic system is an touchstone for structural anthropology. An early Copyright © 2013 SAGE