ANTH245 2007-09-17

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ANTH 245: Lecture for SEPT 17 2007

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Business

• Responses to the class are due by Thursday morning; i.e. do them Wednesday night ...
• Email will be fine ...

Recap

Rappaport's second cybernetic loop

• Sacred propositions -> pragramatic proposition -> the System --> Ritual experience --> Sacred propositions
• Actually similar to this:
  • EXPERIENCE --> RELIGION --> POLITICS --> ECONOMICS --> EXPERIENCE

Segue

Cognitive models and their function

• Sacred speech tied to congnitive models
• Both Rappaport and L-S focus on the function of the cognitive models contained in myth and ritual
• Both would agree that they perform a social function -- but they differ on the nature of the function
• For Rappaport, cognitive models are crucial to the functioning of the system, but do not represent the system
• This is called pragmatism in philosophy, the idea that beliefs -- in particular religious and metaphysical ones -- are "true" to the extent that they are "useful," and not as mirrors of reality
• But for Rappaport, the content of myth remains largely unexplored
• AND, his explanation of the function of myth is unsatisfactory
  • it hinges too much on experience -- the very same psychologism that L-S will attack in his essay on myth

Actually looking at a pattern (myth)

• Finally, L-S, unlike Bateson or Rappaport, is actually looking at a "patterned stream of information" -- myth

Levi-Strauss

Background

• One of the greatest anthropologists
• A major public figure
• Founded the anthropological version of structuralism

Essay 1 (Structuralism)

>> See Levi-Strauss, 1951, "Language and the Analysis of Social Laws"

Wiener's pessimism

• Working from analysis of "time series" data under stable conditions
  • e.g. anti-aircraft
  • Learning
• Famously found social science unfertile

The model of linguistics

• Historical linguistics
  • Grimm's law
  • Regular and unconscious

• Phonology
• Phonemics vs. Phonetics
  • Classification
  • Sound blindness
• Distinctive features

voicing	b:p d:t g:k
labiality	(p,b):(t,d,k,g)
nasality	(n,m):((t,d):(p,b))

• Semantics
  • Langue vs. Parole

The example of Kroeber

• Culture as Language school
• Dresses, like sound patterns, follow regular shifts
• "The fact of regularity in social change is the primary inference from our phenomena. The amplitude of the periodicities is of hardly less importance. Their very magnitude dwarfs the influence which any individual can possibly have exerted in an alteration of costume." (Kroeber 1919:260)
• "It is also evident how little even the intensest individual faculty can have added to the outcome of the greater revolutions, how little hastened their momentum." (Kroeber 1919:261)

Structuralism

• The linguistic analogy
• Elements and rules
  • Rules = "code"
  • Same "universal grammar" applied to language and other domains
• Importance of binary oppositions (a la the distinctive features of phonemes)
  • Note how this looks like it has something to do with Shannon's bit
• Structure and Event
  • Derived from Langue/Parole

The image of the computer

• Explained by reference to the computer (or database)
• Not the only time:

The day may come when all the available documentation on Australian tribes is transferred to punched cards and with the help of a computer their entire techno-economic, social and religious structures can be shown to be like a vast group of transformations.
The Savage Mind, p. 89.

• Other examples from our reading this week?

Kinship as a communication system

• Women as signals
• "Information" exchanged by certain rules
• Understood as a total system
• EXPLAIN restricted exchange, generalized exchange, and statistical modes
  • Shows relationship between individual behavior and the whole system

Comparing kinship and language

• A test of L-S's hypothesis that both language and culture are produced by a common, universal, and unconscious grammar

Essay 2 (Mythology)

>> See Levi-Strauss, 1955, "The Structural Study of Myth"

The problem with the study of religion

• Psychologism
  • Can't be explained as bad science or as a project of emotions or ideas

A new approach

• Myth is like language
  • apparently random but universally similar
  • comprised of levels
• Need to look for mythical elements -- like phonemes

The method

• Based on the observation that myth has an interesting property
  • Both synchronic and diachronic, historical and ahistorical
  • LIKE MUSIC IN THIS RESPECT -- the image of repetition ... patttern
• So, how to extract the structure from the event (time series)
  • Serial to parallel

The conclusion

Turning back to the Oedipus myth, we may now see what it means. The myth has to do with the inability, for a culture which holds the belief that mankind is autochthonous (see, for instance, Pausanias, VIII, xxix, 4: plants provide a model for humans), to find a satisfactory transition between this theory and the knowledge that human beings are actually born from the union of man and woman. Although the problem obviously cannot be solved, the Oedipus myth provides a kind of logical tool which relates the original problem—born from one or born from two?—to the derivative problem: born from different or born from same? By a correlation of this type, the overrating of blood relations is to the underrating of blood relations as the attempt to escape autochthony is to the impossibility to succeed in it. Although experience contradicts theory, social life validates cosmology by its similarity of structure. Hence cosmology is true.

How to reconcile the "meaning" with the L-S's interpretation?

• Tragedy of will vs. destiny

Themes

Myth as signal and message

• Message as ontology
• Code as method of interpretation
• Myth itself is a vehicle for ontology

The function of myth

• Compare to Rappaport
  • L-S focuses on content, Rappaport sacred context
  • L-S helps explain myths credibility -- it overcomes contradictions
• Compare to Bateson
  • Patterns
• Who is communicating?

L-S's image of the computer

• Confuses cybernetics with computation
• Actually very interested in databases