Semiotics of Cities, Selves, and Cultures: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology 9783110857757, 9783110126013

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: On remembering some founding fathers and mothers
Search for a great tradition in cultural performances
Yankee City in renaissance
A semiotic of the city: Purusha and Corbusier's modulor as architectural symbols
The symbolic and historic structure of an American identity
The semiotics of the id
A conversation of cultures: The United States and Southern Asia
A neglected source of Lévi-Strauss' structuralism: Radcliffe-Brown, Russell, and Whitehead
Peirce, Malinowski and the emergence of semiotic anthropology
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Semiotics of Cities, Selves, and Cultures

Approaches to Semiotics 102

Editorial

Committee

Thomas A. Sebeok Roland Posner Alain Rey

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Semiotics of Cities, Selves, and Cultures Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology by Milton Singer

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

1991

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Singer, Milton B. Semiotics of cities, selves, and cultures : explorations in semiotic anthropology / by Milton Singer. p. cm. — (Approaches to semiotics ; 102) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-89925-726-7 (alk. paper) 1. Culture—Semiotic models. 2. Ethnology — Philosophy. 3. Symbolism. 4. Cities and towns —United States. 5. Cities and towns —India. I. Title. II. Series. GN452.5.S57 1991 306'.01 — dc20 91-22332 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging in Publication

Data

Singer, Milton: Semiotics of cities, selves, and cultures : explorations in semiotic anthropology / by Milton Singer. — Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1991 (Approaches to semiotics ; 102) ISBN 3-11-012601-X NE: G T

© Copyright 1991 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-1000 Berlin 30 All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Typesetting: Asian Research Service, Hong Kong. — Printing: Ratzlow Druck, Berlin. — Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin — Printed in Germany.

For Fred Eggan

1906-1991

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: On remembering some founding fathers and mothers

1

1. Cultural performances in Madras 2. Revisits to Lloyd Warner's "Yankee City" 3. A semiotics of personal and social identities 4. The decline of the natural science model of culture and the emergence of a semiotic model 5. Peirce, Malinowski and the semiotic model of culture 6. Towards a conversation of cultures Search for a great tradition in cultural performances 1. Defining the unit of field study 2. Defining the units of observation: Cultural performances 3. Analysis of cultural performances 3.1. The cultural stage 3.2. Cultural specialists 3.3. The social organization of tradition in the village 3.4. Cultural media 4. From field study to the study of a total civilization Yankee City in renaissance 1. 2. 3. 4.

Cultural revitalization, revivalism and progress From demolition only to demolition with restoration Semiotics of urban renewal and restoration Conclusion: Restorationists and modernists in a museum without walls

A semiotic of the city: Purusha and Corbusier's modulor as architectural symbols 1. The City as a community of interpretation

4 6 9 13 18 20 24 26 28 30 31 32 34 35 38 42 44 51 58 64

72 72

viii

Contents

2. The City as a combination of opposites: Tradition and innovation 3. Le Corbusier: The man, the monument, and the cosmos 4. Postscript 5. Summary and conclusion 6. Epilogue The symbolic and historic structure of an American identity 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

A changing American ethos? Revisiting Warner's "Yankee City" Historic reenactments as secular rituals Historic reenactments as cultural performances Mystical identification with ancestors or role-playing?

The semiotics of the id 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Introduction: How is the id culturally constituted? The names of the id Symbolism: The "language" of the id The id's family romances Semiotic triads and Oedipal triangles Conclusion: Cultural relativism, human nature, and semiotics

A conversation of cultures: The United States and Southern Asia

84 96 106 109 118 129 129 132 134 138 140 146 146 149 154 158 161 164

169

1. Emergence of the ideal of a conversation of cultures after the Second World War 170 2. National steps toward intercultural education 171 3. The formative period at Chicago 173 4. A new kind of area studies: The Redfield model 176 5. An undergraduate introduction to South Asian civilizations 179 6. From ethnocentric images to scholarly knowledge 180 7. From outside to inside views 182 8. Toward a social anthropology of civilizations 184 9. Symbols, myths, and cultural performances 185 10. Conclusion: Toward a civilization of the dialogue 186 11. Postscript 187

Contents

A neglected source of L6vi-Strauss' structuralism: Radcliffe-Brown, Russell, and Whitehead 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Prologue Radcliffe-Brown's philosophy of science Social structure and structural form Dual opposition — social and logical The construction of primitive cosmologies The homology between nature and culture as a postulate in primitive thought 7. Conclusion: From an "order of odors" to the logical construction of the world 8. 1983 postscript: The problem of historical evidence

Peirce, Malinowski and the emergence of semiotic anthropology

ix

189 189 196 207 213 220 227 234 241

260

1. Prologue 2. "Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology ; I shall be the Conrad." 3. "Dürkheim reduced to Behaviouristic psychology" 4. "Mr. Malinowski, meet Mr. Peirce!" 5. Synchronic functionalism and the semiotics of history 6. Syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics 7. A puzzling gap 8. Contextualism in historical perspective 9. The semiology and/or semiotics of culture 10. Is there a Chicago dogma that cultures are systems of symbols and meanings?

260

296

11. A trial summary and conclusion

302

265 269 272 277 281 284 286 291

Notes

309

References Index

325 375

Acknowledgments

Four of the papers - the "Introduction"; "Purusha and Corbusier's Modulor as Architectural Symbols"; "The Semiotics of the Id"; and "Peirce, Malinowski, and the Emergence of Semiotic Anthropology" - are published for the first time in this volume. I am deeply indebted to Thomas A. Sebeok for the cordial welcome he has extended to the present volume and to previous volumes published under his sponsorship. His description of my book Man's Glassy Essence as "the first really interesting unification of modern English and continental anthropology with classical American Semiotics" has guided my selection of papers to include in this volume and has also provided the positive reinforcement needed to put the whole project together. "Mickey" Eder's ingenuity with computers and informed interest in the content are responsible for the consolidation of the separate references into a single, uniform bibliography and for the index. As acknowledged in several of the papers, colleagues at the University of Chicago, and at the Center for Psychosocial Studies have provided the forum and stimulus for an ongoing conversation of disciplines and cultures in which I have had the good fortune to be an interlocutor and participant-observer. Colleagues who have been quoted in the book have been given an opportunity to verify the quotations and to emend their views. The secretarial services needed to process so many words have been graciously and efficiently provided by the staff of the University of Chicago's Department of Anthropology and of the Center for Psychosocial Studies. My wife, Helen, merits thanks and gratitude for the time she has given to a critical reading of the manuscript. Permission to reprint listed materials has been kindly granted by the following sources: The American Anthropological Association for "The symbolic and historic structure of an American identity" reproduced from Ethos 5: 4, Winter 1977.

xii

Acknowledgments

Mouton de Gruyter for "Yankee City in Renaissance" from Paul Hockings, ed., Dimensions of social life: Essays in honor of David G. Mandelbaum, 1987. Mouton de Gruyter for "A neglected source of structuralism: Radcliffe-Brown, Russell and Whitehead," Semiotica 48: 11-98, 1984. The American Institute of Indian Studies, New Delhi for "A conversation of cultures: The United States and South Asia" in Aspects of India: Essays in Honor of Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr., 1986, Margaret Case and N. Gerald Barrier (eds.). Norma Evenson for Figure 1 and Figure 2 and selected texts from her book Chandigarh, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1966. Unwin Hyman Ltd. (Harper Collins Publisher), London, for selected passages from Malinowski, Coral gardens and their magic, vol. II, Bloomington, 1935 [1965], Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi for Fig 3 reproduced from Melinda Moore: "The Kerala house as a Hindu cosmos" in Contributions to Indian Sociology. 23: 1 (n.s.), ©, Institute of Economic Growth, 1989. Frits Staal for selected passages from his book Agni: The Vedic ritual of the fire altar. 2 vols. Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1983. University of Miami Press, Coral Gables, for a selected passage from Emile Benveniste: The Problem of General Linguistics [1971 ]: 67-68. The University of Chicago for excerpts from "The Cultural Role of Cities" by Robert Redfield and Milton Singer in Economic Development and/Cultural Change, Vol. Ill, No. 1 [1954], pp. 53-73, from The Little Community: Viewpoints for the Study of a Human Whole by Robert Redfield, Chicago, 1955, and from RadcliffeBrown's A Natural Science of Society, 1948. Duke University Program in Comparative Studies on Southern Asia for excerpts from A.K. Ramanujan, "Towards an Anthology of City Images" in Urban India: Society, Space, and Image, Richard G. Fox, ed., 1970.

Acknowledgments xiii Indiana University Press for excerpts from Man's Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology by Milton Singer. Bloomington, IN,1984.

Introduction: On remembering some founding fathers and mothers

Alfred North Whitehead once wrote that the science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost. His predecessor at Harvard, George Santayana, is usually credited with the opposing thought that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Although many words have been written to argue which of these attitudes toward history is correct, the apparent dilemma posed by them is avoidable if we consider Whitehead's most famous works. Two of these, Science and the Modern World (1925) and Adventures of Ideas (1933) are histories of science in Western culture, and of "mankind's slow drift to civilization". The third work, Process and Reality, is essentially a metaphysical exercise in relating the processual aspects of events to the "eternal objects" which abide. These three works certainly hesitate to forget the founders of science and philosophy and of the great ideas which influenced history. Ironically, so far as the history of anthropology is concerned, that alleged arch-functionalist and anti-historian, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, recommended to his students in Sydney about 1929, and in Chicago in the 1930s, that they read Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (see Stanner and Eggan quoted in the paper "A Neglected Source of Structuralism"). He seems, moreover, to have accepted Whitehead's critiques of instants, points and particles, and Russell's of numbers, classes and properties, as high abstractions, in favor of events and their relational structures. Both structural anthropology and processual analysis owe their intellectual inspiration to these Whitehead and Russell sources. Another strategy for bypassing the apparent dilemma posed by the initial Whitehead and Santayana quotations is to concentrate on the present instead of on the past or the future. This strategy, in fact, was announced, and occasionally followed, by Malinowski's and Radcliffe-Brown's synchronic functionalism. This is the famous

2

Introduction

empiricist strategy of resorting to direct observation of events "in the field" as they happen instead of relying on "arm-chair speculative reconstructions" and second-hand perusal of reports by untrained observers. As the discussion of Malinowski indicates, the notion of an "ethnographic present" is more elusive and temporally layered than is usually assumed. It certainly cannot be defined in terms of William James's "specious present" which is measured in seconds, or by Saussure's distinction between "synchronic and diachronic" analysis. In addition, the delimitation of an "ethnographic present" depends on the unit being studied — a village, a town, a city; a person or group of people; a whole culture or a civilization. Not only do the temporal and spatial spans of these different units differ; so do the modes of perceiving and conceptualizing the units. Alfred Kroeber, and following him, Robert Redfield, sometimes considered "portraiture" as a direct means of grasping and depicting the character of a culture or civilization. For Kroeber this possibility turned, in practice, into a typology of esthetic styles, with historic profiles of incipient growth, flourishing, climax and decline in particular domains of culture (Kroeber 1944, 1957, 1963). Redfield continued to see a perceptual and cognitive gap between the art historian's appreciation of the esthetic style of a Dogon tribal African carving of twins and an ethnographic description and interpretation of the same carving (Redfield 1962). The latter would find its place among the inventory of the "forms of thought" available to anthropologists who seek to understand the "little communities" and "great communities" as wholes. For Redfield, esthetic styles of cultures and civilizations, however, would presumably find their niche in the normative standards articulated by the interacting "little traditions" and "great traditions" which constitute the historic structures of different civilizations (Redfield 1953b, 1955b, 1956a, 1962). What happened to the ethnographic present in Kroeber's and Redfield's contributions? Kroeber, for his part, seemed content to renounce the microscopic functionalist viewpoint and to live with the telescopic view of culture as a superorganic, superindividual, and superpsychological phenomenon. A comparative historical study of total culture patterns and configurations of different cultures and civilizations provided sufficient work for cultural anthropologists, Kroeber believed. Cultural causality and micro-

On remembering some founding fathers and mothers

3

functional relations were too massive and intricate to unravel, in his conception of the archaeology and cultural history of civilizations (Kroeber 1963). Redfield, however, continued to cling to three remnants of the idea of an ethnographic present. These are phenomenological, functional, and unitary conceptions of human civilizations and cultures. The first paragraph of his lectures on The Little Community (1955a) expresses his phenomenological commitment: Humanity presents itself to the view of common sense in just a few kinds of integral entities. . . . Person, people, nation, and civilization are forms of humanity, each kind of which constitutes a great and easily recognizable class, and each separate one of which is describable in its own characteristics as a whole. The small community is another of those prevailing and conspicuous forms in which humanity comes to our notice. In all parts of the world, in all of human history, there are and have been little communities (Redfield 1955a: 1).

Although in his book on The Little Community, Redfield analyzes the different "forms of thought" under which a little community can be conceived and described, the assumption of the phenomenological presence of a community, to the imagination if not to the eye, is taken for granted. In this respect the contrast with Kroeber is striking, both at the levels of microscopic units and of macroscopic units of civilizations. For Kroeber, the ethnographic present evaporates into a "twilight zone" between living history and the "patterned memory" of myths and legends. Redfield is more reluctant to relinquish the concept of an ethnographic present. It survived for him as "a concept of cogitation" in the Whiteheadian conception of history as "the story of a single career, that of the human race" (Redfield 1953b: x), as well as in "a concept of observation" in his conception of the "world view", the mental outlook, of people who lived in "little communities", before the coming of cities ("primitives") or outside of them ("peasants"). His own plans to enter a civilization through a village community, "from the bottom up", were frustrated in China in 1949 by Mao's "long march" and in India in 1955 by serious illness. While he continued to find the image of the "little community" the most congenial unit around which to deploy the forms of thought for entering another culture or civilization, he nevertheless welcomed an alternative approach by way of "the cultural role of cities"

4

Introduction

and "cultural performances" (Redfield and Singer [1954] 1962; foreword to Marriott, ed. 1955; Redfield 1955a, 1955b, 1956a). The papers in the present volume represent this alternative approach. Since their author has been a participating observer and interlocutor in a continuing interdisciplinary and intercultural conversation with Redfield, Kroeber, and a good many other anthropologists, a conversation which began more than forty years ago, these papers also belong, in a sense, to the "ethnographic present" of social and cultural anthropology. Meyer Fortes once suggested that three generations of a domestic social group could be taken as a measure of the synchronic perspective, and therefore of its ethnographic present. With the appropriate qualifications, we might apply his suggestion to the ethnographic present of cultural theory. Many younger anthropologists and other scholars just entering on their professional careers will be surprised to discover that they represent about the fourth generation in the chain of guru-disciple transmissions from a founding father or mother in their discipline or sub-discipline. Reckoning Kroeber, Redfield, Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski, White, Parsons, Jakobson, Lfevi-Strauss, Warner, Margaret Mead, for example, as founding grandfathers or grandmothers, it would be fairly easy to identify their intellectual children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren among our contemporaries. Some of them would prefer to claim more than one ancestral lineage, and some none at all. Yet those who hesitate to remember the history of social and cultural theory are doomed to remain outside the ongoing conversation of disciplines and of cultures that constitutes the outreaching identity of the community of scholars who represent the vanguard of their field.

1. Cultural performances in M a d r a s If one conceives of a cultural performance as the enactment, with song, music, dance and recitation, of an episode from a sacred myth or legend, then such a performance provides an observable measure of an ethnographic present in terms of the time it takes to act out the episode. The organization and program of the performance its organizers, cultural media and specialists, stage and story — provide data for interpreting the changes and meanings of a per-

On remembering some founding fathers and mothers

5

formance in relation to self-defined cultural traditions and identities (Singer 1955, 1958-1959, 1966, 1972 [ 1 9 8 0 a ] ; cf. Erdman 1985). The fact that participants in and the audiences for these cultural performances freely discussed their meanings and described them as encapsulations of some of their cultural traditions, reduced the usual gap between the outside observers' and the "natives'" points of view. In fact, many of the performances I was invited to attend in Madras were announced in a daily list of "Today's Engagements" in a local newspaper. The first published account of the "cultural performance" concept appeared in the report "The Cultural Pattern of Indian Civilization" in the Far Eastern Quarterly in 1955 on my return from the first trip to India and Madras City. A companion paper by Redfield on "The Social Organization of Tradition" appeared in the same issue. A slightly revised version of my paper was published in 1972 in my book When A Great Tradition Modernizes under the title "Search for a Great Tradition in Cultural Performances". While the "Cultural Pattern" paper describes and interprets a wide range of the cultural performances I observed in and around Madras City during our first visit in 1954-1955, an intensive study of RadhaKrishna Bhajans in Madras City which I made during my second visit in 1960-1961 was published in 1963 in the journal History of Religions and later in When A Great Tradition Modernizes (1972 [1980a]). On my third trip in 1964, I did not do a direct study of cultural performances, but interviewed nineteen successful industrial leaders, their families and some of their employees. Reports of this study were published in Singer and Cohn (1966) and in Singer ([ 1972 ] 1980), with special emphasis on the relation of Max Weber's contrast between the effects of the Hindu ethic and that of the Protestant ethic on individual industrial entrepreneurs. Cultural performances and other forms of symbolic action turned up as part of the Madras industrialists' adaptive strategies of compartmentalization, vicarious ritualization, reinterpretation of their essential tenets, etc. Such strategies helped them reconcile the demands of their religious beliefs and rituals with the demands of their industrial careers. In a 1970 conference on Entrepreneurship and Modernization of Occupational Cultures in South Asia held at Chicago, substantial evidence was presented by colleagues for resort to similar adaptive strategies not only in business and industry in other Indian cities, but also in law, medicine and science. One

6

Introduction

participant in the conference, Charles Leslie, called such strategies "symbolic traditionalization" (Singer, ed. 1973; cf. MacAloon 1984; Gusfield 1981). Since these observations and interpretations on the "Weber problem" have been published in book form and in several articles, they have not been included in the present volume. "The Weber thesis" continues to be an issue for polemical debate (see my recent reply to some of this criticism in the article "Max Weber and the Modernization of India" (1985).

2. Revisits to Lloyd Warner's "Yankee City" It was a pleasant surprise to discover during our revisits to Warner's "Yankee City" in the 1970s that the ceremonies for Memorial Day and Historical Parades were also described and analyzed by him as kinds of cultural performances in which "the citizens of Yankee City collectively state what they believe themselves to be". The changing and conflicting interpretations of these cultural performances and other symbol systems are discussed in the three papers about "Yankee City," and in the chapter on "Emblems of Identity" in Man's Glassy Essence. It is probable that Warner's dramatistic interpretations of these events were natural extensions of his interpretations of aboriginal Australian rituals and ceremonies (Warner 1937 [1952]; 1959). Warner, in turn, drew on Radcliffe-Brown, who supervised his Australian research, and on Dürkheim, and Malinowski, to mention only some of the more immediate anthropological backgrounds of his ideas about the relation of ritual and religion to social organization, myth, drama, and play (cf. Burke and Parsons on "Dramatism" in IESS). Beyond this immediate ethnographic background, Warner had a strong interest in the philosophy and psychology of symbolism, an interest which his wife's biography of him traces to the early influence of George Boas, the philosopher, one of Warner's teachers at Berkeley (M.H. Warner 1988). In any case, the last Yankee City monograph, The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans (1959) amply acknowledged and used the words of a galaxy of theorists of symbolism - Ogden and Richards, Freud and Jung, G.H. Mead and Morris, Sapir and Korzybski, Langer and Levi, among them.

On remembering some founding fathers and mothers

7

When we first started revisits to "Yankee City" in 1974, I was not aware of Lloyd Warner's long-standing interest in cultural and social symbolism. A careful reading of his monograph The Living and the Dead (1959), which he began in the early 1940s but did not finish until long after the other monographs, suggested that "the symbolic life of Americans" had preoccupied him for almost twenty years. This, however, was not the reason for the start of my revisits. By 1970 I had finished putting together the reports of three trips to India and an overall interpretation of how social and cultural innovations were introduced, selected, and assimilated or rejected with respect to the great and little traditions of the metropolitan center of Madras City and its environs. Being free to explore the question of the relation of innovation to tradition in American culture, I first started to visit shrine centers dedicated to American innovators such as Ford, Edison, Tiffany, Jefferson, John Hays Hammond. Since we had usually summered in Cape Ann, Massachusetts, we visited some of these "shrine centers" around Boston, Gloucester, Newburyport, and Shelburne, Vermont. The 1974 visit to Newbury and Newburyport encountered the lively controversy between urban renewal and restoration, described in "Yankee City in Renaissance". The critical role of city signs and architectural symbolism in the controversy aroused some curiosity about a semiotics of urbanism. After several summers of revisits, interviews and observations, the impression formed itself that the relation of innovation to tradition in "Yankee City" was a mirror image of their relation in Madras. That is to say, while modern innovations in Madras were interpreted as restorations of traditional forms and patterns, in Yankee City restoration and preservation was interpreted as "progress through the past", a frontier for Yankee ingenuity. The interpretation of the relationship seemed to depend in each case on wider cultural values and orientations. Such a preliminary hypothesis obviously could be explored and tested by analyzing and comparing specific cultural performances and specific symbolic representations in different cities within India and in the United States. The papers on city signs are intended as contributions to such an exploration. To avoid misunderstanding, I would like to stress that these papers are not intended to represent statistical samples from which generalizations about Indian and American cities can be extrapolated. If they are in some sense samples, they do not represent typical microcosms, but are samples

8

Introduction

of networks of social and cultural relations which vary in different regions and in different historical periods. Nor are they intended to be objective demographic, ecological, or economic and social analyses independent of how they are interpreted by the "natives". The natives' point of view, of their relation to their world, is an essential ingredient in the descriptions, analyses, and interpretations. In fact, the nostalgic search for roots so prevalent in the 1970s among American ethnic, social, and religious groups was a backdrop for my own return home from India. In 1970, while the student "counter-cultural revolution" was still strong, a group of about twelve graduate students, mostly in anthropology, asked me to conduct a workshop on American culture, a request I acceded to annually through 1979. The students' individual research projects extended and deepened my own knowledge of the diversity of American culture. One paper returns to a semiotic interpretation of the cultural role of cities in a wider comparative context. The paper on "Purusha and Corbusier's Modulor as Architectural Symbols" was originally presented to a workshop on "Meanings of the City" organized by my colleague Paul Wheatley. It takes its point of departure from Wheatley's suggestion that the three astrobiological principles of an Axis Mundi, cardinal orientation, and macro-microcosmic parallelism be taken as the defining symbolic structure of "traditional" cities, in China and elsewhere. The paper explores the relevance of his suggestions for the Indian cities Madras, Madurai, and Chandigarh, using some recent historical studies as well as personal observations to arrive at some unexpected conclusions about the dichotomy between "traditional" and "modern" cities. This paper has not been previously published. These papers on the semiotics of cities show the value of adding a mode of symbolic analysis to the more familiar ecological, economic, sociological, and political analyses. In these papers an attempt has been made to illustrate a possible synthesis of the different modes of analysis, although the focus is on the ways in which a semiotic analysis has been incorporated. Another illustration of how a semiotic analysis of the cultural role of cities can be integrated with the ecological and demographic kinds of analysis characteristic of the Chicago school of sociology and anthropology will be found in my paper "Symbolism of the Center, Periphery and the Middle" (Singer 1988 in Greenfield and Martin,

On remembering some founding fathers and mothers

9

eds. 1988). The conceptual framework for such an integration was sketched in the paper "The Cultural Role of Cities" (Redfield and Singer 1954), but was not filled in until empirical urban studies began to appear in China, India, Indonesia, the Middle East, and the United States which provided some detailed observations.

3. A semiotics of personal and social identities The concept of "identity" connotes a self-awareness which is not generally connoted by the widely used concept of "personality". Many psychological theories of "personality" — whether behavioristic, sociological, or cultural - do not assume that the "personality" of an individual or group implies an experienced self-awareness of the "personality" in question. They imply only that there are "objective" tests and causal explanations for determining personality types. This general observation applies even to psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious. As used by anthropologists and social psychologists, psychoanalytic theories emphasize the role of unconscious influences. In the personality and culture theories, for example, a concept like Dr. Abram Kardiner's "basic personality structure" was applied by Cora DuBois and Kardiner to the people of Alor on the basis of observations of childrearing, interviews, Rorschach tests, and interpretations of "projective systems" expressed in myths and rituals, but it was never claimed that the Alorese were aware that they were "dilapidated personalities" (cf. Singer in Kaplan 1961b; DuBois 1944; Kardiner 1945). Ruth Benedict, on the other hand, although referring to cultural configurations as a personality writ large and projected on a cultural screen, did not describe individual persons in Patterns of Culture (1934), nor did she assume that the bulk of members of a society who conformed to a given cultural configuration were necessarily aware of their personality configuration and experienced it as such. Personality in "personality and culture studies" was an object o f anthropological discourse — rarely a subject and participant in it (Singer 1 9 6 1 b : 6 6 ; 1 9 8 4 : 53).

In the 1950s and 1960s, interest in phenomenology and in the Eastern religions revived interest in the older conception of the self as a feeling, thinking, acting being, as earlier described by Peirce,

10

Introduction

James, and Mead, among others. Redfield, Hallo well, Opler, and other anthropologists became interested in a concept of personal and social identity which placed society and culture on the self axis. In the 1978 lecture to the American Anthropological Association on "Signs of the Self', I argued that Peirce's semiotic, social and pragmatic conception of the self provides a theory of the self that includes self-awareness as well as its external signs and social sources ("My language is the sum total of myself')· The elaboration and application of this argument in Man's Glassy Essence to personal and social identity, totemic emblems, and the Indian Advaitin concept of identity ("you are that") illustrated the relevance of Peirce's theory of signs for a semiotics of personal and social identity. The papers on identity extend the application to the semiotic structure of American identity as revealed in several revisits to Yankee City and in a comparison with Warner's earlier descriptions of "Yankees" and "Ethnics" in the town. The time-table for assimilation of ethnic groups that Warner projected in the 1940s has taken some unexpected turns in the 1970s. One of the papers answers Spiro's challenging question about "Whatever happened to the id?" The answer that it has been culturally constituted depends on a parallel between Freud's ego, id, and superego and Peirce's I, it, and thou, a parallel which became evident when Max Fisch forwarded several of Peirce's pages on the pronouns in 1979. The probable common source for this parallel in Schiller's three drives was suggested by Fisch's comment on the connection between Peirce and Schiller. An earlier paper on "Pronouns, Persons and the Semiotic Self' (Singer 1989) tried to integrate grammatical, semantic and pragmatic analyses of the pronouns I, it, and thou within the framework of Peirce's semiotics. Taking its point of departure from some recent reinterpretations of Dürkheim's and Mauss's conceptions of individual person and social personages, this essay constructed an iconic diagram of a semiotic self. This diagram includes two indexical signs ("I," "you") and a symbolic sign ("it"). The diagram can be easily converted into a set of different sentences in philosophy, theology, economics, sociology, etc. by specifying the triadic relation variable between the three pronouns. A linguistic interpretation of the triadic relation as a relation of signification (sign, object, and interpretant) identifies it as a nuclear act of communication. As such, this relation can also be interpreted

On remembering some founding fathers and mothers

11

by an identification of an individual self with "an outreaching identity", that is, as a relation between a first person as speaker, a second person as addressee, and a third person as object spoken of. Peirce described this act of communication as a relation between utterer and interpreter, and stipulated the condition for successful communication as a shared understanding of the meaning of the signs uttered and their interpretations (see p. 70 below). For Peirce the internal dialogue, or thought, is similar in structure to external conversation, since in his doctrine of Tuism all thought and conversation are addressed to a second person, or to oneself as a second person. Illustrations of pronominal use in Beatle songs and ordinary English indicate some possible empirical studies of a semiotics of personal and group identities. Comparisons and contrasts with ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Indian pronominal usage indicate possibilities for cross-cultural comparisons as well as some possible sources for Peirce's semiotics. The role of the third person, and the pronoun "it" as its designation, remains ambiguous in Peirce's tuism. If the third person is not present, "it" is not an indexical sign, but a symbolic sign. Peirce's earlier interpretation of it suggests some influence of Indian metaphysics where "it" refers to "the all" (Peirce 1982: 47-49; Singer 1984a: 183-185). Because Peirce rejected an indubitably intuitive knowledge of one's self, such as Descartes proclaimed in his cogito ergo sum, he would probably also have rejected an immediate, intuitive knowledge of a semiotic self consisting of a triadic relation between first, second, and third persons. We first see blue and red things. It is quite a discovery when we find the eye has anything to do with them, a discovery still more recondite when we learn that there is an ego behind the eye, to which these qualities belong. (Peirce 1955: 308; cf. Singer 1984a: 47).

How much more recondite, then, the discovery that the ego is denoted by the personal pronoun "I", that "a person is not absolutely an individual, that his thoughts are what he is 'saying to himself', that is, saying to that other self that is just coming to life in the flow of time . . . . that all thought whatever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language?" (Peirce 1955: 258). Add to this conception of an individual ego the idea of three persons designated by "I", "it", and "thou", in a triadic relation

12

Introduction

of a speaker, an addressee, and an object of reference not immediately present, as an iconic diagram of a semiotic self, and the probability that the participants in such a relationship would have an immediate, intuitive knowledge of it, is quite low. Instead, Peirce resorts, as we all do, to inference, retrospective analysis, and idealized postulation to describe the triadic relationship involved in a conversation, whether with oneself or with a second person. Although Peirce had some sharp differences with his friend William James about the existence of absolutely separate individual selves, James's description of a social self - "I have as many selves as there are people who recognize me" and of his "me" as including not only his body and psychic powers, but "his clothes, his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank account" is an "outreaching identity" indeed, and is consistent with Peirce's descriptions. In turn, James's and Mead's " I " and "me" as components of the self find their representation in Peirce's distinction between the self that has just spoken, denoted by an indexical "me" and the self coming into being in the flow of time, denoted by an indexical "I". (James 1961: 44; cf. Singer 1984a: 86-89). In these descriptions, there is room for William James's " I " and "me" as subject and object of a self, as well as for George Herbert Mead's "taking the role of 'significant others' and of a 'generalized other'". More importantly, Peirce's semiotic analysis of the self directs our attention to the signs and symptoms in social interactions of its growth and development. In agreement with Kant, Peirce regards the use of " I " by a two-year old as evidence of selfconsciousness. Erikson's "developmental map" of the personal pronouns continues Peirce's semiotic analysis of identity because it describes a pronominal palimpsest on which is inscribed the formation of the major personal and social identities in an individual life cycle (see Singer 1989: 267-270). Such a developmental map of personal pronouns was lacking in earlier attempts to apply psychoanalytic theory to an analysis of personal and social identities. (See, e.g., my essay on "Shame Cultures and Guilt Cultures" in Piersand Singer 1953 [1973]). The "outreaching identity" of Peirce's self concept, as well as the inclusive nature of James' "me" indicates that their concept of personal identity presupposes a social identity and a cultural identity as well. This is a distinctive feature of the social psycho-

On remembering some founding fathers and mothers

13

logical theory of the self in Peirce and James, as in G.H. Mead and Cooley. A "me" cannot exist without an institutional framework and processes such as families, schools, language, property, banks and boats on which the child depends for its education, growth, protection and maintenance.

4. T h e decline of the natural science model of culture and the emergence of a semiotic model Professional anthropology came rather late in my career, approximately a decade after my having received a Ph.D. for a historical study of the development of formal methods in mathematical logic from Boole to Carnap (Singer 1940). The supervisor of the dissertation was Rudolf Carnap, and it was also influenced by Charles Morris and Bertrand Russell, with both of whom 1 had numerous opportunities in 1938 and 1939 to discuss it. My graduate studies at the University of Chicago concentrated on semiotics, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of the social sciences. During the decade 1941-1951 my participation in the three-year interdisciplinary social sciences program of the Hutchins College had offered occasions to teach and read Dürkheim and Weber, R.H. Tawney and Henry Maine, Freud and Marx, as well as such contemprary authors as Benedict and Mead, Bateson, Gorer, Warner, Fromm, and many others. When Robert Redfield invited me in 1951 to join him in his Ford Foundation-supported project to explore and develop methods for intercultural studies, I did not feel unprepared for the task. The 1976 paper on "Robert Redfield's Development of a Social Anthropology of Civilizations" gave a detailed history of this project, of which I was associate director from 1951 until Redfield's death in 1958, and director from 1958 to 1961. This project affected my academic career in several important respects: it took me to European centers of comparative cultural studies, to India and Asia three times, and into the University of Chicago's Department of Anthropology. After the project was officially terminated, I made several revisits to Warner's "Yankee City", and also proposed an application of Peircean semiotics for a semiotic anthropology. Redfield's project probably also affected the career of social and cultural anthropology, turning it, as he said, to the humanists on its left while not deserting the social scientists on its right:

14

Introduction . . . There is some real difference between a disposition to conceive our abstractions in conformity with mechanical and functional or even causal examples provided by physical and biological science, and a greater willingness to make use of the artist's way of conceiving and communicating a human reality . . . whose completeness and humanness can be communicated fully and through that effort of descriptive integration . . . that portrait-painter's way of doing it. (Redfield 1955c in 1962: 127)

The net effect of Redfield's program to extend anthropology to a study of civilizations must be evaluated by others less involved with the project. The papers in this volume are offered by one of the participants as a part of the record to be evaluated. The papers on "A Neglected Source of Structuralism" and "Peirce, Malinowski and the Emergence of Semiotic Anthropology" document the transformations in the theory of culture from a natural science model to a semiotic model. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the transformation proceeded along a simple linear progression, from Tyler to Malinowski, RadcliffeBrown, and Redfield, and on to Schneider and Geertz, et al. There were some complicating qualifications to the process, as the papers show. A symbolic and semiotic component was already included in Tylor's 1871 definition of culture and civilization. Ceremonial symbolism is also described in the early 1900s by Boas and Kroeber, Rivers and other anthropologists. The semiotic model of culture emerges after 1950 by being abstracted from Tyler's complex whole. Social structure and social system are complementary abstractions from the same complex whole. A second complicating qualification derives from Durkheim's and Radcliffe-Brown's elevation of concepts of social structure and social system to dominant, all-inclusive concepts, with culture as a subordinate concept. The ensuing imperialistic rivalry between the concepts of cultural systems and of social systems ended officially in 1958 with the Kroeber and Parsons joint article on "The Concepts of Culture and Social System". Unofficially, the complementarity of culture and society had been recognized by Redfield as early as 1941, and restated in his 1955 Huxley lecture. Recognition of such complementarity has been associated with acceptance of a semiotic model of culture, although an occasional anthropologist who accepted a semiotic model of culture nevertheless insisted on a materialistic definition. An example of this procedure is Leslie White.

On remembering some founding fathers and mothers

15

The locus classicus of the debate between sociological and culturological interpretations of kinship terms occurred in the exchanges between Kroeber and Rivers on classificatory kinship, and between Kroeber and Radcliffe-Brown (summarized in my 1968 article on Culture in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences). An analogous issue appeared in the controversy over totemism, in which it was debated whether totems were cultural systems or social systems. Dürkheim, in this case, recognized the cultural side by defining totems as emblems and names of clans, moieties and other social units. Radcliffe-Brown, on the other hand, seemed in his earlier writings on Australian totemism to emphasize the social functions and foundations, except for his emphasis on the religious connection in his letters to Rivers (Kuper 19 ; Stocking 1984: 153-154). In his second (1951 in 1958) lecture on totemism, however, Radcliffe-Brown took special note of the "dual opposition" between Eagle Hawk and Crow as "contraries" in thought, and as "opponents" in a social relationship. For Radcliffe-Brown, this idea of "dual opposition" became an important link between cosmology and society in Australia, Africa, North America, and China. If Radcliffe-Brown's second lecture on totemism did not "trigger" Lövi-Strauss's structuralism, as Leach suggested, it was acknowledged by Lövi-Strauss as a "genuine structuralist" analysis. Lövi-Strauss's little book on Totemism (1963) did "trigger" my own curiosity about the broader intellectual sources of Radcliffe-Brown's and Ldvi-Strauss's structuralism, and stimulated the research and writing of the paper "A Neglected Source of Structuralism: RadcliffeBrown, Russell and Whitehead". The historical controversies over whether kinship nomenclatures and totems were cultural systems or social systems were raised to a new level in the early 1960s, with Lävi-Strauss's introduction of structuralism and semiology. His structuralist analysis seemed to imply that both cultural systems and social systems were cultural, and needed to be compared with natural systems as homologous structures. The relational structures, he said, not the terms related, were the important objects for analysis, in totemism, mythology, kinship or economic exchange. Lövi-Strauss's structuralist and semiological critique of the "totemic illusion" continued Goldenweiser's 1910 critique and also stimulated Schneider's critique of the "kinship illusion". These critiques concluded that there are no such things as kinship or totemism — as universal and unitary natural

16

Introduction

phenomena. They also concluded positively that totems and kin terms are symbol systems and meanings distinctive of particular cultures, constructed from diverse local environments and experiences. The critiques also desubstantialized culture as a universal, unitary aggregate of material objects, and instead defined it as a plurality of distinctive symbol systems subject to empirical observation, analysis, and interpretation. This interpretation of the critiques of totemism, kinship, and culture as desubstantializing obviously suggests a parallel with Whitehead's and Russell's critiques of "misplaced concreteness" in physics and mathematics. The parallel did not become obvious to me until after drafting the 1968 Encyclopedia article on the Culture concept. At that time, about 1969, a careful reading of Radcliffe-Brown's 1937 lectures in A Natural Science of Society (1957) turned up distinct evidence of his acquaintance with the Russell-Whitehead logical analysis of cardinal numbers, their logic of relations, and their critique of instants, points, particles, numbers, classes, etc. as abstract constructions rather than concrete, observable objects, as the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" would have it. Radcliffe-Brown's extension of this critique to anthropology took him beyond the naive empiricist butterfly-collecting imputed to him by Leach, and towards a genuine structuralist analysis of why Eagle Hawk and Crow are selected as totems, and the structural homologies between them and their moieties — that is, Lövi-Strauss's "postulate of homology" between two systems of differences, natural and cultural. Since some of my colleagues expressed skepticism of my linking Radcliffe-Brown's (and L0vi-Strauss's) structuralism with Russell and Whitehead, I consulted some of his former students and colleagues at Chicago, Oxford, Cambridge, Sydney and Manchester on the question: Stanner and Firth on the Sydney period in the late 1920s, Eggan, Tax and Spicer, and Levi on Chicago in the 1930s; Fortes, Gluckman, and Srinivas on Oxford in the 1930s and 1940s, and Gluckman, V. Turner, Emmet, and Colson on Manchester in the early 1950s. All supplied testimony — oral, written, or documentary - essentially supporting the thesis that between 1929 and 1951 Radcliffe-Brown was acquainted with the Russell-Whitehead logic of relations and tried to construct a theory of social anthropology making some use of it. Stanner wrote that in Sydney in 1929 Radcliffe-Brown was recommending Whitehead's Science and the

On remembering some founding fathers and mo thers 17 Modern World and R.B. Perry's General Theory of Value to his students, and was interested in a relational logic and a post-Aristotelian cosmology for social anthropology. L^vi-Strauss, who read the 1973 paper, accepted the argument as far as Radcliffe-Brown was concerned, but wrote that since he had not read Russell and Whitehead, their influence on him must have been more indirect. Quine wrote that Ldvi-Strauss's structuralism also reminded him of Russell's theory of structure in relating perception to the physical world of science. Victor Lowe, a philosopher who specialized on Whitehead, and also collected material for a biography, supplied information about the early Cambridge period and some details about the Chicago period, suggesting possible encounters between Radcliffe-Brown and Russell or Whitehead. The historical and biographical evidence seems to me to substantiate the major thesis of "A Neglected Source of Structuralism: Radcliffe-Brown, Russell and Whitehead", which had been presented (in absentia) to the British Association for Social Anthropology in 1973 at its Oxford meeting. One reason that some anthropologists have been reluctant to accept this evidence is that they have found it difficult to reconcile their image of Radcliffe-Brown as a naive, empiricist "butterfly collector" with the abstract relational structuralism deriving from Russell and Whitehead. As one anthropologist wrote I was "reading the thoughts of a great mind into that of a mediocre one". The evidence from Radcliffe-Brown's A Natural Science of Society, from his axiom system for kinship relations, and from the testimony of his students and colleagues does, I think, show that Radcliffe-Brown was acquainted with the Russell-Whitehead structuralist philosophy of science and tried to apply it to social anthropology. How well he succeeded is an arguable question. Not everyone who quotes or borrows from Shakespeare is likely to be as great a poet as Shakespeare. Even the publisher of Radcliffe-Brown's 1937 lectures contributed to his image as a naive empiricist and naturalist by calling the book A Natural Science of Society, overlooking the emphasis in Fred Eggan's Foreword and in the appendix on the fact that Radcliffe-Brown intended to present an argument for a "theoretical social science" based on "a modern philosophical background", as an alternative to Mortimer Adler's previous presentation of an Aristotelian theoretical scheme. Adler's reaction is summarized in the appendix to "A Neglected Source of Structuralism".

18

Introduction

5. Peirce, Malinowski and the semiotic model of culture L6vi-Strauss's recognition of a genuine structuralist analysis in Radcliffe-Brown's second lecture on totemism stimulated the research and paper on "A Neglected Source of Structuralism: Radcliffe-Brown, Russell and Whitehead". This paper together with L6vi-Strauss's Inaugural Lecture at the College de France which introduced Saussure's semiology as a "science of the signs at the heart of social life" as an appropriate field for social anthropology made me aware that anthropologists have turned to linguistics, philosophy, psychology, literary and art criticism for their theories of cultural symbolism. Since Saussure defined semiology in terms of a dyadic relation of signifier and signified, without speakers and objects at the level of la langue, it occurred to me that Peirce's definition of semiosis as a triadic relation of sign, object, and interpretant might provide a more adequate analysis of cultural symbolism. I therefore constructed an ideal-type contrast between semiology and semiotics and used it as a basis for a plea in 1976 at Bloomington for a "semiotic anthropology". (See Man's Glassy Essence 1984a: 42; Umiker-Sebeok 1977; Sebeok ed. 1978.) Saussure relegated individual subjects and objects and speech acts to a separate psychological discipline of la parole. So far as language (la langue) as a conventional system of signs is concerned, there were only relations which defined the terms related, such as phonemes, by their differences. This aspect of Saussure's semiology appealed to Lövi-Strauss and became the basis for his structuralist analysis of totemism and later of mythology as systems of binary oppositions. By 1976 when Sebeok invited me to lecture at Bloomington I was well on the way to exploring a Peircean semiotic theory of culture, first in contrast to a Saussurean theory, and then in fairly quick succession as a semiotics of the self, of personal and social identity, of totemic emblems of identity from Dürkheim to Warner, and a semiotics of Indian identity (Singer 1984a). Some reviewers of Man's Glassy Essence have erroneously assumed that the ideal-type contrast of Saussure and Peirce is intended as a rejection of Saussure. On the contrary, the point of the contrast was to show that Peirce's semiotics includes Saussure's la langue, but not the converse. In terms of Morris's later division of semiotics into syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics, Saussure's la langue

On remembering some founding fathers and mothers

19

belongs to semantics, his la parole belongs to pragmatics, while Peirce's semiotics includes all three. This relationship has been clarified by Greenberg 1948, by Jakobson 1957, and by Silverstein 1976 (cf. Singer 1984a: 21-26). When I started to explore the possibility of applying Peirce's theory of signs to cultural theory in the early 1970s, I did not know that two of my colleagues, Paul Friedrich and Michael Silverstein were also interested in that possibility. As Raymond Firth's book on Symbols: Public and Private (1973) testifies, there was a strong interest in symbolism among members of the Department in 1970 when he gave the lectures that were to become the book. Firth's statement in the book that Leach was the first anthropologist to refer to Peirce in his 1957 essay "On the Epistemological Background of Malinowski's Empiricism" in the Firth Festschrift volume on Malinowski aroused my curiosity. The reference in question says that Malinowski was influenced not by Peirce's pragmatism, but by James's. This reference made me wonder whether Malinowski might have been influenced by Peirce's semiotics and thus brought Peirce's theory of signs into anthropology. Leach's 1985 review of Man's Glassy Essence added a personal note to this question, since he referred to my book as an illustration of "the Chicago dogma" that cultures are "systems of symbols and meanings." The paper on "Peirce, Malinowski and the Emergence of Semiotic Anthropology" tracks Peirce's semiotics into social and cultural anthropology. Perhaps it also contributes to the poetic justice of Firth's 1973 attribution of the first mention of Peirce to Leach's negative reference by identifying Malinowski's 1923 supplementary essay on "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages" in the Ogden and Richards book as one of the first uses of Peirce's semiotics by an anthropologist. The probable impact of semiotic and semiological conceptions of culture on the use of natural science models in anthropology is discussed in the postscript to the "Emergence of Semiotic Anthropology". It is, I think, fairly obvious that the trend away from empiricism, synchronic functionalism and naturalism and towards structuralism, history and symbolism is running strong. It may not be equally obvious that the very conceptions of natural science and their influence on anthropology are also changing. At least the older image of a causal, deterministic, objective, value-free science is no longer a professed model for anthropology, and is

20

Introduction

also being seriously qualified in the physical and biological sciences. To what extent the conception of cultures as systems of symbols and meanings needs to include natural systems varies with different anthropological schools. My personal position takes a leaf from Peirce and is a mix of empiricism, realism, and a pragmatic idealism. We need all three of Schneider's baseball umpires to referee our culture games, the umpire who calls balls and strikes as he sees them, the umpire who calls them as they are, and the umpire for whom balls and strikes are nuttin' until he calls them. At least this is an epistemological position formulated for physics by Einstein and has also been endorsed by my astrophysicist colleague Professor 5. Chandrasekhar. Why should anthropologists and social scientists disdain it? (cf. Singer 1989: 262-266; Chandrasekhar 1987, Dyson 1988, Penrose 1989).

6. T o w a r d s a conversation of cultures A semiotic conception of cultures as systems of symbols and meanings has important implications for intercultural and international relations. The phrase "a conversation of cultures" was first used in Robert Redfield's article, "Does America Need a Hearing Aid?" This article, published in 1953 in The Saturday Review, applied and elaborated the metaphor of face-to-face conversation as an ideal for the conduct of international relations: Mutual security depends on mutual understanding, and for understanding you have to have a conversation . . . . At home and abroad to talk and then to listen, to listen with the help of reason and reasonably to talk is to strengthen us just where we can be so much stronger than the Soviets. It is to build the community of free minds, "the civilization of the dialogue."

Redfield was not alone in articulating this ideal of the metaphor of "a conversation of cultures" and "a dialogue of civilization". Senator J. William Fulbright appealed to it when he launched his Fulbright program for international fellowships and cultural exchanges. The metaphor also gained currency in some of the UNESCO publications. What distinguished Redfield's use of the metaphor in his 1953 article was his discussion of it as a possible program for intercultural and interdisciplinary scholarly research and educa-

On remembering some founding fathers and mothers

21

tion. In fact, he launched such a program in 1951, based at the University of Chicago, with support from the Ford Foundation. As the paper on "Robert Redfield's Development of a Social Anthropology of Civilizations" (Singer 1976) documents, he first proposed such a program in 1944 as a practical way to organize language and area studies after World War II by assembling groupings of relevant disciplines around the intensive study of particular civilizations in historic depth. Such a program was launched at the University of Chicago in 1956 for South Asian, Islamic, and Chinese Civilizations, and soon after was extended to Japanese, Greek and other civilizations. (See R. Davis 1985 for this history). The paper on the relations between the United States and Southern Asia as a conversation of cultures describes how Redfield's proposal inspired the organization of South and Southeast Asian studies at the University of Chicago and, to some extent, at the national level as well. Readers would probably like to know a bit more about the relation of such educational and research programs to a semiotic anthropology, and what are the implications for public policy in the field of international relations If we adopt Margaret Mead's 1962 definition of "semiotics" at the Bloomington Conference as "the study of all patterned communication in all modalities" (in Sebeok et al. 1964), then it is fairly easy to see how a study of the world's major civilizations with the help of specialized disciplines needs to study all patterns of intercultural communication in all modalities. Beyond this, the metaphor of a colloquial conversation was Peirce's preferred metaphor for his analysis of semiosis, as Royce and Fisch have pointed out, and as we have demonstrated in the discussion of the triadic and pentadic analysis of signification, communication, and thinking (cf. Singer 1984a: 78-81, 96-102). The application of semiotic analysis to international and intercultural relations was not one of Peirce's major interests, although his knowledge of many languages, his occasional reference to such usages as "our possessions in the Philippines", and his social theory of logic and of science, suggest a Kantian approach to international relations and world peace. Beginning in 1987, a group of faculty and students from several different departments at the University of Chicago and several other universities started to explore the semiotics and ethics of nuclear policy issues. Our immediate point of departure was Freeman Dyson's

22

Introduction

book Weapons and Hope. Professor Dyson, an astrophysicist with experience and knowledge of weapons systems, encouraged social scientists and humanists to participate in his important project to make the "language of the warriors" and "the language of the victims" mutually intelligible. Essentially, this is a project for interdisciplinary and intercultural translation and a conversation of cultures for which pure and descriptive semiotics, as well as applied semiotics, are highly relevant. Their relevance to public policy is intrinsic and does not need to be added externally as an afterthought, because Peirce's semiotics is a pragmatic and social semiotics, as Charles Morris noted (cf. Singer 1984a: 28-31; Singer, ed., Nuclear Policy, Culture and History 1988). Because international relations are more than geopolitics, economics, and weapons technology, they are also cultural and symbolic, we need a semiotics of international relations to help us listen to and translate the international conversation of cultures in all modalities of communication, if we are to acquire the mutual understanding that is a condition for mutual security. Historical and ethnographic studies of how national signs and symbols emerge and are sometimes transcended in "convivial relations" become an important agenda for future research (Fernandez 1983). This kind of applied semiotics not only calls for linguistic skills or for schemes for better international communication; it requires also studies of the social and cultural contexts of communication and of the historic background of the nations in contact. It calls for a Redfieldian hearing aid that will listen for changing moods, within the persistent national structures and within an acquired universal human nature. In the end these are the things to listen for in intra-national communication as well as in intercultural communications of nations, for many nations are multiethnic, multi-linguistic, and multicultural. Recent writings by Fernandez, Inoue, Lee, MacAloon, Ramanujan, Silverstein and Urban are showing us the path to follow in this new branch of semiotic anthropology. It is encouraging to find in two recent anthologies of articles dealing with the applications of semiotic analysis to social and cultural phenomena some younger scholars well represented (Mertz and Parmentier [eds.] 1985; Lee and Urban [eds.] 1989). More impressive it is to find that individual monographs which these scholars, as well as some of their peers who happen not to be represented in these two anthologies, are publishing, incorporate

On remembering some founding fathers and mothers

23

varieties of semiotic analysis that are so well integrated with their social and cultural contexts that they would not be noticed, if they were not explicitly mentioned (e.g., Gold 1988). Most striking in this new kind of semiotic analysis is that while the authors' gurus are usually acknowledged — say, a Friedrich, a Geertz, a Schneider, a Marriott, a Silverstein, a Stanner, a V. Turner — the first generation gurus are not prominently acknowledged — say Parsons and Kroeber, Redfield and White, RadcliffeBrown and Malinowski, L^vi-Strauss and Jakobson, and Weber and Dürkheim, among others. Yet it is that very first generation which brought some form of symbolic analysis into social and cultural anthropology. The analysis of cultures as systems of signs and symbols was brought in, not usually from anthropology, but from philosophy, psychology, linguistics, literary and art criticism. Semiotic anthropology, semiological and structural anthropology, symbolic anthropology, in other words, are the heirs of a multidisciplinary ancestry. The "Revolution in Anthropology" ushered in by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown in 1922 had its sources in an intellectual revolution evidenced in the works of Mach and James, Whitehead, Russell and Wittgenstein; Dewey, Mead, Morris and Carnap; Saussure and Jakobson, Ogden and Richards. From this perspective, Peirce's semiotics has been the uninvited guest to a feast of symbolism for which he created the recipe.

December 5, 1989

Search for a great tradition in cultural performances 1

During a visit to India in 1954-55, I had an opportunity to do a methodological field study in South India. The purpose of this study was to chart an intellectual map of some of the researchable territory that lies between the culture of a village or small community and the culture of a total civilization. This study is not easy to classify in terms of prevailing conceptions about "research", since it falls between the intensive anthropological field study and the purely conceptual types of methodological analysis. But despite its unorthodox character, it seemed an appropriate study to undertake in a new and not-well-known field. Although the study was primarily designed to serve the methodological purpose of giving an empirical content to some very general ideas and to suggest concrete hypotheses for further research, it also turned up some substantive findings that have importance on their own account. In this report, I shall mention some of these in passing but will in the main confine myself to the problems of method posed by the study. Before I went to India I already had a fairly explicit framework of ideas for the study of civilizations. Most important of these was the view of a civilization, suggested by Redfield, as a complex structure of a Little Tradition and a Great Tradition. 2 Using these ideas, as well as another distinction of Redfield's between "orthogenetic" and "heterogenetic" cities, I had tried to formulate several broad hypotheses concerning the relation of Little and Great Traditions in Indian civilization.3 These were: 1. that because India had a "primary" or "indigenous" civilization which had been fashioned out of pre-existing folk and regional cultures, its Great Tradition was culturally continuous with the Little Traditions to be found in its diverse regions, villages, castes and tribes. 2. that this cultural continuity was product and cause of a common cultural consciousness shared by most Indians and expressed in essential similarities of mental outlook and ethos

Search for a great tradition in cultural performances

25

3. that this common cultural consciousness has been formed in India with the help of certain processes and factors that also play an important role in other primary civilizations: i.e., sacred books and sacred objects as a fixed point of worship, a special class of literati (Brahmans) who have the authority to recite and interpret the sacred scriptures, professional storytellers, a sacred geography of sacred centers - temples, pilgrimage places and shrines - and leading personalities who by their identification with the Great Tradition and with the masses mediate the one to the other 4. that in a primary civilization like India's, cultural continuity with the past is so great that even the acceptance of "modernizing" and "progress" ideologies does not result in linear forms of social and cultural change but may result in the "traditionalizing" of apparently "modern" innovations. In considering how such broad hypotheses might be tested by a field study in India, I got some help and encouragement from several other quarters. One of these was M.N. Srinivas's study, Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South India.4 From this work I learned that the Great Tradition of Indian civilization might be approximately identified with what Srinivas called "Sanskritic Hinduism" and what previous writers like MonierWilliams called "Brahmanism" in contrast to popular Hinduism. As Srinivas defines it, Sanskritic Hinduism is the generalized pattern of Brahman practices and beliefs that have an all-India spread, in contrast to those forms of Hinduism with a local, regional, or peninsular spread. From Srinivas's work, too, I learned that Sanskritic Hinduism was not confined to the Brahmans but, as in the case of the Coorgs, might be taken over by non-Brahman groups as part of an effort to raise their status. To this process Srinivas has given the name "Sanskritization", and it is obviously an important way in which the Great Tradition spreads from one group and region to another group and region. Other ways of conceiving the relationship of the great Indian civilization to the culture and social structure of a particular Indian village were suggested by McKim Marriott in a seminar that we held in Chicago during the spring of 1954. s Between Srinivas's conception of Sanskritic Hinduism as a generalized all-India phenomenon and Marriott's description of one village as the locus of

26

Search for a great tradition in cultural performances

interacting Little and Great Traditions there appeared to me to be a gap which might be filled by a synchronic and functional type of field study.

1. Defining the unit of field study The unit of field study proved to be much smaller than the "intelligible unit of study" with which our methodological discussions in the Chicago seminar had dealt — namely, a total civilization in its full historical and geographical sweep. I did not, of course, expect to encompass the history of Indian civilization within a few observations and interviews carried out over a period of several months. But I must confess I entertained some hope of making contact with Indian civilization on an all-India level. The basis of this — as it turned out - naive hope was the assumption that, if Hindu traditions were still cultivated by professional specialists and if Sanskritic Hinduism, at least, had an all-India spread, a strategic selection of the main types of such specialists should offer a quick access to the structure of the civilization. I was not sufficiently familiar with India to feel confident in my selection of the "strategic" specialists, but, with the help of my reading and the advice of some who knew India better than I did, I obtained introductions to caste genealogists (Bhäts) in Uttar Pradesh, a subcaste of bards (Cärans) in Räjasthän and Saurästra, some individual sädhus and pandits in Benares, a Sanskritist in Madras, a cultural historian in Bombay, and several political-cultural leaders in New Delhi. While this rather broad geographical spread was in part an accident of the location of my advisers, it seemed to assure a genuine all-India scope to my inquiry. When I arrived in India, I quickly saw that, however strategic such a selection might appear from 10,000 miles away, it did not take sufficient account of the cultural and noncultural realities of the Indian scene. The sheer physical problem of traveling around to these various points in India would leave little time for even a preliminary study of any of these groups. But this was not the decisive obstacle; in the end, I did get to almost all these regions and to several others. A more serious obstacle to my original program arose from the fact that, even if I had been able to make studies of these various groups, I did not see how I could directly

Defining the unit of field study

27

relate them to one another and to Indian culture as a whole. Perhaps one deeply learned in the history of Indian civilization and familiar with its regional and local varieties could have brought off such an integration, but to a neophyte the task appeared overwhelming. The regional variations alone were sufficient to give me pause. Indians in the north and south did not speak the same language or identify with the same tradition. Beset by such difficulties, I decided to abandon the plan for an all-India unit of field study and to reformulate a plan that would limit the study to one region. Because I had met in Madras a very knowledgeable Sanskritist sympathetic with the study, and because Madras itself seemed to be a rich center of cultural activities, I selected the Madras area for an exploratory study. This selection, however, still left open a number of other alternatives. Should I set the bounds of the study by the boundaries of the linguistic region, that is, all of the Tamil-speaking country; should I concentrate on a village or a city, or on one group of specialists, or perhaps on one individual or on one institution, like a temple? Had I been doing an intensive field study over a longer period of time, 1 should probably have chosen the smallest manageable unit and concentrated on it alone. Since I was interested in charting the topography of Indian culture, its general terrain, and its different mountains, valleys, and river sources, such a procedure would have given me too narrow a perspective. For my purpose, it seemed better to begin with a rich and complex cluster of Indian culture so that I could find representatives of the major kinds of cultural institutions, cultural specialists, and cultural media. Such a cluster was offered to me by the cultural activities and institutions of the city of Madras and the adjoining towns of Conjeevaram. Mahäbalipuram, and Chingleput, as well as about six villages on the immediate outskirts of Madras. It is difficult to characterize such a cluster with any degree of precision, and perhaps it would be futile to try for great precision. It might be characterized geographically in terms of the land area covered and in terms of the different kinds of settlement units included within it. But since my criteria of selection were not geographical, this characterization would be misleading. The cluster could also be described in terms of political-administrative and cultural categories. Madras is the capital of the state, Chingleput is a district seat, Conjeeveram is an ancient temple and pilgrimage city. These characterizations, although quite apposite,

28

Search for a great tradition in cultural performances

were not the basis of selection. Perhaps the characterization that comes closest to describing my actual unit of field study is that which describes it in social terms as a community of people. For it was primarily the subcaste of Smärta Brahmans in the Madras area whose culture I found myself studying most persistently and intimately. It was their rites and ceremonies, their households, temples, and matha, their Sanskrit and Ayurvedic colleges, their storytellers, devotees, patrons, scholars, and spiritual leaders that I got to know best. But even this description of the unit is inaccurate. For I did not set out to study a community of Smärta Brahmans, and because of the dispersed character of this community, I doubt that it would be possible to do a community study on them. Through a series of coincidences, I simply found that members of the Smärta Brahman community were also leading representatives of the Great Tradition of Sanskritic Hinduism. While most of these representatives have face-to-face interpersonal relations, the relationships among these representatives alone would be a very fragmentary segment of the social relations to be found in the community as a whole. On the other hand, I was not prevented by a concentration on the Smärta Brahmans from studying other subcastes of Brahmans, like the Srivaisnavas, or non-Brahmans, like the followers of Tamil Saivism. Sometimes I was led to take notice of these "out groups" by the Smärtas themselves, e.g., of the non-Brahman performers of classical bharatanätya dancing and Carnatic music, because the Brahmans are patrons and connoisseurs of these arts; sometimes I came upon these other groups quite independently — as in the case of village folk plays, still performed by lower castes in the villages and in the cities.

2. Defining the units of observation: Cultural performances When I got my program of observations and interviews in the Madras area under way, I discovered what I suppose every field worker knows, that the units of cogitation are not units of observation. There was nothing that could be easily labeled Little Tradition or Great Tradition, or "ethos" or "world view". Instead, I found myself confronted with a series of concrete experiences, the observation and recording of which seemed to discourage the mind

Defining the units of observation: Cultural performances

29

from entertaining and applying the synthetic and interpretative concepts that I had brought with me. These experiences had an intrinsic fascination, which also tended to discourage the broad, reflective view to which I had been accustomed. As I grew more familiar with my environment, however, I gradually saw emerging the relation of the woods to the trees. There were units of observation; they were quite distinct from the interpretative categories, but I came to see by what mental operations one might pass from the one to the other. I was helped to identify the units of observation not by deliberately looking for them but by noticing the centrality and recurrence of certain types of things I had observed in the experience of Indians themselves. I shall call these things "cultural performances", because they include what we in the West usually call by that name — for example, plays, concerts, and lectures. But they include also prayers, ritual readings and recitations, rites and ceremonies, festivals, and all those things we usually classify under religion and ritual rather than with the cultural and artistic. In the Madras area - and India generally, I suspect — the distinction cannot be a sharp one because the plays are more often than not based on the sacred Epics and Puränas, and the concerts and dances are filled with devotional songs. The religious rituals, on the other hand, may involve the use of musical instruments, songs, and dance mudräs similar to those used in the concerts by cultural "artists". One of the leading Madras newspapers daily lists forthcoming cultural events under three headings: "Discourses", for religious readings and discourses on the sacred books; "Entertainments", for performances of plays, dances, and concerts — mostly classical; and "Miscellaneous", for meetings of political and professional groups, public lectures on current topics, and receptions. As I observed the range of cultural performances (and was allowed, sometimes asked, to photograph and record them) it seemed to me that my Indian friends — and perhaps all peoples — thought of their culture as encapsulated in these discrete performances, which they could exhibit to visitors and to themselves. The performances became for me the elementary constituents of the culture and the ultimate units of observation. Each one had a definitely limited time span, or at least a beginning and an end, an organized program of activity, a set of performers, an audience, and a place and occasion of performance. Whether it was a wedding, an upanayana

30

Search for a great tradition in cultural performances

(sacred thread) ceremony, a floating temple festival, a village Pongal festival, a ritual recitation of a sacred text, a bharatariätya dance, or a devotional movie, these were the kinds of things that an outsider could observe and comprehend within a single direct experience. I do not mean that 1 could, even with the help of interpreters, always understand everything that went on at one of these performances or appreciate their functions in the total life of the community. And sometimes even the "limited" time span was not limited enough: I was not accustomed to sitting through a fourhour movie, a play or devotional gathering that lasted all night, or a reading that took fifteen days. But it consoled me to observe that the local audiences did not sit through these stretches of time either; they would doze, talk, walk around, go home and come back, and find other resources for diverting their attention. Yet, despite such qualifications, whenever I looked for the ultimate units of direct observation, it was to these cultural performances that I turned.

3. Analysis of cultural p e r f o r m a n c e s Once the units of observation had been identified, my interest in the conceptual ordering and interpretation of the observed revived. How were the cultural performances interrelated so as to constitute "a culture"? And were there among them persistent patterns and structures of organization, perhaps diverse patterns of cultural tradition, which were related as Little Tradition and Great Tradition? Two types of ordered patterns suggested themselves almost at once as being particularly obvious and natural. One grouping included the cultural performances that marked and celebrated the successive stages of the individual life cycle from birth to death (the rites de passage), and the other marked nature's cycle of seasons, phases of the moon, and the like. I was somewhat surprised to find, however, that neither grouping had any special prominence in the minds of my friends and acquaintances. In fact, I do not recall a single instance when anyone identified a particular cultural performance as belonging to one or the other of these two groups. In formal discussions of the äirama system and in discussions of a Brahman's duties, the individual life cycle is used as an ordering principle. But this usage is highly abstract and conventionalized

Analysis of cultural performances

31

and rarely takes account of the prevailing local rites and customs. When I found that the ordering of cultural performances by these distinct principles was not in the forefront of consciousness of the participants and did not in any case include all of the cultural performances I had observed, I ceased to regard these principles as compellingly "natural". It occurred to me then that the cultural performances may be susceptible to a number of different types of patterning, varying in explicitness and degree of significance for cultural analysis. I therefore re-examined my materials to see what some of these alternative patterns might be. 3.1. The cultural stage One type of analysis might study the place where the cultural performance occurs. The home, for example, is the center for a fixed cycle of rites, ceremonies, and festivals (including both the lifecycle and nature-cycle rites), and the temple is a center for another set of daily rites and periodic festivals. This division is consciously recognized, and there are two quite distinct sets of ritual functionaries, domestic and temple priests, who may conduct the rites in the two places. Temples and pilgrimage places are also specialized with respect to the type of deity to whom they are dedicated and the kind of motive for which they are visited: to have a specific request granted; to fulfil a vow; to expiate for sins; to gain spiritual edification, for example. Beyond the home and the temple is the matha, not so much a center for cultural performances as a seat of the highest spiritual authority of the sect, the jagadguru, who approves the annual religious calendar and whose blessing and advice are much sought after. The more secular performances of popular culture are put on in public halls before mixed audiences and are usually sponsored by cultural associations or sabhäs, when they are not completely commercialized. In the villages, they may still be performed in the houses of well-to-do patrons or in the temple hall, but there, too, the institution of the community center is introducing a new kind of stage, less closely tied to individual, caste, and sect. In all of these institutions, much goes on that is culturally significant but may not be part of an organized cultural performance. This is particularly true of the informal and casual cultural "training" that children receive from their parents. But this function, too,

32

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is probably being increasingly professionalized and institutionalized in training centers — schools, Sanskrit academies, dancing schools. An analysis of cultural performances in terms of their institutional settings would be relatively comprehensive both as to the range of performances and the range of performers and institutions t o be found in South India. It cannot deal, however, with those types of performance that have no fixed or recurrent institutional base — e.g., a folk play (terukküttu), which is given in a village field or city lot, or a group of devotees who sing devotional songs along a street or country road. It also fails to include certain types of cultural specialists whose primary function is not to participate in or conduct cultural performances but to give advice about proper times (astrologers) or to supply the necessary props (imagemakers). Thus, a construction of the cultural pattern that starts from institutional settings would have to be completed with constructions that include noninstitutionalized performances and "nonperforming" cultural specialists. 3.2. Cultural

specialists

One wants to know more about a cultural specialist than can be learned from watching him perform: his recruitment, training, remuneration, motivation, attitude toward his career, his relation to his audience, patron, other performers, and his community — all matters that can best be discovered by interviewing the specialist himself. While all of these things cannot be directly observed in the field, some aspects of them can be observed in favorable circumstances, for example, the training process or the performer's relation to an audience. In the main, however, the analysis of culture in terms of the careers and social roles of the professional cultural specialists is, like the institutional analysis, a construct for analyzing observable cultural performances. Redfield has suggested that such a construct is a specialization and extension of the social anthropologist's constructs of "social structure" and "social organization" to a community of cultural specialists; he therefore has called it the "social organization and the social structure of tradition". 6 The Madras area provided representatives of five types of specialists that I had on my original list as well as a considerable number of others that I had not previously known about. The only type I did not get to hear or meet were the local bards and caste genealogists,

A nalysis οf cultural performances

33

although I was told that there were some in the area. Most of the specialists I interviewed were affiliated with special cultural institutions - temple priests with the temples, domestic priests or purohitas with household ceremonies, Sanskrit pandits with Sanskrit schools and colleges, a Sanskrit research scholar with the university, and a whole group of reciters, storytellers, singers, dancers, dramatic performers, and instrumental musicians with the cultural associations or sabhäs. The press, the radio, and the movies have also developed new types of cultural specialists in the form of editors, program directors, story writers, and producers, and I interviewed several. As far as possible I tried to observe the performances of these specialists in their respective institutional settings as well as to interview them outside of these settings. There was also a group of cultural specialists, as I have already mentioned, without any fixed institutional affiliations, who nevertheless still play an active role in transmitting traditional culture. Among them were a specialist in Vedic mantras, an astrologer, a maker of metal images for temple and domestic shrines, leaders of devotional meetings, and an Ayurvedic doctor. Whether associated with an institution or not, the cultural specialist rarely stands alone. Supporting him are usually other specialists and assistants, a teacher or guru, a patron, an organizer of performances, an institutional trustee, a public critic of the specialty. Occasionally I was lucky enough to interview the several representatives of such a functionally linked series, e.g., a dancer and her patron, a dance teacher, student dancers, the organizer of a dance school, and a publicist and critic of the classical dance. The patron, organizer, and critic are usually not themselves specialists, although they may know a good deal about a particular specialty and play an important role in setting standards of public taste and criticism. In this respect, they function as cultural policy-makers. I also found cultural policy-makers who assumed responsibility not merely for formulating the aspirations and standards governing a particular cultural specialty but for an entire cultural tradition. The head of a matha in the region, a sväml and sannyäsin, highly respected and influential, showed much concern about the future of orthodox Hinduism in the area and throughout India. Another sväml, without any institutional affiliation, was through public lectures urging a policy of democratizing the Vedas. Such matters, too, were the concern of some people who held political office and who were in a position to affect public opinion and legislative policy.

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Search for a great tradition in cultural performances

3.3. The social organization of tradition in the village In the villages, too, one can find cultural policy-makers, especially among individuals associated with the introduction of village development plans and extension services. The heads of the village development committees and youth leagues, the social recreation officers, the village-level worker, although primarily concerned with agricultural improvements, sanitation, and similar matters, are also affecting cultural aspirations and policies. The building of new village schools, community and recreation centers with their libraries, radios, and community stages, are creating in the village single centers of cultural life that formerly revolved around its several temples. The villages lack the variety of cultural specialists to be found in the cities and towns. In the villages I visited, a temple priest, a domestic priest, and a schoolteacher seemed to be the usual minimum. Several villages had more specialists, but the social organization of tradition in the village still differed from that of the city because it involved less specialization, less full-time and professional activity, and depended more on traveling specialists from other villages and nearby towns. In one village, the temple priest is also something of a pandit, a ritual reciter of sacred texts, a singer of devotional songs, and an astrologer — functions that tend to be carried out by different people in the city. In this same village, a resident dramatics teacher trains the village boys to perform in puränic plays, but he is also a drummer and the village potter. There are no professional dancers, actors, doctors, or image-makers in this village, although residents know about these specialists from having seen them in neighboring villages and towns or occasionally when they pass through the village. Specialists representative of the newer mass media — the newspaper, radio, and film — are of course not to be found in the villages. I heard about villages in South India that until recently were the homes of famous musicians, dance teachers, poets, and pandits and were active cultural centers. This situation is no longer common, however, since it depended on grants of village lands or on grants of temple privileges to families of specialists. Except for the occasional village that is the seat of a famous shrine, the village looks to the city and to the planning committee for its cultural specialists. Even the most traditional cultural specialists told me how their itineraries have shifted from the villages to the towns in the last twenty years

Analysis of cultural performances

35

because the most educated and "cultured" villagers have moved to the cities and towns. Despite the declining position of the village as a center for cultural specialists, for several reasons, one nevertheless still finds a strong sense of cultural continuity between village and town. Until recently, many villages were active centers of traditional culture; even today, some of the basic cultural institutions and specialists are the same in both village and town. Moreover, in the Indian countryside, there is what Oscar Lewis7 has called a "rural cosmopolitanism" built up in part by the network of caste and kin ties and in part by the traveling cultural specialists. Finally, in the cities and towns there is a cosmopolitan folk culture, sometimes little modified from its village counterpart and sometimes assimilated to the mass culture of the urban center. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the continuity in culture between village and city is the common stock of mythological and legendary themes shared by both villager and city man. The same stories from theRämäyana, the Bhägavatapuräna, and the Mahäbhärata are recited, sung, and played in both village and city. Even among a colony of untouchables who were otherwise culturally impoverished I found a teacher who knew these plays teaching boys to act them out. It is because they perform and know the same stories that we can say that villager and urbanite belong to the same culture and civilization. Or, to put it more cautiously and more operationally, a contextual analysis of epic and puränic stories would probably disclose an underlying continuity of mental outlook and ethos between the villager and the urbanite. 3.4. Cultural media To describe the cultural continuity between village and town in terms of a common stock of epic and puränic stories is to shift attention from the cultural specialists and their social organization to certain elements of cultural content. Before I went to India, I knew these stories as occurring in printed books called the Rämäyana, the Mahäbhärata and the Bhägavatapurätia, parts of which I had read in translation. This knowledge gave me a welcome sense of recognition when I heard some of the stories, but it did not prepare me for the rich variety of ways in which they are told and retold. Seldom did I come across an Indian who had read these stories as I did, simply in a book. This is not how they learn them and it is not

36

Search for a great tradition in cultural performances

how they think of them. There is a sense of intimate familiarity with the characters and incidents in the references made to HariScandra, Räma and Sita, Krishna, Aijuna, and Prahläda, as if the world of the stories were also the everyday world. Many children are told these stories from an early age by parents and grandparents, but this is by no means the only way in which they learn them. The very tissue of the culture is made from puränic themes. Practically every cultural performance includes one — in song, dance, play, recitation, and exposition. Characters and scenes are ever present on the colored lithographs used in homes and public halls (as well as in the brilliantly colored figures on temple towers, for example, on the modern Sr! KapälTSvara temple in Mylapore, Madras). The cultural and physical landscapes are literally and imaginatively painted with them. As I grew familiar with the different ways in which the stories were communicated in the Madras area, I realized that the modes of communication — the "cultural media" — were themselves worthy of study, for it was these forms and not printed books that carried the content of belief and practice expressing the living outlook of a majority of the population. Such media, too, are "cultural" in two other senses: In their differentiation of forms as song, dance, and drama, they constitute what is popularly considered "culture"; and these formal differentiations are in turn well articulated with other aspects of the culture and society. Cultural specialists, for example, are distinguished according to their mastery of the different media — in singing, dancing, acting, knowledge of Sanskrit, technique of dramatic recitation, and the like. Even when a performer is a hereditary specialist, his status is not taken for granted but is judged in terms of his proficiency in the medium. Spoken language is the pre-eminent cultural medium; it is a constituent of culture, symbolizes elements of belief and practice, and, as an activity, articulates with other aspects of sociocultural organization. Nonlinguistic media, however, also played an important role in the cultural performances I observed. Song, dance, acting out, and graphic and plastic art combine in many ways to express and communicate the content of Indian culture. 8 A study of the different forms of cultural media in their social and cultural contexts would, 1 believe, reveal them to be important links in that cultural continuum which includes village and town, Brahman and non-Brahman, north and south, the modern mass-media culture

Analysis of cultural performances

37

and the traditional folk and classic cultures, the Little and the Great Traditions. From my limited observation, I cite one example to illustrate the possibilities for such inquiry. The Rämäyana is probably one of the most popular sacred texts in the area and is communicated through a variety of cultural media. One — called Rämäyana päräyana - is a daily ritual reading of a canto of the Välmiki Sanskrit text. It is done in the household by the Brahman householder or by a special Brahman reader, and at the temple by a Brahman reciter. The reading is continued until the entire text is completed, and then a new cycle of readings with the same or another text is begun. I have called it a "ritual reading" because it is a prescribed religious duty for all Brahmans; it is done before a sacred shrine by a Brahman, and the correct repetition of the holy words in Sanskrit is as important as understanding their meaning. In these respects, it resembles recitations and chanting of Vedic mantras and may be considered a part of the sacred culture. Another form of reading is expository. Its chief purpose is to explain the story in the regional language, Tamil, and to draw moral lessons. Depending on the erudition of the pauränika and of his audience, the text is Sanskrit or a Tamil version composed by a Tamil poet, Kamban, about 700 years ago. Expository recitations are usually given in public halls, although they may also be given in private homes and in temples. Brahmans most frequently are the expounders, but nonBrahmans do it also. A third form, Harikathäkälaksepam, resembles the second in using expository narration in Tamil as the chief medium but differs from it in adding relevant songs from Sanskrit, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, Marathi, and Tamil with musical accompaniment. The performer in the latter case must be something of a singer, a linguist, and an "artist", as well as a dramatic storyteller. This art form is relatively recent in the Tamil country, having been developed about 250 years ago from Mahärästrian models. It is practiced by non-Brahmans as well as by Brahmans, and one of the outstanding artists is a woman. Then there is the variety of dance and dramatic forms, traditional and modern, through which themes from the Rämäyana are presented. Folk as well as classical forms are used, and both have been adapted to such mass media as the film. A detailed analysis of cultural media would cast much light on the ways in which cultural themes and values are communicated as well as on processes of social and cultural change. The ritual

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Search for a great tradition in cultural

performances

reading in the sacred setting seems to be the oldest form and differs from the others in types of institutional setting, specialists, values expected, and amount of Sanskrit used. Yet it is possible to see strong links of continuity between this form and the less ritualized forms of popular culture. Even the most recent of the mass media, the movies, draws heavily upon the older cultural media and on the common stock of traditional devotional and mythological stories.

4. From field study to the study of a total civilization Some anthropologists advised me before I went to India not to spend much time preparing myself by studying the history of Indian civilization or reading the Indian epics and other texts. A field study, they said, has a strict obligation to record only those realities which the field worker himself can observe within a limited area and what is within the living memory of the people he interviews. Historical and literary research would only clutter the mind with preconceptions and should be done, if at all, after the field work is finished. Although I did not take this advice, the course of the study would seem to justify it: I was compelled to limit my attention to a particular group of people within one region restricted enough to be brought under a single conspectus of interrelations; I had to set aside generic conceptual categories about total civilizations in favor of concrete units of observation like cultural performances; and even the analysis of cultural performances runs in terms of constituent factors such as cultural institutions, cultural specialists, and cultural media, which in part, at least, are amenable to the direct observation and interview of the field worker. Yet the necessity of concrete research does not quite end the story. The purpose of the study was to test some general concepts and hypotheses about Indian civilization as a whole — particularly about the cultural continuity of its Great and Little Traditions across the barriers of village and town, caste and caste, region and region, past and present. How can the results of a limited field study be relevant to hypotheses so general in scope? How can the "cultural pattern of Indian civilization" be found in a regionally delimited cultural cluster with a very shallow historical depth? Must we then abandon the civilizational frame of reference or reconsider how

From field study to the study of a total civilization

39

a limited and functional field study is relevant to the study of a whole civilization in its full regional and temporal scope? Methodologically, there are two different ways to relate a limited field study to a total civilization. One way is to consider the unit of field study - whether it be a village or a cluster of villages and towns - as an isolate that contains within it the culture pattern. Once the pattern is delineated for one field unit, it may be compared with the pattern found in similar units in other regions until enough cases are studied to give good measures of central tendency and of the range of variation in patterns. To give historical depth to such patterns, it would of course be necessary to supplement the field studies with historical and archaeological studies of similar isolates in the past. This procedure results in a view of the cultural pattern of a civilization as a kind of statistical aggregate of the patterns of all the cultural molecules, past and present, that have been isolated for study. If, however, a civilization is, as Redfield writes, "a great whole in space and in time by virtue of the complexity of organization which maintains and cultivates its traditions and communicates them from the great tradition to the many and very small local societies within it", 9 then it is doubtful whether the procedure will reveal the required complexity of organization. Within a delimited unit of field study, such as I started with, it was possible to find a variety of cultural institutions, specialists, and media that link Brahman and non-Brahman, villager and townsman, one sect and another, to a common cultural tradition. But if a unit is to disclose the cultural links with the past and with other regions, it cannot be regarded as an isolate but must be considered rather as one convenient point of entry to the total civilization, as one nodule in the organized network of cultural communication to which Redfield refers. Different field studies may of course choose different points of entry - in terms of size, character, and location - but the interest in comparing their results will be not to count them as instances for statistical generalization but rather to trace the actual lines of communication with one another and with the past. The general description of this organization in its most embracing spatial and temporal reach will then be a description of the cultural pattern of the total civilization. In closing this preliminary report, I should like to mention several lines of cultural communication that lead out from my chosen

40

Search for a great tradition in cultural performances

unit of field study into other regions and other times. The pilgrimage to the Ganges and to other sacred spots is undertaken by many ordinary people, but one also hears of many sannyäsins who have been to the Himalayas or who are planning to retire there. Thus does the sacred geography of the land extend cultural consciousness beyond one region. One harikathä artist I interviewed told me that she has performed all over India, as well as in Burma and Ceylon. Outside of the Tamil-speaking areas, her audiences rarely understood her Tamil narration but never failed to respond to her songs and pantomime because they were familiar with the puränic and epic stories she recited. The links to the past are plentiful in a culture based until recently on the transmission of oral and written texts within families of hereditary specialists. An image-maker I interviewed still knew a separate Vedic mantra to help him draw each image and occasionally consulted on difficult points ancient manuals (Silpaiästras) that had been handed down to him on palm leaf manuscripts. Specialists on different types of tästras as well as on the Puränas are still regularly consulted to settle difficult cases, and Vedic prayers and chanting still accompany many rites and ceremonies. To follow up these various strands would require competence in the different regional languages, in Sanskrit, in Indian cultural history, and other subjects, and more time than is usually given to a single field study. It is obviously a task that requires cultural historians, linguists, and Sanskritists, as well as field anthropologists. Occasionally one finds, especially among the cultural leaders and scholars of Tamilnäiju, persons whose outlook seeks to comprehend the total pattern of Indian civilization and to define its Great Tradition. A Sanskrit scholar, a Smärta Brahman, sees Sanskritic and Vedic Hinduism as the Great Tradition that has in the course of history incorporated many elements of folk and regional cultures not included in the Vedic one. He sees the formative process as a constructive Sanskritization that has conserved existing practices and customs, has reduced a bewildering mass to some cultural homogeneity, and has resulted in a refinement and "civilization" of lower practices. A Vaisnavite Brahman pandit, on the other hand, spoke of two lines of tradition that he had inherited: one "familial and spiritual" — the Vedic — and the other "spiritual only" — Vaisnavism. The latter has its scriptures, rituals, temples, mathas. saints, and functionaries that overlay a Vedic foundation and that

From field study to the study of a total civilization

41

he shared with non-Brahman Vaisnavites. A non-Brahman Saivite scholar made the cleavage between the Vedic and Tamil traditions sharper still. Respectful to the former, he identified with a Saivism whose medium was Tamil and whose institutions, practices, and beliefs were, as he described them, largely non-Brahman and nonSanskritic. And then there are individuals who speak only of a great Tamil and Dravidian tradition and who actively reject the Vedic and Sanskritic tradition as cunning impositions of a northern, Aryan, Brahman " f i f t h column". Representatives of this group, pursuing a program of de-Sanskritization, have rewritten the Rämäyana as a drama in which Rävana is the southern hero, and Räma the northern villain. All of these views represent in one sense "autodefinitions" of the Great Tradition, since they all begin from some special vantage point — usually inherited — of occupation, caste, sect, and region. But they can also serve, especially the more scholarly and informed among them, as valuable guides in the effort to add regional scope and historical depth t o a limited field study.

Yankee City in renaissance

My remarks introducing the symposium in which this paper was first presented 10 explained both its purpose and its context in the climate of opinion of the bicentennial year, a climate which has by no means completely changed. As I said at that time, Many people used to think, and some still do, that historic cultures are collections of ancient folk practices and beliefs handed down from generation to generation in unconscious ways. A corollary of this conception was that the best way to study a historic culture was to collect its customs and artifacts, place them in a museum, record their distributions in a book, and speculate about their antiquity and origins. Today's conception of historic cultures is radically changed. People want to relive and re-experience, to retrace ancestral origins and struggles, to revitalize and preserve their ethnic identity. This calls for an almost Proustian program of recherche du temps perdu, not just for one's own childhood experience, but for the recovery of the experience of a whole race, a nation, an ethnic group, a regional or a local culture. It is a program to recover a forgotten or repressed collective memory. Alex Haley's retracing and reliving his ancestral roots in Africa (1976), Michael Arlen Jr.'s "revisit" to Armenia (1975), Irving Howe retelling the "world" of the Eastern European Jews in New York (1979), and Lame Deer Recalling the Sioux (Fire 1972) are among the most recent efforts to recall and relive the ancestral experience of historic cultures. Anthropological research and theory have also passed beyond antiquarianism and museum collections to the study of living cultures and societies in their configurational, functional, structural, and symbolic aspects. Some anthropologists, among them Kroeber, Redfield (Singer 1976), and the members of this symposium, have tried to develop within these newer frameworks a theory of cultural and social change that would account for the persistence and revitalization of particular kinds of cultures and civilizations. These efforts toward a unified theory of cultural survival and revitalization have been stimulated and intensified in the United States by the growing popular interests in the recovery and revitalization of the culture heritages of Blacks, American Indians, Chicanos, and Asians, as well as those of the "white ethnic groups" and the "Old Americans". These interests testify to a growing scepticism about the adequacy of a melting-pot theory which predicted the toal assimilation or disappearance of all minority cultures.

Yankee City in renaissance

43

The symposium was organized to explore what lies beyond, below, above, or around the melting pot, by applying anthropological methods of analysis to the cultural survival and revitalization of three American Indian groups — Tewa, Hopi and Yaqui; two ethnic groups, Hispanic and Amish; and one "Old American" group, New England "Yankee". The comparison of the results of these individual studies should help us to a more sympathetic understanding of the process of becoming American as well as to a better anthropological theory of cultural persistence and cultural change.

"Yankee City in Renaissance" also has historical significance in the development of semiotic anthropology. It represents an early application of Peirce's general theory of signs, and especially his conception of an iconic sign, to some ethnographic data. In fact, the realization that a semiotic analysis helped clarify the controversies in "Yankee City" over urban renewal and restoration, and the role of particular symbolic representations such as "Watt's Cellar" and "Parcel 8", encouraged me to extend the analysis (Singer 1984a). Although L6vi-Strauss' discovery of a genuine structuralism in Radcliffe-Brown's second theory of totemism revived my interest in Peirce's theory of signs (Singer 1984b), it was the anthropological study of symbols in American culture, particularly Warner's The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans (1959), and revisits to "Yankee City", which convinced me of the practical value and feasibility of applying a Peircean semiotics to anthropology. Further examples of semiotic analyses of important American and Indian symbolic icons (or "emblems") will be found in Singer 1977, 1982a, 1984a, 1984b, 1986. A group of anthropology students at the University of Chicago, stirred by the "counter-cultural revolution" of the late 1960s, asked me to teach a workshop on American Culture in 1970. That workshop, which continued annually until 1979 (when I was made Professor Emeritus), became for me a forum in which to explore and extend the insight from my Indian experience on the role of cultural performances in maintaining and changing cultural traditions (Singer 1980). Because David Mandelbaum's Berkeley seminar on the anthropology of Indian civilization, in which I participated in 1954 and 1956 just before and after my first trip to India, started this conversation of cultures, and because of my continued appreciation for his teaching, writing and friendship, I am happy that the present paper was included in a volume honoring him (Hockings 1987).

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1. Cultural revitalization, revivalism and progress The answer to the question whether American historic cultures can revitalize depends in good part on the particular kinds of historic cultures one considers, but the answer also depends on how one defines "cultural revitalization". In anthropological discussions, the most widely accepted definition is probably that formulated by Anthony Wallace: "A conscious, deliberate, organized effort on the part of some members of a society to create a more satisfying culture". Wallace includes within this definition of cultural revitalization both revival movements, whose aim is "to return to a former era of happinesss, to restore a golden age, to revive a previous condition of social virtue", and nativistic movements, whose aim is "to purge the society of unwanted aliens, of cultural elements of foreign origin, or of both" (1956). Frequently, Wallace notes, a revitalization movement can be both revivalistic and nativistic, as it was in the Handsome Lake movement among the Iroquois, studied by both Morgan and Wallace. Millennial movements, cargo cults, and Utopian communities Wallace also classifies as kinds of revitalization movements. He cites as an example of these the Paliau movement in the Admiralty Islands studied by Theodore Schwartz (1962). In this case the native population, under the leadership of a gifted prophet, attempted to bring itself into the mainstream of world cultural development by a rationally conceived reorganization of its entire culture, a reorganization which aimed to develop self-respecting, self-supporting, and self-governing native communities. Although Wallace does not explicitly discuss the problem, the differences in temporal orientation between the different kinds of revitalization movements pose some interesting research questions. Since nativistic and revivalistic movements are oriented to the past, and millennial, cargo, and Utopian movements are generally future-oriented, do these differently oriented movements tend to have opposing effects on cultural innovation and assimilation? — i.e., the former kinds of revitalization slowing and the latter kinds accelerating the rates of culture change? And what happens when both kinds of revitalization movement coexist? Are there then alternating cycles of "progressive" and "revivalistic" change, or a stand-off at zero-growth and no-change? Or does some other form of cultural change occur? Another set of questions concerns

Cultural revitalization,

revivalism and progress

45

the social characteristics of the leaders and their followers of the respective revitalization movements. Are the nativists and revivalists a different kind of people from the Utopians and millennialists, or are they the same kinds of people in different moods and situations? Such questions have become especially cogent for American society, at least since the early 1960s. Not only have the different minority and ethnic groups undertaken revivalistic and nativistic revitalization of their historic cultures, but the mainstream as well appears to have sought revitalization by seemingly turning away from its millennial belief in progress and constant innovation toward historic preservation and restoration, environmental conservation and protection, arts and crafts revivals, back-to-the-land movements, a renewed interest in small-town life, the older forms of religious and spiritual expression, nostalgic revivals of old movies and musicals, of fashions of dress and of hair-do's, attempts to recover the family histories, genealogies, and antiques and experiences of ancestral Americans. That these expressions of interest in cultural revitalization are more than a wayward manifestation of a few "hippies" or marginal minorities is I believe, attested by major national legislation and executive orders of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Among these are the amendments to the Housing Act of 1949 which added rehabilitation to demolition, the Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. It is notable that this legislation, taken together, merges the concern for conservation and protection of the natural environment with the interests in the preservation and restoration of the historic social and cultural environments of the cities, towns and villages. The most incisive statement of the philosophy behind this legislation was probably made by Walter Hickel when he was Secretary of the Interior, in support of the Historic Preservation Act: "Improvement of the old and familiar may be a better choice than destruction for the reward unknown. By this approach we choose not to impede progress, but to support it" (1969). A majority of Americans, however, are it seems far from being ready to give up their belief in technological innovation, progress, and melioristic enhancement of their lives in the future. If they have accepted the new revivalism and nativism, or tolerate it in their children, this is done more as comparable to accepting an auxiliary low reverse gear on the latest model of family car than

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as a replacement of the forward speeds. The new American model begins to look like H.G. Wells' "Time Machine" (1931), which can travel backward into history as well as forward into the future, but the American "Time Traveller", as last observed, has not completely reversed his direction in order to relive the past. He seems t o be alternating between exploring the future and exploring the past, and between experiencing pain from the past and shock from rapid change. The present study has been undertaken to find out how the new model American "Time Machine" is operating, who is in the driver's seat, and in which direction it is headed. It deals not with American society and culture as a whole but, in true anthropological fashion, with a microscopic but I hope not myopic case study of an attempt to preserve and revitalize the historic culture of one community, that of "Yankee City". The idea for the study was suggested to me by a previous study in Madras City, India, of the structurally inverse problem — whether modern innovations and a belief in progress could be added to and coexist with a highly traditional civilization (Singer 1980). "The city by the river", about which John P. Marquand wrote so intimately and nostalgically, is not gone from the minds of men, as he thought. Partly because of his writings, in fact and fiction, "Yankee City" has also become better known from Lloyd Warner's massive anthropological studies begun in the 1930s, continued until 1959 and recorded in five monographs and one abridged summary volume published in 1963. Stephan Thernstrom's small and original study, Poverty and Progress (1971), of working class mobility in the city from 1850 to 1880 opened a new debate between historians and anthropologists on the proper way to do urban history, a debate which sent me back to read the older histories — Currier (1906-1909), Coffin (1977), Morrison (1924), Emery (1978), which Warner also read, and to undertake some systematic field work in the city in the summers of 1974, 1975, 1976, and 1977 to find out which "Yankee City", Marquand's, Warner's or Thernstrom's, still survives. The growth along the North Atlantic seaboard of seaports and a mercantile, marine, and a Yankee-Puritan culture established important channels of trade — along the coast, with the Caribbean, and with the Far East in sailing ships. This trade generated an urban culture and cultural centers in which and from which came much of

Cultural revitalization, revivalism and progress

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the country's cultural development for a century and more. Boston probably remains one of the largest and most influential of these centers but there were others among which Newburyport was the exemplary "Yankee City". One historian has characterized the period of 1835-1870 as "the era of the Yankee City" when "the enterprise and ingenuity and capital of old Americans developed more efficient trade facilities, transformed earlier handicrafts into factory industries and exploited the labor of hundreds of thousands of newcomers from across the Atlantic" (McKelvey 1969). McKelvey's typological characterization applies to Newburyport as well as to many other New England seaports. This characterization provides a generalized framework for analysis of American urban history. The present paper however will concentrate on the particular city of Newburyport rather than on the typological development of cities, not to do a holistic study of a typical and microcosmic American urban community, as Warner set out to do, but to discover in at least this one instance how a historic urban seaport culture is surviving and revitalizing. Newburyport was incorporated as a city in 1851. Originally settled in 1635 by English colonists who came up the Parker River from Ipswich, the original town of Newbury included the area along the Merrimac River mouth waterfront. The merchants, traders, fishermen and craftsmen who lived in that area decided in 1764 to incorporate as the separate town of Newburyport, when their conflicts with the farmers of Newbury proved irksome. Newburyport prospered as a port from fishing, shipping and shipbuilding until about 1850. After this period, its fortunes declined in favor of Boston and other East Coast ports. The decline is usually attributed to the fact that the development of larger sail and steam boats required deeper harbors, and the improvement in inland transportation made coastal transportation less important. Jefferson's 1807 Embargo, the 1811 fire, and the War of 1812 were also decisive blows. Except for a brief reign of the Clipper ships, Newburyport's maritime activities, in any case, tended to be displaced in the latter part of the nineteenth century by manufacturing, first of combs and cotton textiles and then of shoes. The depression of the 1930s, when Lloyd Warner and his associates studied the city, brought these manufactures in turn into decline, leaving by the 1940s only

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a few metal crafts and the retail and wholesale trade downtown. The merchants of the city received some national publicity in the 1940s when they agreed to a "Newburyport Plan" to reduce prices by from 10 to 30 percent. Newburyport's population (Table 1) rose and fell with these changes in economic conditions, as the figures from 1790 to 1980 in the table indicate (U.S. Census, Vol. II, Part 21, Mass., 1953; Vol. I, Part 23, Mass., 1973; Vol. I Ch. B, Part 23, Mass., 1980). Table 1. Population of Newburyport, 1790-1980 1980 1970 1960 1950 1940 1930 1920 1910 1900 1890

15,900 15,807 14,004 14,111 13,916 15,084 15,618 14,949 14,478 13,947

1880 1870 1860 1850 1840 1830 1820 1810 1800 1790

13,538 12,595 13,401 9,572 7,161 6,375 6,852 7,634 5,946 4,837

An interesting observation on these demographic trends is that while Newburyport was one of the largest cities in the state during the peak of its maritime activities, it has remained one of the smallest with the coming of industrialization and mass transportation. In the light of this economic and demographic background, it is not surprising that Newburyport's best-known popular author, John P. Marquand, should have described it as a New England Pompeii buried in the eruption of social change. Nor is it surprising that he should have written about the city, his family, and some of its historic characters with affection, nostalgia and irony. Marquand was pessimistic about the survival or restoration of the old order, as he was unenthusiastic about the creeping modernity of gas stations, nursing homes, shopping centers, and "plastic colonial" that was replacing it. In his novel, Point of No Return, Marquand (1949) sharply satirizes an anthropologist and his staff doing a study of the small New England town of Clyde. Perhaps to make some amends for this satire, Marquand concedes in the last book he wrote, a second

Cultural revitalization, revivalism and progress

49

biography of the eccentric eighteenth century Newburyport merchant, "Lord" Timothy Dexter, that Warner's portrait of the old social order was still viable in the 1930s but changed beyond recognition by the 1950s. Nevertheless it is surprising that Warner should have selected Newburyport as the site for his social anthropological study of "Yankee City", declaring that it fitted his criteria, as Cicero, Illinois, did not: a distinctive, homogeneous, stable, and integrated modern urban community with a well-organized social system, a longestablished history and cultural tradition, and a typical microcosm of American society. Not only were many changes beginning to appear when Warner and his co-workers were studying Newburyport but, if we accept Thernstrom's findings, Newburyport was not a stable, integrated, culturally homogeneous "Yankee" community even in the midnineteenth century and may never have been such a community. I do not accept Thernstrom's charge that Warner's portrait of "Yankee City" is "largely a creation of Warner's imagination", omitting or distorting its history by the use of the ahistorical methods of social anthropology. Warner, after all, did three historically oriented studies, of the strike in the shoe factories, of the status of the ethnic groups, and of religious and public ceremonials, such as Memorial Day and the Tercentenary Celebration of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's arrival. Thernstrom is critical of the first two on historical grounds and praises the third study, The Living and the Dead (1959) for at last making clear the distinction between the "mythical history" concocted from his upper-class informants' legends, and the "actual history" contained in the historical documents. Yet the portrait of "Yankee City" that emerges from The Living and the Dead is precisely the same as that of Warner's other monographs which Thernstrom called a creation of Warner's imagination. Might this portrait represent a cultural self-image for Newburyport's citizens? A self-image through which they seek to preserve and revitalize, as well as identify with, the city's historic culture as they display and reenact its charming icons in the many cultural performances? I would answer "Yes" on the basis of my recent observations and shall try to make a case for this answer. That is also the answer many Newburyporters would give. The description

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Yankee City in renaissance

of a full page of pictures in the local newspaper uses the words one often hears and sees in local descriptions of the self-image: Newburyport, a city of renaissance through restoration, has maintained its charm of early American Yankee heritage. High above the city, from a seven-story vantage point, one can gaze upon the Mighty Merrimack, the stately towering steeples and the majestic brick Federalist buildings of the proud old Clipper ship town. (News, Sept. 3, 1976)

During the summer of 1974, while planning to spend part of the summer as usual in Cape Ann, also in Essex County, and to do some research as well, my wife and I paid a visit to Newburyport. 1 found at the Mall Information Booth on High Street brochures announcing a nine-day "City in Renaissance" as part of a "Yankee Homecoming" celebration and a folder carrying a description of his "favorite city" by John P. Marquand. To someone familiar with Lloyd Warner's famous "Yankee City" studies, Marquand's New England novels and Stephan Thernstrom's .Pomty and Progress, this was like coming upon the announcement of the forthcoming appearance of a historic or literary figure who had been much written about and whose traits and very existence had been debated. The opportunity to meet the founding character in person, and moreover revivified, could hardly be bypassed; we returned to observe the "Yankee Homecoming" celebrations as well as the progress of an urban renewal and restoration project in the downtown and waterfront area, and to interview leading participants in these events in the summers of 1974, 1975, 1976 and 1977. One intriguing question that guided these observations and interviews was to discover which "Yankee City" was having a renaissance - Marquand's New England Pompeii buried in the eruption of social and cultural change? Warner's stable and integrated New England urban community, with a six-class social system, dominated by an old Yankee aristocracy who were the custodians, if not the creators, of an unbroken Puritan-Yankee cultural tradition? or Thernstrom's city of ethnic immigrants and newcomers whose dominant values were progress, expansion, and mobility, geographical, social, and occupational? The Warner monographs on "Yankee City" were based on fieldwork carried out "approximately from 1930 to 1935; later and less intensive work was continued until shortly before the publication of the last volume" (Warner 1963). Most of the developments

From demolition only to demolition with restoration

51

described in this paper occurred in the period from 1960 to 1976; my systematic observations and interviews were done in the summers of 1974 through to 1977. Casual observations also were made over the years beginning in 1949. Although not intended as a "restudy" of Warner, the present study provides some indications of significant changes in "Yankee City" that have emerged since 1959. It also supplies some answers to the questions raised by Marquand, Thernstrom and others about the verity of Warner's portrait of "Yankee City". An example of the new situation: on the waterfront there is a historic marker for "Watt's Cellar" — presumably a colonial and perhaps precolonial cave where early settlers and Indians probably stored fish. At the insistence, legally instituted, of a local group calling itself "Friends of the Newburyport Waterfront", who wished to locate the cellar and other "archeological resources" before the waterfront is built up anew, the local Redevelopment Authority persuaded the Department of the Interior to send some consulting archeologists to do a survey of the foundations of two early nineteenth century buildings on the waterfront. The archeologists only found some nineteenth century "Old Forester" bottles and charred remains of the nineteenth century building foundations. They recommended that the basements of the two buildings not be excavated but that the area between the two buildings, and the rest of the waterfront, might be surveyed before further urban redevelopment takes place. The archeologists' recommendation was accepted by both sides in what has been a protracted dispute. Neither side was in a position to invoke descent from local early settlers in favor of the authenticity or credibility of their respective positions. Each group relied on its personal knowledge of archeology and history, its common sense in judging the recommendation of Interior's archeologists. The earlier negative opinion of the Massachusetts State archeologist was rejected by the "Friends" and made one of the bases for calling in the Department of the Interior.

2. F r o m demolition only t o demolition with restoration Sporadic suggestions were made in the 1950s for preservation of some of the historic houses and buildings and for bringing new

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Yankee City in renaissance

industry and commerce to Newburyport. But as Marquand noted in his comments on Perry's restoration proposals, they aroused only a transient interest and "the idea has now been forgotten with the advent of plastic motifs that give the most authentic part of State Street a juke box air" (1960: 122). It was, however, the increasing availability of Federal and State funds for urban renewal, highway and traffic-pattern construction, environmental quality and engineering projects that would soon transform the Newburyport scene and spirit Marquand described in the late 1950s. A Newburyport Redevelopment Authority (NRA) received a certificate of organization from the State in 1960. Consisting of a five-member board, of whom the Mayor appointed four members and the State one, this NRA board and its executive director, hired by the board, became an independent agency which for the next sixteen years initiated or administered the city's urban renewal and restoration activities. The NRA applied for urban renewal funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in 1962 and received the first loan and grant contract in 1966, after the City Council finally approved the application. Several further contracts were negotiated with HUD after this period. By 1976, the NRA had become responsible for expending, on behalf of the city, about 7.9 million dollars in public obligated funds. Private developers came forward to invest in urban renewal to the extent of about 2.3 million dollars by 1976. The city continued to receive funds under the Community Development Act to help finish the Urban Renewal project and started a small planning department to deal with the technical problems of future growth and planning. From the point of view of the survival and revitalization of Newburyport's historic seaport culture, the most interesting feature of the urban renewal project was its sudden reversal in 1966 from a demolition and slum clearance project to a rehabilitation and restoration project. In the original application submitted to HUD in 1965, the city planned to preserve and restore only two historic buildings in the project area, the Fire Station and the Custom House, designed in 1834-1835 by Robert Mills, architect of many notable American public buildings. The rest of the Urban Renewal Plan was designed to eliminate the blighted area, to revitalize the City's central business district and waterfront area, broaden the tax base, and reduce unemployment. But as some of the old buildings began

From demolition only to demolition with restoration 53 to collapse and others were being demolished, public opinion was suddenly mobilized in a campaign to save the historic buildings and turn the urban renewal plan around from "a demolition only" plan to a demolition and rehabilitation plan. The first turn-around occurred in 1965 after the original "total demolition" plan had already been ratified by the NRA, had been passed by the City Council, had been accepted by HUD and awarded a contract. The intensity of sentiment for rehabilitation and restoration, and of opposition to "demolition only", led to amendments in the original plan which included rehabilitation and studies of the feasibility of restoration. The Amended Plan was resubmitted to HUD in 1970 and was the basis on which an additional loan and grant were awarded in 1971. The Amended Plan combined one of the basic objectives of the Urban Renewal Plan — "a realistic program for the elimination of a blighted area" — with a program for restoring and preserving the economic, functional, esthetic and symbolic values of the central business district. The former aim of revitalizing the City's central business district was now linked to "its traditional position as a commercial center for surrounding rural towns", since "Newburyport has traditionally been the shopping and employment center for the surrounding rural towns". The combination of old and new was to be achieved, in the Amended Plan, by eliminating "the existing outmoded Newburyport retail area (while preserving the architectural character and aesthetic value), and to replace it with modern and efficient commercial uses in a more compact central unit" (Amended Plan). The historical importance of the downtown area, known as Market Square, was to be commemorated by a public square on the north-west corner of Merrimac and Water Street. The City's "historic association with the sea" would be illustrated through restoration of the Custom House and its activation as a historical museum. The Amended Plan explained that "one of the major reasons for amending the Urban Renewal Plan . . . is to provide for the retention of many structures previously designated for clearance. The buildings to be retained have been determined to be of historic and architectural significance by the city of Newburyport. . . ." The 5.5 acres of the 22 acre project area determined to be of historical and architectural significance was described as follows in the NRA's Handbook for Developers:

54

Yankee City in renaissance Newburyport is the classic example of Federal architecture in the entire country and Market Square may be described as its most important arrangement of federal structures. The buildings, individually and collectively, display the aura of Newburyport's heritage, its link with the sea, with ships, and with maritime commerce. The picturesque shapes and masses of the buildings and the rich color of their brick surfaces evoke images of a potentially tasteful restoration. Market Square, surrounded on all sides by these multi-story brick structures, retains its atmosphere and its unique relationship with the past of this old seaport city.

A similar determination of the Market Square area was made by the President's Advisory Council on Historic Preservation's /Issessment of the Architectural, Archeological, Historical, and Cultural Significance of Market Square Historic District: For today, with its cluster of Federal-style business houses, its early churches and public edifices, and its closely related 18th and 19th century residential district, Newburyport represents perhaps the last opportunity to experience, in its totality, the environment at once imposed by and evolved out of federalist New England's maritime economy. Only in Newburyport is there to be found an extensive commercial area cohesively related through a meaningful town plan to a little-disturbed residential district in a community whose physical character is a product of Federalist New England's maritime economy.

The mood of the city began to change dramatically after the 1966 HUD loan and grant contract. Deep pessimism, doubt and anxiety gave way to or in some cases were overlaid by a growing optimism, self-confidence and impatience to get on with the renewal. An editorial in the News argued that the city had no choice but to accept the renewal plans since it had nothing to lose, being at rock-bottom. Although it had become a matter of public hearings and debates, this turn-around in the renewal project had widespread public support. Many who were in favor of "slum clearance", new buildings, and new industry which would bring more jobs and people and a broader tax base, were also persuaded, when they learned about the historic buildings, to support the proposal for rehabilitation and restoration if it could be shown to be economically feasible. An economically viable compromise had been reached by 1972 and hinged on the facts that only 5.5 acres of the 22 acre project area consisted of historic buildings, and that only the brick exteriors of these buildings would be restored, while their interiors would be adapted for twentieth century uses: usually stores or service or

From demolition only to demolition with restoration

55

craft shops on the first floor, offices on the second, and residential apartments on the third. This compromise was also supported by the relocation of some of the stores from the central business district to a modern shopping center, and the zoning of a "Lord Timothy Dexter Industrial Green" for light, clean industry on the outskirts of the city. The preservation and restoration of some of Newburyport's historic culture thus seems to have been achieved through an adaptive strategy of compartmentalizing the old and the new in a functionally viable integration. This compartmentalizing strategy broke down, however, when it came to new construction in the project area, as became evident in the stormy dispute over the kind of building that should be built on Parcel 8. The designated developer for this parcel, which had been cleared of some historic buildings, but abutted on restored ones, proposed to build on Parcel 8 a modern three-story cantilevered building to house a modern commercial center. A picture in the local newspaper of a cardboard model of the proposed building without details, standing in the midst of the old buildings, created an immediate furor and cries of "monstrosity". The size, proportions, style, materials, location of the proposed building were criticized as incongruous with the surrounding buildings and the project area. At first the opposition was widespread, with citizen groups, individuals, abuttors, and even the City Council protesting. But after the Mayor and the Newburyport Redevelopment Authority defended the design, and the developer agreed to some modifications, the general opposition subsided. The dispute, however, instigated the organization of a group of concerned citizens, the "Friends of the Newburyport Waterfront", who took their arguments to District Court and got an injunction from Judge Garrity which halted new construction on Parcel 8 and on the waterfront until HUD could do an Environmental Impact Study which would evaluate the alleged adverse effects of the new construction and recommend measures to mitigate them. HUD published its Environmental Impact Statement two years later, in June 1975, and the injunction was lifted, clearing the way for new construction on Parcel 8 and on the waterfront. In the meantime, the designated developer for Parcel 8 was dedesignated and the designated developer for the waterfront with-

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Yankee City in renaissance

drew. The Friends filed a new suit to enjoin new construction on Parcel 8 and the waterfront until provisions were made for preserving the historic public ways to the waterfront, for parks and recreational areas, for mass transit, and for the exploration of archeological resources, including "Watt's Cellar". The suit went again to Judge Garrity's court, but he postponed ruling on it to encourage the informal efforts between the Friends and the Newburyport Redevelopment Authority to resolve their differences. The Friends' legal action aroused local hostility against them as "carpet-baggers", "obstructionists", etc., and polarized the division between the "realists" and "workingmen" who wanted a speedy completion of the urban renewal project and the "intellectuals" and "61itists" who wanted to preserve and revitalize the local "heritage". The Friends' suit asked that the new injunctions, if granted, remain in effect until HUD prepared and published a supplemental Environmental Impact Statement that would evaluate alternatives for management of archeological resources, sources of money for archeological survey, the status of present public rights in the project area, alternatives to Parcel 8 construction, and alternative public transit systems. The Friends' second law suit was assigned eventually to Judge Garrity's court, as was the first case. By the time the case reached him, some leaders of the Friends and the Director of the NRA had already started informal conversations with one another and with HUD and Department of Interior officials in Washington in order to find funds for an archeological survey and to expedite the procedure involved. Judge Garrity postponed hearings on the case in order to encourage these out-of-court efforts. By the summer of 1976 the Department of Interior's consulting archeologists had made initial archeological surveys in the foundations of two waterfront parcels with early nineteenth century brick buildings (Parcels 6A, 6B). The archeologists recommended that the cultural materials uncovered, some "Old Forester" liquor bottles and charred remains of nineteenth century foundations, would not justify the costs of excavating the basements of those two buildings. Further archeological surveys of the area between the buildings and of the remaining waterfront area were recommended. Since such surveys were to be completed by the end of June 1977, the NRA would have sufficient time to proceed with development plans for the waterfront and to find developers.

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57

For the time being, both parties seemed to regard the present situation as vindicating their respective positions. The issue of public ways to the waterfront had in the meantime been referred by the NRA to a land court for settling the land titles, a procedure to which the Friends agreed. The issue of public transit has been left open for further discussion and specification. In retrospect, the urban-renewal-cum-rehabilitation project, in spite of the long delays and disputes, realized one of its basic aims of revitalizing the architectural values of the downtown business district. Most of the historic buildings in Market Square have had their exteriors restored and are open for business; those remaining on the waterfront are being restored; the sidewalks and streets are attractively repaired; a sea wall is being built with Federal and State funds at an estimated cost of $1.8 million. Federal CDA Funds of about $462,000 were assured the City towards the construction of a "citizen's promenade" along the waterfront. Even "Watt's Cellar" may yet be found! In the summer of 1976, Yankee City's "Renaissance" showed, among some citizens, a euphoric, almost manic mood. The mood was sustained and in part generated by a rapid sequence of celebrations: the City's 125th Birthday Party on June 24, 1976, the July 4 Bicentennial Celebrations, the visit of the Queen of England and the Tall Ships to Boston in July, where Newburyport's Continental Navy served as an escort, and the 1976 "Yankee Homecoming" celebrations July 31-August 8. This mood was articulated in an attractive illustrated brochure produced and distributed by the NRA for the 1976 "Yankee Homecoming" under the title Newburyport — Progress through the Past. One of its paragraphs reads: "Newburyport's urban renewal program is not a storybook reconstruction. It has retained the thread of the past with which to weave the cloth of the future. The City's link with the sea, a sense of time and place are important stepping stones to tomorrow . . . . Progress through the past." This theme was developed with emphasis on the fact that the urban renewal program combines rehabilitation of nineteenth century buildings with twentieth century use, and that this combination has been "a vital factor in the economic rebirth and development of the central business district". The euphoric mood was encouraged by the favorable comments of a growing stream of visitors to look at the project. These have

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Yankee City in renaissance

included 200 members of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the American Institute of Planners, two Israeli planners seeking advice on how to beautify Israel by preserving its historic past and staying modern. Many other people from far and near have come: one visitor wrote an enthusiastic letter to the News to praise the "brand new old city". A film has been made of the renewal project and has been shown in the local public library and distributed widely. Painters and photographers made pictures of Market Square buildings and of many of the dedications and celebrations. These pictures appear regularly in the newspaper. Buoyed by such supportive reactions, city officials and local citizens developed a new kind of worry — that Newburyport might "become a Rockport" (overcrowded with tourists and cars on weekends), or a Williamsburg (elegantly cosmeticized). This kind of apprehension was picked up by one of its neighboring cities, Gloucester, whose planners began asking Gloucesterites whether they want their city to become a Fifth Avenue, a Newburyport, or some other kind of city.

3. Semiotics of urban renewal and restoration The preceding account of Newburyport's urban renewal and restoration project from 1960 to 1976 centainly reads like a success story. It also suggests that Yankee City's historic seaport, mercantile and maritime culture is being revitalized through an ingenious and practical combination of "historic facade restoration" with adaptive modern uses of the interiors of the old buildings and of the spaces enclosed by them. Even electronics and other light industries are being brought in and enclaved in a "Lord Timothy Dexter Industrial Green". The cultural revitalization that is symbolized in Yankee City's "Renaissance" is both revitalistic and millennial, both restorationist and progressive — "a progress through the past". How has this neat trick been performed, will it continue to work, and what can it teach us about the persistence of historic American and other cultures? To answer all these questions in detail is beyond the scope of the present paper; but to extrapolate several general observations from the details is not. (1) The conscious, deliberate efforts to preserve Yankee City's

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historic culture did not begin with a clear and detailed knowledge of that culture. Apart from a very small number of cultural and architectural historians, the recognition that such a historic culture persisted in buildings, monuments, historical documents, living descendants of sea-captains and ship-owners, had to be continually discovered through historical, genealogical, and archeological research. Such research is widespread at a popular level among "history buffs" and family "genealogists", and is also pursued at a professional and near-professional level among a small number of historians genealogists, and archeologists. A constant stream of articles, pictures, books, historic markers, museum collections and exhibits, and "special occasions" flows from this research to help people identify the objects, events, and actors in the historic "Yankee City" culture and its dimensions in space and time. (2) The public presentation and display of the results of the research were an essential phase in the process of getting to learn about the historic culture and in affirming a personal identification with it. These presentations usually took the form of "cultural performances" — that is, multi-media displays in which symbolic representations of selected phases of the culture's history, ethos and cosmology were enacted or re-enacted for the benefit of the performers as well as the audience. Warner's studies of the Memorial Day ceremonies and Massachusetts Bay Tercentenary celebrations were pioneer analyses of some of Yankee City's cultural performances. More recently, the "Yankee Homecoming" celebrations, the Bicentennial activities, including fully costumed historic reenactments of a tea-burning, the Battle of Bunker Hill, Benedict Arnold's Quebec expedition and other famous events, have emerged as cultural performances. It is suggested that the restoration of old houses, commercial buildings, the Custom House and Court House are also part of the process of discovering, identifying, and displaying Yankee City's cultural heritage. To participate in this process is to participate in a series of cultural performances through which one searches for and declares a cultural identity. (3) While cultural performances generally express and affirm selected collective values and beliefs (Durkheim's "Collective Representations"), they are not necessarily uniformly interpreted or accepted by all participants and observers. The intense controversies and disagreements that erupted over the different restoration and renewal proposals fell far short of the kind of public consensus

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needed to support public ceremonial celebrations, or the realization of those specific proposals. Nevertheless the public hearings and discussions of these controversial proposals were stimulated and guided by symbolic representations — pictures, models, architectural drawings, slides — which seemed to contain in microcosm not just the plan for a particular building but the image as well of an entire design for living, a particular life style. Several people told me, for example, that their feelings for restoring the old buildings were most strongly aroused when they saw a picture in the local newspaper of the developer's model for the three-story cantilevered modern building to be constructed on Parcel 8. The following excerpt from a letter to the editor of the News expresses a typical reaction: Why modern amongst the old To the Editor: Just as all seemed set and secure for the preservation and restoration of old Newburyport, the plan for the new . . . building was pictured on the front page of Monday's Daily News. Despite the clarity of the photo, it seemed there must be detail not discernible which would make it of colonial design . . . . . . . to put a modern building smack-dab on the border of Market Square is not good. Just as one bad apple can spoil a barrel, so can one modern building spoil Market Sqaure. It will sap the flavor of the antiquity right out. . . . Without the taxpayer, there would be no city, and I know there are many who are disappointed at this surprise of structural modern design in a hoped for "old" Newburyport. {News, June 1 3 , 1 9 7 2 )

The picture of the model in the paper carried underneath it the legend "A cardboard dummy lacking in details". The editorial next to the picture was called "Embellish the Old with Honesty" and could be read as supporting the NRA and the developer of Parcel 8: "Far better to embellish the originals (of the early nineteenth century) with other originals, modern though they be", than imitate them with " p h o n e y " early nineteenth century new constructions. The newspaper editorial also pointed out, however, that members of the NRA were not architectural experts but must and should rely on professionally skilled consultants: "They do have individual tastes, of course, and these may well clash. But the end result of the downtown area should not be something resulting from individual tastes. Some of us enjoy very bad music, very bad paintings, very bad poetry, and that is why knowledgeable critics play such an important role in every society". Whether this

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referred to the "Friends" as knowledgeable critics is ambiguous, although some of them were professionally qualified in the field of industrial design. Since Parcel 8 was on land from which some of the old buildings had been cleared, Parcel 8 and the picture of the developer's model for the new building to be constructed on it became a kind of Rohrschach inkblot onto which everyone projected his respective personal values and emotions. Following Freud, Sapir, Warner and Victor Turner, we might regard the picture of the model as a condensed symbol which carried a heavy emotional charge. The picture of the model, representing only a sketch for a possible construction, became an icon in Peirce's sense, a sign which resembled an intended possible world. In either case, whether we think of the picture of the model as a condensed symbol or icon, to interpret its meaning for Yankee City residents it is necessary to make collateral observations of their reactions to it and of the debate which it generated. In other words, we need to observe the process of symbolic condensation which expressed the significance of the picture for the readers of the newspaper. A similar line of analysis would apply to other pictures, drawings, and models that have entered into the urban renewal/restoration discussions and debates. Although not in general so provocative as the Parcel 8 model was, these too served as important icons of architectural styles, historical episodes, political philosophy and world view in the debates over urban renewal and rehabilitation. The Environmental Impact Statement, quoting in support both the NRA's Handbook for Developers and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, puts the symbolic interpretation of the architectural icons most succinctly: "Federal architecture reflects certain significant characteristics of the historic period — Federal dignity, the birth of democracy, restrained dynamics, the merit of man" (Final EIS: 160-161, Environmental Design Research 1975). (4) Collateral observations of the discussions of architectural designs and of other symbolic representations of plans of urban renewal and restoration revealed ever-widening levels of meaning in the discussions. At the most specific and obvious level, the argument seemed to be about the scale, proportions, materials, location, architectural style of a plan for a particular building. At another level it was about preserving the "architectural integrity" of the whole downtown and waterfront area, put in terms of whether a

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" m o d e r n " style building is compatible with buildings in the historic Federalist style. This argument in turn presupposed a still broader argument about what kind of city there should be and who should decide. The differences in conceptions of the ideal community and of the means for realizing it brought into prominence differences in cultural values, ethical ideals, and world views. The arguments over a specific architectural drawing or model, in other words, tended to become arguments about Yankee City's "Time Machine", who should drive it, in what direction, and by what rules of navigation. The distinctive interest and promise of Yankee City's Renaissance is that it embraces in ambiguous symbiotic and semiotic tension both kinds of time-travellers, those who want to travel the path of progress and those who wish to preserve and revitalize their historic heritage. The suggested semiotic analysis of the controversies over "Parcel 8 " and "Watt's Cellar" as arguments about microcosmic urban icons and "condensed symbols" implies that Newburyport's historic culture can be analyzed into a system of such symbols and icons. By examining the picture postcards, maps, paintings used by the local Bicentennial Commission, the program announcements and notes for historical re-enactments, the Yankee Homecoming books, the individual paintings, photographs, drawings of local buildings, restorations, and re-enactments, as well as the pictures and stories in the newspaper — and by directly observing and recording civic celebrations and cultural peformances, it is possible to identify and recognize a recurrent set of such condensed symbols and urban icons. In observations made during the summers of 1974, 1975 and 1976, I found that a prominent set of these icons included the following: the Custom House on the waterfront, designed by Robert Mills, now restored and converted into a Marine Museum, the nineteenth century commercial brick buildings with nineteenth century street lamps in Market Square, the Unitarian Church and steeple designed by Bulfinch, models of the "Flying Cloud" and the "Dreadnaught", the Court House and Frog Pond on the Mall, members of the volunteer ceremonial militia, the Continental Navy, in full costume marching in a parade (the Fife and Drum group and one black officer are especially popular in pictures and posters), some of the famous Federalist houses on High Street and on side streets, the Mayor and other city officials as well as members of the Bicentennial Commission in eighteenth century costumes, a swan on

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the frog pond of Upper Green, Newbury, scenes of the bridge over the Merrimac River, firemen's musters with antique hand-pumps. These icons were not all assembled on a particular occasion into a single system, but the display of several of them together in a parade or dedication ceremony or in a historical re-enactment usually suggested a cityscape and landscape that provided the frame for a coherent style of life. For some people, the selections and grouping of these icons may have recalled nostalgic childhood scenes. But for most, what made these symbols memorable and meaningful was more than nostalgia — their intrinsic esthetic charm, their historical associations, their social significance. To attempt a semiotic analysis of the urban renewal and restoration controversy is not to assume that Newburyport's historic culture is merely symbolic, an imaginative construction by the present generation projected into a mythical past. Warner's pioneering semiotic analysis of the Federalist houses and gardens on High Street, the sailing ships, the cemeteries, as the status symbols of an "upper-upper" Yankee class life style was well-documented and persuasive. His addition of an historical dimension to this analysis, by postulating a long chain of "delayed communication" from the original "senders" transmitted by "enduring objects", such as the Federalist houses and cemeteries, to the present "receivers", is ingenious, albeit a bit speculative. His linking of modifications in the chain of "delayed communication" with projections by the receivers of their unconscious wishes and phantasies, has even been commended by one of his sharpest critics, Thernstrom. But Warner's semiotic analysis needs t o be extended and developed further, particularly on the historical, esthetic, epistemological and ontological sides. Whether the semiotic analysis of historical, architectural, esthetic values can ever become so precise as to help establish a scale of priorities for the preservation and restoration of a historic culture, remains to be seen (see Final EIS), but at least the method of analysis needs to be developed and applied. For this purpose, Peirce's semiotic doctrine seems to me a most fruitful point of departure. Without attempting to expound Peirce's definitions and classifications of the different kinds of signs and symbols, let me indicate one far-reaching implication of his "pragmatic semiotic" for the conception of a historic culture as a system of icons or of condensed symbols. (Singer 1984a discusses some of the epistemological and ontological implications of Peirce's "pragmatic semiotic".)

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Applying Peirce's theory to the controversies over "Parcel 8 " and "Watt's Cellar", we might say that the restorationists reacted to the icon for "Parcel 8 " so strongly because they saw it as resembling a possible object whose existence they preferred not to see verified by the actual construction of the building in the future. The icon for "Watt's Cellar", on the other hand, they interpreted as referring to a possible object which probably existed in the past and whose rediscovery they urged. In both cases the restorationists were interested in preserving and protecting endangered species of possible worlds: the "Watt's Cellar" cave and a "Parcel 8 " with a historically compatible building. The signs of these possible worlds were embodied in particular icons and condensed symbols. What the controversy was about was whether these possible worlds symbolized by particular icons will be brought into existence by archeological research in the case of "Watt's Cellar", and by construction of a new building in the case of Parcel 8. To say therefore that a historic culture consists of a system of icons and of condensed symbols does not preclude the existence in the past, present or future of the objects represented by the symbols and icons. To know whether the objects of the icons and condensed symbols exist, have existed, or will exist requires research - archeological, historical, anthropological and futurological (Faulkner et al. 1978, Harris 1972, 1 9 7 5 , 1 9 7 7 , Van Bokkelyn 1973).

4. Conclusion: Restorationists and modernists in a museum without walls The historic culture of Newburyport as a Yankee city and as an eighteenth and nineteenth century seaport is not simply the survival of a collection of cultural traditions known to most of the inhabitants through the unconscious transmission of folklore and folkways. It is rather an object that is being constantly researched, discovered and rediscovered. The discovery procedures are many and varied. Historical and genealogical research are locally recognized and respected as appropriate discovery procedures. A "history b u f f " and a "genealogist" are to be found in many families and social groups, doing research on family genealogies and histories, the lineages of famous houses, identifying and studying the designers

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and architects of public buildings and monuments, the details of historic events and the visits of famous men. Some of this research is of professional quality in its use of original documentary sources and careful inferences therefrom. Much of it depends rather on secondary sources and hearsay. Historical and genealogical research, whether professional or popular, is not however the way most people come to learn about the city's historic culture. Their discovery procedures include participating in and observing public celebrations, historic re-enactments, commemorative church services on the occasions of annual "Yankee Homecoming", Bicentennial ceremonies, national and local holidays. Because on such occasions elements of the historic culture are displayed or re-enacted - in a model of a sailing ship, naval handicrafts, colonial uniforms and arms, speeches and music — the events become for most people "cultural performances" in which elements of the historic culture are exhibited, described, and identified with. Historic markers and plaques on houses, on public buildings, and at historically significant places are another important way for people to learn about their historic culture. The selection of objects for historic markers and the selection and social organization of cultural performances are usually determined by deliberate discussions and decisions of special committees and groups. Much of Warner's analysis and interpretation of the historic markers, floats, and ceremonies of the 1930 Massachusetts Bay Tercentenary celebrations depended on his assumption that the predominance in the organizing committees of the Old Yankee families determined the selection of historic objects, events, and characters to be displayed and re-enacted. If members of these families did not themselves design the displays or act in the performances as, according to Warner, they often did, then they selected the artists and actors who did so. The influence of these Old Yankee families, their knowledge, tastes, and presence, guaranteed the historical authenticity of the displays and re-enactments. In the 1970s most of the historic markers put up for the 1930 Tercentenary were still standing and visible. In addition, some new markers were put up. The Bicentennial celebrations and the annual "Yankee Homecoming" events also provided occasions for historic floats and re-enactments. There was one important difference, however, from the 1930s situation which Warner's study had described: the organizing committees for these selections and cultural per-

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formances were dominated by " n e w c o m e r s " and "outsiders", not by the Old Yankee families. In fact, except in a few of the older societies such as the Sons and Daughters of the First Settlers of Newbury and the Historical Society of Newbury, the Old Yankee representation on the organizing committees averaged 10 percent or less. In spite of the low representation of the Old Yankee families in the selection, organization, and performance of the historic culture, the insistence by all concerned on historical authenticity seems t o be as strong as it was in t h e 1930s. The authentication is now provided by more frequent appeals t o professional authorities — historians, genealogists, archeologists — who usually have no local genealogical connections with the Old Yankee families, and to individual judgement and knowledge. In either case, the discovery procedure remains a f o r m of "research" into t h e past. Of particular interest for the present study are the disputes and controversies generated by the search for the historic culture, and especially the disputes over the question of whether there should be any research, where, how, and at what cost to the community. The local descriptions and characterizations of these differences of opinion and controversies point to a basic polar opposition in the discussions, variously referred to as a conflict between "intellectuals and workingmen", "esthetics and economics", "newcomers and old-timers". In these descriptions the " n e w c o m e r s " are sometimes characterized as people who came in red MG's from Cambridge or Marblehead to tell the "old-timers" in loud voices how t o run their c o m m u n i t y . Good examples of the polarization of groups and values crystallized in t h e Parcel 8 debate are the following t w o statements, t h e first by a leader of "The Friends of the Newburyport W a t e r f r o n t " and t h e second f r o m the Mayor's appeal t o the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Concluding a critical analysis of the designated developer's plans for Parcel 8, in which he compared it unfavorably, with respect t o architectural design as well as economics, with the plans of another developer rejected by NRA, one of t h e Friends' leaders wrote: But in the sweep of Newburyport's history, the politics of urban renewal are trivial. Of greater consequence is the character of the last remaining Clipper ship business district in America. Parcel 8 is so located and so visible as to affect the course of central Newburyport for decades to come.

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The contemporary building which stands on Parcel 8 must have an integrity of design and visual scale which will be as harmonious and enduring as the Inn and State Street neighbors are today after two centuries. It must complement the existing buildings and be an aesthetic statement to the future. It is the first of the new buildings in the urban renewal project, since Newburyport embarked on a course of historical restoration. Citizens and board members alike must point to the building with pride, not embarrassment. Changes must be demanded before HUD approval and before construction begins, and the public must have an opportunity to be heard regarding the adequacy of any changes so proposed.

The Mayor, on the other hand, after pointing out that Newburyport's urban renewal project had been changed from complete demolition project to a demolition and/or rehabilitation project which was preserving all the city's historic buildings, and enumerating the local and state historical societies, architectural historians, and consulting architects who approved the revised design for Parcel 8, expressed his "great consternation" at the Advisory Council's negative report on Parcel 8, a report which declared the proposed building "incompatible" with the historic buildings in Market Square. The Mayor blamed the opposition to the Parcel 8 proposal on a group of citizens "which represents a very small minority of the public" and has been outspoken not only in opposition to Parcel 8, but has also "done all in its power to obstruct and hinder any new construction in the redevelopment area. It is very important to note that the majority of this small minority does not reside in this community". The very large majority of the community, for whom he said he spoke, wanted Parcel 8 construction to proceed without further delay, the Mayor said: "This administration feels very strongly about the preservation of our historic buildings, but it also has to take into consideration the economics of today's times. We cannot construct or imitate 1813 buildings in 1972". (News, Nov. 15, 1972). These local descriptions and characterizations of the disagreements, together with the associated discussions and activities, do reflect and express a basic conflict in attitudes towards the amount and kinds of restoration and in underlying cultural values and world view. A preliminary schematized description of this conflict based on personal observations, conversations, study of documentary materials, can be given in terms of a dichotomy between modernists and restorationists.

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The modernist position favors slum clearance, bringing more commerce and industry into the city, more people, especially tourists, to patronize the shops, more jobs and income, more modern buildings to replace the old, and greater speed in carrying out the urban renewal program. One woman was quoted d propos the Parcel 8 controversy: "I don't care what they build down there — even if it is a pyramid — so long as they build something". Obviously the source of the "demolition only" phase of the urban renewal project, the modernist position represents the familiar American belief in progress, incessant innovation, and the proposition that faster and bigger is better and better. The Friends' insistence on exploring alternatives was bound to strike modernists as delaying and obstructionist tactics, hopelessly unrealistic, insensitive to the urgent and desperate needs of an impoverished and stagnant economy, sentimentalizing about old buildings and going on archeological fishing expeditions instead of helping the community to get some funds while available and to get something done. Needless to say, the Friends denied these charges. Their restorationist values and beliefs put a more positive interpretation on their role. Their position stresses variety and quality of people, buildings, landscapes, rather than quantity. More tourists, cars, industry, new buildings from their point of view create the wellknown problems of congestion and pollution - visual, olfactory, and aural. Continuity with the historic heritage of the architectural, horticultural, maritime, and mercantile experience of the place is more desirable than an accelerated rush into future shock. This heritage can serve as a guide — esthetic and legal — to the development of commercial buildings, parks and open spaces, public ways and transportation to the waterfront. Were the city to follow this guide, it would produce, in the restorationists' view, a true renaissance of a spirited people, trading and playing year round on a revitalized waterfront - buying and selling; fishing, birdwatching, skating and boating; and through archeologizing in "Watt's Cellar" and other sites, coming to learn of early civilization in North America and of its relations to other cultures and civilizations. Esthetics and history are, in the restorationist view, not incompatible with economics but are required to broaden the tax base and to make Market Square and the waterfront economically viable in the 1970s.

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The differences between the modernist and restorationist positions explain why some of the controversies, frictions and basic disagreements over urban renewal policy have arisen. Fortunately, these differences are not categorical, permanent, and irreconcilable. If they were, urban renewal and restoration would become hopelessly embroiled in a Kulturkampf - a battle over ideology, culture, economics, politics, society, art and architecture. The "Renaissance" in Yankee City has, as we have seen, avoided this fate, for reasons that are worth noting. There are very few purist modernists or purist restorationists. For each group it becomes more a matter of relative priorities. The modernists are willing to accept a certain amount of restoration so long as it does not interfere with their top priority of more business and industry, people and jobs, a wider tax base. Similarly, the restorationists will tolerate modern business and technology if it does not endanger historic sites and buildings or the quality of life and environment they seek to preserve and protect. Between these two positions it is possible to find some common ground, as was in fact done when the demolition-only plan for urban renewal was changed to a demolition-plus-rehabilitationand-restoration plan. In this turn-around, moreover, many people changed their position from apathy to involvement, or from the modernist to a part-restorationist position because they discovered that a "heritage" was being demolished along with "blight" and deteriorated old buildings. The surprising extent of common ground between the modernists and restorationists was revealed in the replies to and discussion of a questionnaire prepared and distributed by HUD consultants in 1974 and printed in The Daily News to determine citizens' preferences and selection criteria for the urban renewal project. The 407 respondents agreed very closely with the "Friends'" proposals for the development of the waterfront and downtown area. Yet the NRA was approved also in the role of redevelopment "actor" to get the job done quickly, and the Friends, city political figures, and consultants were disapproved (Final EIS: 95-106). Such overlaps and interplay between the modernist and restorationist positions seem paradoxical, but they are commonplaces of culture change. For culture change is accumulative: new culture elements are added to an ongoing organized culture; they do not instantly replace old elements or transform an entire culture. The new elements may coexist with the old in functionally adaptive

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ways and perhaps displace them eventually from stage center or the salient role. Certainly this is the kind of culture change that we see taking place in Yankee City. While one leading bank financed a show-piece restoration of one of the early nineteenth century brick buildings on the waterfront, another financed the construction of an experimental solar-energy house. Both publicized their activities extensively, the "solar energy house bank" in radio spot commercials. While a large and rather barren modern shopping center, with a discount department store, was built on the outskirts of the city, rehabilitation and restoration is the program for the central business district. As the old buildings in Market Square have had their exteriors and signs restored according to the strict criteria of "historic facade restoration", their interiors have been adapted for twentieth century use as drugstores, book stores, insurance and law offices, furniture stores, gift, toy, boutique and craft shops, and the like. The names of shops on the decorous signs were often "very 1970s" (Sign Book, n.d.). And while some of the most dedicated restorationists live in Colonial, Georgian, Federalist, Greek Revival or Victorian houses which they have personally restored with their "own sweat and blood over many years", as one of them put it, they often commute to Boston or elsewhere to work in modern legal, commercial and electronic industrial offices. The coexistence of a variety of culture elements and styles - new and old, foreign and "native" — suggests Malraux's museum without walls. The "Jimmy F u n d " parade which annually culminates "Yankee Homecoming" celebrations, usually includes "Hiram the Horse" pulling a local farmer's cart of vegetables and fruits, the Clydesdale horses of Anhauser Busch breweries, firemen musters with old hand pumps, antique cars, the latest fire engines (as well as the oldest) and police cars sounding their sirens at full volume, Shriners dressed like nineteenth century Arabs on miniature cars and Mopeds, and Ronald McDonald's Hamburger Temple car. In addition historic floats, from various historical periods, according to the occasion, are included. In 1975, even a Transcendental Meditation float appeared in the parade, along with several Bicentennial floats. The spirit of this cultural museum without walls is perhaps most graphically epitomized by a recent real estate advertisement in the

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local paper which offered "good buys" in Newburyport, "the city of the past, the present and the future": "Circa 1850 Cape", "circa 1965", "circa 1976 Gambrel", "circa 1825 colonial" and two land sites "circa 4,000,000,000 B.C.".

A semiotic of the city: Purusha and Corbusier's modulor as architectural symbols11

Le Corbusier o n architectural symbols: Cinema, books [and magazines such as] Je Sais tout, Science et Vie, have replaced by their documentation all the poetics of yesterday. The mystery of nature, which we attack scientifically and hardly exhaust, always grows deeper and more profound the more we advance. In fact it becomes our new folklore. The esoteric symbol, we still have, for those initiated today, in the curves which represent forces, in the formulae which resolve natural phenomena. (In Jencks 1973: 8 0 )

1. T h e City as a community of interpretation The title but not the subtitle, of this paper was suggested by Paul Wheatley. He thought that 1 would find it congenial since he knew that I had been working on a book on semiotic anthropology for several years and that I was especially interested in the semiotics of urbanism. Actually I prefer Wheatley's title to one I might have used such as "The semiotics of the city". The pseudo plural "semiotics", is now in more common use than the singular "semiotic", but the latter was more often used by Charles Peirce as a designation for the general doctrine or science of signs. "A semiotic of the city" would in the Peircean definition then refer to the application of the doctrine of signs to cities. We are also indebted to Paul Wheatley's work for the suggestion that at least one kind of city, the ancient traditional city, can be characterized in terms of a specific and limited constellation of symbols which recur in many different

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civilizations. I shall return to this important suggestion for a semiotic of a particular kind of city in Part II of this paper. In trying to think about the general title of the workshop, "Meanings of the City", I have found it easier to think about signs, symbols and images of cities than about their meanings, although signs and meanings are obviously connected. As I recall my experience of Indian cities, for example, specific constellations of signs and symbols come to mind rather than the enormously complex and sometimes inchoate "meanings". On our first visit to Madras in 1954-55, we had an opportunity to invite five Toda tribesmen to tea in the garden of our hotel. They and a larger group of Todas had been brought to the city by an Indian anthropological colleague. The purpose of their visit was to present a petition about tribal rights to the then Prime Minister Nehru, who was available since he had come to address a meeting of the Congress Party at Avadi, near Madras City. When we sat down to the garden tea party with our Toda visitors, two of them, at opposite ends of the table, cupped their hands over their mouths and sang a Toda song greeting us as visitors who live in multi-story houses across the sea. The meaning of this greeting was not quite what we interpreted it as at first - a charming way of saying "hello" to foreigners from the urban West. We soon learned that at least three of the Todas could speak English, that one had a son studying mathematics in Cambridge, England, and another's daughter was in London training as a nurse. The song of greeting, sung in the traditional Toda manner described by the linguist and ethnographer, Murray B. Emeneau, was almost verbatim the same song that they used to greet British District Collectors. This does not mean that the Todas were ingratiating sycophants. Toda oral poetry, as Emeneau explains, resembles ancient Greek poetry: "fixed themes and formulae are combined with a free improvisation, the relevance of which to a particular context must be recognized by the audience"; the way in which all the important events of life are celebrated on the spot with an appropriate song — "a rich verbification of Toda life", Emeneau calls it. (Singer 1959: XIV; Emeneau 1959; 106ff.) The Todas were not the only people who wished to see Prime Minister Nehru on this occasion. My wife and I also went to Avadi to listen to Nehru address a vast audience sitting on the ground in a field. The magical chemistry between himself and Indian crowds that he describes in The Discovery of India was much in evidence

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among listeners, some of whom did not understand English. Another memorable image of that occasion were the profile cut-outs of a Hindu temple, an Islamic mosque and a Christian church surrounding the crowded field. Years later, in the 1970s, when I saw the restoration of 19th century building facades in the Market Square of "Yankee City" in Massachusetts, an idea suggested by the architect W.G. Perry, a restorer of colonial Williamsburg, I remembered the religious profile mock facades at Avadi and acquired a fresh insight into the nature of architectural symbolism. Reading and reflecting on the recent literature on architecture as a language, and such books as Rapoport's The Meaning of the Built Environment, A Nonverbal Communication Approach or Jenck's The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, I was strongly reminded of Gulliver's visit to the Grand Academy at Lagado, as told by Jonathan Swift. The variety, novelty, and imaginativeness of the efforts to interpret urban architecture as a language, or as a system of signs and symbols, are highly reminiscent of some of the projects Gulliver was shown at the Academy. Does not the view of "the built environment" as a nonverbal system of signs suggest the most radical of the Academy's projects in the School of Languages — "a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever"? (Swift 1726 [ 1 9 6 7 ] , 1983) The Academy's professors' substitute for the use of words was for all "to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on, . . . since words are only names for things". The inconvenience of having to carry around heavy bundles of things for long conversations was to some extent obviated in short conversations, for which a man may carry implements in his pockets and under his arms, enough to supply him, and in his house he cannot be at a loss; therefore the room where company meet who practise this art, is full of things ready at hand, requisite to furnish matter for this kind of artificial converse.

Another advantage performed by this invention was that it would serve as a universal language to be understood in all civilized nations, whose goods and utensils are generally of the same kind, or nearly resembling, so that their use might easily be comprehended. And then, the ambassadors would be qualified to treat with foreign princes or ministers of state, to whose tongues they were utter strangers (Swift 1726 [1967]: 230-31).

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Architects of the International Modern Style, such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and their followers, have generally agreed on avoiding words and other ornaments on their buildings, but have bypassed the inconvenience of having to carry around big bundles of buildings by bringing their clients to their constructions where those have already been built, or carrying around small bundles of sketches, architectural drawings, and threedimensional models of buildings yet to be constructed. Post-Modernist architects such as Robert Venturi have pointed out that under modern conditions the free-standing undecorated towers of the International Style are less functional than buildings constructed with decorations and even a few words on them, such as Las Vegas casinos have, signs which can be "read" by drivers approaching at high speed. It is not necessary, say the PostModernists, to restrict architectural discourse to the five perfect Platonic solids, as Le Corbusier tried to do in his purist period. For the Post-Modernists, ducks, hamburgers, sheds decorated with all sorts of "ugly and ordinary symbols" are all valid forms of architectural "language" (von Moos 1979: 65; Venturi et al. 1972 [1977]: 10-11). The seventeenth century debate over words and things was joined by philosophers such as Bacon, Hobbes and Locke as well as by poets and writers. In the same footnote for the Penguin edition of Gulliver's Travels in which Sprat's History of the Royal Society is quoted, the editor also quotes from Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding (III, xi) the sentence "The shape of a horse or cassowary will be but rudely and imperfectly imprinted on the mind by words, but the sight of the animals doth it a thousand times better". A picture is worth a thousand words! The Academy professors' project of using "bundles of things" for a universal language that would serve them well in international communication also had its precedent in the discussions of the Royal Society. At least one of its founding members, Bishop John Wilkins, published an Essay on a Universal Character in 1668, which is not only related to Leibnitz's scheme for a universal language, but also to Frege's Begriffscrift and to Wittgenstein's search for a script and notation that would "picture" the logical structure of propositions, in his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (1922). Wittgenstein's collaboration with Adolph Loos on the design for Wittgenstein's sister's Vienna house indicates a family resemblance between Wittgenstein's

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structuralist logic and architecture without ornament. 12 The relevance and aptness of Gulliver's visit to the Grand Academy of Lagado for our present discussions about a semiotic of the city is no serendipitous coincidence, but reflects an underlying convergence of interests between Swift's times and our own. Swift scholars have recognized Gulliver's "Voyage to Laputa" as a satire on the Royal Society, and have seen the discussions at the Society as the prototypes for the "projects" at the Grand Academy. Swift visited the Royal Society in 1710 and may have heard the discussions about improving language and style. Bishop Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society noted that after Henry VIII the language "received many fantastic terms which were introduced by our Religious Sects; and many outlandish phrases, which several Writers, and Translators, in that great hurry, brought in, and made free as they pleased. . . The ill effects of this superfluity of talking have already overwhelmed most other Arts and Professions". To correct these evils, the members of the Royal Society, according to Bishop Sprat, have therefore been most rigorous in putting in execution, the only Remedy that can be found for this extravagance: and that has been, a constant Resolution, to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in equal number of words. . . . (quoted in Howell 1946: 140)

Swift's "scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever" and carrying around "bundles of things" for expressing oneself is obviously a satire on the Royal Society's call for a new plain style. A.C. Howell, whose article "Res et Verba: Wordsand Things" traces the background of the seventeenth century controversy over words and things to the classical writers on rhetoric, also notes the recurrence of the issues in the "semantic writers" of the 1930s and 1940s who praised "pointer words" that stand for things, as did the Royal Society (Howell 1946: 142). Whether the Royal Society also advocated a new plain style in architecture and city planning is not clear. Judging from Gulliver's observations on the exaggerated use in Lagado of geometrical and musical figures to measure the beauty of women, the shape of food, clothes and houses, all of which measurements led to awkward results for want of practical experience and commonsense, Swift may have been satirizing not only the interest in speculative science,

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but some of the Pythagorean and Platonic revivals in architecture by Sir Christopher Wren, a member of the Royal Society (Rykwert 1983: 139-154). The "most ingenious architect who had contrived a new method for building houses, by beginning at the roof and working downwards to the foundation, which he justified . . . by the like practice of those two prudent insects, the bee and the spider" may not appear in the Royal Society's transactions but his "new method" expresses Swift's scorn for the reckless experimenting that left the houses of Lagado "very strangely built, and most of them out of repair". The contrast with the traditional methods is graphically made in the description of Lord Munodi's house, "indeed a noble structure, built according to the best rules of ancient architecture. The fountains, gardens, walks, avenues, and groves were all disposed with exact judgement and taste". Gulliver's praises do not, however, dispel Lord Munodi's melancholy doubts that "he must throw down his houses in town and country, to rebuild them after the present mode, destroy all his plantations, and cast others into such a form as modern usage required. . .". Lord Munodi's explanation to Gulliver of how Lagado changed from a traditional to a modern city places the blame on "certain persons" who, after spending about five months on the floating island of Laputa, "came back with a little smattering of mathematics, but full of volatile spirits acquired in that airy region. . . . They began to dislike the management of everything below, and fell into schemes of putting all arts, sciences, languages, and mechanics upon a new foot". The Academy of Projectors in Lagado, and similar academies in other towns in the Kingdom, were erected by these people. In these colleges, the professors contrive new rules and methods of agriculture and building, and new instruments and tools for all trades and manufactures, whereby, as they undertake, one man shall do the work of ten; a palace may be built in a week, of materials so durable as to last for ever without repairing. . . . The only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection, and in the meantime the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food and clothes. By all of which, instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and d e s p a i r . . . . (Swift 221-222).

The connections between architecture and theories of language and symbolism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are not

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very direct and transparent. Joseph Rykwert's recent book, The First Modems: The Architecture of the Eighteenth Century (1980), throws some new light on these questions, especially on the way in which Locke's theory of primary and secondary qualities influenced the esthetic views of Shaftsbury and Hutcheson (Rykwert 1980: 156, 193, 221 nl86), and Bishop Berkeley's New Theory of Vision transcended Locke with a theory of how objects of vision (including Palladian architectural proportions) constitute a universal and divine visual language (Rykwert 1980: 235 n272). It is doubtful whether our contemporary linguistic and symbolic theories of architecture have their direct sources in those earlier discussions. Two major sources of the contemporary theories are probably Saussure's structural linguistics and "semiology" and Peirce's general theory of signs, or "semiotics". Neither Saussure or Peirce had very much to say about architecture, but their respective theories of signs have influenced the interpretation of architecture and the built environment as systems of symbols. Saussure's "semiology" as a science of the study of signs "at the heart of social life" was announced by Claude L6vi-Strauss as a program for structural anthropology in his Inaugural Lecture at the College de France in 1960. L6vi-Strauss' own studies concentrated on a structural analysis of kinship and myths and only occasionally referred to architectural plans and constructions (see, for example, the Bororo village plan in Tristes Tropiques and the comparison of European and New World cities). Rolande Barthes' use of architecture, along with food, clothes, and furniture to illustrate the Saussurean distinctions between syntagmatic and paradigmatic features of non-verbal "language" systems, gave wide currency to the approach (Barthes [1970] 1963: chapter 3; Leach 1970: 43-52). Peirce acknowledged Locke's third branch of the division of the sciences, called by the Greek term semiotiki, or the doctrine of signs, as a predecessor of his own semiotic (Peirce 1955: 98, 242-43, 269; 1982: 170-174; Locke, Essay Book IV, chapter 21). Peirce also wrote a long critical review of Berkeley (Peirce 1871 [1984: 462-487], ). Apart from a reference to architectural drawings and another to civil war memorials in American towns, Peirce does not seem to have applied his semiotic analysis to the meanings of the city. Umberto Eco was one of the first modern writers to attempt application of a Peircean semiotics to architectural signs (Eco 1968.; 1972; 1973; 1976: 239, 260). Broadbent (1980: 313-359), Foote

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(1983: 12-16), Jencks (1977 passim), and Rapoport (1982: 36-43) have recently discussed critically the semiotic approach to "the meaning of the built environment", but have not always distinguished it from Saussurean semiology or from structural and formal methods of analysis. Critics of Peirce's semiotics usually object to his use of selfdesigned technical terms and to his abstract definitions and formulations without recognizing that he is following the practice of scientific fields in which he was trained and had experience mathematics, logic, and chemistry. In these fields a new concept or phenomenon is given a technical name, usually derived from Greek or Latin, whose definition is thereafter acknowledged according to the priority of the discoverer. Peirce called this practice "the ethics of terminology" and tried to adhere to it in his definitions and classifications of kinds of signs and sign relations. The abstract nature of the definitions and classifications has a similar source, since Peirce sought the utmost generality of formulation, as in mathematics or logic, even at the sacrifice of popular intelligibility and lucidity. His definition of a sign, for example, as something that is determined by an object to determine an interpretant to assume the same relation to the object that the sign has, is an abstract formulation of this kind (see Singer 1984a: 79 for further discussion), intended to achieve a generality and formality of the concept which would cover all possible varieties of sign, to which general statements derived from the observations of some signs could be applied. These technical and "quasi-formal" features of Peirce's semiotics were counterbalanced by its social and pragmatic features, which were expressed in colloquial and commonsensical language. A sign, he also explained, is something that stands for another thing to someone in some respect (Peirce 1955: 99). The social feature of Peirce's theory of signs and sign action is built right into his definitions and explanations. As Max Fisch has pointed out, "Peirce began where most of us begin, with a model which, taken by itself, would suggest too narrow a definition; the model, namely, of conversation between two competent speakers of the same natural language" (quoted in Singer 1984a: 74-75). The fact that Peirce's definitions and explanations are sprinkled with quotations from colloquial conversations both real and imaginary, also points to his conviction that all thought is dialogical and

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"addressed to a second person or to one's future self as a second person", as he defined his doctrine of Tuism for the Century Dictionary (Singer 1984a: 85, 87). Peirce extended this dialogical conception of thought to science, saying that "a science" implies a social group of investigators devoted to the study of the same subject. This line of reasoning led Peirce to some of his most characteristic conceptions — of the self as "a loosely compacted person," of logical reasoning as a kind of insurance company, and of reality as the eventual consensus to be reached by an unlimited community of investigators (see Singer 1984a: 64, 93; Peirce 1955: 38). The pragmatic side of Peirce's semiotic theory was closely related to the social principle and to what he called "the laboratory habit of mind". Pragmatism, he said, was a method o f ascertaining the meaning o f hard words and abstract concepts, an experimental method b y which all the successful sciences . . . have reached the degrees o f certainty that are severally proper to them; this experimental method being itself nothing but a particular application o f an older logical rule, "By their fruits ye shall k n o w them." (Peirce

1955:271)

Peirce applied this experimental method — which he had practiced for about thirty years working for the United States Geodetic Survey - to his semiotic theory. In doing so, he made his semiotic a pragmatic semiotic, and thus "embedded semiotic in a theory of action or behaving" as Charles Morris observed. "The relation of a sign to what it signifies always involves the mediation of an interpretant, and an interpretant is an action or tendency to action of an organism" (Morris 1970: 40). By analyzing the interpretant of abstract and intellectual concepts ("the logical interpretant") as a habit ("a readiness to act in a certain way under given circumstances and when actuated by a given motive"), and by regarding these habits of action as the products of triadic sign action, Peirce incorporated his pragmatism into his semiotics and gave it an essentially pragmatic dimension. His classification of the measuring instruments of handicrafts and scientific observation (e.g. the weather vane, plumb line, compass, pendulum) as indexical signs installed the "laboratory habit of mind" in his pragmatic theory of meaning and, incidentally, anticipated Percy Bridgeman's later "operationalism" (Peirce 1955: 275-276). How, then, can we apply Peirce's semiotic theory to the problem of a city semiotic, and more generally to the problem of the meanings

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of the city? Its main contribution, I believe, will be to supplement the concepts of the city as a demographic, ecological, and economic system by adding a concept for the city as a semiotic system. This includes, of course, the city as a system of symbols or signs. That is only the formal, logical dimension of a semiotic system, emphasizing that the meanings of a city will not be found simply by interpreting particular individual symbols, or collections of symbols, but rather by interpreting particular systems of symbols which express a cosmology, a cosmogony, a culture and a society. From recent syntactical and semantical studies of symbol systems, particularly the study of myths, we have learned something about how to interpret symbol systems. Yet these methods of interpreting symbol systems have yet to be integrated with their social and pragmatic interpretations. Peirce's dicta that all sign-action is dialogical, that the meaning of a sign depends on an acquaintance with the objects of the sign, and that the final interpretant of a sign depends on some action and experience of an interpreter, have to be taken seriously if the formal and semantic analysis of symbol systems, urban and rural, is to become a fully semiotic analysis. The social and pragmatic dimensions of Peirce's semiotic need to be added to a syntactical and semantic analysis of symbol systems if the meanings of a city are to be conceived as "a community of interpretation". The phrase was used by Josiah Royce, but, as he acknowledged, was based on Peirce's conception of interpretation as a triadic relation of sign, object, and interpretation. Royce's more popular and concrete elaboration of Peirce's semiotic provides a suggestive bridge to a semiotic of the city (Singer 1984a: 93-94; Royce 1913, volume II). Royce cites a number of examples, each of which presupposes or implies the existence of a community of interpretation. These include two men rowing a boat, an Egyptologist translating a manuscript, an individual scientist discovering a particular fact, a geologist interpreting the geological crust of the Colorado Canyon. In each case a Peircean triadic relation of interpretation, A interprets Β to C, is distinguished from the dyadic relations of perception, A observes B, and conception, A conceives of B. The individual scientist, for example, who says, "I have discovered a physical fact" is not merely reporting the working of his own individual ideas, he is interpreting. He is therefore appealing to a community of interpretation. . . The acknowledged facts of a natural science are the possession of the community. . . That the scientific com-

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Royce's emphasis on the social nature of science and scientific interpretation reflects some of Peirce's formulations, but the analysis of the scientific community as consisting of a minimum of three persons — the original discoverer, his interpreter, and "the critical worker who tests or controls the discoverer's observations by means of new experiences devised for that purpose" (1913: 249) formulates the process of interpretation more in terms of the kinds of interpreters than Peirce's more general analysis of the triadic sign function as a relation of sign, object, and interpretant would suggest. Royce's general description of interpretation as a conversation in which someone addresses someone, an interpreted object as a sign, and the interpretation as a mental act which is itself a sign subject to further interpretation, comes fairly close to Peirce's own description of semiosis as a triadic sign-relation. No less a student of Peirce than John Dewey objected to introducing a reference to "interpreters" in Peirce's account in a famous discussion with Charles Morris. Max Fisch has clarified several misunderstandings in this controversy, the conclusion of which is, 1 believe, that Peirce's expanded description of the sign-relation includes a reference to an interpreter as well as to an utterer of the sign, as the following quotation clearly indicates: There is the Intentional Interpretant, which is a determination of the mind of the utterer; the Effectual Interpretant, which is a determination of the mind of the interpreter; and the Communicational Interpretant, or say the Cominterpretant, which is a determination of that mind into which the minds of utterer and interpreter have to be fused in order that any communication should take place. This mind may be called the commens. It consists of all that is, and must be, well understood between utterer and interpreter at the outset, in order that the sign in question should fulfill its function. . . . it is out of the nature of things for an object to be signified (and remember that the most solitary meditation is dialogue) otherwise than in relation to some actuality or existent in the commens. (Peirce in Singer 1984a: 63; Peirce 1977a: 197)

Royce's concept of a "community of interpretation" raises another and perhaps more difficult question. If the boatmen, the Egyptologists, the geologists all form different communities of interpretation, is there a total community of interpretation formed by the residents of a city, a town or of a village? This is a question

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in which sociologists and social anthropologists as well as urbanists have been especially interested. They have not, however, generally approached the question from a semiotic point of view, except for a small number (e.g. Redfield, Warner, Geertz) who have come to be called "symbolic interactionists" and who continue the tradition of Peirce, Royce, G.H. Mead, and C.H. Cooley among others (Singer 1984a: chapter 4). The classic sociological definition of the city as a large, dense, socially heterogeneous population-aggregate in fact implies that a modern city is not and cannot become a cohesive community of interpretation (Wirth 1938). This position has been subject to considerable criticism and revision even with respect to the city of Chicago (Hunter [1982] 1974) and for other cities such as San Francisco (Fischer 1982). This critical literature and the empirical studies it has stimulated will not be reviewed in this paper. Part II of the paper will deal with an empirical application to India of an anthropological spin-off of the Chicago school's demographic and ecological approach to the city — Robert Redfield's folk-urban and folk-civilization continuum. As a prelude to that discussion, it may be helpful to point out that Royce's criteria for defining a human community already included the conditions for the formation of a community of interpretation. These consisted of a group of many selves who are ideally extended so as to include the same object; the past, present and future deeds of the members bound up with the group; and distinct selves capable of and engaged in social communication. Since the group has a common life and is aware of the fact, its members understand their own roles and those of others, like the members of a chorus or an orchestra (Royce 1913: 64-67, 86-95). We begin to see in these formulations anticipations of G.H. Mead's ideas about "taking the role of a generalized other" and C.H. Cooley's emphasis on the primacy and importance of social consciousness. As did these sociologists, Royce links the development of the self and its identity to social interaction, social communication. Perhaps it will come as no great surprise then to learn that for Royce, as for Peirce, there is no absolute individual, and that the community of interpretation is unlimited, without a boundary, because the process of producing and interpreting signs is endless. The universe is a community of interpretation whose life comprises and unifies all the social varieties and all the social communities which, for

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The universe, moreover, contains its own interpreter — man the symbolizing animal: Full of wonder is nature. But the most wonderful of all is man the interpreter; — a part and a member (if our philosophy is right) of the world's infinite community of interpretation. (Royce 1 9 1 3 : 4 1 8 )

L6vi-Strauss has given a kind of semiotic definition of anthropology: Men communicate by means of symbols and signs. For anthropology which is a conversation of man with man, all things are symbol and sign which act as intermediaries between two subjects. (livi-Strauss 1976: 9-11)

Dan Sperber, a former student of L^vi-Strauss, seems to regard this conception of anthropology as characteristically French and paradoxical: The Frenchman lives in a universe where everything means something, where every correlation is a relation of meaning, where the cause is the sign of its effect and the effect, a sign of its cause. By a singular inversion, only real signs — words, texts — are said, sometimes, to mean nothing at all. (Sperber 1974: 83; Singer 1984a: 34)

In suggesting that we explore the meanings of the city as a Peircean and Roycean "community of interpretation", I am not advocating that we emulate the French national character or the Projectors at the Grand Academy of Lagado. Once we acknowledge that anthropologists as well as other urbanists are participant observers and interpreters in the community of interpretation, we shall come to recognize that all scholarly discourse is a part of that polyphonic conversation of cultures which is human civilization.

2. The City as a combination of opposites: Tradition and innovation It is no accident that the idea of a semiotic of the city should appeal to Paul Wheatley. His own studies of the cosmo-magical symbolism of the traditional preindustrial city, beginning with his London University Inaugural Lecture on "The City as Symbol" in 1969 and extending for at least a decade after, can be taken as a point of departure for a general semiotic analysis of the meanings of

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the city. I am not referring only to the specific architectural features of traditional cities that he has identified as symbolizing a center and navel of the world, an axis mundi, cardinal orientation, a circumference and boundary, or an image of the cosmos. These features must, to be sure, be the starting points for any empirical description of a city's symbols. Yet they are only starting points, for to interpret the meanings of the symbols, whether they are the gate tower of a South Indian temple (gopura), or the pivot of the four quarters in an ancient Chinese shrine, requires knowledge of the cosmology and world view, the rites and ceremonies, and even the social, political, and economic organization of the civilization to which the city belongs. Precisely because Wheatley's identifications and interpretations of city symbols are informed by such knowledge, drawing in part on the investigations of many other scholars, he has been able to construct a persuasive and challenging synthesis of a semiotic for the ancient city in South and Southeast Asia, in China and Japan, and in the Middle East (Wheatley 1977: 51-54). To what extent can this approach be applied to the modern city — western and non-western? Wheatley does not make a large affirmative claim in this regard for his kind of analysis. Acknowledging that one can find "vestiges" and survivals of the traditional principles in cities of the modern world, and an occasional effort to build a modern city de novo according to those principles, of which the 18th-century construction of Jaipur is an example, he sees the modern city following different principles and signifying different meanings, if indeed it signifies anything more than sound and fury. At issue is not whether the architects, builders and residents of the modern city have the knowledge and techniques for determining the center and boundaries of a city, constructing tall buildings, aligning them by cardinal orientation, or following a grid pattern of roads and squares. The modern city is of course usually well-provided with people possessed of such knowledge and has often followed their counsel. The problematic issue is whether these architectural features symbolize the same kinds of meanings in or around the modern city as they symbolized for the ancient traditional city. If not, what kinds of meanings do they symbolize? Is there in fact a general semiotic analysis of the city that will enable us to make such comparisons, let alone integrate them within a unified concept of urbanism? Wheatley does not attempt to extend his symbolic analysis of the

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ancient traditional city to the modern city. Instead he suggests briefly that the model of the city developed by the Chicago school of sociology in the 1920s and 1930s might be updated. That model, a creation of Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and their students, with some earlier contributions from William I. Thomas, took the city of Chicago as a "laboratory for the study of human behavior" (Park in Sennett 1969). This model placed emphasis on the city as a changing demographic and ecological "natural" system, subject to scientific description and analysis. Louis Wirth's 1938 article "Urbanism as a Way of Life" epitomized one of the Chicago school's conceptions of the city by defining it as "a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogenous individuals" (Wirth in Sennett 1969). Wirth's analysis, in addition to its use of many of the empirical sociological studies of Chicago, also shows the influence of Georg Simmel's classic paper on "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (Simmel in Sennett 1969). The demographic and ecological studies of the modern metropolis pioneered by the Chicago school have been updated and statistically refined by several generations of the founding fathers' students (see, for example, Burgess and Bogue 1964; Hunter 1974). Criticisms of the validity and generality of the approach have also been expressed. It has been characterized as a theory of urbanism valid only for late nineteenth-century European and American industrial cities (Berry 1973), not for the preindustrial traditional cities of the West or the East (Wheatley 1969), nor even for contemporary American cities (Fischer 1982). The discussion and evaluation of this vast literature is beyond the scope and competence of this paper. There is, however, an anthropological relative of the Chicago school that needs to be mentioned here, namely, Robert Redfield's theory of the folk-urban continuum. Redfield entered the University of Chicago's Department of Anthropology in 1926, three years before it separated from the Department of Sociology. As Robert Park's son-in-law, and a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School who had returned to the University for a Ph.D. in sociology and anthropology, he extended the ecological approach first to the folk culture of Tepoztlän in Mexico (Redfield 1930), and later to a systematic and more or less simultaneous comparison of four communities in Yucatan (Redfield 1941). The major result of the Yucatan studies was to show that the order of variations in the "folk" and "urban" traits

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in the four communities (Tusik, a tribal village; Chan Kom, an agricultural peasant village; Dzitas, a railroad town; and Merida, the state capital) followed a trend towards individualization, secularization, and cultural disorganization that increased with increasing proximity of a community to the urban center. This result confirmed in a general way the Chicago sociologists' ecological and demographic conception of urbanism, although Redfield placed more emphasis on the city as a social system ("a network of social relations"), a culture ("an organization of conventional understandings expressed in act and artifact"), and a community ("occupying a territory") (Redfield 1941: 14-15). This added emphasis was probably reinforced by the presence in the Department of Anthropology at Chicago from 1931 to 1937 of the English anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, who was generalizing his functional analysis of social and cultural systems just at this time into a "theoretical and natural science of society" (Redfield in Eggan 1955; Radcliffe-Brown 1957; Singer 1984b). Redfield's research in Yucatan was guided as well by an idealtype distinction between a folk society and culture and an urban society and culture. This distinction was not intended as a descriptive classification of societies and cultures but as a synthesis of bipolar attributes which would differ in degree as the different communities are compared. The selection of the bipolar attributes — such as small-large, homogeneous-heterogeneous, collective-individ ualistic, organized-disorganized, sacred-profane — represented for Redfield a distillation of sets of classical contrasting conceptions suggested historically by Sir Henry Maine, Fustel de Coulanges, Lewis H. Morgan, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Emile Dürkheim (Redfield 1955a: 39-43). Redfield's construction of a folk-urban continuum in Yucatan describes Merida as a city with a heterogenous and slightly cosmopolitan population, taking the lead "in adopting new and modern ways from Euro-American civilisation" (Redfield 1941: 21, 23). After the Second World War Redfield saw the importance of looking at former colonial urban centers in the perspective of their own historic civilizations and indigenous urban traditions. From 1951 until his death in 1958 he directed a cooperative international scholarly effort to compare the great traditions of Chinese, Indian, Islamic, Mesoamerican and Western civilizations, with a view to increasing their mutual intelligibility (see Singer 1976 for a descrip-

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tion of the project). In a 1954 paper on "The Cultural Role of Cities", intended to guide the ongoing discussions and research of the project, Redfield sought to distill some of his thinking about the historic role of different types of cities in different civilizations. A major typological distinction which he formulated in this paper was that between the "city of orthogenetic transformation" and the "city of heterogenetic transformation". The "cities of orthogenetic transformation" such as Delhi, Quito, Beijing, Kyoto, Mecca, and medieval Ltege, "carry forward, elaborate a long-established cultural tradition local to the community in which those cities stand. These are the cities of the literati: clerics, astronomers, theologians, Imams and priests". Redfield also called this kind of city "the city of the moral order" and contrasted it with "city of the technical order" or the "city of heterogenetic transformation [London, New York, Yokohama, Shanghai, Bombay] where local cultures are disintegrated and new integrations of mind and society are developed". The city of heterogenetic transformation is a city of the intelligentsia, "a place of differing traditions, a center of heresy, heterodoxy, and dissent, of interruption and destruction of ancient tradition, of rootlessness and anomie" (Redfield 1962: 330-32). An important feature of the distinction between "the city of orthogenetic transformation" and "the city of heterogenetic transformation" is that cities are both those things, and the same events may appear to particular people or groups to be representative of orthogenesis or representative of heterogenesis. The predominating trend may be in one of the two directions, and so allow us to characterize the city, or that phase of the history of the city, as one or the other. (Redfield 1962: 332-333)

In my attempts to apply Redfield's framework to India, I initially selected the city of Madras as a metropolitan center within which to study what happens to the great tradition of Sanskritic Hinduism in such a context. My assumption that Madras was a "heterogenetic city" was soon challenged by my observations and by knowledge of some of my informants. It did not take long to discover that practically all the elements of an orthogenetic city were present in Madras in significant numbers — temples, priests and pundits, sacred rituals and festivals, gurus and saints, Sanskrit colleges, ayurvedic doctors and clinics, astrologers, classical dancers and musicians, reciters and story tellers, image-makers and other traditional craftsmen.

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In fact, Paul Wheatley's three principles of "astrobiology" - axiality, cardinal orientation and the micro-macrocosmic parallelisms — were well understood by some of my informants and recognized in the city (see Singer 1980a, chapter 4). 1 3 These manifestations in and around Madras City of the traditional sacred geography, rituals and ceremonies, sacred myths and sacred specialists were so numerous that 1 soon considered Madras also to be a city of orthogenetic change, where tradition and innovation somehow coexisted in its life. An alternative interpretation of the situation also occurred to me, namely, that the city was in a transitional stage in which modernity was replacing tradition. It was easy to find families who had migrated to the city from villages and towns and in two or three genertions had acquired a modern education, as well as training and positions in law, medicine, engineering, business and industry, and along with these, such appurtenances of modernity as the use of the automobile, the radio, telephone, air travel, wrist watches, and refrigerators, and even in some cases the giving of parties with alcohol. Closer acquaintance with these families, however, revealed that they had not generally abandoned their kinship connections in village and towns, and had not given up all their traditional practices and beliefs. The pressures of modern life led them to stream-line the ritual observances, accept neon lights and electric amplification in temples and temple ceremonies, endow new temples, and make pilgrimages to shrine centers by bus and airplane. Yet they remained convinced that the "essentials" of their religious practices and beliefs, and of their social organization, were still intact, and that only the "non-essentials" have been changing. If Madras city is in a stage of "transition" from tradition to modernity, it would seem to be a "permanent transition", as Clifford Geertz noted in Indonesia. There are also indications that the coexistence of the traditional and the modern has another significance when one considers the many revivals of traditional social and cultural forms — of recitations and singing of scriptual puranic texts, "classical" dance and music, Sanskrit and Vedic study, ayurvedic medicine, ancient architecture and sculpture. These revivals often incorporate some innovations in style of performance, in place and sponsorship, and class of performers and audience, but the continuity with earlier forms is always stressed as is the belief that the revivals express some aspect of a great and ancient tradition (for details, see Singer 1980a).

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The urbanization I studied in Madras city in the 1950s and 1960s was both "orthogenetic" and "heterogenetic", and the two kinds of changes were not only going on simultaneously but were functionally interrelated. For example, the quickening pace of modern life compelled a contraction and consolidation of ritual observances and this in turn generated compensatory revivals in devotional Radha-Krisna bhajans, or classical Bharata-Natyam dance concerts, and other cultural performances. Because specific modern innovations, such as following a career in machine industry, were frequently associated with traditional precedents, the process of urbanization appeared to be modernizing Indian society and culture by way of a "symbolic traditionalization" of the specific innovations. Sometimes this "symbolic traditionalization" was consciously articulated in explicit verbal interpretations, as some of my Madras informants were quite capable of doing. More often, the habitual use of traditional names for products with new material (e.g. nylon saris) and the transfer of everyday expressions to new contexts ("College of Indigenous Medicine" for a college that combines traditional ayurvedic with modern medicine) were sufficient to mark the changes. The numerous ways in which the old and the new were separated and recombined spatially and symbolically (e.g. changing from Western dress and English in the office to Indian dress and speech at home) enable "traditionalization" to go on quietly as a social and cultural process of "compartmentalization" in the wake of urbanization (see chapters 8 and 9 in When a Great Tradition Modernizes for a detailed description and analysis; Das 1976). Studies by colleagues in other regions of India, working in other social and cultural domains, have also noted the importance of "symbolic traditionalization" as a form of modernization in urban settings (in Singer ed. 1973; Owens and Nandy 1977). Some of them have given different names to the process: M.N. Srinivas, for example, speaks of "Sanskritization" and "Westernization" occurring together in modern India (Srinivas 1952, 1966). J.A.B, van Buitenen, in a paper on the Bhagavata Purana, speaks of the "archaism" of this literary work's style and language as a form of "sanskritization" in which the motive for upward social mobility seems less important than the prestige of following particular cultural canons (in Singer, ed. 1968: 23-40). Other anthropologists who have studied culture change in areas other than India have also noted the compartmentalization of tradi-

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tion and innovation and have interpreted this adaptive strategy as a defensive reaction to the destructive effects of Western colonialism on indigenous cultures (see Singer 1976: 229-243 for discussion). One urban historian working in India has in fact analyzed the history of Madras city as a "colonial port city" and has contrasted it with the history of Madurai, in the same state as a "ceremonial city" (Lewandowski 1977). The essential feature of Lewandowski's Madras-Madurai contrast is her interpretation of Madras as a creation of British colonialism and an expression of Western ideology which separated the domains of politics, economics, and religion, and subordinated religion to politics and economics. This ideology, she believes, received expression in the city's architectural and functional history. The architectural and functional history of notfar-distant Madurai, on the other hand, she believes, express an indigenous Hindu world view in which politics, economics, and religion are not sharply differentiated, and in which politics and economics are subordinated to religion, symbolized by the centrality in the city of the large Minakshi temple, which conforms to the classical rules of Hindu architecture, as well as to Wheatley's principles of astrobiology (Lewandowski 1977). If the port city Madras/ceremonial city Madurai contrast is correct, it would tend to cast doubt on my interpretation of modern Madras as highly traditionalized. I do not question the contrast, but I should like to point out that it depends on adopting two different points of view for looking at the two cities — a British and Western point of view for Madras and a traditional Hindu point of view for Madurai. My study started with a Western point of view of Madras as a modern metropolis and was compelled by closer observation, interview and archival research to add a more traditional Indian interpretation of the city. If this bifocal perspective is applied to both cities, the contrast between them becomes much less sharp. In a later article, on "The Hindu Temple in South India" (1980), Lewandowski herself comes to the same conclusion. In this second study, Madras "remains a city of temples" (1980: 146) and a center for "the revival of Hinduism in urban India" in a streamlined form made necessary by a shortage of space and other resources. Although the new popular Madras city temples are now located in the suburbs and may lack a temple tank, a temple cart, a special street for Brahmans, or a wide street for processions, and substitute reinforced concrete for the traditional granite, they still perform some of

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their former functions. "As in the past the temple legitimized the Nayakas of Madurai and the merchants of early Madras, so today it legitimizes wealthy newcomers' (Lewandowski 1980: 142). Madurai, the ceremonial center, and the political, religious, and cultural capital of ancient Pandyan and Nayaka kingdoms has also undergone changes in modern times. Redesigned in the middle of the 16th century by the Nayaka kings' architects to conform to the ancient architectural principles set forth in manuals, of cardinality and axiality, and to a celestial prototype, the city and the Minakshi temple at its center "became a visual expression of the strength and expandability of the Nayaka kingdom, and a reflection of its relationship to the sacred and divine" (Lewandowski 1977: 191). Additions made to the temple and its environs since then have not only completed the classical architectural plan, but have also expanded the former boundary of the city to include new commercial, industrial, governmental, and residential sectors not envisaged in the classical plan. These changes have done much to lessen the contrast between the ceremonial center and the colonial port city, between the city of "orthogenetic change" and the city of "heterogenetic change". While the temples in Madras and in Madurai now perform some of their former functions along with secular and quasi-secular institutions such as art galleries, theaters, concert and dance halls, zoos, and political processions and celebrations, they probably still continue to function as predominant centers for dramatizing in cultural performances the sacred myths of particular sects, and for traditionalizing the social and cultural innovations for which members of these sects are responsible. In a joint paper about their recent parallel studies of a large Sri Vaishnava temple in Madras and the Shaivite Minakshi temple in Madurai, Appadurai and Breckenridge have argued persuasively that the changes in temple administration introduced by the British, and by the post-independence Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department, by the independent judiciary, and even by the anti-Brahman ideology of the present state government of Tamilnadu (the DMK) have not eliminated these ancient and important functions of the temple as a social and religious institution: . . . officials of the state who have active bureaucratic involvements with particular temples, as well as the staff and worshippers in such temples,

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share the idea that the government . . . is in some fashion carrying on, in its management of temples, the mandate of pre-British Hindu kings to protect such institutions. The persistence of this conception of the relationship between the state and the temple, in spite of significant changes in the social, economic and political order, suggests its centrality to the South Indian way of ordering the universe. (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1976: 208) 14 The coexistence and complementarity of tradition and modernity in Madras and Madurai has obviously been changing in degree, if not in kind, with such historical changes as the coming and going of colonialism; the cosmopolitanism of a port city; the political power of an imperial capital; the concentration of literati, sacred texts, sacred shrines, rituals and processions; the change in point of view of the observer, and other changes. In spite of these historical changes, particular cities may acquire relatively persistent reputations as "traditional" or "modern" cities, "cities of orthogenetic change" or "cities of heterogenetic change". Madurai and Madras are such a contrastive pair of cities with reputations that can be traced back at least as early as the fourth century A.D. In the famous Tamil epic of "The Anklet" (Sillapaddikaram), as A.K. Ramanujan has noted, the image of Madurai is that of an "orthogenetic" city and of its contrastive city, Puhar, an ancient port city located on the Bay of Bengal very near the present Madras, is that of an "heterogenetic city". Ramanujan, drawing on the graphic descriptions in the Tamil epic, summarizes the contrast between the two cities, Puhar and Madurai, quite explicity (Ramanujan 1970: 238-239): Puhar clearly has a heterogenetic character. I shall mention here only a few details: The order is a technical order, an environment for both good and evil; the whole and the maimed, the lame, the deaf, and the blind have their place. It is a market city, an open city, both physically and socially. Puhar means "the mouth of a river". As a seaport, foreigners are at home; they have accumulated wealth and built houses. Ordinary citizens like Kovalan and his wife Kannaki live in it and are mentioned by name. A great variety of religions and gods are mentioned, paralleling the variety of the social scene. The city itself is a found functional order by occupation, contrasting with the city founded and planned according to an imposed geometric order. Instead of ritual, festival, and bards, we have drama, game, song. Instead of a sacred literati, we have the impression of a cosmopolitan intelligentsia, accustomed and hospitable to foreigners, enjoying and accepting variety in trade as in women, pleasure and lifestyle. There are no high buildings or palaces conspicuously men-

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A semiotic of the city tioned, though several impressive public places are. . . . Puhar . . . swarms with real life, and it changes from street to street, from house to beach. Madurai with its elaborately described fortifications, battlements, and weapons of destruction is a protected and moated city like Ayodhya ("the city none can challenge in warfare") and unlike the open Puhar. Instead of the pluralism of the many gods of Puhar, we hear the drums of Siva; the dominance of one deity is paralleled by the significant absence of the Greeks in Madurai except as mercenaries. The foreigner (here Kovalan from a neighboring kingdom, not even a Greek) is unwelcome, suspected, victimized. All the protection of battlements is after all against the attack of outsiders. It is a unitary city. Like Ayodhya, the emphasis here too is as strongly on moral order as it is on military defence: the Pandya king prides himself on the rigor of his justice, and dies on the spot when he hears that Kovalan was killed unjustly, and with him Madurai goes up in flames. Yet unlike Ayodhya, Madurai is a corrupt city - the corruption is suggested by the differing attitudes to courtesans and concubines exhibited in Puhar and in Madurai.

Madurai's "orthogenetic" reputation did not keep corrupt and wicked people out of high places or save the city from a divine incineration brought on it by the righteous indignation of Kanniki, the heroine of the epic, after she learned that her husband, Kovalan, had been unjustly executed by the king. This particular incident is not included in the sacred history of Madurai which is inscribed in the puranic 64 "sports" (lilas) of Shiva and is illustrated by a series of murals painted around the walls of Minakshi temple. These murals depict many destructions of Madurai, more often by water than by fire, and also its many rebuildings and restorations around the Shaivite temple. (See Plate 24 in La lägende des Jeux de ςίνα ά Madurai, 1960.) Other contrastive pairs of "traditional" and "modern" cities are well known. In India, they include Delhi and New Delhi, Pune and Bombay, Banaras and Calcutta. In other countries one finds Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Mecca and Ryadh, Peking and Shanghai, Kyoto and Yokahama, Moscow and Leningrad, Rome and Genoa, Paris and Chartres, Canterbury and London, Washington and New York. These examples are selected on the basis of general reputations and stereotypical popular images, not on close acquaintance or historical studies. One question raised by these contrastive city pairs is which type of city is more representative of the national identity and national character of the country in which the pairs exist. It is tempting to say that the "traditional" type of city, the "city of orthogenetic change", is the more representative of

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the nation. This answer, however, will be quickly challenged by those who would deny, for example, that Washington, D.C. represents the "real America" or that Delhi represents the "real India", even if they are unable to persuade the traditionalists that this honor belongs to the more "heterogenetic" members of the pair - to New York (now Los Angeles) or to New Delhi, for example. The problem of reaching a consensus on this question depends of course on whether the national "representativeness" of a city represents some cross-section of traits of the national population, or whether it expresses a dominant configuration of national values. Salt Lake City may be more representative of "traditional American values" of family, religion and patriotism than San Francisco, judging from the selection of Miss Utah as the Miss America of 1984, although neither city may be statistically representative of the country. Without trying to arbitrate between the values of "counter-cultural" San Francisco and those of "traditional" Salt Lake City, or between the Democratic and Republican parties, it may be possible to say something about the relationship between the traditional-modern typology of cities and their respective national identities, at least so far as the values of tradition and innovation themselves are concerned. Wheatley has pointed out that an ancient traditional capital city receives architectural expression in China as well as in India, in spite of the differences in the great-traditional values of these civilizations, which have made the secular royal palace the center of the Chinese shrine city, and the temple the center of the Indian city (Wheatley 1969; Wu 1963). Can we make analogous comparisons of contrastive pairs of cities in relation to the value configurations dominant in India and in some other nation such as the United States? The discussion of "symbolic traditionalization" in Madras and in Madurai would seem to suggest that a dominant value in India is a desire to assimilate innovative changes in a city to some preexisting patterns or rules of a great tradition. We might formulate this hypothesis as "all innovation is restoration". Even the "rationalist" anti-Brahman movement in South India fits this hypothesis, since it seeks to justify its actions and beliefs in terms of an ancient Dravidian tradition. It might be objected to the extrapolation of such a hypothesis from the Madras-Madurai contrast that Madras was never a "heterogenetic city" even in its colonial period under the British, and that the hypothesis should be tested against a genuinely new Indian city.

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I propose to do just that with Le Corbusier's Chandigarh. Before this test is applied, let me keep your curiosity about the American side of the comparison from being completely frustrated by telling you that on the basis of some preliminary observations in Lloyd Warner's "Yankee City", I would surmise that the appropriate formulation for the dominant urban value configuration in the United States is "all restoration is innovation" (Singer 1977, 1984a: 144-148). 15

3. Le Corbusier: The man, the monument, and the cosmos After India became independent and partitioned in 1947, the capital of Punjab, Lahore, went to Pakistan. By 1950, the American city planner Albert Mayer had been commissioned to draft the master plan for a new political and administrative capital of Punjab State to be built in the town of Chandigarh. The site in the foothills of the Himalayas about 160 miles north of Delhi had been selected by Punjab's chief engineer and chief administrator. Prime Minister Nehru, who had met Albert Mayer in India during the war, recommended him and his New York architectural firm for the Chandigarh assignment. When the architect Matthew Nowicki, whom Mayer recruited to assist him, was killed in a plane crash in the Punjab in 1950, Mayer decided to withdraw from the Chandigarh project. Chief Engineer Varma and Chief Administrator Thapar then travelled to Europe to look for a successor. In Paris, they were able to persuade Le Corbusier to accept the challenge of becoming Chief Advisor to the project for planning and building the new capital. Le Corbusier in turn recruited his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, and two British architects, Jane Drew and her husband Maxwell Fry, to assist him. These three, together with several Indian architects who were trained on the project, made up the architectural team who worked under Le Corbusier's direction to start and complete the first phase of the planning and building. Le Corbusier's contract assigned him the responsibility for the overall planning of the town and for the design and construction of the capital complex, to consist of a high court, a legislative assembly, a secretariat, and a governor's palace. The contract also required that he spend two periods a year of at least four weeks each in India. Le Corbusier

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sketched his new master plan, a revision of Mayer's, in a hotel room on his first visit in 1951. Two years later in April of 1953 enough of the new capital had been built to justify its official inauguration. On this occasion Prime Minister Nehru said: "Let this be a new town, symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered by the traditions of the past . . . an expression of the nation's faith in the future". Le Corbusier spoke in a similar vein: Chandigarh is a realization not only for Punjab or India but for the whole world. The attention of the people is focussed on Chandigarh for many things, new techniques, new architecture, new art of life. (Le Corbusier 1973:223)

The community of interpretation between Prime Minister and architect is quite striking. Both seem to agree that the new capital of Punjab, later also of Haryana and a Union Territory, represents a break with tradition, architectural, technological and sociological. For Nehru the modernist and Le Corbusier a founding father of the modern movement in architecture these sentiments sound quite in character. Yet as we learn more about Corbusier's plan for the city and how it was realized, the community of interpretation grows more ambiguous and the results more enigmatic. Chandigarh did not turn out to be a "city of towers" for three million, nor even a political-administrative capital in the grandiloquent style of Lutyens' New Delhi. The Punjabi officials vetoed high-rises and Prime Minister Nehru vetoed Le Corbusier's plan for a Governor's Palace at the head of the Capitol complex as inappropriate for a democracy. When Le Corbusier's plan for a high-rise secretariat building was turned down, he became angry and threatened to resign, but the next day came in with a plan for a horizontal secretariat fully drawn. It is not, however, these kinds of conflicts and compromises which shade Nehru's and Le Corbusier's modernism. A far more astonishing ambivalence is revealed by Norma Evenson's description of Le Corbusier's master plan and by the symbolism which was incorporated in the construction: The city was conceived in its essential form as a square containing a cross axis, with the capitol complex culminating the northeastern axis toward the mountains. This simple diagram derives from one of the oldest formal urban plans, and perhaps represents one of the ancient, intuitive gestures by which man takes possession of a place and marks it as his own. What is believed to be the oldest symbolic representation

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A semiotic of the city of a city is an Egyptian hieroglyph consisting of a circle containing a cross, and the rectilinear shape embodying a cross axis of principal streets was later the customary form of Roman settlement. (Evenson 1966: 31)

Evenson does not give quotations from Le Corbusier which indicate that he was aware of the resemblance between his master plan for Chandigarh and "the oldest formal urban plans", which she also compares with the ancient Indian architectural plans. It is precisely in Le Corbusier's "emphasis on a monumental axial composition" that Evenson sees the greatest difference from Mayer's plan (see Figure 1, p. 126). Although in both designs the capitol area was planned to stand against the mountains, only in Le Corbusier's plan was there an effort to provide a single monumental approach linking the body of the city to its symbolic head and relating along a single axis the two main public areas of the city, the capitol complex and the civic center. (Evenson 1966: 32)

Evenson's reference to the "symbolic head" and the "body" of the city are not her own poetic language, but reflections of Le Corbusier's deep-seated convictions about the relations between architecture and "biology". The analogy between the city and an organism was often made in Le Corbusier's plans and, as Evenson observes, explicitly expressed: The conception of the city as an organism is found frequently throughout Le Corbusier's urban theories. In explaining his analogy, he stated, "A plan arranges organs in order, thus creating an organism or organisms. The organs possesss distinctive qualities, specific differences. What are they? lungs, heart, stomach. The same question arises in architecture . . . 1 am talking of organisms like Industrial Centres, 'Unites d'Habitation,' Cit6s Lineaires. I am claiming sun, space and green surroundings for everybody and striving to provide you with an efficient system of circulation. BIOLOGY! The great new word in architecture and planning. (Evenson 1966: 31)

The analogy was elaborated in detail by Jane Drew, one of the British architects (Drew quoted in Evenson 1966: 31). Whether Le Corbusier and his staff were aware that their biological analogy for the city was also a part of a systematic set of correspondences between the human body and the Indian temple is not clear. (Compare diagrams in Volwahsen and Beck) What is clear and unmistakable is that the Le Corbusier master plan for Chandigarh and the language which he and his staff used to describe

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it embodied those three principles of "astrobiological" thinking which Wheatley identified as the essential characteristics of the ancient ceremonial center: namely axiality, cardinality, and micromacro cosmic parallelism. What's more, these principles were embodied in "monuments" together with several other symbols in the Chandigarh plans (see Figure 2, p. 127). Le Corbusier himself described the origin of the idea for these monuments: One evening, on the lawn outside the Rest-House of Chandigarh, where Jane Drew, Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry and Le Corbusier have their base, Jane Drew said: "Le Corbusier, you should set up in the heart of the capitol the signs which symbolize the basis of your philosophy and by which you arrived at your understanding of the art of city design. These signs should be known — they are the key to the creation of Chandigarh". From this arose the conception of the great esplanade about 400 yards long which joins the Parliament Palace to the High Court. Here the signs of the Modulor, the Harmonic Spiral, the daily path of the sun, le jeu de soleil, the Open Hand, etc. will be set out. (quoted in Evenson 1966: 86)

Curiously, Evenson does not entirely approve of these "monuments": However useful as formal elements in activating the extensive sweep of open space in the center of the capitol complex, the inclusion in a civic area of what is, in fact, the purely personal symbolism of the architect may be of questionable appropriateness. Essentially, these structures are monuments to Le Corbusier rather than symbols of the city. (Evenson 1966: 86-87)

Yet some of the Indians associated with the project, especially Chief Engineer Varma, approved of the symbols and wrote to Le Corbusier, "Your philosophy of the "open hand" will appeal to India in its entirety. . . Ours is a philosophy of open hand. Maybe Chandigarh becomes the new center of thought" (quoted in Evenson 1966: 87). P.L. Varma did not write "the center of new thought" as Le Corbusier envisaged the new capitol, for the Chief Engineer was describing his "deep faith in the ultimate - faith borne of the surrender of the will to the Ultimate Source of Knowledge, service without reward and much more" (also cf. Le Corbusier, Modulor 2 195-196 on Purusha). The difference between conceiving Chandigarh as a "new center of thought" and as a "center of new thought" may explain the riddle of how a leading political modernist, Prime Minister Nehru,

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and a leading architectural modernist, Le Corbusier, came to establish a community of interpretation of Chandigarh as a new modern capital, "unfettered by past traditions". It is well known that the Prime Minister often spoke of overcoming the "burden of the past" and travelling to the West for ideas about the future. He was also prepared, however, to search for the Indian "spirit" and identity in its own great traditions, and to see the self in everything and everything in the self. To him a modern capital or a modern dam might well be the "temples" of a new age for the expression of an ancient "metaphysical democracy" (Singer 1984a: 161-164). These interpretations of Chandigarh by Le Corbusier and Prime Minister Nehru are, needless to say, consistent with our interpretations of Madras and Madurai, namely, that the Indian city is a combination of both tradition and modernity, that modernization o f t e n takes place by way of a "traditionalization" of modern innovations, and that innovations are perceived as restorations and eternal recurrence. Other interpretations of Chandigarh have of course been given in the literature — political, ecological-economic, psychological. Some writers, for example, have seen in Chandigarh's monumental artchitecture an expression of Le Corbusier's alleged passion for power and authority. They trace the continuity of this "passion" in his plans for the Palace of the Soviets, the several Italian projects, Vichy government commissions, and for the League of Nations and the United Nations. His assocations with Stalin, Mussolini, Marechal Petain, and John D. Rockefeller, who gave the land for the UN buildings, are then seen as part of a megalomaniac complex, of which his friendship with Prime Minister Nehru and the attempt to emulate Lutyens' New Delhi plan are but culminating confirming instances of the general pattern (for suggestions along this direction, see von Moos 1979: 218-20). It is no doubt possible and plausible to trace some continuities in Le Corbusier's architectural drawings for all these civic projects. It is much more difficult and problematic to infer psychological motives and political ideology from such drawings. Most of the projects proposed t o the architects were themselves quite grandiloquent if not Utopian. The architectural knowledge and sophistication of the political "authorities" and their consitutiencies were quite limited. Stalin preferred a classical Greco-Roman Palace of the Soviets to Le Corbusier's "new architecture". The Italians and

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French also found him uncongenial to their tastes. The Americans liked his plan for the UN buildings, which won the competition, but for obscure reasons of local politics deprived Le Corbusier of the opportunity to supervise their construction. Throughout all these vicissitudes of his career in civic architecture, Le Corbusier's politics and political ideology remained enigmatic. He has been described as "apolitical", because his dominant persistent aim seems to have been to get his particular architectual plans and style accepted and realized, an aim which more often failed than succeeded, until Chandigarh. Whether or not Le Corbusier had a "passion" for power and authority, there is no doubt that his architectural conception and realization of Chandigarh have a quality of monumentality. The capitol complex in particular has been so regarded because of the massive volumes of the buildings, the vast spaces between them, the unfinished concrete on walls and heavy sunbreakers, the appearance of great strength and panorama. Some, including the architects Yamasaki and Mayer, have described it as "crude", "ugly", even "brutal". To assess these impressions fairly one must take account of the Indian interpretation of the new capital, and particularly of the Prime Minister's desire for it to symbolize India's newly gained independence and strength. The extremes of Punjab heat and cold, rain and dust storms, poverty and political conflict also need to be considered. Norma Evenson's summary presents a persuasive and sympathetic interpretation of Chandigarh's monumentality: It is precisely because India at the time Chandigarh was projected was a new nation, poor, technically undeveloped, and politically divided that she needed symbols of power and permanence, and of all the architects in the world, Le Corbusier, with his continuing and obstinate belief in the essential seriousness of architecture, was able to give to the capitol complex the unity and strength which can come only from the impress of one strong mind and one long-embattled will. Disciplined by climate, poverty, and primitive technology, the buildings of the capitol complex rise from the earth, massive sculptural forms of rough concrete, uncompromisingly asserting their presence against the vast sweep of plain and the distant mountains. Battered by rains and dust storms, scorched by a brutal sun and buffeted by winds, these structures have been laboriously built by the toil of many men. They have been built to last. As India herself stood alone and threatened when the city was planned, so the capitol structures stand within a hostile world. (Evenson 1966: 89)

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Some architectural writers interpret Chandigarh's monumentality and Le Corbusier's "brutalist" period generally as an expression of a machismo complex. In this vein they suggest a kind of "pop" psychoanalytic interpretation of his reference to a "naked man", his use of a six-foot male figure with one arm raised as a standard measure of "human scale," an engraved "monument" of this figure on a building as a signature and logo, a "modulor" strip calibrated on the basis of the six-foot male to calculate and measure ideal proportions, his preference for the right-angle and walking erect, and his anthropomorphic analogies between the human figure and buildings and cities (see Jencks [1976] 1973: 80, 99-110 for examples). It is possible to find quotations by Le Corbusier which seem to invite this kind of psychoanalytic interpretation: The spirit of geometry produces tangible shapes, expressions of architectural realities: upright walls, perceptible surfaces between four walls, the right angle, hallmark of balance and stability. I call it spirit under the sign of the set-square, and my description is confirmed by the traditional name of "allantica" given to Mediterranean architectural art, for "allantica" means antique, based on the set-square . . . strong objectivity of forms, under the intense light of a Mediterranean sun: male architecture, (quoted in Evenson 1966: 73)

Such references to a "male architecture" do not necessarily express Le Corbusier's personal machismo complex; a direct psychoanalytic study would be needed to establish that conclusion. Pending this study, I would suggest that the architectural expression of "maleness" or "femaleness" be interpreted cosmologically and semiotically. One day when I was watching a festival at a small shrine in Madras city centered on a shiva lingam, one of two elderly gentlemen standing in the crowd near me commented, without addressing me directly, "shiva lingam and yoni, the male principle and the female principle". The second gentleman then added meditatively, "Yes, the alpha and omega of the universe." These comments were expressing a very traditional, conscious cosmological interpretation of the shiva lingam and could not plausibly be regarded as the speakers' unconscious expressions of repressed wishes. Analogously, the art historian Wittkower's correlating of the spread of domed churches during the Renaissance with the cult of the Virgin does not imply a conversion from machismo to feminism by the Pope or by architects who built domed churches. The association between church domes and females, church spires and males

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remained cosmological and theological (Wittkover 1971, Pt. 1.5; Rykvert [1983] 1980: 137-51). A semiotic interpretation of domes and spires, shiva Ungarns, high-rise and horizontal structures does not deny the potential validity of the cosmological, theological, or psychological interpretations but abstracts from them in order to arrive at a general analysis of the kinds of signs involved in all these and other cases and the possible kinds of interpretations of these signs. Returning to Paul Wheatley's cosmological symbols of the ancient ceremonial shrines, we can now see that the astrobiological principles of axiality and cardinality are both symbolized by architectural indexical signs, which Peirce defines as physically connected with their objects in such a way that the objects determine their respective signs to indicate the direction of the objects in relation to the position of the interpreter of the signs. The principle of micro-macro parallelism represented by the imago mundi is symbolized by iconic signs, defined by Peirce as pictorial images, diagrams, or metaphors whose relational structures are homologous to the relational structures of their objects. Both indexical signs and iconic signs are "natural signs", for their meanings depend not on conventional interpretations of the signs but on physical or structural relations of the signs to their objects. The verbal symbolism of the cosmological and cosmogonic myths and sacred histories, however, depends for its meaning on conventional usage and how it is interpreted. In Peirce's classification, signs of this kind are called symbols or symbolic signs. Strictly speaking, no kind of sign has any "meaning" until it is interpreted, but individual inconic and indexical signs may have physical and structural relations to their objects which do not depend on conventional usages (see Singer 1984a for discussion of the theory of cultural symbolism). This kind of semiotic analysis applies to Chandigarh's architectural monuments and symbols because of the structural correspondence between Corbusier's master plan and the ancient Indian architectural mandala. There is one important gap in the demonstration which prevents us from concluding that the semiotic of Chandigarh is identical with the semiotic of Jaipur or even with that of Madurai or Delhi: the residents of Chandigarh complain that there is no sense of unifying identity in the city. Their complaints sound more like those of the residents of New Delhi or Washington, D.C. than of

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the residents of a traditional Indian city. Perhaps Chandigarh has some elements of modernity in it after all, not so remote from Louis Wirth's definition of urbanism as a way of life! If we extend Peirce's semiotic definition of personal identity to the collective identity of a city as constituted by a name, a history, and a character, we would say that Chandigarh has a name, which incidentally is taken from the local name of the goddess "Chandi," but is still forming its history and character. A city primarily of government employees, lacking the well-defined social structure of religious sects, castes, and extended families, as well as a long history and tradition, its character looks "heterogenetic" indeed. Yet one hears of more "orthogenetic" trends too, of a folk artist using debris from the Corbusier construction to build impressive art work; of sectarian religious revivals, of impressive museum displays of Indian art history. The hordes of squatters who have set up their tent colonies in the spacious streets give the city's planners and admirers of Corbusier's architecture deep anxieties, but at least have added some of the variety of life and color one finds in the "traditional" Indian city (D'Souza 1968; Schiff 1984; India Today, Jan. 31, 1984). Evenson's sobering conclusion to her book on Chandigarh strikes a reasonable, hopeful and characteristically American note: In the final analysis, a city is not the creation of its planners; it is the creation of its people through time. A city planner is not God and cannot bring life into existence, and however much he might have wished it, Le Corbusier could not turn a provincial Indian capital into another Paris. The cities we love were not planned for this, but have come to be loved through the workings of time, circumstance, and perhaps just the right combination of luck and human destiny. At present Chandigarh represents a generous investment of courage and hope, of talent and devoted effort, and it will continue to require such investments. If Chandigarh is ever to become a true city, however, it will be only when its people have given it a history, when it has become free of its planners to acquire a destiny of its own. Ultimately the people of Chandigarh must achieve the city they deserve. (Evenson 1966: 99)

A more Indian conclusion is symbolized by the story Le Corbusier told about the end of his first visit to the Chandigarh site: That Modulor strip had been in my pocket, in a small Kodak film box, since 1946. An adventure befell it, such a pretty one that one may tell it under the title "Birth of the Legend":

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"On 28th March, 1951, at Chandigarh, at sunset, we had set off in a jeep across the still empty site of the capital - Varma, Fry, Pierre Jeanneret and myself. Never had the spring been so lovely, the air so pure after a storm on the day before, the horizons so clear, the mango trees so gigantic and mangificent. We were at the end of our task (the first): we had created the city (the town plan). "During that last visit of the site before my return to Paris, the Modulor had fallen from the jeep on to the soil of the fields that were to disappear to make way for the capital. It is there now, in the very heart of the place, integrated in the soil. Soon it will flower in all the measurements of the first city of the world to be organized all of a piece in accordance with that harmonious scale." (quoted in Corbusier's book Modulor 2: 32-34)

The Indian symbolism of Le Corbusier's story depends on the traditions derived from the ancient architectural manuals, according to which the magic diagram — or mandala — drawn on the land as a ground plan for the construction of a city and a temple should include the drawing of a kind of primeval man or person called a purusha (in the västu-purusha mandala) (see Figure 3, p. 128). According to some of these traditions, when a construction was completed, the architect was buried in the soil under his construction, literally or symbolically (Volwahsen 1969: 43-58 for a description of the construction rites and the geometry of the constructions). It is not known how much of this traditional Indian lore was known to Le Corbusier. He often denied knowledge of esoteric symbolism. When his book on The Modulor was published in 1950 and was exhibited together with the Modulor strip in the window of a bookstore on the Boulevard Saint Germain in Paris which specialized in the "metaphysical sciences", Le Corbusier wrote that he "was credited with a thousand intentions he had never entertained, a hundred abilities he certainly does not possess, and contacts with the eternal past which he has never had the good fortune to establish" (Le Corbusier Modulor 2\ 32-3). At the same time in 1950, Le Corbusier wrote that he found the key to his six-foot man in a book called Natural Architecture, to which his attention had been drawn by M. Rouhier of the same Vega bookshop. He was especially interested in the numerical values, such as 108, which had mystical significance among the Hindus. In the same book . . . a Hindu value is given as decisive: The Purusha of the Brahmins: a man lying fully outstretched, the arms forming an extension of the body. . . . I, as a layman, find this Purusha most attractive.

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Le Corbusier Modulor 2: 195-196; cf. Kramrisch in Chandra 1967 for an authoritative interpretation of Purusha in Indian art and architecture; cf. Beck 1976; Staal 1983: 186).

At Chandigarh Le Corbusier "modernized" the Brahmins' Purusha by standing him erect with one arm upright and making him the measure for the human scale of the city and an icon of cosmic harmonies.

October 11, 1984

4. Postscript The parallel between modulor and purusha is even closer than Le Corbusier's description and sketch of the Brahmins' purusha suggests. In his recently published study Agni, The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar (1983), Frits Staal has pointed out that the basic units and dimensions of the bricks for the fire altar depend on the height of the sacrificer (the yajmäna): Before anything can be done, the ycqmäna has therefore to be measured. Standing with hands raised above his head, the distance from the tips of his fingers to the ground is copied on a measuring stick, subsequently divided into five equal parts. (Staal 1983,1: 196)

Staal does not give a specific height for the sacrificer since, he says, it varies from person to person. In a supplementary study of Vedic geometry included in volume II of Staal's study, Seidenberg gives IVi feet as the distance from the tips of the sacrificer's fingers to the ground (in Staal 1983, II: 96). Seidenberg, moreover, makes explicit one definition of purusha as the sacrificer and a linear measure: The basic falcon-shaped altar (a variant of which occurs in the Agnicayana ritual) had an area of l l h square purusas: the word purusa means "man" and is, on the one hand, a linear measure — namely the height of a man (the sacrificer) with his arms stretched upwards (about TlA feet, say) and, on the other, an areal measure (about 56'Λ square feet). (Seidenberg in Staal 1983,11:96)

Seven and one half feet comes to 228.6 centimeters, which is pretty close to the 226 centimeters that Le Corbusier gives as the

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distance for the same measure of his modulor figure standing with left arm upraised. Le Corbusier was aware of the parallel (Modulor 2: 195-196). Staal and Seidenberg both discuss the hypothesis that the Vedic fire ritual, the Agnicayana sacrifice, may have derived from a preVedic prototype of the Indus and Iranian civilizations. To this discussion Staal adds the suggestion, made by Paul Mus and several other scholars, that some of the Vedic and pre-Vedic rituals in South and Southeast Asia included human sacrifice. While these rituals did not stipulate that the architect be sacrificed, their symbolism can be plausibly connected with Le Corbusier's "pretty story" about the loss of his modulor strip at Chandigarh. That connection becomes apparent when the symbolism of the rituals is linked, as Staal links it, to the Rig Vedic "Hymn of the Cosmic Man" (or Purusha), from whose dismemberment everything is created (Staal 1983,1: 113-125). Bearing in mind Durkheim's definition of a ritual as the dramatization of an origin myth, one can imagine that the residents of Chandigarh will some day celebrate an annual festival which will include a reenactment of Le Corbusier's story about the loss of his modulor strip. Even if such a festival should not become a sacred ritual, it may become a cultural performance in which the burial of a 226 cm. modulor strip, or the burning of a IVi foot purusha stick, will symbolize the birth of the city from the sacrifice of its primordial architect. Embedded in traditional Indian ceremonies and myths, such a festival may yet provide the unifying sense of civic identity which many residents miss in Chandigarh. The objection that Indians would not be willing to honor a foreign architect in this way is not decisive, for there are good precedents. The Sanskritist van Buitenen argued that Maya, the architect who built the splendid Assembly Hall in the Mahabharata, was probably a foreigner and a refugee from the ancient Persian empire after the Achaemenids were defeated by Alexander. His argument is supported by the example of the Magadhan capital of Pataliputra built in the imperial style of Persopolis: There is nothing inherently improbable in the assumption that the description of Yudhisthira's great hall, built by an alien Asura from the north with his own myrmidons, who fetched his necessaries from the north, was patterned on the "sumptuous palaces" that Megasthenes observed in 302 B.C. in the Pataliputra of Chandragupta Maurya, the capital of

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a country that otherwise figures prominently in The Assembly (van Buitenen 1975: 9)

Hall.

Closer t o home we have t h e precedent of a national capital planned by a foreign architect in Washington, D.C. Originally designed in 1791 by the French officer, artist, engineer and architect Pierre Charles L'Enfant at the request of President Washington; t h e plan for the "Federal C i t y " embodied an urban geometry of squares, circles and triangles designed to provide wide reciprocal vistas, parks and a regular gridiron of streets and avenues. Jefferson had sent L ' E n f a n t maps and plans of Paris, Amsterdam, Milan and other European cities he visited at t h e time, at L'Enfant's request. (Grant 1932: 4-5 nl). The L ' E n f a n t plan was slow to be realized and recognized for financial, political, and demographic reasons. The government did not move into the capitol complex until 1800, and by then m a n y departures f r o m L'Enfant's plan had been introduced, including t h e dismissal of L'Enfant in 1792. Until the Civil War, descriptions of Washington sound in some respects like the early descriptions of Chandigarh. Charles Dickens wrote that the city consisted of spacious avenues that begin in nothing and lead nowhere; streets a mile long that only want houses, roads and inhabitants; public buildings that need a public to be complete; . . . One might fancy the season over, and most of the houses gone out of town with their masters, (quoted in WPA Guide [1983] 1942: 36)

L'Enfant, denied the $100,000 he asked of Congress f o r his services and offered $3000 on t h e recommendation of President George Washington, died in 1825 in poverty and obscurity. His remains were moved t o Arlington National Cemetery in 1909 and reburied with military honors in a t o m b . His original plan was resurrected in 1871-1874 and reaffirmed and extended in 1901 by the report of the McMillan Park Commission (Burnham, McKim, Olmstead, and Saint Gaudens), which proposed t o "restore the original plan and to adapt the principles of its design to new and enlarged conditions" (quoted in WPA Guide, p. 64-65: See also Caemmerer 1 9 7 0 ; K i t e 1929;Martin 1961: 27). In 1968 L'Enfant Plaza, a shopping and office center in the Southwest Urban Renewal Area designed by t h e architect I.M. Pei in steel and glass was described in a Washington Guidebook

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as having done "justice to L'Enfant's original concepts of combining efficient urban function with impressive grandeur" (Walker 1969: 285). The text on a 1983 tourist map describes Washington physically as "the most un-American of major U.S. cities. There are no skyscrapers, no smog and little dirt. It is lush green and expansive". The comparison of L'Enfant's Washington with Le Corbusier's Chandigarh is not far-fetched. As von Moos has noted, Le Corbusier's modifications of Mayer's master plan for Chandigarh returned to the tradition of Western pre-Howardian town planning and "evoked the grandiose urban geometry of L'Enfant's Washington or Haussmann's Paris", as well as Lutyens' New Delhi (von Moos 1979: 218). Nor would the idea of an annual festival celebrating the birth of Chandigarh have displeased Le Corbusier, for he himself had included a New Years' festival in his plans which he later withdrew. Nor are the symbols Le Corbusier designed for Chandigarh's buildings, tapestries, and the "valley of contemplation", only "the blown-up trademarks symbolizing Le Corbusier's architectural mythology". These symbols, especially the modulor figure, the city plan on sewer covers, and the monument of the open hand, were also intended as "public icons", "an elementary language of heraldic forms symbolizing the essential values in which a community of men is able to recognize itself and its spiritual aims" (von Moos 1979: 290-291).

December 27, 1984

5. Summary and conclusion In my Madras studies I tried to find out what happened to the living tradition of Sanskritic Hinduism when its practioners moved to the city, acquired a modern education, went into commerce, industry and the professions. Their tendency to compartmentalize the traditional and the modern sectors of their lives and to use such adaptive strategies as ritual neutralization, vicarious ritualization and reinterpretation of essential tenets indicated that they were modernizing Sanskritic Hinduism by incorporating innovations and "traditionalizing" them into the cultural structure and social

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organization of their traditions. These adaptive strategies were used even against the hostile political attacks mounted by the Dravidian movements against Sanskritic Hinduism. An extrapolation from the Madras observations into the past and the future suggested the hypothesis that the processes of "orthogenetic" and "heterogenetic" transformation postulated by Redfield in "The Cultural Role of Cities" (1954) were going on simultaneously in Indian civilization and that Indians were daily becoming more modern in urban centers like Madras without becoming less "Indian". The conference on the modernization of occupational cultures showed some significant support for this hypothesis in other Indian cities, as well as some significant variations and exceptions (Singer ed. 1973;Owensand Nandy 1977). The earliest application of Redfield's conception of a civilization as a historic structure of interacting little and great traditions to an Indian holy city was made in L.P. Vidyarthi's The Sacred Complex in Hindu Gaya (1961). Dr. Vidyarthi who grew up in the city of Gaya had done field work, (1951-1954), on the Gayawal, the pilgrimage center priests, for his M.A. at Lucknow University under the supervision of Professor D.N. Majumdar. After graduate studies at the University of Chicago (1956-1958), Dr. Vidyarthi returned to Gaya to do a second field study of the city. While the Gayawal were still a major focus of his study, their changing roles as "sacred specialists" within a "sacred complex" which also included a "sacred center", a "sacred geography", and "sacred performances" were described and analyzed. A pilgrimage center of great antiquity, Gaya according to Dr. Vidyarthi's ethnographic study, provided common symbols and rituals and a meeting place for different sects and castes, and for devotees from different linguistic and geographic regions and of different economic and social status. It was not always easy to separate "great tradition" from "little tradition" in the details of worship and types of priests. The "intricate combination" of different levels of tradition indicated an underlying continuity of Indian religions from tribes, to peasants, to city-dwellers who met at the pilgrimage center at Gaya. This mixture of the different levels of tradition was already evident, Dr. Vidyarthi pointed out, in the Vaya Purana and other ancient texts and helped to form a synthesis of Hinduism as well as a sense of all-India unity before the coming of modern nationalism. Concentrating on the recent history of the Gayawal from 1810

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to 1955, Dr. Vidyarthi's book traces how changes in patronage in industry and transportation, the coming of political democracy and secularism, have contracted and reorganized the "sacred complex" at Gaya. Professor Vidyarthi's book stimulated other related studies. One of the most important of these was The Sacred Complex of Kashi: A Microcosm of Indian Civilization (1979) by L.P. Vidyarthi, B.N. Saraswati and Makhan Jha. Funded by the Indian Council of Social Science Research for a five year period (1972-1977), this volume grew out of a group research project organized by Professor Vidyarthi, the field operations supervised by B.N., Saraswati, and field data collected by five younger anthropologists. After about 20 months in the field (1972-1973), preliminary summaries of the research were presented and discussed at a workshop seminar on "The Sacred Complex in India (Kashi)" which met for three days in Ranchi (1973) and was published in the Journal of Social Research (1974: XVII: 1-137). Baidyanath Saraswati, a coauthor of the Kashi volume, who supervised the field research, also published a small volume in 1975 on Kashi: Myth and Reality of a Classical Cultural Tradition, which includes the result of his earlier study of Kashi asceties done jointly with Dr. Surajit Sinha (1967-1969) for the Anthropological Survey of India, and of his 1969-1971 study of Kashi pundits under the auspices of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Saraswati's book also contains some interesting observations on the overlapping between the secular and the sacred in the "sacred city" and the co-existence of a popular urban culture in Kashi. In contrast to the books on the "tradtional" and "sacred" cities of Gaya and Kashi stands Professor Vidyarthi's study of modern Ranchi. Another product of group research, this study was published in 1968 as Cultural Configuration of Ranchi: Survey of an Emerging Industrial City of Tribal India (1960-1962). The Ranchi study represents another major focus of Vidyarthi's research interests the tribals of Bihar. This interest, first stimulated by a visit in 1954 to the Maler, grew into a deep professional commitment, with several tribal monographs and applied studies of tribal development, leadership and industralization resulting. Although he agreed with Julian Steward's foreword to the monograph on the Maler (1963) that the tribal "little tradition" of the Maler did not reflect India's "great tradition" of castes, occupational

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specialists, and urban and political concentrations, Vidyarthi nevertheless viewed tribal culture and even the Ranchi cultural configuration within a Redfieldian perspective as "a dimension of the little tradition" of Indian civilization, in Surajit Sinha's phrase. According to Vidyarthi, Ranchi conforms to both the "orthogenetic" and the "heterogenetic" types of city; the heterogenetic character of the city has come to predominate as the local folk cultures of the tribals, "among whom the local morals and religious norms still prevail", are being largely replaced by cultural forms built around the production and distribution of goods and administration (Vidyarthi 1968: 3). Starting as a small tribal town in 1834, Ranchi formed a rural municipality in 1869 and by 1961 had grown to be the fifth largest city in Bihar, a district and state headquarters. With its coal and iron mines, and heavy machine industry, built with Russian and Czech assistance, Ranchi is well on its way to becoming a national and international city, a contrasting "modern" city to pair with the "traditional" city of Gaya. In 1974, attracted by a dramatic debate between urban renewal and restoration of "Market Square", I started a series of summer revisits to Lloyd Warner's "Yankee City". Since the debate had in part been sparked by architectural drawings and pictures of a three-dimensional model, I made a preliminary semiotic analysis of the issues (Singer 1977, 1987a). The contrast between the American and the Indian conceptions of the relationship between tradition and innovation also impressed me at this time. In the United States the growing interest in preservation and restoration was nostalgic, and subservient to a dominant ideology of innovation. In India the interest in modernization seemed to subserve a belief in an underlying reality of an eternal tradition. Hence the two (perhaps too simplified) contrasting formulas "all restoration is innovation" for the United States and "all innovation is restoration" for India. These comparative reflections on innovation and tradition in "Yankee City" and in Madras renewed my interest in updating the Madras studies, an interest that was also stimulated by the appearance of some interesting new studies of Madras and Madurai by Lewandowski, Appadurai and Breckenridge, Pressler and Fuller. When Paul Wheatley consequently asked me to participate in a workshop on "Meanings of the City", it appeared to me an auspicious occasion for applying a Peircean semiotic analysis to update "The Cultural Role of Cities". Wheatley himself had spent at least a decade

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since 1969 exploring the concept of the ancient traditional city as a configuration of symbols, characterized by the astrobiological principles of an Axis Mundi, cardinal orientation, and micro-macro cosmic parallelism. His conclusions seemed to offer a promising point of departure for testing the use of the language analogy to interpret traditional, modern, and post-modern architecture. Susan Lewandowski's report that the "traditional" city of Madurai, which conformed in its architectural structure to the three astrobiological principles, was also a "modern" city, reemphasized my earlier, and her later, inverse recognition that the "modern" metropolis of Madras also showed many features of a "traditional" orthogenetic urban center. These mixings of city types not only raised the question whether the three astrobiological principles are sufficient criteria for defining a "traditional" city, but also whether a newly constructed "modern" city would show "traditional" features. The observations, by Evenson and others, that Punjab's new capital city of Chandigarh indeed shows some striking traditional features of Indian cities — for example, in its planned grid with a "cosmic cross", its use of anthropomorphic names and proportions for the different parts and relations, the monumentality of some of the buildings, and the classifications of sections and buildings by function and income (although not by caste) - are relevant here. To answer David Pingree's question whether such analogies between "modern" and "traditional" urban forms are historically significant or are the accidental resemblances in superficial designs would require a detailed systematic historical comparison of Indian and Western architectural traditions. I am not competent to undertake such a study but would like to suggest several reasons why the modern-traditional parallels in Chandigarh are probably more than a coincidence in built forms. Considering the problem from the point of view of a semiotics of architecture, we noted that there was a "community of interpretations" among Prime Minister Nehru, the Punjabi officials, and the Western city planners and architects selected, that the new Capital should symbolize India's newly-won independence, strength, and capacity to endure against natural and social obstacles. The agreement was particularly close between Nehru and LeCorbusier in their desire to introduce a new form of architecture and a new way of life, "unfettered by the traditions of the past". If in spite

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of such a joint resolve to build an entirely new capital city, traditional Indian, and Western forms should persist in its plans and construction may be explained by at least three factors: (1) use of the human figure as the unit of measure, proportions, and metaphor; (2) the practical methods of determining center and periphery and cardinal directions; and (3) the cosmological and cosmogenic interpretations of the relation between the human being and the city. LeCorbusier has emphasized, as noted, his use of the modulor as a technical measure of length, scale, and proportions for the Chandigarth constructions. He has also emphasized that the modulor should not be used mechanically by masons and carpenters but only as guided by the architects' creative and esthetic intuitions (although he once proposed that the modulor be used to standardize building design and the manufacture of furniture). Because LeCorbusier based the modulor on the figure of a six foot man with left arm upraised, it bears a strong resemblance to the purusha figure in Indian tradition. Even if the purusha of the Vedic sacrifice is not exactly IVi feet tall, as Seidenberg estimated, it has many of the same functions in the construction of a Vedic altar (Staal), a Temple (Kramrisch and Beck), a palace (Inden), a house (Moore), and a city (Volwahsen). That is to say, the purusha and the modulor both used a human figure as a standard of reference for measuring the spatial dimensions, scale and proportions in constructing buildings and cities, as well as a metapor for naming the parts of constructions and their interrelations. Corbusier admitted to an acquaintance with the Brahmin purusha and even sketched the figure in a prone position with both arms extended. It is unlikely that his was the source for Corbusier's idea of the modulor. More likely the platonic-pythagorean mathematical cosmology behind the Vitruvius' figure combined with the Old Testament account of creation and revived by Italian renaissance artists was modulor's predecessor in Western architectural traditions, as Wittkower has pointed out. If Renaissance theory held that architecture must conform to the proportions of the human body because God created man in his own image, it follows that the proportions of the human body are perfect. This theory survived into the nineteenth century, when it was modified by the theory of the golden section as the only true proportions and by a theory of dynamic symmetry (Wittkower 1970). Although Corbusier was aware of his platonic-pythagorean and

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renaissance legacy, and was often reminded of it, he nevertheless insisted on the originality of his modulor concept and used an engraving of the human figure on some of Chandigarh's buildings as a logo and personal signature. It is possible to trace a parallel Indian architectural tradition with a cosmological interpretation of the relations of individual men to a cosmic man that goes back at least as early as the Rig Vedic Hymn 10.90 (Staal 1983: I, 113-125; Brown 1931). Some of the Upanishads transform this relation into a metaphysical identity of the individual self (Atman) and the world spirit {Brahman). Unlike his fellow Swiss, C.G. Jung, who interpreted the Vedic and Upanishadic passages about purusha psychologically, LeCorbusier disclaimed knowledge and interest in this kind of metaphysical knowledge and would have denied that modulor was a "symbol" of his "libido", mother, or the "world spirit". Modulor remained for him a measure of human scale and of good proportions (Jung 1912 [1956]; Singer 1984a: chapter 6). It may be that the cosmology of purusha is more mystical than that of modulor. Even if that is so, purusha as a measure of human scale is no less practical than modulor. Staal's detailed description of the ancient methods used for measuring a Vedic altar not only testifies to this assertion but also describes the practical method used for determining the center, circumference, and cardinal directions of a construction (Staal 1983: I, 244-265). The fact that this method is essentially the same for the construction of a temple (Kramrisch 1946: 227-270), a house (Moore 1983), a palace (Inden 1982), and a city (Volwahsen 1969: 43-58), explains the prevalence of the three astrobiological principles in both traditional and modern Indian cities. The association of these principles with an elaborate cosmology and cosmography articulated in myths, philosophies and the sciences provides a framework of symbolic signs to interpret and explains the indexical and iconic signs in the Indian city. A mantrika in Madras, for example, showed me a large diagram on which the figure of the zodiacal man was surrounded by the planets and zodiacal mansions. He said he used this diagram together with correlated lists of directions, planets, and deities, and with several auxiliary aids, to diagnose and treat the symptoms of people who consult him about "ghosts" and "mental troubles". He used the same apparatus to answer "modern questions — to predict the outcome of an examination, the behavior of the stock-

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market, or whether the anthropologist would return home by plane or ship (Singer [ 1980]; 123-127, 146-147). Kapila Vatsyayan has recently suggested that when Indian cultural traditions are studied as an "organic whole" they will be found to conform to a small number of general principles very similar to the astrobiological principles. She has attempted to show that such principles are semiotically expressed in Vedic ritual, in architecture, and in the performing arts of dance, drama, sculpture, and music. She believes that an organic unity is expressed in these different media of the arts and embodies a characteristic and distinctive Indian world view which persists as a living tradition in the sastric texts as well as in the non-literate traditions, particularly in regions like Kerala. For practical reasons Vatsyayan has restricted her investigation to the concept of movement of man in space. The description of her approach suggests a dialectical interplay between the Indian world view and the performing arts: . . . perhaps if one single moment were devoted to thinking about the common phenomenon of the standing Man, then a whole cosmic world would open out. Thus the mere fact of my physicality determines certain possibilities of relationship with space outside the relationship with the self within. (Vatsyayan 1983: 4)

Vatsyayan's autodefinition of India's living cultural traditions might well be taken as the subject for a positive-style historiographic critique. The outcome of such a critique need not be destructive of the living traditions, but may enrich them with a greater awareness of their historic sources. Citing an early text, the Agnipurana, Vatsyayan points out how the analogy with the human body, purusha, or figure of man, is "consistently followed in the structural plan of the temple". The text "speaks of the door of the temple as its mouth, the platform terminating the trunk of the superstructure as the shoulders (skanda) of the Purusha, the bhadra or projected arms, and the jangha and the lower most moulding as the feet (padnka)" Vatsyayan (1983: 74). Vatsyayan cites other examples from these ancient texts "to show that this process of perceiving the material world as the figure of man and of purifying the physical body of man to a point where symbolically he achieves an aspect of Cosmic man is central to the

Summary and conclusion 117 architectural design and functions of the temple as a proportionately reduced image of the cosmos" (Kapila Vatsyayan, The Square and the Circle of the Indian Arts 1983: 75). The general conclusion Vatsyayan draws from her analysis of the ancient texts and available archeological studies of Indian architecture and sculpture is that "the fundamental concepts of ManNature relationship, along with the common vocabulary of myth and legand, find a place in every constituent part of the Indian Temple". These architectural motifs are not only decorative embellishments of plastic beauty; they reveal that "the builder of the temple was delightfully playing with the basic and fundamental concerns through a language of mass, volume and line in a manner which was intrinsically symbolic. . . " (Vatsyayan 1983: 94). Taking her original sources for the artistic superstructure as expressing the world view of the Upanishads and the Brahmanas, Vatsyayan is able to conclude that although the basic unit of the physical body of man as measure becomes a uniform methodology for creating an artistic composition in space, yet it is finally a tool of expression and must ultimately be transcended. On the plane of 'form' the square and circle determine the principle of composition. (1983: 79)

How far this principle of composition can be extrapolated backward in time to the Indus valley civilization is a question on which Vatsyayan's book is reluctant to speculate in the absence of deciphered texts. Some of the archeological evidence from seals and excavations at Harappa, Mohenjo Daro and more recent sites in India, however, suggests that Vatsyayan may have started her search for principles of continuity at too late a historical point, that, as W. Norman Brown has written "There is undoubtedly a large element of continuity between the pre-Aryan Indus Valley Harappa civilization and the civilization of later Hindu India" (Brown 1972: 21). The figure of a dancer, another of a male seated in a yoga position, terra cotta figurines, the rectangular grid of streets and houses built from brick, public works and citadels are some of the indications that the square and the circle antedated the Vedic and Sanskrit texts (cf. John Irwin 1973-1976; Seidenberg 1983; Possehl 1986). These archeological indications would seem to support Kramrisch's claim that Thousands of years before they were given verbal expression in the Veda

(the Scripture), and Vastu sastra and silpa sastra (the text books on the

118 A semiotic of the city arts) the traditions of India were embodied in the form of Indian art. . . The tradition, however, remains unbroken, for the themes and forms of the art of the Indus valley during the third and second millenia B.C. are continued in Indian art when it reemerges in the third century B.C. (Kramrisch 1954: 9-10).

6. Epilogue Several historians who have read the preceding pages have raised some searching questions about historical evidence for many of the statements made. Their questions usually concern specific assertions, for example, that the purusha was lxh feet tall, but also reflect underlying critical and empirical reservations, specifically concerning long past history, which must be taken seriously by any attempt to apply a semiotic anthropological approach to the study of traditional and modern cities. This critical historical empiricism tends to be sceptical of assumptions about the great antiquity of "traditional" cities and their architectural plans. It asks for the specific dates, locations, and archeological documentation of actual constructions. It distrusts "deductive" and "speculative" hypotheses, suggested by architectural manuals and texts, about actual constructions or about the intentions of their builders. In the absence of specific evidence to the contrary, it assumes that change and discontinuity are more frequent than recurrence and continuity in social and cultural history. Cases of similarities and of historical continuity are to be explained by borrowing and diffusion rather than by independent invention or even by reinvention of a tradition. For anyone familiar with the history of cultural anthropology, the position of these historians is reminiscent of the position Franz Boas called "the historical method", which he contrasted with "the comparative method". In his famous 1896 paper on "the Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology" (Boas 1896 [ 1940]), in which he marshalled a critique against evolutionary theory and generalizations, Boas described the comparative method as "deductive" in contrast to the "inductive" historical method for investigating the local historical development of particular customs and beliefs in a limited cultural area. Forcing phenomena into the strait-jacket of a theory is opposed to the inductive process by which the actual relations of definite phenomena may

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be derived. The latter is no other than the much ridiculed historical method. Its way of proceeding is, of course, no longer that of former times, when slight similarities of culture were considered proof of relationships, but it duly recognizes the results obtained by comparative studies. Its application is based, first of all, on a well-defined, small geographical territory, and its comparisons are not extended beyond the limits of the culture area that forms the basis of the study. Only when definite results have been obtained in regard to this area is it permissable to extend the horizon beyond its limits. . . . (Boas 1896 [1940]: 277).

Boas' historical method and critique of evolutionary theories of culture became the foundation for an entire school of anthropology, particularly in the United States, where it recruited such wellknown anthropologists as Lowie, Kroeber, Sapir, Goldenweiser, Radin, Benedict, and Mead, among others. Beginning in the 1920s the Boas historical method had to compete with a rival school of synchronic functionalism, advocated by Malinowski and RadcliffeBrown. Synchronic functionalism did not share Boas' self-restraining ordinance about making wide-ranging cross-cultural and universal generalizations concerning social and cultural types. Not until the 1950s was there a serious effort to combine localized histories of culture growth and process with the comparative study of generalizations about the structure and organization of cultures and civilizations in Eggan's method of controlled comparison, Redfield's social anthropology of civilizations, Geertz's thick description, Dumont's hierarchical and equalitarian types of society. The comparison of Corbusier's use of the modulor in Chandigarh with the use of the purusha in "traditional" Indian cities is essentially an attempt to combine a Redfieldian social anthropology of civilizations with Boasian localized histories of culture patterns and processes — at a semiotic level of analysis. From this point of view, the parallels between the modulor and the purusha are semiotic parallels. They are parallels between architectural signs, their significations, and uses. When used as linear measures in constructions, both modulor and purusha are indexical signs. When used to mark proportion and scale, they are iconic signs transferring in a magic diagram, or mandala, the prototypical structure of the human figure to the structure of a house, a temple, a palace, or a city. When used as an emblem or logo, the modulor and the purusha become symbols — the personal signature of the architect, or metaphor for a living organism, or a microcosmic symbol of a cosmic

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reality. In all these cases as architectural signs and instruments, the modulor and purusha do not necessarily imply the actual existence of particular constructions. At most, they imply possible constructions, or at least, in the case of their iconic use, a blurring between the possible and the actual, as Peirce and Redfield both observed: "In contemplating a painting", Peirce wrote, "there is a moment when we lose consciousness that it is not the thing, the distinction of the real and the copy vanishes, and . . . it is for a moment a pure dream — not any particular existence and yet not general. At that moment we are contemplating an icon" (Peirce quoted in Redfield 1962: 471-473). Since my paper implicitly assumed, although did not state explicitly, that the purusha of the Vedic sacrificer, the vastu-purusha mandala used in the construction of temples and houses, and Corbusier's modulor used in the construction of Chandigarh were all measures and prototypes based on the human body, it is necessary to give some of the reasons for making such an assumption. It may be useful t o note in the sources I used in the paper some indications of similarities in the architectural signs as anthropocentric measures and prototypes. That the measurements and arrangements of the bricks in the Vedic altar produce a structure that is correlated with the structure of the human body is explicitly indicated in the following passages from Staal: Prajapati and Purusha, both generally conceived in the shape of a man, also assume the shape of a bird. . . Each of the seven areas [of the fire altar] is called purusha, a term that acquires geometrical meaning in the context of altar construction. . . The four squares in the middle are together called atman, "body" or "self'. (Stahl 1983:1, 65-67)

This is not a statement of Staal's own opinion but his summary of an interpretation attributed to an ancient sage, Sandilya, in the Satapatha Brahmana. In another passage which Staal quotes from one of the Upanishads, the bricks of the fire-altar are compared to a man: . . . Its bricks are spring, summer, rains, autumn, winter. It has a head, two wings, a back and a tail: (thus) this fire is like a man. (Staal 1983: 1,69)

In his discussion of this problem, Staal also says that "though many of the interpretations of the Agnicayana found in the Brahmanas

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and especially in the Satapatha, are obvious rationalizations, they continue to inspire scholars. . . " (1983: I, 67-68). In India these interpretations "were destined to have a great future in the Upanishads and the Vedanta": The jajamana's [sacrificer's] identity with Prajapati and with the fire altar, the center of which is called its "body" or "self' . . . was generalized into the identity of atman and brahman in every human being, which is one of the cornerstones of Indian philosophy. (Staal 1983,1: 68)

For Staal, the fact that the Brahmanas and the Upanishads contain interpretations and speculations of the Vedic ritual "does not imply that such interpretations do not refer t o actual ritual activities, but that they do so indirectly since they presupposed such activities" (Staal 1983, I: 70). Whatever the eventual verdict may be on the merits of these opinions on the textual identifications of the sacrificer purusha with the Vedic altar, and with the cosmic Purusha in the Vedic hymn, it seems fairly clear that Staal's quoted identifications do not assert literal and substantive identities. The identifications refer to structural homologies (a bird's wings are like a man's arms), and to the use of words such as " b o d y " and " s e l f ' in a metaphorical sense, and to cosmogonic myths such as Rig Veda 10.90, which explain the origins of ordinary events, practices, and people. The bird-shaped Vedic altar is structurally homologous to the sacrificer, some of its parts are given anthropomorphic names, and it is connected in m y t h with the cosmic man of the Rig Vedic hymn. A similar interpretation has been given of the purusha in Hindu temples by Kramrisch, who uses some of the same textual sources as Staal. The identification of purusha and temple is also one of structural homologies and proportions, a metaphorical transfer of body-part names to parts of the temple, and cosmological and cosmogonic explanations of origins (Kramrisch 1946, 1967). In both cases, the Vedic sacrifice and the temple, the purusha served not only as a measure in construction, but as a structural prototype for the construction. The correlators are the sticks, coconut-leaf strips, strings, powders, feet, fingers, with which the measures and diagrams are made (Staal 1983,1: 195-203). Given such correlators, it seems justifiable t o say that the diagram of the Vedic altar [or of the temple or house] can serve as a measure and plan for the actual construction. Certainly that would seem to be

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one reason for drawing a vastu-purusha mandala on the ground before building a house over it. As Linda Moore has documented, the cardinal orientation, center, boundaries, internal dimensions and divisions of the traditional tarawad house built in Kerala fifty years ago are correlated with the diagram inscribed in its vastu-purusha mandala (Moore 1983, 1985). Even the Kerala calculus of caste avoidances was calibrated by measures based on the human body. The famous "distance pollution" rules . . . are organized according to three principles that informants like to call "untouchability", "unapproachability", and "unseeability". The first of these . . . indicates the smallest distance in /eft', and is responsible for the seven-foot distance observed between, for example, Nambutiris and Nayars. Seven feet is the closest distance at which, should two persons fully extend their arms, they could not possibly touch. (Moore 1985: 34-35)

To the foregoing, the historians would probably comment that the "indications" cited are mostly textual and symbolic, and refer at best to "ideal plans". They would like to see evidence that the symbolism and the ideal plans influenced architectural practice in particular localities and periods. I would suggest that the relationship between the "ideal plan" in the texts and the built artifact is mediated by a system of signs with an hierarchy of realities. For Staal, Vedic ritual action, with a formal structure like music or mathematics that has no "meaning", is a primordial reality. For Kramrisch, "the Hindu temple is the sumtotal of architectural rites performed on the basis of its myth. The myth covers the ground and is the plan on which the structure is raised". While we wait for evolutionary ethology to explain "meaningless" ritual activities and for history and archeology to certify which of the textual "ideal plans" were actually built, it may be useful to recall that the purusha as a magic diagram, metaphor, or cosmic image is, in Peirce's classification, an iconic sign, one that resembles its object in some respect, and, for a moment of contemplation, a pure dream. Might it be that those ancient Indian sages and builders who told the epics and myths, drew magic diagrams, and spoke in metaphor and simile, were contemplating the human body as an iconic sign of real possibilities, some of which were actually constructed? What, then, about that modern "master-builder and sage" Le Corbusier and his modulorl There can be no question in this case

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about the existence of the artifact, Chandigarh, and its direct connection with a conscious ideal plan and symbolism. All of this is documented by Corbusier, as well as by Evenson and others, in his use of the modulor as a measure of dimensions and proportions in the city's buildings, streets, and parks. Yet, in an exception which seems to prove the rule, there is evidence that Corbusier used the modulor as an iconic sign in Peirce's sense: to draw the diagrams of the city's plan, to describe the city's structure and functional divisions in the metaphor of an organism, and to inscribe the six foot man with left arm raised as an image and logo of his personal vision of modern architecture. At times Corbusier seemed to believe that his personal vision and its inscription in a "plan" was more "real" and enduring than any concrete realization would be. His indifference to crumbling concrete and functional discomforts such as too much heat, light, and space seemed to express a kind of architectual platonism whose only standard of evaluation was the esthetics of form. In this respect also, the modulor seems to be a Peircean iconic sign: . . . the designs "an artist draws of a statue, pictorial composition, architectural elevation, or piece of decoration" are iconic signs by the contemplation of which [he] "can ascertain whether what he proposes will be beautiful and satisfactory" (Peirce quoted in MGE 1984: 108).

At the same time, Corbusier's esthetic and intutitive judgements kept him from a purely mechanical application of the modulor, and left him free to adapt his designs to the peculiarities of the local environment, the scarcity of materials and financial resources, and the needs and values of the political authorities. Although he wrote that his use of the modulor enabled him to "conjugate the government buildings with one another in a strict ratio of height and size" CModulor 2: 214), he also admitted that he occasionally misjudged the appropriate scale and proportions with the use of the modulor, when, for example, he dimensioned the offices of the Secretariat building to the "scale of giants", instead of to a "human scale" (Modulor 2: 220-221). He criticized the Renaissance theory of "Divine Proportions", because it forgot "man in his environment" {Modulor 2: 49, 19). Corbusier's invocation of esthetic, economic, environmental, and political considerations to judge his departures from his original "ideal plan" was soon emulated by the critics of Chandigarh —

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other architects and planners, politicians, and residents. Albert Mayer, the American city planner whose master plan served as Corbusier's point of departure, made a one-day inspection of the capital in 1958 and wrote a very mixed report of it in his newsletter. He was not quite sure whether the "over-scaling", "open spottiness", "wide roads", and signs of incompletion were due to the fact that at that early stage there had not yet been "definite enough crystallization either of the plan or of the official and public atmosphere into which it will be uttered". His overall judgment was not dogmatic but openly sceptical: The fact is that one can scarcely foresee whether the ultimate city will be urbane, with sufficient intimacy of scale and interlinked relationships to make for urban vivacity and excitement and variety (Mayer, second 1958 Newsletter. Regenstein Special Collections, University of Chicago).

Mayer's judgement of specific buildings and features of Chandigarh was less qualified. The High Court produced, he said, "a noble and powerful effect, almost a primordial effect", but the building didn't work functionally: The courtrooms face the sun; the entire surface is glass; the judge looks into the sun. . . There is no interior corridor . . . the warped ceiling of the entrance is not an inherent structural e l e m e n t . . . . Thus, one is left with a building of great power visually in three dimensions, but which does not work functionally. . . Thus, really a great evocative work of sculpture, not in fact architecture.

His judgement of the ten-story Secretariat building, a high-rise as originally designed but later laid on its side, was less mixed: "This monstrous affair of a building . . . remained ugly and misshapen to me". The residental neighborhoods and houses Mayer found "much more pleasing and vivacious", especially the free-standing houses of the wealthier people. But "the free-standing houses done privately are simply terrible, indescribably undisciplined and pointless, a hodge-podge of elements". Mayer's critical judgements have been repeated many times by other observers. Surveys of residents have also added bitter complaints about the architecturally marked classification of housing and residential sectors by incomes and occupational status (DeSouza 1968). Mayer and other critics agree, however, that the housing is "a tremendous step up, and a great expansive relief to

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the observer". Mulk Raj Anand, a journalist and author of many novels, pronounced a "progressive" verdict on Chandigarh's residential quarters: Le Corbusier has indeed carried out the bourgeois revolution in Indian architecture, by enabling the middle and lower classes to expand themselves into the four to five-roomed life. And if he could not get over the class system, and divided the rich from the poor, all the same he released a social revolution in the lives of the poor by giving them verandahs, smokeless kitchens, flush lavatories, front gardens and urges to demand a classless and casteless society . . . (Marg. 1961, vol. XV, 2-4).

In spite of the many analogies between Chandigarh and "traditional" Indian cities and city plans, there are obviously many differences. The same can be said of their respective symbolic icons and measures, the modulor and the purusha. While both are based on the human body, their use in architectural constructions does not uniquely determine a set of dimensions, scale and proportions irrespective of local context, circumstance, ideology and personal preference. It may be true, as Corbusier wrote, that the Modulor has introduced a wealth of mathematical or geometrical combinations which can be evaluated in meters or in feet and inches, etc . . . dimensioned by our bodies, and suitable therefore for the construction of objects for our use: architecture and mechanics. (Corbusier

Modulor 2: 51) The scale of the modulor, "which progresses towards zero on one side and into infinity on the other . . . within the range of the human stature (between 0 and 2.26 meters)", still leaves open a large number of possibilities and choices for an anthropocentric architecture, particularly since multiples of the modulor measure are also used by Corbusier. An architecture that constructs "containers and extensions of the human b o d y " is sufficiently rich in its possibilities to be symbolized by both the purusha and the modulor as measures and prototypes, even if Corbusier halts "at the threshold of metaphysics and symbolism" {Modulor 2:83) and would allow "esoteric symbols" to persist only in "the scientific curves which represent forces, and in the formulae which resolve natural phenomena". One wonders, however, what kind of pygmy Corbusier had in mind with a stature of 0 meters. February 28, 1986

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Fig. 1. Final plan of the capitol complex, showing revisions made as of December, 1956. A. Secretariat. B. Assembly. C. Museum of knowledge (formerly site of governer's palace). D. Open hand monument. E. High court annex. F. High court. Below. Entrance into capitol complex.

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A semiotic of the city

Fig. 3. Plans and symbols of the city used to decorate end walls of buildings. Clockwise from upper left. Capitol complex; modulor proportions; projected museum complex for Valley of Leisure; city plan.

The symbolic and historic structure of an American identity16

1. A changing American ethos? A Martian visiting the United States in 1975 or 1976, seeing the red, white, and blue products and projects celebrating the Bicentennial, might well wonder whether Americans had, like the Time Traveller in H.G. Wells' Time Machine, reversed the gears of history and were plunging backwards into the past at the same dizzying speed with which they had previously plunged into the future. If such a vistior had by chance stayed long enough in the country to see the nostalgic revivals in the arts and crafts; the strong interest in conservation, preservation and restoration — some of it embodied in Federal and State laws; the growing support for zero-growth in population and technology; the back-to-the-land and back-to-thesmall-town movements, he would probably conclude that Americans have lost their nerve and their zest for progress and innovation, and have been so disturbed by "future shock" they are regressing into the fatalism and hopelessness of a "traditional" culture. While such a visitor's impressions are understandable, they do not show deep insight into American history and the kind of identity it has produced. Historians and novelists are quick to tell us that Americans have always shown a deep ambivalence towards the future and towards the past and perhaps towards the present as well. Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, John P. Marquand — the ambivalence recurs so regularly that Erik Erikson has taken it as the foundation of the American identity. Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee — Hank Morgan, machinist in an arms factory, a tutor to King Arthur's court in technological progress and invention, who blows it all up in the end — is a bitter comment not only on the author's personal losses investing in a typesetting machine, or on 19th century industrial civilization, but also on the profound ambivalence of Americans towards their technological ingenuity and the nostalgic worlds of childhood, of farm, river,

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The symbolic and historic structure of an American identity

and small town, which that ingenuity has displaced. Since the ambivalence runs deep historically and psychologically, sudden swings should occasion no great surprise, whether from "future shock" to "nostalgia" ("a pain of the past") or the reverse. Why the American pendulum should be swinging just now from progress to the past is a complex historical and psychological question. Accelerating rates of social and cultural change no doubt generate the kind of disorientations which Toffler calls "future shock". Erikson's observation that the worry about the unchanging roots of human identity "may be as intrinsic to an age of ruthless change as a widespread sense of guilt was to the agricultural age; the technology of violated nature" suggests that a history as well as a psychology of identity crises and identity confusions is needed. The growing power of modern governments over the lives of individuals and the invasion of privacy has tended to destroy the sense of personal identity and continuity. As George Orwell so prophetically projected in 1984, the most sinister aspect of this power is its destruction of the records and memories of the past, of the very beliefs in the past existence of particular people, places, and events, and of the capacity to verify such beliefs by historical research. Big Brother's control adds a new principle and new techniques to the old fashioned despotism's "Thou shalt not" and the modern totalitarian's "Thou shalt". That principle is "Thou art". Since Orwell wrote, the trends he envisaged have become, unfortunately, all too common in many countries. The despotic and totalitarian practices of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and torture; censorship of press, mails, and expression; the restriction of free movement and association, take on a new significance for the problem of uprootedness and identity when combined with the newer techniques of electronic bugging, mind drugs, and the office shredder. The Big Brothers, and the Great Mothers, can now rewrite history according to their own scenarios. They have declared the question of "should old acquaintance be forgot?" a matter of state policy. Democratic nations are not immune from these Orwellian horrors. As early as 1832 De Tocqueville observed in his Democracy in America that the United States has a kind of built-in "memory hole" of its own in its individualism and commitment to equality of condition. This principle not only "makes every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contem-

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poraries from him". In contrast to the strong attachments to forefathers and descendants in aristocratic nations, among democratic nations, "The woof of time is every instant broken and the track of generations effaced" (1946: 312). Yet De Tocqueville also observed that "There is hardly an American to be met with who does not claim some remote kindred with the first founders of the colonies; and as for the scions of the noble families of England, America seemed to me to be covered with them" (1946: 374). This observation could be read as contradicting his generalization that in democratic nations the track of generations is effaced and "the interest of man is confined to those in close propinquity to himself'. It is also possible, however, to read this as an exception which proves De Tocqueville's rule, as a kind of cyclical effort to compensate for the lost worlds by new acts of remembrance. De Tocqueville himself writes that while the individualism and equality of conditions in the United States breed a spirit of independence and self-reliance, "experience soon teaches them that, although they do not habitually require the assistance of others, a time almost always comes when they cannot do without it" (1946: 375). Recognition of common weakness, dangers and sufferings leads to mutual compassion, concern and assistance when required. "In democracies no great benefits are conferred, but good offices are constantly rendered; a man seldom displays self-devotion, but all men are ready to be of service to one another" (1946: 376). De Tocqueville's observations suggest another explanation for the recent swing to nostalgic revivals, restorations, and historic reenactments: having drunk so deeply at the well of forgetfulness, Americans are parched for their past; they have dived into the lake of memory to search for their identity (cf. Jane Harrison, Themis, 1962a, pp. 511-514). At least this explanation is supported by my recent observations in New England in a rather surprising fashion, one of the surprises being that the leading preservationists, restorationists and reenactors are not from old Yankee families and that they see themselves as pioneers working on a new frontier — the frontier of America's past. Paradoxically, they do not feel a sense of guilt for the deeds of Yankee or Loyalist ancestors, for they generally are not descendants of such ancestors. Their guilt is probably more connected with their travelling so far from their own ancestral roots, geographically and culturally.

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A further interest of this study is to discover in at least one concrete case the kind of institutional matrix in which an American remembrance of things past is flowing and to interpret the meaning of that flow. In 1984 so much of the institutional matrix had been destroyed or had come under Big Brother's control that Orwell dramatized Winston Smith's rediscovery of the past and of himself through the sight of a glass paperweight and the keeping of a personal diary, both forbidden by the Party and eventually destroyed by the thought police. Proust's reliance on the taste of a madeleine to release the rivers of memory is an imaginative literary creation drawing from a life lived in the happier days before 1984. Remembrance of Things Past has come to symbolize feats of recollection beyond the reach of ordinary people. For them, Orwell's message must remain relevant — that the availability of the past depends on free access to people and places, to libraries, universities and schools, museums, art galleries, theatres and music halls, old houses and antique shops, cemeteries, churches — a complex network of social institutions in which the traces and records of the past are preserved and can be studied by historians, archeologists and genealogists, artists, writers, and anyone. The availability and vitality of the past, in short, depends on its being embedded in living cultural traditions and on being reenacted in cultural performances. 17 Any particular individual's recollections of it, whether triggered by paperweights, madeleines, or psychoanalysis, are not entirely pure subjective memories of uniquely private experiences, but are also memories "screened" by later social experience and reflective and creative imagination. 18 They are "remembrances of remembrances", as one Yankee City old-timer called them. The personal identity Americans are looking for in the lake of memory is also a cultural identity, a collection of records, remembrances, and guilts and prides, belonging chiefly to other people, in which an identity is symbolized, incorporated into one's personality, and creatively changed.

2. Revisiting Warner's "Yankee City" As already mentioned in "Yankee City in Renaissance", we decided in the summer of 1974 to take a close, continuous look at the Newburyport area, the site of Lloyd Warner's famous "Yankee

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Warner's "Yankee City "

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City" studies in the 1930s. We found there such a full and rich array of Bicentennial activities, as well as a dramatic urban renewal and restoration controversy, that I began systematic observations and interviews with a view to updating Warner's study, at least that part of it dealing with Yankee City's image of its past in The Living and the Dead. 1 was also interested in assessing the potentials and feasibility of conducting other specialized studies in the area. I not only encountered about a dozen people who remembered Warner's study, voicing definite opinions about where it was right and where it was wrong, and two full sets of the Yankee City monographs in the Public Library, one of them very dog-eared, together with Thernstrom's historical restudy, Poverty and Progress; more to the present purpose, I also found the local sense of the past pervasive and strong as it was in Warner's description for the 1930s. Moreover, although the range and kind of institutionalized expression for this sense of the past had changed since the 1930s, its symbolic structure, meanings and value were strikingly similar to those Warner found. In The Living and the Dead Warner used the five-day Tercentenary celebrations in July, 1930, as the main empirical data for his analysis and interpretation of Yankee City's image of its past. To understand and evaluate this analysis of what Warner called "secular public rituals", one must compare it with Warner's analysis of the mixed "secular-sacred rituals" of the 1930s Memorial Day ceremonies (Part III of The Living and the Dead) as well as with his analysis of the "sacred symbol systems" of Protestant and Catholic Christianity (Part IV). His theory and method of symbolic analysis (Part V) is derived, as Warner acknowledged, from Dürkheim, Radcliffe-Brown, Ogden and Richards, Freud, Jung, and Pareto, G.H. Mead, among others. Warner put these together to produce a pioneering semiotic analysis of cultural performances. An important key to his application of this method to the Yankee City Tercentenary celebrations is the almost exact analogy he drew between the dramatic reenactments of historical episodes in Yankee City's history and the totemic ritual dramatizations of origin myths among the Murngin whom he studied in Australia. Critics who have accused Warner of "primitivism" for use of this analogy have overlooked that his method is really "bicultural" if taken as a semiotic and structural method and not as an evolutionary or historical theory of the development

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identity

of drama and art from ritual and myth. In any case Warner's totemic analogy breaks down with recent changes in Yankee City. In 1974 and 1975 there were no Tercentenary Processions, and Memorial Day ceremonies were no longer vital community-wide expressions of a "cult of the dead". Memorial Day had shrunk to a small parade of war veterans organized by the American Legion; a few other individuals, about 30, went to decorate family graves. An ancestral cult was still to be found, to be sure, in such societies as the "Sons and Daughters of the First Settlers" and in the widespread and serious interest in genealogical research. These are, however, relatively recent organizations and their interests are responsive to new kinds of motives. A reference to Warner's description of the lady who felt more comfortable sitting in the cemetery surrounded by the graves of her relatives and friends than in her home brought only smiles from three descendants of a very old family. That sort of thing isn't done any more, they said, although one of them did recall an acquaintance who has moved away and who faithfully visits her family's graves on Memorial Day. The acquaintance, it turned out, was a "newcomer" and "non-Yankee". A restoration of the colonial Old Hill Burying Ground, recently launched, is again not an expression of a cult of the dead or of ancestor worship but one of the projects of the local Bicentennial Commission to train young people, conceivably with modern "problems", in the various skills required for cemetery restoration, as well as related crafts, and to interest them in local history. The model for this project was a similar one organized in Gloucester, another Essex County small city. The leadership in both projects, as well as many of the young people who participate in them, are locally classified as "newcomers" and many are non-Yankees.

3. Historic reenactments as secular rituals There were in 1974 and 1975 the 17th and 18th annual nine-day "Yankee Homecoming" celebrations, parades and many Bicentennial reenactments in full costume by local militia companies — of a tea burning, formation of the first Revolutionary volunteers in a church, the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Arnold Expedition to Quebec, and others. These historic reenactments tended to focus on the Revolutionary years 1774 and 1775 and did not, even when taken

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together with the other celebrations, present a comprehensive chronological sequence of Newburyport's history from the 17th to the 20th centuries, as did the 1930 Tercentenary Procession. Yet the historic reenactments and celebrations of 1974-1975 represented a symbolic structure whose meaning and values seemed similar to those Warner described for 1930. They projected an image of a community whose citizens took a leading role in fighting the Revolution and in building up shortly thereafter an important port with world-wide mercantile and maritime connections. The surviving evidence of that period of greatness was still close at hand in the grand Federalist houses, some of which have been recently restored by their present occupants, in the restored Market Square and the Custom House which was opened in the summer of 1975 as a Maritime Museum. In antique shops, galleries, and shops and factories one can find "original" pieces of furniture, silver and prints or modern "exact reproductions". Those who want to do historical and genealogical research will find excellent collections of genealogies and local histories in the Public Library and in the several local historical societies, as well as at the now much-used Registry of Deeds in Salem, the county seat, where the "lineages" of the old houses can be traced. When I spoke with sponsors, organizers, participants, and spectators before, during, and after historical reenactments and restorations, they showed a strong concern that their reenactment or restoration be "authentic". The adjective was applied to reenactments of revolutionary battles, to the uniforms, muskets and clean shaven faces of the militia, as well as to restored houses, furniture, shops, boat models, a frog pond on the Mall, and to "old families". They did not generally mean by calling reenactments, objects or people "authentic" that they were true "originals", although that sometimes happened with an antique or a relic. They meant that the authenticity could be established by showing through historical or genealogical research that the forms and materials of the reenactment, the object or the family, were descended from some true original, "exactly as it happened" or "exactly as it was". Such research did not usually depend on a direct comparison between the "reproduction" and the "original", even for the professional historian or genealogist, but depended more often on comparing the "reproduction" with the pictures and verbal descriptions of the "original" to be found in historical documents and published books.

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The judgment of historical authenticity, in other words, was not an absolute one. It was operational and fallible and varied with the amount and quality of the historical and genealogical research. Almost every group had its "history buffs" and "genealogists", whose research sometimes led to dramatic conflicts about the authenticity of a particular item, such as whether the officers and seamen of the original Continental Navy of the United Colonies were permitted to wear facial hair. Warner describes in The Living and the Dead some of the same kind of concern, "almost obsessive" he calls it in one place, for historical accuracy and authenticity in designing the 1930 Tercentenary floats and reenactments. He uses in his descriptions many of the same words which I heard used in 1974 and 1975. These were also the same words that I found were used in the 1930 program notes and contemporary newspaper accounts of the Tercentenary celebrations. Warner did not make them up! He also noted the appeals by the organizing Tercentenary committee and others to professional historians and genealogies, as well as the use of local histories and documentation, to authenticate the historical accuracy of what was presented. For Warner this concern for the historical authenticity and careful historical research he observed in 1930 raised a major question: "What are the meanings and functions of this very great emphasis on historic accuracy and realism?" (The Living and the Dead, p. 119). Since the same question was raised by my own 1974 and 1975 observations, perhaps Warner's answer will also explain the persistence of historical authenticity as a social value in Newburyport. This turned out not to be the case, for reasons that will shortly appear, but Warner's answer is ingenious and may have been valid for 1930. One part of Warner's explanation accepts a fairly standard view of factuality and realism as prime Puritan and Yankee values. To this, however, he adds the more subtle explanation which assumes that iconoclastic Protestants and skeptical Yankees would not have much faith in rituals, icons, and myths. Therefore, Warner argues, it is necessary to appeal to the authority of science and professional history, not only to get the Protestants and Yankee skeptics to believe in the historical accuracy of the Tercentenary procession, but also to get them to respond to the factuality of icons, rituals, myths presented. A rational means, Warner wrote, was used

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to release in the participants and spectators a nonrational response. In this sense the Tercentenary became "a scientific and secular ritual of consecration", designed and organized by members of the Old Yankee Aristocracy who, "like priests at the altar . . . took ordinary things and, by the authority vested in them, transposed them into symbols of ultimate significance" (ibid., p. 126). Unlike that inhering in Catholic priests, however, the efficacy of the Committee's secular rituals depended on the audience's not recognizing or authorizing them as a form of secular consecration. The stipulation of "authentic designs" and "historical accuracy" in presentation of the city's past makes it possible, then, according to Warner, for the "tribal elders" to tell a consistent story: "the official 'myth' and its control made certain that various ethnic, religious, and other status groups could not insert discrepant versions of historic truth" (ibid., p. 116). If Warner's explanation of the concern for historical authenticity as a "secular ritual of consecration" and "a ritualization of the past" (a kind of extension of Durkheim's explanation of the efficiency of totemic ritual) was valid in 1930, certain changes have made it invalid for 1974 and 1975. The members of the organizing committees in 1974 and 1975 of Yankee Homecoming, the Bicentennial celebrations, the local militias, as of the preservation and restoration groups, are not predominantly from the "Old Yankee aristocracy" or even from Old Yankee families. These tend to be outnumbered on these committees by members of Irish, Greek, French Canadian, Italian, Black, American Indian, Armenian, Jewish, Polish, Hungarian backgrounds and by Protestants who have come to the city within the last generation or two, many of whom are called "newcomers" and "outsiders". A similar distribution exists among the spectators, with "ethnic" groups probably making up at least 60% of the audience. Then there are the tourists for whose trade the towns compete in putting on Bicentennial celebrations and historic reenaetments. In such mixed audiences it is doubtful that Warner's "secular rituals of consecration" are as necessary or as sufficient as they may have been in the 1930s. They are not needed to release belief in ritual, icon and myth among the Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Jewish, participants and speakers. These groups already are disposed to such belief from going to Mass, or reenacting Greek Independence Day, or celebrating Passover, respectively. The "secular rituals" of the Bicentennial and other patriotic

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celebrations are not on the other hand sufficient to evoke "belief" in Yankee skeptics. They are quite overt in expressing their skepticism of the authenticity of historical reenactments and of other attempts to reproduce the past exactly. One finds such expressions in newspaper editorials, in private and street conversations, as well as in John P. Marquand's books. The Protestant churches in the area, and especially the Old South Church (First Presbyterian), frequently conduct religious services as integral parts of historic reenactments. Occasionally these services may even be ecumenical, with priests and rabbis as well as other congregations' Protestant ministers participating. Warner himself refers in The Living and the Dead to a "liturgical revival" whose existence he observed on a 1952 revisit to Yankee City, a revival in which Protestant churches reintroduced many old rites and feast days {ibid., 394-395).

4. Historic reenactments as cultural performances If the search for historical authenticity is not in the 1970s a kind of self-deceiving confidence trick to release unconscious "belief' among iconoclastic Protestants and skeptical Yankees, what then is it? I would agree with Warner that the meaning and function of the emphasis on "authenticity" and on careful historical and genealogical research cannot be completely explained at a purely cognitive level as perceptual or intellectual judgments of correspondence between a "reproduction" and an "original". There does seem to be a noncognitive, perhaps even a transcendental, element in such judgments. Mixed with such expressions of cognitive interests in historical authenticity, I also found a variety of non-cognitive interests. The local militias' reenactments of Revolutionary episodes, for example, are considered a family hobby for weekends and holidays as well as living theater whose colorful costumes, fife and drum music, and stirring parades represent forms of folk arts and crafts. These are also exemplified in wooden carvings, ceramic figurines, drawings and prints, and in a revival of naval crafts such as scrimshaw, macrame, knot-tying, sail making, and the like. It is a widespread local belief that to make these reenactments as historically accurate as possible not only enhances their dramatic

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and esthetic values but also makes them better expressions of patriotism, religion, and of some extraordinary reality of the past with which performers and spectators tend to identify. When I asked a prominent Newburyport businessman if he and his family participated in the costumed historic reenactments, he said, "No, we are not 'show biz' people". His answer does not, I believe, imply a disapproval of the reenactments but rather a characterization of them as dramatic performances. Such a characterization of them is in fact widely accepted locally by participants, spectators, and the disinterested. An officer in the Continental Navy and oldtime "Yankee", for example, could not see too much difference between the historic reenactments on the one hand, and the costumed performances of fraternal associations, and stage plays, on the other, except that the reenactments were of a more historical nature and were intended to perpetuate the memory of men who fought in the Revolution. In oral discussion, program notes, newspaper reports and editorials, the historic reenactments are described in terms of a dramatistic language of "scripts", "costumes", "roles", "scenes", "characters", "plots", "rehearsals" and similar words. I found this same language used in 1930 accounts of the Tercentenary Procession, the program for which gave a complete list of the forty-seven floats, each with a very brief description of the character or event it represents, and the sponsoring group. The contemporary newspaper reports of the parade included this information, and added pictures of the floats as well as a list of the actors who played the historical characters. An old-timer remembered that she played the role of a spectator on the witch float and that a friend of hers "put on a good act as the witch" (Goody Morse). The local dramatic conception of the Tercentenary floats and reenactments must not have escaped Warner's notice. His own analysis of the Procession tends to interpret it as a "symbolical historical drama". This is implicit in his interpretation of the individual floats, but becomes more explicit in his analysis of the "symbolic life of associations" (Chapter 7 of The Living and the Dead). He also noted that the methods of dramatic analysis were applicable to both sacred and secular rituals {ibid., p. 402). For Warner, as for local residents, the historical reenactments included drama, art, play and games, old-fashioned nostalgia, as well as patriotism and religion. In fact, a scrapbook of the 1930 Procession

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made by one of its chairmen was organized in a form which may have suggested the totemic analogy to Warner: narrative historic episodes on one page, pictures of painted designs and photographs of the matching floats on the facing page.

5. Mystica 1 identification with ancestors or role-playing? Warner based the totemic analogy not only on a direct comparison of Australian and Yankee City beliefs and practices, but also on Durkheim's conception of ritual as a dramatization of tribal myths {Elementary Forms, 82, 373-383). In the context of anthropological theory, this conception is usually associated with the similar conceptions of Robertson-Smith, Frazer, and Jane Harrison as marking the priority in anthropological analysis of action to belief. This conception of ritual is also associated with the theory that drama and the arts historically evolved from ritual and myth (Leach, "Ritual" in IESS for a good review of these anthropological theories). There is another interpretation, however, of the theory that ritual is a dramatization of myth, one often overlooked, in Dürkheim as in Warner, and perhaps in their predecessors as well. We can interpret the analogy as a set of structural proportions without reference to evolutionary or historical relations: history is to dramatic reenactments as myth is to ritual. This is usually interpreted in readings of Warner and of Dürkheim as a "primitivistic" theory, that is, the dramas and history of modern society are explained in terms of the ritual and myths of primitive society. Since the analogy can be read as a structural equation, it is equally valid to explain "primitive" myth and ritual in terms of "modern" history and drama. Dürkheim in fact does this implicitly and Warner explicitly in distinguishing between the mystic identification of ancestor worship from genuine dramatic role-playing even among the aboriginal Australian tribes. Warner compares some of the Australian totemic rites to a Wagnerian drama! 19 In comparing the Yankee City Memorial Day celebrations and the Tercentary Procession to primitive totemic rites and myths, Warner was saying that there was evidence that the citizens of a modern city were seeking a mystic identification and communion with their ancestors. Apparently there were still enough descendants of these ancestors around in the 1930s and in important organizing

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positions, to make this a plausible interpretation. In the reenactments of 1974 and 1975, however, a direct descendant playing the role of an ancestor was the exception rather than the rule. One such said that when he was participating in the Battle of Bunker Hill reenactment he thought of some of his colonial ancestors, but was also aware that they had not been in the Battle of Bunker Hill. On the other hand, most of those for whom the reenactment "brought back to life the real thing" were not direct descendants of any colonial ancestors and, as one of them pointed out, they were "not even born then". Participants in historic reenactments, such as that of Bunker Hill, spoke of what a "fantastic experience" it was, of how "real" it was, and how it made history "come alive" after "being dead" for two hundred years. In similar vein, occupants of some of the Federalist houses speak of "keeping the memory of the past owners alive" by finding out their life and family histories through research and even, in a case or two, receiving their ghosts. To others the surviving old buildings in Market Square and on the waterfront are the very "life blood of the community". Such ways of speaking about historical reenactments, old houses, and buildings might tend to suggest that Warner's analogy with Australian totemic rites and myths may still have a relevance, that these residents of Yankee City are trying to communicate with their ancestors, that they are practicing in their reenactments and restorations a "cult of the dead", or at least of ancestor worship. There is one stumbling block to the ancestor worship explanation - the preponderant majority who speak this way about "reliving the- past" or "living in the past" do not have "long roots" in the area. Their ancestors came from other parts of the country or from foreign countries — Canada, Ireland, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Sweden, Armenia, Greece, and others. Indeed, they admit that their interest in and knowledge of their own family genealogies and histories is not as strong as that in the former owners of their houses or in the famous residents of the area. And that interest extends to the history of local "loyalists" and "tories" as well as "patriots" and problematic figures such as Benedict Arnold. "To be authentic we must include them all because they were here" is the usual explanation. This explanation of the desire for historical authenticity probably explains as well the curious fact that some members of the Continental Navy in 1974, 1975 also owned sets

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of Loyalist uniforms and dressed in them for historic reenactments in which Loyalists were known to have participated. For that dwindling minority of descendants of first or early settlers whose ancestors were in the area during the Revolution or in the Federalist period, there may be a desire to establish some kind of mystical communion with their ancestors through reenactments and living in restored old houses. At least some of them said they did sometimes think of their ancestors during a reenactment. But they would usually add some disenchanting circumstantial detail such as that their ancestors did not take part in that particular battle, or that they came over as indentured servants and did not move into Newburyport from Newbury and prosper until well along in the nineteenth century. Their "structural amnesia" was not deep enough to withstand the cold water and commonsense of their historical and genealogical research. One clue to a different interpretation of the search for historical authenticity was suggested to me by some remarks of a local resident. He was surprised by the number of inquiries from people about old items — pictures, account books, old flags, they found in their attics. They seemed very much interested, he said, in finding out if their old items had any historical significance, as if they were looking for some kind of identity, although he was not sure what kind. With a little help from Dürkheim and from Freud, I should like to sketch the kind (or kinds) of identity the people of Yankee City, and perhaps other Americans as well, are looking for in their search for historical authenticity, and of how this search may be related to a sense of guilt. In his brief autobiographical reminscence of a summer trip he and his brother took to Athens as young men, 20 Freud explains the surprise and thrill he felt when standing on the Acropolis in terms of the persisting childhood sense of guilt they felt about disobeying their father's command not to go far from home and the piety they felt towards him in not wishing to go beyond him culturally. This unconscious sense of guilt and this conscious piety, Freud thinks, may have implanted doubts in their minds about the real existence of the Acropolis when they read about it in their school books. The confrontation with "the real thing" in Athens not only dispelled such doubts, at least momentarily, 21 but also permitted an incorporation of the previously alienated objects and events into their personalities.

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This kind of explanation may apply to those "newcomers" and "outsiders" come to live in a historic town and region and seeking through reenactments and restorations to relive its past. Isn't it likely that their "fantastic experiences" in trying to find out what this past was exactly like and in surrounding themselves with the "life blood" of that past represents a kind of personal discovery, a "d6ja vu" feeling, similar to Freud's on the Acropolis? They are surprised to find that the things they had read about in their history books really do exist and that they have experienced "the real thing" - what it feels like to pull the trigger of a flintlock, to see the billows of smoke puffs after, or to live in an 18th century house. And, as in Freud's case, the surprise must in part derive from a doubt of the existence of such things implanted by a childhood sense of guilt at straying far from home, geographically or culturally. That this sense of guilt persists was indicated by at least a half dozen of these "newcomers" who, after describing how they restored and live in one of the historic houses, would add that they were putting up on a wall a portrait and other relics of a European grandfather or grandmother or great grandparent right between the portraits of some old Yankees they picked up in an antique shop. The kind of identity that is sought in "reliving history" is not for the "newcomers", "outsiders", and non-Yankees a return to their roots, as is commonly supposed. For they are not returning to ancestral homes and scenes. The charming frog pond and green, church spire and old burying ground are not a reliving of their childhood or ancestral memories. And the religious and cultural ambience of New England is pretty far removed from what they have been nourished on. One might say that they feel alienated from an authentically early American identity and that they are trying to overcome this alienation through historical and genealogical research, through dramatic reenactments and restorations, and through pioneering on the frontier of the past. For the descendants of early Yankee settlers, the search for an identity as authentic early Americans or descendants therefrom is at first glance a bit more puzzling. Why should they be so concerned about their historical authenticity if they are descended from early settlers? One answer is that many of them are not concerned; they take this identity for granted, sit on their old wealth, if any remains, and are indifferent to preservation, restoration and historical reenactments. They are true traditionalists who don't

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feel they have lost touch with the past. They feel they do not need to act out an identity in symbolic historical dramas because they are the identity; they are living the past, not reliving it. Theirs is the kind of identification with ancestors and mystic participation in the past that Dürkheim describes. Some of them, however, do worry. A minority are active in preservation and restoration and in Bicentennial reenactments, reliving the past. Freud's kind of explanation has some application to them as well. Many of them have travelled far from New England geographically and culturally. Their "Yankee Homecomings" for family and class reunions may only be motivated by simple nostalgia for childhood scenes and faces. Whether they stayed or moved on, they must have felt some sense of guilt towards their ancestors because they were forgotten, or were loyalists (like Major Molyneux) or sold slaves, or had intermarried with someone who was Indian, Irish, German, Scandinavian, French, Polish — some non-Yankee admixture. In one way and another the direct line of mystical identification has been broken, and they try to rewrite it by reenacting and reliving the past, even if this means joining up with non-Yankees and "ethnics" to put on the play. If the performance is carefully researched and produced, the performers and spectators will be rewarded with a vision of the past exactly as it happened, where it happened. The achievement of such a vision temporarily reduces the guilt that kept both "ethnics" and some "Yankees" from believing in the real existence of the past. As actors and spectators in the historic reenactments and restorations, they not only are reassured about the reality of the past, but are also declaring a personal identification with it. The historic reenactments, restorations and reproductions, are, in other words, cultural performances, participation in which helps to constitute or reconstitute an historically authentic American identity. Any extrapolation of an American Identity from the symbolic and historical structure of Yankee City's sense of the past will have to run the gauntlet of observations from other towns and other parts of the country. I do not assume or predict that one will find as many Bicentennial projects, Homecomings, reactivated militias, reenactments, historical societies, churches, cemeteries, antique shops as one finds in a New England town. Warner's claim that Yankee City was a typical American town has been eroded by much

Mystical identification with ancestors or role-playing? 145 criticism. Nevertheless, one of his severest critics has pointed out that in residential and occupational mobility and in the rapid turnover of its population, Yankee City was far more typical of other American towns and cities than other critics recognized (Thernstrom 1964: 196). Until the evidence of other studies can be marshalled for comparison, we can at least say that our interpretation of the search for historical authenticity in Yankee City seems to explain the American ambivalence towards the past and the future as a tension between the desire to leave home and the desire to return. The tension persists and fluctuates not only because of social and cultural changes, but because psychologically Americans can't go home again, and because, as Freud found, it is difficult to leave home, no matter how far one travels geographically and culturally. This explanation is consistent with but not identical to Margaret Mead's theory that all Americans are "third generation" in character structure, "an odd blending of the future and the past, in which another man's great-grandfather (George Washington, e.g.) becomes the symbol of one's grandson's future" (And Keep Your Powder Dry. p. 50). It is also consistent with Tocqueville's 1832 observations of Americans as people in motion who never succeed in settling down, and with Thernstrom's finding of a high turnover in Newburyport's population during the last half of the nineteenth century. Finally, it is consistent with Lloyd Warner's interpretation of the Tercentenary Procession as symbolizing "a feeling of incoming and outgoing to and from Yankee City . . . a syncretistic melange of rocks and rivers, of land and water" around which was built "a proud city filled with the virtues of New England civilization". That the "great tradition" of this high civilization should have persisted and spread is no doubt in part explained, as Warner suggested, by the fact that they who live elsewhere, in order "to establish their claims as legitimate heirs and present holders of the great tradition", must go to New England where the great tradition still lives {ibid., p. 122), and must symbolically relive some of its history.

The semiotics of the id 22

1. Introduction: H o w is the id culturally constituted? Melford Spiro's deceptively short and straightforward 1979 article on "Whatever Happened to the Id"? challenges a paradigm which has dominated cultural anthropology for the last fifty years. Manifestly a specific criticism of Lfevi-Strauss' structural and symbolic interpretations of patently Oedipal themes in a Bororo myth, Spiro's article protests the neglect or denial of the aggressive and sexual aspects of the myth in favor of its interpretation as an etiological tale about the origin of cooked food. Contrasting such an interpretation with the Freudian interpretation of the origin of culture, Spiro points out that sexuality and aggression do not disappear in Freud's origin myth (or "Just-So Story" as Kroeber called it), but rather they become subject to socially and individually instituted rules and controls with the coming of civilization. Lest Spiro's criticism of Lfevi-Strauss be considered as a nostalgic return to a psychoanalytic theory of the origin of culture long discredited by anthropologists, it should be noted that the target of Spiro's criticism is not structural and symbolic interpretations of culture as such, nor a particular origin myth. His target is, instead, the neglect of panhuman and pancultural emotions in such interpretations. This becomes quite explicit in some of Spiro's recent articles (1974, 1978, 1982b, 1984), in which similar criticism is directed at some American varieties of cognitive and symbolic anthropology. The issue joined in these articles is whether observed cultural variability in the expression of human emotions can be explained by the differences in local cultures ("cultural relativism" and "cultural determinism"), or whether universal human nature and pan-cultural and social constants must also be invoked. In deciding for the latter option Spiro is not turning his back on the last fifty years of anthropological progress in order to restore the 19th century omnibus and global unities of culture, society, and personality, and the psychic unity of mankind. On the contrary, he believes that the evidence of his own intensive and cross-cultural

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field work in Micronesia, Israel, and Burma compelled him step by step to abandon classical cultural relativism and t o adopt a new kind of universalism in which culture, society, personality, biology, and ecology interact as quasi-independent and complementary systems (Spiro 1978). Spiro's experience in this respect has paralleled that of other anthropologists, many of whom started in the late 1940s and early 1950s to look for universale in culture, language, society, and personality in a framework of comparative and cross-cultural studies. Those who come easily to mind in this context include Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, Firth, Hallowell, Redfield, Eggan, Kluckhohn, Kroeber, and L6vi-Strauss, among others. The Kroeber-Parsons joint article on society and culture as complementary concepts (1958) marks one of the key milestones in this new trend (see Singer 1961b, 1968, 1976; Greenberg ed. 1963). What is distinctive and intriguing about Spiro's position is the way in which he incorporates the newer structural, symbolic and cognitive concepts of culture and society and combines them with a psychoanalytic model of personality. He defines "culture" as a cognitive system of traditional propositions about nature, man, and society; defines "society" as traditional forms of social relations; and "personality" as a differentiated Freudian psychological structure. A surprising feature of Spiro's definition of "culture", in view of his criticism of L6vi-Strauss, is that it omits emotions and emotional meanings of cultural signs and symbols. "Culture as such — a cognitive system encoded in collective representations — does not consist of emotions" (1984). This conclusion follows logically from his definition of "culture" as a system of public signs and symbols and their cognitive meanings: "Since thinking and feeling are properties of persons, and since culture — neither by this definition, nor by any other that I am aware of — does not consist of people, it is hard to see how either could be part of culture" (1984). Spiro here follows the classical distinction between the collecttive cultural and the individual psychological made by Dürkheim, Radcliffe-Brown, Sapir and other anthropologists. His novel addition to the distinction is to point out that culture as traditional cognitive symbol systems may have emotional antecedents and consequences for particular individuals, and that some of these may be unconscious and unanticipated. In this way thinking and feeling, although not part of culture are often determined by culture. That is, we most often think by means of the concepts comprising cultural pro-

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positions, and our emotions are o f t e n aroused by them; in short, many o f our thoughts and emotions are (what might be termed) "culturallyconstituted". (Spiro 1984: 3 2 4 )

Spiro's concept of "culturally-constituted" feelings and thoughts conceptualizes the interactions of culture and personality as distinct and independent systems, a possibility he admits he rejected in 1950 (1978). He attributes the phrase "culturally-constituted" to his teacher Hallowell, who used it to refer to the manner in which an individual's perception of reality is mediated by his behavioral environment and his culture's world view (Spiro 1978; Hallowell 1955). Spiro has extended and applied the concept of "culturallyconstituted" to those emotional antecedents and consequences of cultural beliefs, rituals and customary practices which may be unintended and unconscious but nevertheless provide defense mechanisms against emotional conflict and pathology (Spiro 1965). The unintended and unconscious "culturally-constituted" antecedents and consequences of cultural beliefs and practices are not encoded in collective signs, and they are (therefore) not transmitted b y means o f intentional enculturative processes. (They are discovered b y the anthropologist as an inference from clinically-oriented interviews, dreams, projective tests, and culturally-constituted projective systems such as myths, folklore, and the like (Spiro 1984: 3 2 4 )

Such inferences obviously imply that Spiro adopts the Freudian model of personality - an id (or impulses and wishes in frequent conflict with cultural norms), an ego (or a cognitive perceptual system), and a superego (or a normative prescriptive system of internalized cultural values). Spiro agrees with Freud that culture necessarily produces "discontents". Spiro's definition of "culture" as consisting of symbol systems and their cognitive meanings has not prevented him from dealing with the emotional and noncognitive aspects of human behavior. He has been able to do so by adopting three methodological strategies. The first two, as already noted, emerged in the 1950s; they are, respectively, to convert the definition of "culture" from an omnibus, global concept to a definition in terms of semantic systems, and to relegate to empirical research the problem of the relationship of such systems to personality and society as complementary and quasi-independent, interacting systems. A third strategy, in which Spiro did not follow the mainstream of social and cul-

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tural anthropology, was to adopt the Freudian id-ego-superego model of personality as an independent variable in the culture and personality relation, rather than the regnant model of a plastic human nature that is shaped into many different dominant personality types in accordance with the dominant cultural configurations of different societies. Recognizing that his position is a direct challenge to cultural relativism and cultural determinism, Spiro has attempted to formulate a new conception of a universal human nature and its relations to culture and society. In his paper on Cultural Determinism and Relativism, Spiro suggests that the culture and personality distinction is analogous to Saussure's distinction between la langue and la parole: that is, socially established and historically derived public signs which "contain" their meanings, on the one hand, and the individualized, private signs and their emotional and other meanings for individual social actors, on the other. The Saussurean analogy suggests that the relation between culture and personality in Spiro's revisionist theory is semiological or semiotic — that what happened to the Id is that it has been culturally constituted by being represented in sets of signs and symbols that need to be interpreted in accordance with some specialized codes, non-linguistic as well as linguistic. I should like to explore this hypothesis in the remainder of the paper and propose to do so within the framework of a Peircean semiotics rather than a Saussurean semiology, because Peirce's theory of signs is more comprehensive than Saussure's, and Spiro himself occasionally makes use of it. As Greenberg has in any case pointed out, Saussure's la langue corresponds to the Peirce-Morris syntactics and semantics, and his la parole to their pragmatics (Greenberg [1948] in Hymes 1964: 8; for further discussion see Singer 1984a, Chap. 1). The particular semiotic aspects of the culturally-constituted Id that I propose to explore are the names of the Id, the symbolism and "language" of the unconscious, and the relations between the semiotics of personal identity and the semiotics of social identity.

2. The names of the id The first observation to make about the semiotics of the Id is that the word "id" was not used in German by Freud but was introduced

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in the authorized English translation of his book The Ego and the Id (1923). Freud attributes to the physician and psychoanalyst Groddeck the observation that "our conduct through life of what we call our ego is essentially passive, and that . . . we are 'lived' by unknown and uncontrollable forces", and cites Groddeck's Das Buch vom Es (1923). Freud feels "no hesitation in finding a place for Groddeck's discovery in the fabric of science" and proposes to take it into account by calling the entity which starts out from the system Pcpt [perceptual] and begins by being Pes [preconscious] the ego, and by following Groddeck in giving to the other part of the mind, into which this entity extends and which behaves as though it were Ucs [unconscious], the name of Id (Es). (Freud 1923: 27-28)

In a footnote to this passage Freud adds that "Groddeck himself no doubt followed the example of Nietzsche, who habitually used this grammatical term for whatever in our nature is impersonal and, so to speak, subject to natural law" (Freud 1923: 28). The translator also adds a footnote to Freud's footnote to explain her translation: For the German 'Es' which means literally 'it', the corresponding Latin word 'id' has been adopted on the analogy of 'ego', which is the accepted rendering of the German 'Ich' (literally T). (Freud 1927: 28)

Although the German edition of Freud's book The Ego and the Id was published in the same year, 1923, as Das Buch vom Es, Groddeck had been corresponding with Freud since 1917 and first met him at the International Congress for Psychoanalysis at The Hague in 1920. When Freud received a copy of Groddeck's book in 1923, he wrote to him that "the book represents the theoretically significant view-point which I have incorporated in my about-to-be-published The Ego and the Id" (quoted in Groddeck 1961: vii) Groddeck (1866-1934) had been an army surgeon for 8 years, before he became a superintendent of a sanatorium in Baden-Baden (1897-1900) and then went into private practice there and also ran a small sanitorium. In 1934 he escaped to Zurich after Hitler ordered his arrest for writing a letter of protest against Nazi policies. Although sometimes called "the wild analyst" (Grossman 1965), Groddeck is credited with early discoveries in psychosomatic medicine. E. Simmel published a tribute to him in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1926.

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The English translation of Groddeck's Das Buch vom Es was called The Book of the It (Groddeck 1961). In this book the unconscious "It" is often contrasted with the conscious "I" as a source of a patient's hidden desires and motivations. Groddeck defines the "It" as "the physical, mental, spiritual, the organism with all its forces, the microcosmos which is a man" and frequently contrasts the unknown "It" with conscious and known "I". Sometimes called a mystic, Groddeck himself called the "It" an hypothesis — "not a truth but a useful tool in work and in life . . . a way of s e e i n g . . . to attempt to interpret what It is trying to express through the disease". The test of the hypothesis was that when patients were told of the meaning of their physical symptoms, their trouble disappeared. The English translations of Freud did not follow the practice of Groddeck's translator. Das Es was translated as "the Id", das Ich as "the Ego", and das Über-Ich as "the Super Ego". The lay psychoanalyst, Bruno Bettelheim, has vigorously criticized these translations of the colloquial German pronouns into Latin and Greek forms from "a dead language that reeks of erudition", while the colloquial terms "make us feel vibrantly alive" (Bettelheim 1983: 55). He believes that the use of medical-like terms imposes an objective and outside point of view on psychoanalysis without the deep emotional commitment and associations evoked (in German) by the colloquial terms. He points out, for example, that in German das Es has a special feeling because German children are referred to by the neuter pronoun es and the German reader is reminded that "this is how he was referred to before he learned to repress many of his sexual, aggressive, and otherwise a social impulses" (Bettelheim 1983: 57). Bettelheim believes that comparable emotional associations are evoked by English colloquial usage, associations that are absent from the learned vocabulary. He contrasts, as an illustration, the two sentences "My ego is trying to understand why I did this" and "I am trying to understand why I did this". In the former sentence, he believes "no feeling of personal involvement would be communicated", while in the latter "our whole being is involved". Bettelheim also believes that the distinction between "the I" and "the It" is "immediately clear to us" in colloquial usage and cites Freud's illustration in support. "It came to me in a flash; there was something in me which, at the moment, was stronger than [I]". ("C'fetait plus fort que moi".) Freud is

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quoted as writing "our teaching ought to be comprehensible to our patients who are often very intelligent, but not always learned" (Bettelheim 1983: 60). Bettelheim has some difficulty finding a colloquial English translation for the German Über-Ich and suggests "the upper-I", "the over-I" and "the above I" as possible names for "those aspects of the psyche which attempt to rule the person through a claim of higher authority" (Bettelheim 1983: 59). He nevertheless concludes that there is no compelling reason to use Latin pronouns in the translations of Freud and observes that the practice is not followed in other European languages, such as French, where das Ich is translated as le moi, das Es as le ςα, le soi, and Über Ich as le sur moi. Bettelheim's criticisms of the standard English translation of Freud are not restricted to the translations of Ich, Es, and Überich. He also objects to the translations of other key terms in psychoanalysis - for example of Seele as 'mind' instead of 'soul' or 'psyche', of Triebe as 'instinct' instead of 'drive' or 'impulse', of Die Traumdeutung as The Interpretation of Dreams instead of Ά Search for the Meaning of Dreams', and of Das Unbehagen in der Kultur as Civilization and Its Discontents instead of "The Uneasiness of Culture'. In these translations the issue for Bettelheim is not the use of learned words, but of a tendency to translate German words that have human emotional connotations by English words that have intellectual and mechanical connotations. Taken together with the general (Anglo-American) ignorance of the classical myths of Eros, Psyche, Oedipus, and Narcissus to which Freud alludes, these translations distort Freud's meaning, Bettelheim claims, and portray psychoanalysis as a natural medical science instead of as a "human science that helps people become aware of their unconscious feelings and drives and to control and change them under the guidance of reason" (Bettelheim 1983: 61): "Where it was, there should become 1". Bettelheim's objections to the English translations of Freud are not those of a professional linguist but of a German-speaking lay analyst who was brought up in the same cultural and social Viennese milieu where Freud practiced and wrote, and who has himself lived, taught, written, and practiced in the United States for many years. His comments, therefore, have the authority of an educated and experienced observer of some linguistic usages in Vienna and

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Chicago. Even if we accept his conclusions as valid at the level of pragmatics and la parole, we must also consider the situation at the level of syntax and semantics, or la langue. In other words, does the comparative grammar and semantics of the personal pronouns lead to conclusions that are consistent with Bettelheim's? Fortunately for the present paper, the French linguist Benveniste has published two studies which are highly relevant to this question and suggest a paradoxical answer to it. Of Benveniste's two studies, one deals with the relationship of person in the verb (1946) and the other with the function of language in Freudian theory (1956). The first paper, on pronouns, points out that there are important differences between the third person ("he", "she", "it") and the first and second persons "I" and "you". "The third person" is not a "person": "it is really the verbal form whose function is to express the non-person" ([1946] 1971: 198). The third person is always used "when the person is not designated and especially in the expression called impersonal" (1971: 199). The "third person" is "the only one by which a thing is predicated verbally" Although Benveniste does not specifically discuss the FreudGroddeck theory of the "It", his linguistic analysis of the differences between the pronouns of first, second and third person suggest that a colloquial translation of the German pronouns into English pronouns does not eliminate the psychological impersonality of the third-person pronoun, for that seems to be inherent in German and English grammar (as well as in the Latin grammar of Id). This suggestion is not necessarily inconsistent with Bettelheim or with the Freud-Groddeck theory of the "It", for Bettelheim is talking about unconscious individual associations with words, while Benveniste is talking about conscious collective grammatical rules. Freud and Groddeck, on the other hand, use das Es to refer to unconscious and impersonal forces that drive the individual psyche. Benveniste recognizes that the impersonal 'third person' is not a depersonalized person but a non-person, "which possesses as its sign the absence of that which specifically qualifies the Τ and 'you'. Because it does not imply any person, it can take any subject whatsover or no subject, and this subject, expressed or not, is never posited as a 'person'" (Benveniste 1971: 199-200). Between the third person pronouns and the first and second persons, Benveniste sees a kind of scale of psychological distance

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- with "1" as the subjective person, transcendent with respect to "you" ("the only imaginable person outside of me"), and the third person pronouns as non-persons, expressing "an indefinite set of nonpersonal beings", the "indecisive generality of 'one'" (Benveniste 1971: 201-20). Such a scale is constructed at a conscious level; at an unconscious level, the scale of subjectivity is reversed, for the "it" which refers to an individual's unconscious motivations is the most subjective and inward, while the "I" is most conscious and objective, and the "you", being outside of me, is an unknown external quantity. The resolution of this paradox depends on making the unconscious known in oneself as well as in others by psychoanalysis: "Where id was, there shall ego be".

3. Symbolism: T h e " l a n g u a g e " of the id Psychoanalysis has been called "the talking cure" because so much of the treatment seems to depend on the patient's talking to the analyst. Some observers have been so impressed with the role of speech in psychoanalysis that they have tried to analyze it as a special form of discourse (Lacan 1977; MacCabe 1981; Pitt enger et al. 1960; Wilder, 1968). At least one psychoanalyst, the French Jacques Lacan, has taken the analogy with language seriously and has applied the concepts and methods of structural linguistics and structural anthropology to "the language of the unconscious". Has the It, like Monsieur Gentilhomme, been speaking prose all the time without knowing it? Is the "language" of the unconscious presumably expressed in dreams, free associations, slips of the tongue, neurotic symptoms, myths, folklore, legend, idioms, proverbs and jokes only a third language whose syntax and semantics can be learned as our first and second languages have been learned? If so, why is psychoanalysis so prolonged a procedure and its results so uncertain? Benveniste's paper on "The Function of Language in Freudian Theory" (1956) answers some of these questions from a linguist's perspective. Without repudiating the linguistic analogy completely, he calls attentions to some important differences between linguistic symbolism and the symbolism of the .unconscious. The symbolism of language, he points out, is organized into a plurality of collective and traditional social institutions, or "languages", each of which articulates the infinitely varied signs into

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systems of relationships that can be formalized. These languages can be learned by growing up in the community that speaks a particular language or by special study and instruction. The symbolism of the unconscious, on the other hand, has a "vocabulary" of symbols that is common to all peoples and is not learned or recognized by those who produce the symbols. The connection between the signifiers, which are multiple, and the signifieds, which are unique, is not arbitrary as in the case of linguistic signs, but depends on a "motivational connection", such as the realization of a repressed desire, released in disguised images. The semantic and syntactical organization of languages, on the other hand, cannot be separated from the things of a "real" world which they reflect and shape according to a systematic and consistent logic, specific and distinct for each language. The syntax of unconscious symbolism recognizes only one dimension, that of succession [of the images], which provides a kind of causality for the unconscious processes. In spite of his insistence on these basic differences between linguistic symbolism and the symbolism of the unconscious, Benveniste does concede that there are some unconscious uses of stylistic devices that are also to be found in poetic and mythological discourse. These are chiefly substitutions to avoid tabooed expressions in euphemism and allusions, e.g., metaphoric conversion, metonymy and synecdoche, and ellipsis. Such devices, Benveniste believes, throw light on the unconscious motivations behind an individual's construction of a particular style and persona. If we accept Benveniste's analysis, we must conclude that the "language" of the Id, while sharing a few stylistic devices with poetic and mythological language, differs from ordinary language in several important respects; it is a "language" of universal symbols whose meanings consist of a very limited number of emotional motivations. The "symbols" are generally, but not exclusively, nonverbal images connected with their meanings by nonarbitrary relations which are hidden from the view of the subject as well as of the external observer. The aim of psychoanalysis is to discover such relations and to bring their meanings to conscious awareness. Although a widespread knowledge of psychoanalysis has generated familiarity with an alleged dictionary of Freudian "symbols" for example, that round objects symbolize the female organ and linear, pointed objects the male organ - the test of a correct and

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successful psychoanalytic interpretation depends, as Freud pointed out in his paper on "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" (1937 [ 1950c]), on whether patients get better as a result of the analysis. It would be useful for a linguist with a knowledge of psychoanalysis to extend Benveniste's comparison, and especially so for him to look at Freudian symbolism from a broader semiotic perspective such as Jakobson's functions of language or Peirce's semiotic. As a nonlinguist, I have the impression that some of the distinctive traits Benveniste attributes to psychoanalytic symbolism are also found in ordinary speech symbolism - for example substitutions, emotional motivations and intentions, the use of visual imagery, nonarbitrary connections between signs and their meanings, and even some universal symbols. Perhaps the only trait that is distinctive of the Id's language is that the meanings and intentions of the manifest symbols are unconscious. Even with respect to this trait, however, a distinction needs to be made between unconscious symbols and symbols whose meanings are deliberately set aside while the symbols are manipulated, as with algebra or an algorithm. Whitehead called the algebraic symbols "substitute symbols", following a usage introduced by the psychologist G.F. Stout (Singer 1984b: 25-26). We do not think about the meaning of substitute algebraic symbols because we may be interested in some of their other properties, for example, their syntactical or structural properties. Theoretically, we can find an interpretation for such symbols whenever we put our minds to the problem. In the case of unconscious symbols, we do think of some meanings for the symbols but, according to Freudian theory, these are not the unconscious meanings, which are repressed, displaced or otherwise disguised until revealed by psychoanalysis. One of the interesting byproducts of the psychoanalytic theory of symbolism is that many of the symbolic processes which Freud identified in unconscious symbolism — processes such as substitution, projection, condensation, displacement, sublimation, etc. — have also been identified in the symbolism of art, literature, myth, ritual, language and other fields (in addition to Benveniste, see L6vi-Strauss [ 1 9 7 0 ] ; Sapir 1934 [1949c] ; Warner 1959; among others). Psychoanalytic symbols not only have unconscious meanings; their interpretation is guided by a particular theory of what such symbols mean and of the many different ways these meanings can be expressed. To interpret the Bororo jaguar myth as a symbolic

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expression of Bororo social structure is also an interpretation in terms of "unconscious" meanings, since it is an interpretation not usually made by the Bororo. But as Spiro points out, this is not a Freudian interpretation of the myth, although Lfevi-Strauss acknowledged that he was following a kind of psychoanalytic analogy in trying to construct a universal code for interpreting the symbolic and hidden meanings of the myths (L6vi-Strauss [1970: 12]). Projecting many of the Freudian symbolic transformations on to the enlarged screen of human cultures, Lfevi-Strauss seems to have aspired to construct an algebra of cultural symbolism, with one important difference from Freud's project — that there are no emotional dispositions which motivate the symbolic transformations. Or, as Spiro puts it, there is no id in L6vi-Strauss' interpretations. The extent to which cultural symbolism represents an expression of unconscious id impulses is a controversial and little explored problem. Spiro's researches on the universality of the Oedipus complex bring some new approaches and results to the problem. In the meantime Benveniste's exegesis on Lacan's characterization of the relation of psychoanalysis to language clarifies a useful set of distinctions between sociolinguistic and psychoanalytic methods of symbolic analysis: We recognize the universe of the individual act of speech \parole], which is that of subjectivity. All through Freudian analysis it can be seen that the subject makes use of the act of speech and discourse in order to "represent himself' to himself as he wishes to see himself and as he calls upon the "other" to observe him. His discourse is appeal and recourse: a sometimes vehement solicitation of the other through the discourse in which he figures himself desperately, and an often mendacious recourse to the other in order to individualize himself in his own eyes. Through the sole fact of addressing another, the one who is speaking of himself, confronts himself, and establishes himself as he aspires to be, and finally historicizes himself in this incomplete or falsified history. Language [langage] is thus used here as the act of speech [parole], converted into that expression of instantaneous and elusive subjectivity which forms the condition of dialogue. The subject's language [langue] provides the instrument of a discourse in which his personality is released and creates itself, reaches out to the other and makes itself be recognized by him. (Benveniste 1971: 67)

Apart from his use of Saussure's distinction between parole and langue, Benveniste sounds more like Goffman, G.H. Mead and the symbolic interactionists than like Lacan or a Freudian analyst.

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He does go on, however, to point out that the antinomy between discourse and language assumes another meaning for the psychoanalyst: He must be attentive to the content of the discourse, but no less and especially to the gaps in the discourse. If the content informs him about the image which the subject has of the situation and about the position in it that he attributes to himself, he searches through this content for a new content: that of the unconscious motivation that proceeds from the buried complex. Beyond the innate symbolism of language, he will perceive a specific symbolism which will be formed, without the subject being aware of it, as much from what is omitted as from what is stated. And within the history in which the subject places himself, the analyst will provoke the emergence of another history, which will explain the motivation. He will thus take the discourse as the translation of another "language", which has its own rules, symbols, and "syntax", and which goes back to the deep structures of the psyche. (Benveniste 1971: 67-68)

4. T h e id's family r o m a n c e s The male Oedipus complex, according to Freud, basing his description on clinical evidence, is a triangular constellation involving a boy, his father, and his mother, in which the boy's sexual desire for the mother, whose love he wishes to monopolize, leads to hostility toward his father (and his siblings), whom he views as a rival [as rivals] for his mother's love (Spiro 1982b: 4; italics in original). Freud somewhere expressed the hope that psychoanalysis would one day make possible the construction of a "compass card of human motives" from which one could read off the motives of a particular individual or group as one reads off directions. Fond of quoting Schiller's adage "love and hunger make the world go around", Freud believed that in his theory of the Oedipus complex he had isolated one of the "nuclear complexes" of human emotions. The particular combinations and permutations of love and hate impulses between children and parents and how these impulses are formed in the sexual period of early childhood and later repressed or extinguished in a "latency" period are described and analyzed in several of Freud's papers, including Triebe und Triebschicksale (1915), translated in the Standard Edition as "Instincts and their Vicissitudes". Bettelheim suggests that a better translation would have been "Drives and their Mutability" to eliminate the connotation of biological immutability of the drives.

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Freud, however, stressed the mixed phylogenetic and ontogenetic character of the erotic and destructive drives in this and in related papers. In one of his last publications, Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940 [1949]), Freud left no doubt about his judgment of the relative importance of individual experience and heredity in the child's relation to the mother as the child's "first seducer": The philogenetic foundation has so much the upper hand . . . over accidental experience that it makes no difference whether a child has really sucked at the breast or has been brought up on the bottle and never enjoyed the tenderness of a mother's care. His development takes the same path in both cases; it may be that in the latter case his later longing is all the greater. And for however long a child has fed at his mother's breast, he will always be left with the conviction after he is weaned that his feeding was too short and too little (Freud 1940 [1949]: 90).

It was the universality of the Oedipus complex that was most often appealed to by Freud and other analysts as the key to interpreting unconscious symbolism and its cultural expression. Malinowski's claim in the 1920s that he found a cultural variant of the Oedipus complex in a Trobriand "matrilineal complex" in which the son wished to kill his mother's brother, who was the authority figure, and to marry his sister, became the paradigm for a cultural relativism and determinism of an entire generation of anthropologists, and the point of departure for a revision of Freudian psychoanalysis that spread rapidly through many disciplines. The distinctive feature of this development was not merely that it emphasized variations in Oedipal "complexes" in different cultures, but also that it rejected the Freudian theory of a universal Oedipus complex as a phase in the growth of all human children and in the "childhood" of mankind. While accepting the universality of the Oedipus, Spiro attributes the reasons for it to the universal family structure in which children are raised: Everywhere (due to Oedipal struggle and conflict with siblings) children's need for love is necessarily thwarted, as well as gratified, to some extent. Everywhere, therefore . . . hostile, rivalrous, and competitive feelings, as well as those of love and mutual aid, will be found to some extent. (Sprio 1978: 352)

If family structure is an empirically universal condition, the intensity and outcome of the Oedipal triangles between parents

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and children vary with different cultures, according to place and situation, manner of expression, and other variables. But "all cultures produce these feelings to some extent; they are among man's invariant psychological characteristics" and "the uniquely human part of his nature" (Spiro 1978: 352-353). Spiro arrives at this conclusion as a result of his own field researches, before he published his reexamination of Malinowski's Trobriand case: In short, just as the kibbutz and Ifaluk studies convinced me that many motivational dispositions are culturally invariant, the Burmese study convinced me that many cognitive orientations are also invariant. These stem from panhuman biological and cultural constants, and they comprise that universal human nature which, together with received anthropological opinion, I had formerly rejected as yet another ethnocentric bias (Sprio 1978: 349-350; see also Spiro 1974).

Spiro's recent book Oedipus in the Trobriands (1982b), which reexamines Malinowski's theory and the evidence on which it was based, concludes that Malinowski underestimated and ignored the evidence for the existence of a Freudian Oedipus complex in the Trobriands. This conclusion neutralizes the classical "crucial test case" against the universality of the Oedipus complex. It does not however mark a return of the Id, repressed for so many years in psychology, anthropology and sociology. Spiro does not advocate a reinstatement of the discarded nineteenth century phylogenetic and ontogenetic theories of human nature, or of Freud's speculations about the killing of the father by the band of brothers. Spiro certainly would not, moreover, abandon intensive cross-cultural studies and comparisons. His reexamination of the Trobriand data indeed just makes stronger a trend of evidence which has been accumulating in his own field studies in Ifaluk, Israel and Burma. In addition, Spiro appeals to the general observation that the prolonged infancy of human beings provides the conditions and opportunity for nurturance, protection and the acquisition of language and other cultural skills that constitute the panhuman cultural and social constants of a universal human nature. Does the existence of such "a developed and acquired human nature" (to use Robert Redfield's terms, 1958 [1962]: 439-452) imply the validity of Freud's theory of personality as a dynamic structure of Id, Ego, and Supergo? Conversely, does Freud's theory imply

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a universal human nature that is culturally and socially constituted? Judging from Spiro's recent papers, he answers both questions affirmatively. This position enables him to accept a generic cultural determinism while rejecting a particularistic cultural determinism and cultural relativism (Spiro 1984: 343-345).

5. Semiotic triads and Oedipal triangles From the point of view of a semiotic analysis of the Id, does the universality of the Oedipus complex imply that Bettleheim's three pronouns, "I", "It", and "Over-I", and the kin terms "child", "father", and "mother" will be found in all languages? Benveniste's papers suggest that the linguistic distribution is universal for " I " and "It", although he does not link this fact to the distribution of the Oedipus complex or to a Freudian conception of personality. Benveniste's discussion of third person pronouns also raises a question about "It", for if "It" does not denote a person, as "I" and "you" do, what sort of thing does " I t " denote or connote? With a little help from Benveniste and Peirce I believe it is possible to find satisfactory solutions to both problems. The problem of finding the denotation or connotation for "It" is the more difficult, since both Groddeck and Freud conceived of das Es as a largely unknown, unconscious and impersonal force. Negatively, the denotation is something that is not " I " and not "you", as Benveniste characterizes all "third person" pronouns. More positively, we might described " i t " as a kind of variable which can take as values a child, an adult regardless of gender, and any unknown agency that acts within the self and expresses some of its motives. The restriction "within the self' is relative to the way in which the limits and boundaries of the self are defined, a definition that varies with different individuals and cultures. In the Indian Advaitic doctrine of the identity of atman and brahman, for example, the boundaries of the self are so vast that the connotations of "it" are cosmic. "You are it" or "you are that" (tat tvam asi) is interpreted as the self is in everything and everything is in the self (see Nehru 1946 and Singer 1984 for further discussion). Some modern Indians who are familiar with the transcendental conception of the self and who say they believe in its truth neverthe-

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less also say that "one's ego is always there, always claiming that it has done this, it has done that" (Singer 1980: 337). It is probable that this Eastern transcendentalism filtered down to Freud and Groddeck through such intermediaries as Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, all of whom are occasionally cited, along with an occasional quotation from the Upanishads (Freud 1920 [1950]: 79). Charles S. Peirce, who anticipated the Freud-Groddeck theory of the id in several important respects, gave it an explicit semiotic formulation. In some of his early writings Peirce singled out the three personal pronouns "I", "It", and "Thou" as names for three personality types, for three historical eras, and for his three phenomenological categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness respectively (Fisch in Peirce 1982: xxvii-xxxii). Peirce also converted the three pronouns into the adjectives "egotistical", "idistical", and "tuistical", as in the following statement from his oration of 1863 (Fisch in Peirce 1982: xxix, 113): First there was the egotistical stage when man arbitrarily imagined perfection, now is the idistical stage when he observes it. Hereafter must be the more glorious tuistical stage when he shall be in communion with her.

By linking the three pronouns to three motivational drives or impulses as the "I-impulse", the "It-impulse" and the "Thouimpulse", Peirce added a pragmatic and psychological dimension to the purely grammatical and semantical analysis of these pronouns. This addition he derived from his close study of Schiller's Letters on the Esthetic Education of Man (Schiller 1793 [1967], Wilkinson edition). Schiller classifies the three drives a bit differently into a Formtrieb, a Stoff trieb and a Spieltrieb. In a class paper he wrote at Harvard College on Ruskin's criticism of Schiller, Peirce adds an explanation of Schiller's three impulses. "I should say that these were the I impulse and faculty, and the It impulse and faculty; and also the Thou impulse which (it seems to me) is what Schiller regards as that of beauty" (Peirce 1982: xxxviii). In 1861 Peirce started to write a book with the title "I, It and Thou" wherein he wrote "Thou is an It in which there is another I. I looks in, It looks out, thou looks through, out and in again" (1982: xxix). William James, who was in touch with Peirce at the time wrote in one of his notebooks (Peirce 1982: xxix):

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The thou idea, as Peirce calls it, dominates an entire realm of mental phenomena, embracing poetry, all direct intuition of nature, scientific instincts, relations of man to man, morality, etc. All analysis must be into a triad; me and it require the complement

of thou. James in this note interprets the three pronouns as names for three general categories and emphasizes the thou category. When Peirce found other names for the categories, he continued his interest in the doctrine of tuism, which he defined in 1891 for the Century Dictionary as "the doctrine that all thought is addressed to a second person, or to one's future self as to a second person" (Peirce 1982: xxix; also see the Oxford English Dictionary on tuism and illeism). Peirce's doctrine of tuism provides the crucial link between a Jamesian individualistic psychology and a social and semiotic psychology that was to develop with the symbolic interactionism of Josiah Royce, Baldwin, Cooley, Dewey and G.H. Mead in modern sociology and social anthropology (Parsons 1970; Singer 1984a). The doctrine that thought is a conversation of an " I " with a "me" or with an imaginary "you" enabled the private self to join in the public conversations of "1" with "you", "we" and "they", and those of each individual with a "generalized other". Areas of individual privacy in phantasy and language remained not as impenetrable fortresses of solipsism, but as socially and culturally protected sanctuaries. The inescapable indexicality of pronouns, not "the I", but "this I", as Peirce would say, assures recognition for a built-in uniqueness of personal and social identities. And the fact that speech and language must function as means of communication as well as of self-expression and signification also generates the intersubjectivity and public nature of interpersonal discourse on the psychoanalytic couch as well as in the agora. Peirce's personal and private life must surely have influenced his semiotic theory of the self. He himself has interpreted the irreducible semiotic triad of sign, object and interpretant as a kind of family triangle: "A sign mediates between its object and its meaning . . . object the father, sign the mother of meaning". Fisch comments that "he might have added, of their son, the Interpretant" (Fisch in Peirce 1982: xxxii). This interpretation of Peirce's semiotic triad is an intriguing one and finds some further support in his analogy between words and the parental relation:

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A man denotes whatever is the object of his attention at the moment; he connotes whatever he knows or feels of this object, and is the incarnation of this form or intelligible species; his interpretant is the future memory of this cognition, his future self, or the other person he addresses, or a sentence he writes, or a child he gets (Peirce [1866] 1982: 498; Singer 1980, 1984).

Peirce's semiotic triad of sign, object, and interpretant has usually been regarded as purely abstract and formal. In the case of human semiosis, at least, it is necessary to add a dialogue of utterers and interpreters to the triadic relation (see Singer 1984). Now we find that Peirce had in mind a "personal" interpretation of the triad as a parental relation. I do not mean to suggest that his semiotic triad expresses an unresolved Oedipus complex between "mama", "papa" and "me". In fact, some of his friends and critics accused Peirce of a triadomania for introducing so many trichotomies in his writings. He defended himself against this charge by pointing out that trichotomous classifications have often turned out to be very useful in the history of science (Peirce CP 1.568-572). I prefer to leave the question of Peirce's Oedipus complex to psychohistorians. In their research they should bear in mind that the Oedipal interpretation of the semiotic triad is only one of many interpretations which Peirce has suggested, and that he himself consciously recognized the Oedipal interpretation. If his Oedipal dispositions stimulated some of his ideas about semiosis, at least they had been sublimated by a conscious "I". Whatever may have been the outcome of Peirce's Oedipus complex, his definition of the symbolic nature of man and his triadic analysis of the sign relation will remain of permanent value. That he also suggested how the semiotic triad is capable of being interpreted as a parental triangle of child, father, and mother, and as a pronominal triad of "I, It and Thou" does not diminish the value of his semiotic analysis. On the contrary, the suggestion testifies to the power of his theory of signs to analyze the nuclear constellations of human emotions as integral components of an elementary community of interpretation.

6. Conclusion: Cultural relativism, h u m a n nature, and semiotics Spiro's rejection of a particularistis cultural determinism and its associated cultural relativism does not prevent him from accepting

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cultural and social variability in the expression of emotions, or in the structure, intensity and outcomes of a universal Oedipus complex: "Human beings do come in different cultural shapes and forms . . . " ( 1 9 8 4 : 25). But these variations in culture patterns are matters of "surface structure", not of "deep structure" similarities which underlie the varied culture patterns in the display of emotions: Insofar as it is culture that makes us human, and insofar as an enculturated Iatmul, Ifaluk and Ifugao are equally human, the deep structure similarities in their cultures (and in all other cultures) comprise a set of universal culture patterns which, in interaction with a common biological heritage and common features of social interaction, creates a generic human mind. (Spiro 1984: 335)

This affirmation of a generic cultural determinism and reaffirmation in a modern idiom of the classic "psychic unity of mankind" concludes Spiro's response to Michelle Rosaldo's paper "Towards an Anthropology of Self and Feeling" (1984). Rosaldo's position represents an updated and sophisticated refinement of Ruth Benedict's cultural relativism of the 1940s. Not only do different societies vary in the emotions their cultural configurations select for emphasis, such as shame or guilt, as Benedict held. Rosaldo adds, with evidence from her observations of the Ilongots, that "there are correspondences between emotions, social forms and culturally shaped beliefs", and that these variables and the cultural idioms in which they are expressed differ in different societies: The error of the classic 'guilt and shame' account is that it tends to universalize our culture's view of a desiring inner self, without realizing that such selves — and so, the things they feel - are, in important, ways, social creations. 'Shames' differ as much cross-culturally as our notions of 'shame' and 'guilt'.(Rosaldo 1984: 149)

The "shame" felt by the hierarchical Javanese ("a constant sentinel") differs from that felt by the equalitarian Ilongo (an occasional sentinel), and the "shame" of b o t h differs from the "shames" of Mediterranean peasants or of Benedict's Japanese "needing to guard a public presence and restrain such forces as might undermine the status of their families and homes" (Rosaldo 1984: 149). Rosaldo's insistence on the cross-cultural variations in expressions, meanings and functions of "shame" extends t o other emotions —

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"anger", "envy", "happiness", "love" as well. To think otherwise is an ethnocentric projection onto others of western "images in terms of which our subjectivities are formed". Because we think of a subjective self whose operations are distinct from those of persons-in-the-world, we tend to think of human selves and their emotions as everywhere the same. (Rosaldo 1984: 149)

Spiro is not content to answer Rosaldo's direct challenge to a universalistic theory of human nature simply by reaffirming his belief in a "psychic unity of mankind" which incorporates Freud's theory of personality. He also tries to show that Rosaldo's observations on the Ilongo can be better explained by a Freudian theory of emotions than by a cultural relativist explanation. At issue is Rosaldo's claim that the Ilongot did not think of hidden or forgotten anger "as disturbing energies repressed; nor did they see in violent actions the expression of a history of frustrations buried in a fertile but unconscious mind". This suggested to her, on the contrary, that "in important ways their feelings and the ways their feelings work must differ from our own" (Rosaldo 1984: 18-19). Spiro concedes that Ilongot anger when it occurs . . . seems to be much more intense than ours, and its expression is much more violent,but these quantitative dimensions, aside, their anger and ours seem to work in similar ways. They, like we, get angry when frustrated, and they like we usually repress their anger in culturally inappropriate contexts (for example, between kinsmen) and to express it symbolically in culturally appropriate ways (for example, in headhunting strangers). This indicates . . . that human feelings and the ways in which they work are determined not so much by the characterics of particularistic patterns but by the transcultural characteristics of a generic human mind. (Spiro 1984: 331-332)

The disagreement between Rosaldo and Spiro does not spring primarily from a disagreement about the empirical occurrence of certain kinds and intensities of emotion (although this was an issue for Spiro in Malinowski's denial of "normal" Oedipal feelings among Trobrianders). The disagreement centers on the issue whether the Ilongot's violent expression of anger in headhunting unconsciously expresses anger towards kinsmen that has been repressed and displaced onto strangers who symbolically represent those kinsmen. Spiro obviously believes this is a plausible interpretation of Rosaldo's data although he admits, that there is no direct evidence for such

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an interpretation of the kind that might be gathered from psychoanalysing Ilongot headhunters. Rosaldo, as noted, rules out such an interpretation for the reason that in the Ilongot "cultural idiom", in their way of life and images of the self, there is "an absence . . . of an interior space in which the self might nurture an unconscious rage. . . . Ilongot discourse about 'anger' overlaps with, yet is different from our own" (Rosaldo 1984: 20). A resolution of the disagreement between Spiro and Rosaldo, unlike that between Spiro and L6vi-Strauss on the Bororo, depends on the transcultural translatability of different modes of discourse in different societies and not simply on the presence or absence of particular kinds of emotions in those societies. The problem of intercultural translation transcends the domain of comparative linguistics, since, as Ruth Benedict observed in her book on Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, the modes of communication in some cultures may rely to a greater extent on bodily imitation, example, meditation and silence than on explicit verbal commentary and directions (Benedict 1946). In such cultures, psychoanalysis itself must become a "no-talking cure" in order to adapt to the dominant cultural idiom and modes of communication (Roland 1984). In such cultures, words and their interpretation inhabit a small colony in the vast empire of signs that semiotics as the study of patterned communication in all modalities needs to explore (Barthes 1982, Mead in Sebeok et al. 1964). The dialogue between Spiro and Rosaldo on cultural relativism and a universal human nature almost comes full circle to a discussion that began after the Second World War — almost full circle, but not quite, for the debate has risen to a new level, a semiotic level. Over thirty years ago when Ruth Benedict's cultural relativism was in full flower, a critical analysis I published of her distinctions between cultures in which shame is a major external sanction and those in which guilt and absolute moral standards are internal sanctions suggested that this distinction under-stated the universal distribution of a sense of a shame and a sense of guilt becaue of inadequate criteria for defining shame and guilt and the limited methods available for interpreting psychological and cultural data. Drawing on the psychoanalyst Gerhart Piers' distinction between unconscious feelings of shame and guilt, and on Robert Redfield's theory of world view, my analysis suggested some new definitional criteria of shame and guilt, and applied them to interpretations of American Indian psychometric and cultural data.

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The analysis concluded that the validity and fruitfulness of psychological characterizations and comparisons of cultures will increase if they "would develop characterizing constructs in which the emotional emphases of a culture are integrally related to cultural values, world view, overt behavior and features of social organization" (Singer 1953, 1973: 79; cf. Levy 1973). Ironically, in view of the "white man's burden" kind of explanation 1 was soon to encounter for India's rates of economic development and technical progress, Max Weber's construction of a "Protestant ethic" was cited as one example of the required kind of characterization. India obviously has neither a "Protestant ethic" nor a "spirit of capitalism" in Max Weber's strict sense, but may have some functional equivalents (Singer 1956, 1961, 1966). That some Indian industrialists and entrepreneurs have a "Hindu ethic" and a spirit of innovation and achievement has been documented in several recent studies (Singer 1968, [1970] 1980, 1973; Owens and Nandy 1977). Lacking Spiro's training and experience in psychoanalysis, I have not attempted to study unconscious shame and guilt among Indians or to interpret their unconscious symbolism. The observations and interpretations of more qualified students, however, leave no doubt about the existence of Oedipal triangles in India, although their specific interpretations may be problematic (Erikson 1969; Kakar 1978, 1982; Roy 1975; Masson 1980; Ramanujan 1983; Roland 1982). In spite of these controversial issues in psychoanalyzing cultures, it is still possible to gain some access to the inwardness of another culture through a semiotic study of its identity, including a semiotics of the id — provided one is familiar with the signs of the identity and has a collateral acquaintance with the objects of those signs and with their interpreters. A comparison of the semiotics of one country's identity with the identity-semiotic of another country requires, in addition to a familiarity with the signs, objects and interpreters of each country's identity, inter-cultural translatibility of the signs as well as of the semiotic theories of both countries. I have tried to show that these conditions are approximately met for a comparison of Indian and American identities and their respective semiotics (Singer 1984a).

A conversation of cultures: The United States and Southern Asia 23

Mutual security depends on mutual understanding, and for understanding you have to have a conversation. At home and abroad to talk and then to listen, to listen with the help of reason and reasonably t o talk, is t o strengthen us just where we can be so much stronger than the Soviets. It is to build the community of free minds, "the civilization of the dialogue". Robert Redfield It occurred to me as World War II was ending that in order to create a constituency for the concept of a United Nations we needed a program of this kind, in which people from all over the world would come to know one another and to understand and respect the traditions and cultures and values of other people. Senator J. William Fulbright

Since the history, research activities, academic programs and degrees in Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago have been described in previous publications, the present article will restrict itself to a brief account of the international climate of opinion in which the ideal of "a conversation of cultures" emerged, of how that ideal influenced foreign policy and educational programs in the United States, and in particular, the development of several experimental intercultural programs at the University of Chicago.

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1. Emergence of the ideal of a conversation of cultures after the Second World War The idea of guiding the relations among nations by "a conversation of cultures" and "a civilization of the dialogue" emerged as a worldwide ideal after the Second World War. The idea was articulated in the conference and round table discussions organized by UNESCO as well in the meetings of other international and national associations and societies, a few of which changed their names to bury their pasts as societies for colonial affairs. At that time, in the 1940s, the idea of "a conversation of cultures" expressed the hope that international relations would be reconstructed on a basis different from that which led to the Second World War — imperialism and colonialism, master-race myths, psychological warfare, balance of power politics, chauvinistic nationalism. As an alternative means of conducting international relations, "the conversation of cultures" projected the old ideal of peace through mutual and equitable exchange of people, words, goods and services — an exchange that was both a precondition and a consequence of mutual knowledge among the nations of the world. Growing numbers of thoughtful people are now convinced that "to make conversation, not war" remains about the only survival path left open for mankind to follow in this nuclear age. In the United States, post-World War II foreign policies included some attempts to contribute to "a conversation of cultures" with other nations. In addition to the Marshall Plan for Europe and Point Four programs, largely humanitarian programs for postwar reconstruction, there were also programs specifically designed to increase mutual exchange of people and knowledge. Among such programs were the United States Information Service libraries abroad, the State Department's cultural exchange program, the Peace Corps, the Fulbright and Hays fellowships, the Public Law 480 arrangement that bought publications from countries with counterpart funds accumulated from food loans and "gifts". Foreign and international programs funded by the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie foundations and other nongovernmental organizations added significantly to these government fellowship, research, and aid programs. In spite of the many difficulties and imperfections of these programs, deriving from maladministration, naivetfe, and insensitivity,

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or from the operation of other policies which thwarted their aims, the programs have been widely regarded as sincere expressions of goodwill and a desire to help. But the critics of these programs have persistently asked whether goodwill and friendly gestures were enough, whether understanding of other cultures based on firsthand experience and scholarly knowledge was not also an indispensable ingredient for "a conversation of cultures". These critical questions were dramatized in literary portraits of an ugly American or European full of good intentions, carrying "the white man's burden" to help the "natives" but failing in the end because of his lack of knowledge and understanding of their history, their languages, their social customs and mores, their values and mentality, as well as their special conditions of living. Sometimes these portraits were set to cheerful music, as in "South Pacific" and "The King and I". Kipling's sad refrain, "East is East and West is West" somehow kept breaking through the musical comedy optimism, echoing the melancholy overtones of the white man in the East sounded by Conrad, Maugham, Forster, and by Puccini's "Madama Butterfly", and to some extent by Kipling himself, to mention only artists who were "white" themselves.

2. National steps toward intercultural education Awareness of the problems of "the ugly American" and of the need to educate him in the cultures of other peoples broke into public consciousness and public policy with the passage by Congress of the first Fulbright Act in 1946. After that there followed about a decade's quick growth in cross-national programs for exchange of persons, for language and area training and research, for publications, performing arts, conferences, lectures, and seminars, libraries, professional associations, and journals. Some of these programs were authorized and funded by national legislation; some by nongovernmental groups such as the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie foundations; the learned societies, universities, and business corporations. Lines were not always easy to draw, since there were many joint and cooperative undertakings. For Southern Asian Studies in the Unites States, this formative period was marked by a number of important milestones. These included the following:

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1951 - Report of the Joint Committee on Southern Asia of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. The report surveyed present resources and needs, and made recommendations, most of which were in fact realized over the following decade. Professor W. Norman Brown, who had organized the first American university interdisciplinary program on South Asia at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946-1947, was the moving spirit behind the Joint Committee's report. 1956-1957 - The conversion of the Far Eastern Association into the Association for Asian Studies and the associated change in title of the Association's journal from The Far Eastern Quarterly to The Journal of Asian Studies. These changes were made to accommodate the growing number of professional scholars working in Southern Asia, and were negotiated by an Ad Hoc Committee on Southern Asia under the leadership of Richard Park. 1956-1957 - National-level meetings of South Asianists to discuss mutual problems of teaching and research, such as the seminar on "Leadership and Political Institutions in India", Berkeley, organized by Richard Park; the conference on "Introducing India in Liberal Education" in Chicago, organized by myself and the staff of Chicago's Indian Civilization course; the conference on Library Resources for South Asia organized by Horace Poleman, Director of the Orientalia Division of the Library of Congress. 1958-1959 — The passage of the National Defense Education Act, which authorized, under Title VI, the designation and partial funding of Language and Area Centers at universities and colleges. Seven such centers were designated in 1959, including a South Asia Language and Area Center at Chicago, and more were designated later. Funds for predoctoral fellowships and for research were also made available under this act. 1962 — The passage of Public Law 480 (The Library of Congress Book Procurement Program), which brought to participating university libraries thousands of books and periodicals from South Asia (and other countries with counterpart funds). The titles were selected and, more recently, catalogued by a special staff of the Library of Congress (final decisions on which titles to retain were made by the university libraries). This has been the most important single program making contemporary publications from South Asia quickly available for American students and faculty.

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1961-1962 — Establishment of the American Institute of Indian Studies (AUS) by a group of American universities to support the teaching of Indian studies in the United States and research in India. The Institute offers fellowships for study in India to students and faculty with support chiefly provided from counterpart funds. In the 1960s the Institute added special programs of language instruction in India, a Center for Art and Archaeology in Banaras, seminars, and publications. The proposal for establishing an American Institute of Indian Studies was first made in Norman Brown's 1951 Report to the Joint Committee on Southern Asia. The realization of this longcherished dream of Professor Brown's owed much to the great esteem which both Indians and Americans felt for him as a gentleman, a scholar, and a cultural leader. A measure of what had been accomplished during the decade of formative growth of South Asian Studies in the United States from the joint SSRC-ACLS Committee Report of 1951 to the establishment of the American Institute of Indian Studies in 1961 will be found in Resources for South Asian Language Studies in the United States by W. Norman Brown (1960), and Richard Lambert's Resources for South Asian Area Studies in the United States (1962). Lambert also updated his report in 1973.

3. The formative period at Chicago The University of Chicago was an active participant in and contributor to the national-level programs and organizations on South and Southeast Asia that emerged after the Second World War. Chicago faculty people were active as members and officers in the national committees, associations, and societies such as the joint SSRC-ACLS Committee on Southern Asia, the Ad Hoc Committee on South Asia, the Committee on South Asian Languages, the Association for Asian Studies, the Asia Society, and the American Institute of Indian Studies, of which the University became a charter member. In fact, the formative period for these developments of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University more or less coincided with the formative period on the national scene, from the late 1940s through the 1950s. There had been some teaching and re-

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search on India, Burma, the Philippines, and Indonesia before the Second World War in several departments of the University. But this attention, while serious, had been intermittent, scattered, smallscale and unsupported by associated studies of the areas except for Sanskrit studies. With the organization of the University's Committee on Southern Asian Studies in 1954 to coordinate and support further development in this field, the University assembled over the next decade the faculty, library, and language resources that enabled it to offer undergraduate and graduate programs in Southern Asian studies. Most of the programs were distributed over twelve or thirteen departments in the Divisions of the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Beyond making such programs available, these expanded and coordinated resources at the University improved the level of American conversations with the people of South and Southeast Asia in accuracy, depth, and mutual understanding. Before attempting to describe the kind and level of intercultural conversation started at Chicago, it is important to take note of the special supporting conditions that facilitated Chicago's development of South Asian Studies (as well as its other area and inter-na tional studies). Three conditions were basic, 1 believe: the availability of outside funds, the administrative structure and leadership of the University, and the initiatives and persistence of a small group of faculty. No university in the United States is well enough endowed to afford from its regular budget the kind of expansion of faculty, library, language laboratory, and predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships for training, travel and research, to build on its own a first-rate language and area program. Without the institutional grant and fellowship programs of the major foundations — especially Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie — and of the Fulbright-Hays Act, the National Defense Education Act, Title VI, or PL 480, neither the University of Chicago nor any other such institution would have progressed very far toward establishing a center for South Asian studies. A second facilitating condition was the flexible and open administrative structure of the University of Chicago, which permitted the formation of interdisciplinary, interdepartmental, and interdivisional committees, centers, and institutes. Some of the University's administrative officers recognized that the organization

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of scholarly resources for the study of regions such as South and Southeast Asia could not be accommodated in separate departments and would require inter- and supra-departmental administrative structures. They also encouraged the innovative programs with the promise that those which proved educationally successful would be incorporated into regular University budgets. One significant measure of such incorporation may be indicated by the fact that ten out of the fifteen members of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations are now on tenured appointment, and two of these have recently been named Distinguished Service Professors (Edward C. Dimock and A.K. Ramanujan). In addition to the availability of external funds and a flexible administrative structure, a third condition that facilitated the development of the University's program in Southern Asian studies was a small group of faculty willing to take the necessary initiative and to cooperate in coordinating programs of studies. Most of these were not specialists who had been trained in South Asia language and area programs. In many cases, their knowledge of the area, and its people and cultures, was derived from wartime and immediate postwar experience. They traveled and lived in the area in the armed services, or as civilians on special government assignments. Their experience as teachers or students in the army language schools, the Army Specialized Training programs, and the Civil Affairs Training programs showed them ways to improve educational methods. In the immediate postwar period, they took advantage of opportunities for travel, study, work, research under the Fulbright and other fellowships, the United Nations relief agencies, UNESCO, and other societies. When these faculty members returned to their regular duties at the University they drew on their wartime experience and immediate postwar travels in their teaching and research. They joined with colleagues and educational leaders in discussion and cooperative planning of new forms of international education. At Chicago one of the early results of these cooperative efforts was the formation of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies in 1954. But this was only one of several such groups that were formed at the University in the 1950s. Fred Eggan established a Philippine Studies Program; Bert Hoseltiz and several colleagues founded a journal and a Center for Economic Development and Cultural Change in the same year; Sylvia Thrupp founded her journal,

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Comparative Studies in Society and History. Comparative and international programs were also launched at this time for the Comparative Study of New Nations (Shils, Fallers, and Geertz), International Relations (Morganthau and Kaplan), Economics (Schultz, Johnson), Law (Rheinstein), Linguistics (McQuown, Hamp), Literature (Stankiewicz, Dimock), and History of Religions (Kitagawa, Eliade). These new groupings were mutually reenforcing and sometimes overlapped, and were to some extent competing for the same sources of outside funding. Eventually they were administratively unified in a Center for International Studies with Chauncy D. Harris as director. This Center also included other language and area centers, and committees that had meanwhile been organized in Far Eastern, Middle Eastern, Slavic and Balkan, African, and Latin American studies.

4. A new kind of area studies: The Redfield model The problem of finding a basis for intellectual unification for these proliferating area, international, and comparative studies within a framework of concepts that would make scholarly and educational sense was a more difficult one, at Chicago and elsewhere. Robert Redfield, anthropologist and Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences from 1934 to 1946, was one of the first to question the adequacy of the wartime organization of "area studies" as a model for postwar programs in universities. At a 1944 conference on the organization of postwar area studies sponsored by the Social Sciences Research Council, Redfield proposed an alternative model: a long, integrated, and intensive study of the languages, history, economics, government, society, anthropology, and arts of Russia, China, India, and Latin America. In Redfield's model the different disciplines would be brought into considered relation to one another with reference to each of these regions, but the unifying conception of such studies would be anthropological and cultural. For the conception that would give unity to the effort would be not so much the spatial fact that China or Russia or Latin America is one part of the earth's surface, as the fact of culture. These students would all be concerned with a traditional way of life that had maintained a distinguishing character over a long time, to great consequence for mankind. A literate people expresses its traditional way of life in what is

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written; and every people expresses it in institutions and customs and everyday behavior. . . . The regional program in research may take the form of long study of the great world cultures. We shall . . . have one or more excellent sets of different colored glasses through which to see and correct our preconceived notions. What the study of primitive societies now contributes to education will then be attainable through study of important world civilizations with the aid of specialized disciplines, (quoted in Singer 1976)

The idea of studying traditional ways of life or cultures holistically and comparatively was, of course, already a familiar approach to anthropologists in the 1940s. But such an approach had been chiefly applied to nonliterate, primitive, and tribal cultures. Redfield's suggestion that the approach could be extended to the organization of area studies through interdisciplinary studies of a few selected living civilizations and their great literate traditions was a novel and challenging one, even for anthropologists. In his own studies of peasant and urban communities in Mexico and Guatemala in the 1930s, Redfield had already taken the first step towards "a social anthropology of civilizations", as he later called the approach, by a simultaneous comparison of four Yucatan communities along a continuum or "gradient" of folk to urban culture. But since the "great tradition" of Mayan civilization had been pretty well decapitated by the Spanish conquest, Redfield did not feel a need to incorporate historical, literary, and textual studies into his approach. His conception of civilizations as historic structures and organizations of great and little communities, of great and little traditions, persisting, interacting, and changing, emerged when he turned after the Second World War to China, India, the Middle East, Europe, and "the great traditions" of their civilizations.24 Redfield's proposal for organizing "area" studies around groups of scholars from different disciplines prepared to devote themselves to long and intensive study of the cultures of selected living civilizations was not quickly taken up. The methodological and financial problems seemed forbidding. Redfield himself was given an opportunity to encourage the formation of such interdiciplinary groups when in 1951 the Ford Foundation made the first of several grants to the University of Chicago for intercultural studies under Redfield's direction. This grant of funds was not at the outset intended to support the intensive study of any particular civilization. It was

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rather intended to support the exploration and development of methods for characterizing and comparing civilizations. Redfield saw the problem as one of developing widespread knowledge of the differences and similarities among different civilizations and of the common humanity underlying them through a cooperative effort among scholars all over the world. As these explorations of methods for characterizing and comparing civilizations proceeded, based chiefly in a continuing "Comparison of Cultures" seminar at the University of Chicago, several groups of scholars were found who were already engaged on specialized intensive cultural studies of specific civilizations and who expressed a willingness to consider some of the questions being raised by the project. Such were the Committee on Chinese Thought, under the leadership of Arthur Wright and John Fairbank, a group of Islamicists organized by Gustave von Grunebaum, and several groups of social anthropologists and Indianists working in India who were assembled by McKim Marriott and myself. Besides these groups of specialized scholars of particular civilizations, the Redfield project also supported promising research by individual scholars on the world views of peasants in Middle America, (Charles Leslie, Calixta Guiteras-Holmes, E. Michel Mendelson), and on historical and philosophical methods of understanding other cultures (F.G. Friedman, Eliseo Vivas, Arnold Toynbee). A conference organized by Harry Hoijer of linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers assessed the Sapir-Whorf theory of the relations of language to thought and behavior and provided the landmark volume Language in Culture, in 1953. Redfield's participation in the Ford project was not confined to administrative and financial matters. He articulated the animating vision of "a conversation of cultures" and himself charted some of the unexplored territory to be traveled in his three books, The Primitive World and Its Transformations, 1953b; The Little Community, 1955a; and Peasant Society and Culture, 1956a. In three lectures, delivered at the Behavioral Sciences Center just before his death in 1958, and intended as drafts for a little book on civilizations, he began to develop his ideas on how to think about a civilization.25

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5. An undergraduate introduction to South Asian civilizations Redfield's essay on "Thinking about a Civilization" introduced the readings and lectures in the College's introductory course on Indian Civilization launched in the autumn quarter of 1956, and was also given as a paper at the University of Chicago conference on "Introducing India in Liberal Education", in 1957. The latter had been convened to consider alternative ways of organizing such courses. Indeed, the influence of Redfield's approach to understanding living civilizations as wholes went beyond the circumstance of being presented in an opening lecture. The spirit of that approach infused the entire early organization of the Indian Civilization course and, to a lesser degree, the cognate Islamic and Chinese civlization courses, which constituted the first phase of the College's non-Western Civilization program. In the first three years, 19561959, of the Indian Civilization course, for example, the organization of the syllabus, readings, lectures, and discussions roughly followed the model sketched in Redfield's "Thinking about a Civilization": a holistic and comparative conceptual framework for the civilization guided by a direct acquaintance with the culture and its expressive utterances and representations, and by collections of factual information about it. The first quarter of the Indian Civilization course dealt with the changing dimensions of society and culture on the subcontinent (language, religions, culture; land and people; social structure; village and town; civilizational change; world view and ethos). This first unit was taught by three anthropologists: Bernard Cohn, McKim Marriott, and myself. The second quarter dealt with the classical heritage ("The Great Tradition") of ancient and medieval India and was taught by two Sanskritists, George Bobrinskoy and J.A.B, van Buitenen; and the third quarter dealt with the emergence of the independent national states of India and Pakistan, taught by a modern historian, Stephen Hay, and a political scientist, Myron Weiner. The threefold division of the course was not rigidly drawn, for much of the planning of the course was joint; we often listened to each other's lectures, followed a discussion section through the year, and tried to read all the course readings. Films, musical and dance performances, demonstrations of rituals and other expressive aspects of the culture were an integral part of the students', and the faculty's shared experience in the course. This undergraduate

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course quickly became a forum where the specialists' conversations about the cultures of South Asia established a community of scholars who in more specialized courses and study trips taught the languages, literatures, and the arts; the religions, philosophies, and sciences; the customs, laws, politics, economics, and history needed to carry on a dialogue about the cultures and civilizations of South Asia. A measure of the vitality and viability of Redfield's civilizational approach is provided by the fact that about thirty years after his lecture on "Thinking about a Civilization", the Indian Civilization Course, now broadened into a South Asian Civilizations course, has kept the spirit of that approach alive and, in fact, returns to the three-part organization of 1956-1959. The Redfield approach also stimulated the organization of B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. programs in Southern Asian studies, and civilizational studies in other areas. These recent developments have increased the number of civilizations being studied intensively at the University and have also deepened the levels of analysis and understanding attained by the approach.

6. From ethnocentric images to scholarly knowledge For the civilizations of South and Southeast Asia, evidence of these developments is provided by the publications of COSAS members. Even when written for nonspecialists, their work shows a deep and intimate knowledge of the languages, culture, social institutions, and history of the people they deal with. It is not simply the direct acquaintance with a particular festival, person, literary or architectural expression which accounts for the achievement of understanding. One needs also to know how such particulars fit into a context of customs, institutions, language, and arts. Presupposed also in this process of getting to know another civilization is a command of some scholarly discipline — anthropology, art, history, linguistics, philosophy, theology, or politics. We have tended to assume that most of these disciplines as developed in the West have a universal validity and apply to all societies and cultures. Anthropology, geography, and history have occasionally questioned these assumptions, and have tried t o counteract the ethnocentic bias of Western scholars. The formula proposed by anthropology for avoiding ethnocentrism was to try to understand

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other cultures in their own terms, "to grasp the native's view of his relation to his world", as Malinowski put it in his Argonauts of the Western Pacific. The overcoming of ethnocentric bias and the acquisition of the kinds of direct acquaintance, information, and knowledge of the cultures of Southern Asia leading to an understanding of them in their own terms has been a difficult and long undertaking depending on the work of many different kinds of people. The missionary, the soldier and diplomat, the colonial administrator, the scholar have all contributed to the knowledge and opinion, the images and "scratches on our minds" through which the West has seen Southern Asia. A story which seems to have impressed both the Greeks and Romans concerns two Indian ascetics, called in Greek accounts "philosophers" and named Kalanos and Mandanis. The story is derived from Oneskritos, one of Alexander's officers who was sent to find the sages. Alexander had heard that they went about naked, were inured to hardships, and held in highest honor, but would not go to others when invited. Oneskritos found some outside of the city (Taksasila) sitting or lying naked in the hot sun and talked with two of them. Kalanos, the younger, told Oneskritos that if he wished to hear him he should strip off his clothes and lie down naked on the stones to listen. Mandanis, the oldest and wisest, rebuked Kalanos for his insolence and said he would talk with Oneskritos. He praised Alexander for desiring wisdom and for being the only philosopher in arms he had ever seen. "I am entitled", he added, "to indulgence, if while conversing by means of three interpreters who, except for language, understand nothing we say any more than the vulgar, I am unable to demonstrate the utility of philosophy. One might as well expect water to flow through mud". 2 6

Given the large number of languages in South Asia as well as the sophistication and variety of arts and sciences, Mandanis' complaint about the difficulties of communicating with Westerners is still current in South Asia. The complaint is somewhat mitigated by the fact that many in South Asia know European languages, especially English, and that some Westerners have acquired fluency in the languages and literatures of the region. Both kinds of mitigation are well illustrated by members of Chicago's Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, three of whom are tenured native speakers (A.K. Ramanujan, K. Bahl, C.M. Nairn). In their cooperative contributions, members of the Department provide overall historical surveys of South Asian languages and literatures, as well as more specialized grammars, readers, and translations in

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Sanskrit. Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, and Rajasthani. Less regular instruction has also been provided on demand in Gujarati, Maharathi, Kannada, and Oriya. The level of language proficiency required of Ph.D. students in the Department is set at the equivalent of four years continuous study of a language. In addition, a stream of original translations, commentaries, criticisms, and interpretations in prose and poetry, flows from the faculty of language and literary specialists, cultural and art historians, linguists and philosophers. A Southern Asian Reference Center was organized by Maureen Patterson in 1959, with a Reference Collection, Catalogues and Bibliographic Services. The long, integrated study of the languages and history of a great world cutlure, envisaged by Robert Redfield, began at Chicago in 1960.

7. F r o m outside to inside views Redfield particularly emphasized the importance of grasping the "inside view" in trying to understand another culture. He did not, however, think that it was possible to dispense with the "outside view". The characteristic outlook of a people on their world, their "world view", should be grasped as far as possible from the "inside" as it appears to members of the culture; their conceptions of the good life, their value systems, should be formulated in indigenous terms. There are features of every society and culture, however, that are more appropriately described from an objective point of view: its demography, ecology, subsistence economics, kinship and social structure, even some of the psychology of personality. The anthropologist's conceptual and operational tools for describing and analyzing cultures and civilizations must therefore include both the subjective and the objective, the inside and the outside points of view. The outside point of view is clearly represented by the objective kinds of information collected, analyzed, and interpreted, respectively, by demographers, economists, geographers, and economic anthropologists. It is equally clear, however, that these "hard science" kinds of specialists become "softened" when their analyses and predictions are sensitive to considerations of political, social, cultural, and even psychological factors. Food, population, land and urban settlements seem irresistible enough forces, but they are

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forces that move in response to social and personal values, cultural beliefs and values, political organization, and technological innovation. There is a theology and ontology of cows and rice as well as an economics and agriculture. Until about 1950, anthropologists, including Redfield, regarded the analysis of kinship and social structure as one of the more exact, universal, and scientific branches of anthropology. Kroeber's suggestion in 1909 that kinship systems were "psychological", "semantic" systems that varied with the culture was not taken very seriously until it was revived and elaborated in 1956 by Lounsbury and Goodenough. L6vi-Strauss led the field in the same direction when he suggested in the 1940s that behind kinship terminology and kinship behavior, as well as other cultural phenomena, lurked the hidden "deep structures" of the unconscious categories of the human mind. Extending these views to American and other systems of kinship, David Schneider and his students dissolved the last vestiges of an objective, universal biological basis for kinship systems. What kinship is all about, according to Schneider, is a system of "diffuse, enduring solidarity" defined by and symbolically expressed in the terms of a given culture (Schneider, American Kinship: A Cultural Account 1968 ;A Critique of the Study of Kinship [1984]). Ron Inden and Ralph Nicholas as students at Chicago were stimulated by Schneider's conception of kinship and by his study of American kinship in particular, and eventually tried to study Bengali kinship in terms of Bengali culture as Schneider studied American kinship in terms of American culture. The fact that their study of Bengali kinship turned up significant differences from American kinship is not as surprising as that a conception and method of kinship analysis developed for the study of one culture should turn out to be fruitful in the study of another culture — precisely because the results highlighted the differences between Bengali views of kinship and American views. The study of kinship was converted from an objective study of biological facts of genealogical descent to a cultural analysis of "native categories", conscious and unconscious. The feasibility of such a shift from an "outside" to an "inside" point of view depends on the intimacy of direct acquaintance with a culture and its symbolic representations. Where the anthropologist is a "native" of the society he studies, as is the case with Schneider's study of American kinship, or M.N. Srinivas' study of Indian social structure, he usually already has a level of familiarity with the

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culture that is quickly deepened with specialized study. Where the anthropologist is not a "native", he has to begin with almost a child's level of knowledge of the culture and slowly learn his way around — unless he has previously studied the language, history, and society. Inden and Nicholas did not begin their studies of Bengali kinship at a child's level. As students in Chicago's South Asia program, they both studied Bengali language and literature, North Indian social and cultural history, Hindi and Sanskrit. Inden, as an historian, specialized in ancient and medieval Sanskrit and Bengali texts, but also did fieldwork among rural and urban groups. As an anthropologist, Nicholas made several field studies of ecology and ritual in West Bengal, but complemented his observations and interviews with the use of medieval Bengali texts.

8. T o w a r d a social anthropology of civilizations This unusual combination of fieldwork with textual studies, of anthropology and history, prefigured in Redfield's conception of a social anthropology of civilizations, is becoming a distinctive mark of the teaching and research in Chicago's program of Southern Asian studies. While the textualists illuminate their translations of linguistic and literary texts with a knowledge of social and cultural contexts, the social scientists are extending their studies of social, political, and economic institutions to include knowledge of relevant historical and classical texts. McKim Marriott, who has applied this approach to a new interpretation of South Asian caste systems (see Marriott and Inden, "Caste Systems", Encyclopedia Brittanica, 15th edition, 1974) organized a seminar at Chicago during the spring quarter of 1977 on "Person and Interpersonal Relations in South Asia: An Exploration of Indigenous Conceptual Systems", in which Sanskritists, linguists, anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists participated. Some of these were "native" South Asianists. The seminar was sponsored as one of a series by the ACLS-SSRC Joint Committee on South Asia. The planning group of the Joint Committee recommended seminars and workshops to explore and test the value and limits of various South Asian conceptual systems, that is, the tools or frames of thought, or the structures of ideas, that define order, and create meaning in individual and social perceptions in

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South Asia (Szanton, "South and Southeast Asia: New Concerns of the Council", SSRC, Items, 1976). This growing interest in indigenous conceptual systems among social scientists reflects "a widespread recognition of the limitations of Western concepts — too often presumed to be universal — in the study of non-Western societies, and an attempt to develop alternative means of analysis". The planning group is also convinced that special attention to this difficult area "could lead to major breakthroughs in (a) interpreting the meaning of a great deal of social and cultural phenomena" in South and Southeast Asia, and (b) "developing new analytical frameworks applicable beyond the region" (Szanton 1976). Whether these high expectations will be realized remains to be seen. The preliminary results of this approach in terms of a deeper understanding of Bengali kinship and South Asian caste systems certainly justify its continued exploration and application to other domains of South Asian civilizations and to other civilizations as well.27

9. Symbols, myths, and cultural performances The social scientist's interest in reading and using indigenous texts to deepen his understanding of a given civilization's systems of thought is being extended to the interpretation of political, economic, cultural, and psychological systems. A recurring theme in this mode of interpretation is that the human artifacts and events of the earthly world are microcosmic icons of a wider heavenly cosmos peopled by gods and other superhuman beings, and that the meaning and norms of human affairs in the earthly world are to be discovered for the peoples concerned in the cosmic patterns and divine acts that govern the heavenly cosmos. When human affairs go awry, they can be set aright by the intercession of the gods descending to earth in human form or by the powers of those saintly human beings — Bodhisattvas, jivan muktis, Mahaviras — who linger on earth to help ordinary mortals. Underlying such interpretations of South and Southeast Asian cultures is a method of analysis which takes as its units of observation "cultural performances", those multimedia enactments in which the members of a society exhibit to themselves and to out-

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siders aspects of their history, values, cosmology, and social structure encapsulated in symbolic representations. 28 The Redfield approach to the study of civilizations as historic structures of small and large communities, of little and great cultural traditions, has proved most fruitful in Southern Asia. The applications of the approach included in such volumes as Village India (1955) edited by Marriott, Traditional India (1959) and Krishna: Myths, Rites and Attitudes (1966) edited by myself, and Structure and Change in Indian Society (1968), edited by Singer and Cohn, testify to the potential value of the method for integrating the objective and subjective views, and contextual with textual analysis.

10. Conclusion: T o w a r d a civilization of the dialogue The general movement toward an understanding of the civilizations of Southern Asia represented by publications and research in recent years goes, then, from the European and American "outsiders' " unconscious images and conscious concepts whose construction is guided by direct experience and information, to the "insiders' " ultimate theological and cosmological beliefs and world views. Between these two poles are the translations and interpretations of selected texts of the great and the little traditions and the objective social science analysis of food and population, of rural and urban problems. Jawaharlal Nehru, in the closing speech at a UNESCO conference in New Delhi in 1951, The Concept of Man and the Philosophy of Education in East and West, said that he had always resisted the idea of dividing the world into the Orient and the Occident, and that he was convinced that the world faced two great common problems: whether we can avert the disaster that threatens to result from progress, and whether the democratic process can be saved from deterioration consequent on its unthinking use by the mass of mankind. During the sessions of the Indian Philosophical Congress in 1954 a plan was formed to study the problems of "Human Relations and International Responsibility". Richard P. McKeon, Professor of Philosophy and Greek in the University of Chicago, was asked to conduct preliminary symposia in eighteen colleges and universities in India: Mysore, Bangalore, Madras, Calcutta, Visva-Bharata, Andhra, Nagpur, Bombay, Poona, and Hyderabad,

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and he presented a report of the results to the meeting of the Indian Philosophical Congress in Pardeniya, Ceylon, in December, 1954. 29 Seven specific issues were discussed in these conferences: equality, neighborliness, violence, international communication, the universality of art and religion, cultural loyalties, and the humanities and the classics. The dialogues of these meetings exhibited a tendency to get behind the opposition of philosophical disputation and partisan propaganda to the discussion of common problems. It is in meetings and discussions such as these that the conversation of cultures can become a civilization of the dialogue.

11. Postscript In spite of a quarter century's creative growth and development of Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago, and in spite of the substantial institutional incorporation of these studies into undergraduate and graduate programs, the field is now facing two imminent shocks — the possible dismantling of the PL 480 library acquisitions program administered by the Library of Congress, and the exhaustion of funds for the American Institute of Indian Studies. Both of these eventualities may occur because of the exhaustion of the PL 480 excess currency fund of rupees. As Richard Lambert's 1984 report Beyond Growth: The Next Stage in Language and Area Studies concludes, if the AIIS were to disappear, "the most important collective activities in South Asian Studies would disappear with it" (p. 418). When the Library of Congress PL 480 acquisition program expires, equally, "a major new acquisition and cataloging program for the field, supported in the main from the centers' own funds, will have to be developed" (Lambert 1984: 419). Not only Chicago's South Asian Languages and Area Center but all American South Asian centers would be placed in equal jeopardy by the loss of the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Library of Congress Acquisitions Program. It is quite unlikely that most of these centers would have the capacity to replace these services with their own funds and staffs. The negative impact of these events would also compel the existing domestic centers to retrench their teaching and research activities when they should be increasing their enrollment and supporting the formation of new centers.

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The exhaustion of PL 480 counterpart funds will also inhibit the development of domestic and overseas language and area centers in other regions than South Asia at a time when such centers have become financially and politically vulnerable. 30 The language and area centers that were established in some American universities after World War II, and their associated overseas centers for training and research, together with the library acquisitions program administered by the Library of Congress, have proved themselves to be a most effective and economical means to carry on a conversation of cultures with the people of other countries. These centers have given Americans the hearing aid which Robert Redfield said in 1953 they needed for the conversation and mutual understanding that is the condition of mutual security. 31 The organization in 1985 of the Festival of India by the IndoU.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture, supported by Prime Minister Gandhi and President Reagan, encouraged the hope that the conversation and mutual understanding will continue (cf. Borden (1989).

A neglected source of Levi-Strauss' structuralism: Radcliffe-Brown, Russell, and Whitehead 32

1. Prologue The profliferation of different brands of "symbolic anthropology" in the 1960s marked both the decline of one era in anthropological thought and the beginning of a new period of creative ferment. Characterizations of the old and the new eras abound, but the synoptic formula associated with Lfevi-Strauss is perhaps most widely repeated: an era of functionalism, empiricism, and naturalism gives way to one of structuralism and symbolism. That some such formula describes a significant trend of conceptual change, and perhaps the advent of a new paradigm in social and cultural anthropology, is widely recognized. There are, however, two qualifications that must be made in this description: first, the trend in question probably extends over the last 100 years of anthropological thought, and second, the change has not been so much an abandonment of functionalism, empiricism, and naturalism as a shift from conflicting global concepts of culture and society to complementary concepts of cultural and social systems (Singer 1968, 1978). The public recognition of such a shift was well marked by the 1950s, in the writings of Firth, Redfield, and Eggan, among others, and in the famous agreement between Kroeber and Parsons (1958) to treat culture and society as complementary concepts. The decline in dominance of global concepts of society and culture has generated, as unanticipated consequences, efforts both to define culture and society in more restricted terms and to create all sorts of hyphenated anthropologies (cultural-, linguistic-, social-, economic-, ecological-, political-, legal-, religious-, urban-, etc.) to fill the vacuum left by the retrenchment of the unifying global concepts. While these developments have been viewed with alarm and dismay by some anthropologists (e.g., Flannery 1982), they

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have also stimulated creative revitalization of the field and have introduced new theoretical orientations and new problems to be solved. One significant effort to retie the "bundle" of subdisciplines that constituted anthropology was a formulation postulating three quasi-independent systems - social systems, cultural systems, and personality systems. Given currency in the writings of Parsons (1970), this formulation seemed to offer a working compromise between the lost global unity of the past and a chaotic proliferation of hyphenated anthropologies. The concept of system, and the closely associated concept of structure, were especially popular in the 1950s as concepts and as methods of analysis. System analysis and structural analysis were regarded as the open sesame for anthropology and other social sciences to the treasure of becoming rigorously scientific. Now where did these concepts and methods come from? In the writings of L6vi-Strauss, the sources of structural analysis often mentioned are Von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games, Wiener's Cybernetics, and Jakobson's structural linguistics. 33 No doubt those were significant sources for L6vi-Strauss and for other anthropologists as well. These works, however, come a bit late, in the mid-1940s, to account for concepts and methods already so widespread in many other fields. L6vi-Strauss himself expressed surprise at finding "genuine structuralism" in Radcliffe-Brown's second lecture on totemism (1951 [ 1 9 5 8 ] ) and suggested that it may have derived from the development of French structural anthropology and structural linguistics in the decade 1940-1950 (Levi-Strauss [ 1 9 6 3 a ] : 89-90). This paper suggests another explanation: that Radcliffe-Brown was already constructing explicit concepts and analyses of kinship systems and social structures in the 1930s, and that he did so within the general framework of a conception of scientific method that was structuralist. Although some of his language echoed that of a nineteenth-century "butterfly collector", 3 4 according to his own testimony and that of students we may believe that he found inspiration for his philosophy of science and scientific method in the works of Russell and Whitehead (compare Lowe on p. 83). These sources provided Radcliffe-Brown with a twentieth-century philosophy of science that he thought was going to replace the nineteenth-century philosophy of science inherited from Aristotle,

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Descartes, and Newton. Radcliffe-Brown proposed to apply the new philosophy to fashion a "theoretical and natural science of society". That science would analyze phenomenal social reality, with the help of a logic of relations and of events, into social structures and social systems, consisting of networks of social relations and customary social usages in which the relations were expressed. Linear cause and effect sequences would be replaced by a notion of functional causality in which, for example, neither did features of social organization determine a particular kind of kinship terminology, nor the converse, but both the social organization and the terminology were determined by a limited set of structural principles, the natural and universal laws of the new theoretical science of society. In this paradigm for social anthropology as a natural science of society, the individual person is no longer a permanent mental or bodily substance, but is bifurcated into a "social personality" on the one hand, consisting of constellations of social roles and social statuses, and a biological individual on the other hand, a subject for study by psychology, physiology, and related biological sciences. The above sketch of a new paradigm for social and cultural anthropology, explicitly formulated by Radcliffe-Brown in the 1930s, should put us on guard against interpreting his key concepts — structure, function, and process — primarily as expressions of nineteenth-century post-Darwinian interests in biological classification and organic analogies. Those interests survived in Radcliffe-Brown's work, as they did in Dürkheim's and River's and in the work of other anthropologists. What is of greater significance, however, is how Radcliffe-Brown modified characteristic biological concepts to take account of revolutionary twentieth-century changes in the foundations of mathematics, in logic, and in the philosophy of the natural sciences. Because L6vi-Strauss's structural anthropology, Saussure's and Jakobson's structural linguistics, Parson's structuralfunctional sociology, and the configurational anthropology of Benedict, Kroeber, Sapir, Mead, and Bateson also responded innovatively to the same changes, they share with Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski, and Dürkheim some of the credit for the construction and further development of the new anthropological paradigm (Firth 1957; Hymes 1964; Jakobson 1972; Kroeber 1944, 1952;

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Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952; Parsons 1957, 1970; Redfield 1955a, b; Sapir 1958; Saussure 1966; Süverstein 1975; Singer 1961, 1968). While the rehabilitation of Radcliffe-Brown as a structuralist has been proceeding gradually, sometimes through dramatic revaluations (for example L6vi-Strauss 1953, 1963; Leach 1961, 1971), very few of those who have written about Radcliffe-Brown's contributions to structural analysis in anthropology have recognized any connection with Russell's and Whitehead's relational analysis of structure and their philosophy of science. L6vi-Strauss (1963) suggested that the development of structural linguistics and of his own structural anthropology were probable stimuli for RadcliffeBrown. Fortes (1967, 1969) and Langham (1982) found RadcliffeBrown's sources in Rivers and the British tradition of social anthropology. Evans-Pritchard (1954) gives more credit to French sources — Dürkheim, Montesquieu, Montaigne, and Comte. In his 1980 Radcliffe-Brown lecture Dumont (1982), following Leach's (1976) reexamination of the Natural Science of Society lectures of 1937, recognizes some "positive aspects of Radcliffe-Brown's teaching" in his "articulate holism coupled with the consequent stress on relational analysis and on synchrony, and . . . the downgrading of causality. . .'. This appeared to him, as it did to L6viStrauss, as a remarkable deviation from the nominalism predominant in British ideology. In agreement with Leach, Dumont believes that Radcliffe-Brown's relational analysis is "incompatible with the primary emphasis he put on classification and taxonomy" (Dumont 1982: 208). Stanner (1968), an early student of Radcliffe-Brown, did not see any incompatibility between the emphasis on classification and the theory of relations, which he traced to Radcliffe-Brown's Australian period and models of analysis found in Spencer and R.B. Perry (Stanner 1968: 289). Stanner's detailed account of the relational theory makes no mention of Russell's and Whitehead's logic of relations or their philosophy of events. Eggan's Foreword to A Natural Science of Society (1957) makes one of the rare references to Radcliffe-Brown's "early contacts with Whitehead . . . at Cambridge" and claims that he "was one of the first social scientists with a modern philosophical background. . .". A similar brief reference to Whitehead appears in the obituary on Radcliffe-Brown written by Eggan and Warner (1956).

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Curiously, Leach (1957) mentions the influence of Russell and Whitehead and their intellectual revolution on Malinowski but not on Radcliffe-Brown. Another curiosity is that one of the most explicit discussions of Radcliffe-Brown's interest in the logical and mathematical analysis of social structure appears in a work by his most severe critic, Needham (1971), who implies that he plagiarized MacFarlane's 1883 symbolic mathematical analysis of kinship relations (1971: 22-25). It was not only Radcliffe-Brown's critics who took note of his logical and mathematical concepts of structure. Some of his former students and colleagues regarded these concepts as one of his distinctive contributions to anthropological theory. In addition to the published references along these lines in Redfield (1955b), Evans-Pritchard (1954), Fortes (1955, 1967, 1969), and Eggan (in Radcliffe-Brown 1957), some of them have remembered public lectures and personal discussions in which Radcliffe-Brown emphasized the need for a logic of relations and an ontology of events as a philosophical foundation for a natural science of society. Some of these recollections also attribute the acknowledged source of this philosophy of science to Russell and Whitehead. Selected quotations from this kind of testimony will be found in the Postscript, where supplementary confirming evidence is provided for the interpretations of Radcliffe-Brown's and L6vi-Strauss's structuralism based on published sources. If these interpretations of structuralism's neglected sources are valid, they imply that the structuralist paradigm in anthropology, as well as in linguistics, psychology and sociology, derives from developments of logical and mathematical concepts of structure, especially in the first three decades of the twentieth century. A further implication of these interpretations is that the structuralist paradigm does not contain as an intrinsic feature a unique theory of symbolism, but has become associated with a variety of such theories. This paper argues for the validity of the first set of implications. My book Man's Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology (1984) assumes the applicability of a global concept of structure to anthropology and argues that Peirce's theory of signs and symbolism incorporates both the logical-mathematical concept of structure and a theory of meaning and communication that is needed in symbolic anthropology.

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The complementarity of culture and society in the structuralist paradigm did not assure a strict parallelism and symmetry in the treatment of each component. An important cleavage emerged between two groups of anthropologists, one of whom gave more weight to society and the other to culture. This cleavage became clearly visible in the treatment of symbolic phenomena — for example, kinship terminologies, totemism, names, speech and other forms of communication, ritual, myth, and image in religion and art. The group emphasizing society tends to place questions of the structure, meaning, and causality of symbolic phenomena in social and, sometimes, psychological contexts. They are in this sense "functionalists" — ά la Dürkheim, Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown and their respective followers. The group emphasizing culture tends to assert that the symbolic phenomena form cultural systems in their own right as cognitive, "semantic systems" whose structure and meaning can be analyzed independently of social and psychological contexts. L6vi-Strauss and "French structuralism" are usually identified with this approach to symbolic phenomena, but it was also formulated by Kroeber in 1909 as an alternative to Rivers's and Radcliffe-Brown's functionalist interpretations of classificatory kinship systems (Singer 1968). The revival and elaboration of Kroeber's suggestions by Goodenough (1956) and Lounsbury (1956) crystallized the options for social and cultural anthropology as a choice between semantic categorization of cultural systems and a semiotic anthropology of social and personality systems. Although a bit over-simplified, these options represent a distillation from the 1960s debates over French structuralism. [. . .] L6vi-Strauss's problem remains: where did the structuralism of Radcliffe-Brown's second theory come from? In this paper I should like to propose another explanatin. Accepting Fortes's and Leach's cases for the existence of embryonic structuralist precedents in Radcliffe-Brown's earlier works, as well as the Redfield, Firth, and Stanner emphasis on his interest in conceptual and theoretical formulation, I want to add another source. This additional source is Radcliffe-Brown's application in the 1930s and 1940s of a philosophy of science based on a logicalmathematical concept of structure, derived chiefly from Russell and Whitehead, to the development of a science of social anthropology. I shall also argue that Radcliffe-Brown's interest in the logicalmathematical concept of structure and the associated philosophy

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of science was not merely programmatic and visionary but shaped his formulations of basic concepts and methods in social anthropology, as well as one of his most distinctive and detailed pieces of ethnographic analysis, including his second theory of totemism. My conclusion will be that this neglected source fills the gap between the first and second theory of totemism better than structural linguistics and structural anthropology do. While I would not go so far as to say with Leach that Radcliffe-Brown's second formulation "triggered" L6vi-Strauss's structuralism, it does seem that structural anthropology, structural linguistics, and social anthropology all developed in an intellectual climate brightly illuminated by the rapid growth of the logico-mathematical analysis of structure from about 1900 to 1930 [1939] and by the emergence of a philosophy of science and scientific method inspired by that analysis. RadcliffeBrown, L6vi-Strauss, Troubetzkoy, and Jakobson all grew up in this climate, and each responded to it in a distinctive way by developing structuralist modes of analysis in his respective field. While the logico-mathematical conception of structure was not the only influence in their intellectual development, it was a major influence that helps to explain the structuralist emphasis in the different sciences they helped to found. The logico-mathematical conception of structure was a by-product of the vigorous developments from about 1900 to 1930 [1939] of mathematical or symbolic logic and its use as a tool of analysis in the foundations of mathematics and physics, and in the philosophy of science. The same features of these developments, to which Whitehead and Russell made major contributions, that influenced Rad cliffe-Brown also influenced L6vi-Strauss and the structural linguists, namely: the unity of pure mathematics and logic as abstract sciences; the development of nonmetric mathematics and logic in topology, the logic of classes and relations, and axiomatics; and the potential value of a calculus of relations for the analysis of social and cultural systems (see R-B 1957: 8-12, 21-27, 28-31; L6vi-Strauss 1953: 524-528; Trnka et al. 1964: 473; Nidditch 1962 for a good short history). [ . . .] A parallel argument over the different degrees and kinds of "formalism" and "formalization" exists in mathematical logic and foundations of mathematics in the controversies among "intuitionists" (Brouwer, Heyting), "logicists" (Frege, Russell), and

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"formalists" (Hilbert, Carnap). (For good introductions see Carnap 1955, Tarski 1941, and Kleene 1952.) Apart from MacFarlane's important paper applying mathematical and logical methods to the analysis and symbolization of kinship relations, we should note that Peirce published an important contribution to relational logic in the same year, 1883, and that he as well as other logicians and mathematicians such as De Morgan, Lewis Carroll, Schroeder, Russell, and others were fond of illustrating their technical discussions with references to kinship relations. This practice may have attracted the attention of anthropologists like Radcliffe-Brown and suggested to them the importance of a logical analysis of kinship and social relations. Leach's admonition apropos Nadel's introduction of symbolic logic into his book on social anthropology describes the practice of Radcliffe-Brown and L6vi-Strauss and probably that of most anthropologists: "While the consideration of mathematical and logical models may help the anthropologists to order his theoretical arguments in an intelligent way, his actual procedure should be nonmathematical" (Leach 1961: 8).

2. Radcliffe-Brown's philosophy of science The philosophy of science and of scientific method that RadcliffeBrown espoused in the 1930s and early 1940s was drawn chiefly from the writings of Russell and Whitehead, especially Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (1925) and Russell's Analysis of Matter (1927). This philosophy was at that time quite novel and in conflict at many points with common sense, as well as with the philosophy of science propounded in John Stuart Mill's System of Logic and William Whewell's Novum Organon Renovatum, two texts included in the Cambridge tripos on logic and the moral sciences when Radcliffe-Brown was there. For Radcliffe-Brown to acquaint himself with the Russell — Whitehead philosophy of science and to apply it to a new field such as that of the social sciences showed an adventurous and innovative spirit, although I do not know how early in his career at Cambridge he started upon this path. The gist of the Russell — Whitehead philosophy of science as Radcliffe-Brown presents it in his Natural Science of Society (1937) and in several papers published in about the same period can be

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briefly summarized. The reality about which science gives us knowledge does not consist of substances and their attributes but of events and relations between events. Science proceeds by isolating, at least conceptually, systems of such relations from their environments and from other systems, and then describes, analyzes, and explains the structures, functioning, persistence, and change of such systems of relations. A major objective in the scientific study of such systems is to discover the natural laws that govern them. These laws do not take the form of statements of isolated causeand-effect relations but are generalizations about invariant or highly probable associations and sequences of events within a given system. "It is the system as a whole that is involved in cause. To define the cause, one would have to define the whole system: one may not select out only certain factors" (R-B 1952: 42). There are no mechanical discovery procedures for discovering the natural laws of particular kinds of systems. "Systems are observable in varying ways and some not at all". The latter, e.g., systems of electrons and protons, must be inferred indirectly (R-B 1952: 27). "The method of science is one involving observation, classification, and generalization not as separate processes, but as parts of a single, complex procedure" (R-B 1952: 28). There is no unique sequence or combination of these operations that can assure the discovery of natural laws or even of good hypotheses. The individual scientist's intuition and genius play an important part in finding the right concepts and theories (a point also stressed by Whewell and more recently by N. Hanson, who has revived Peirce's term for the process, "abduction", as a complement to induction and deduction [Hanson 1965, 1958; Butts 1921]). On this view, Radcliffe-Brown would have agreed with Leach that "inspiredguesswork" is essential for the discovery of generalizations of mathematical patterns, but for Radcliffe-Brown inspired guesswork also guides comparison and classification and is not an alternative method. Classification and the construction of taxonomies are important and essential preliminary steps in scientific procedure. Radcliffe-Brown's conception of these operations goes considerably beyond a Linnean butterfly-collecting and classification of substances by species and genera. Classification must be based on a comparison of perceived analogies between events, between relations between events, and between systems of relations. And the comparison must consider all the variations in order to eliminate the

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accidental differences and arrive at the essential properties underlying the variations and defining a type of system. The result of such comparison and classification of systems is, when successful, a set of natural laws governing the systems. Radcliffe-Brown's conception of comparison and taxonomic classification as operations that can lead to the discovery of natural laws of systems probably derives from combining Campbell's view of classification as an elementary form of scientific generalization about the invariant properties of certain kinds of systems (Campbell 1921) and Russell's emphasis on similarity as a basic relation in logic and mathematics and especially in the analysis of relational structures (Russell 1938, 1957). For Radcliffe-Brown, in any case, the relations of similarity and difference are "the simplest mathematical relations immanent in the universe" (1957: 14). "If A is similar to Β this means that in at least one respect A differs from Β and in at least one other respect A does not differ from B" (R-B 1957: 14-15 n). Relations of similarity and difference underlie the formation of classes and taxonomies, for all members of a class are similar in respect of its defining property and differ from the members of another class. The comparison of similarities and differences between systems of relations thus leads to the definition of classes of systems. And "if we have made our class of systems correctly, all systems within the class will have the same set of characteristics", i.e., we will have a "natural law" governing that class of systems (1957: 20, italics in original). Radcliffe-Brown distinguishes explicitly and sharply relations of similarity and difference between systems ( " r " relations) from relations of "interdependence" or "real interconnectedness" within a system ( " R " relations). The former are logical or mathematical relations independent of space and time, while the latter are spatiotemporal relations of "real interconnectedness". The former define a class whose members need have no complex relations of cohesion or functional integration among themselves, while the latter define a system whose units cohere into a functionally integrated whole with a structure (1957: 22). This sharp distinction between logico-mathematical relations on the one hand and relations of real connectedness on the other, a distinction that Radcliffe-Brown associates with Hume's distinction between propositions that refer to "relations of ideas" and those

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that refer to "matters of fact" or "phenomenal reality" (R-B 1952: 5), should not obscure the fact that for Radcliffe-Brown both kinds of relations, the "r" relations and the " R " relations, are in some sense attributes of phenomenal reality, which for him consists of events and relations between events (R-B 1952: 14). Since this is a difficult and important point, the understanding of which is essential for avoiding a naively empiricist or positivist interpretation of Radcliffe-Brown's conception of "structure" and structural analysis, I should like to explain it a bit further. The key to the puzzle is to be found, in my opinion, in A Natural Science of Society, where Radcliffe-Brown has made a line-drawing of two figures running toward two glasses of beer on a table in order to illustrate his distinction between the logical-mathematical " r " relations and the " R " relations of real interconnectedness: The Distinction Between 'Class'and 'System' To make clear the distinction between classes and systems I should like to present a little drawing. I am going to suggest that we have in these men the members of a class, and here a class of glasses of beer. There is

a very important similarity between this group of men and this group of glasses of beer. The similarity is that there are two of each. The term two is the name of a class of which this class of men is one member, and this class of glasses of beer another member; and it is also the name of every other instance of a dyad. The type of relationship that exists between all instances of two members, which we may designate as 'r' relationship, is the type I am talking about when I speak of relations of similarity. Now let us suppose that you have here two real men and two real glasses of beer. You then have something quite different - a system of men drinking beer — in which there are specific relations of interconnected-

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ness of type 'R'. (The relatonships would still be real, but quite different, if you had two men and one glass of beer.) You cannot distinguish between relationships V , those of classes, and relationships 'R', those of systems, on the basis that the latter are real·, both exist in phenomenal reality. You distinguish them as that the first are relations of similarity, and the relations of systems are complex iTiter-relationships. To further clarify the distinction between a class and a system, we may list their characteristics: Class ( V relations) Relations simple Relations of similarity Mathematical relations Without form No quality of integration — coordinated by similarity Members may be separated violation to them Members may be moved about without violence to them or to class No cohesion between members of a class No functional relationship between members An aggregate The sum of its parts (members)

System ('R' relations) Relations complex Relations of interconnectedness Spatio-temporal relations Characteristic form Integrated - coordinated by interdependence Units violated in separation Units may not be moved about without violence to them or to system Units cohere and thereby isolate the system from the rest of the universe Functional consistency A genuine whole, having a structure Organic unity; not the sum of its constituent units ([R-B 1940]: 21-22)

N o w what is important about this e x a m p l e is that RadcliffeBrown regards the similarity b e t w e e n the men and the glasses o f beer as existing in p h e n o m e n a l reality as well as in the drawing and makes this similarity t h e basis for attributing t h e number t w o t o the "real" glasses and the "real" m e n as well as t o the drawings o f each. In other words, a mathematical c o n c e p t , the cardinal number t w o , is predicated o f classes o f " p h e n o m e n a l " objects or o f events, namely all those classes o f such objects or events that are similar t o the t w o glasses or t o t h e t w o m e n in t h e drawing. Such an interpretation o f the number t w o as a property o f all dyads explains h o w it is possible t o apply the logical-mathematical "r" relations t o an analysis o f the structure o f the "R" relations o f real interconnectedness within systems.

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This interpretation of a cardinal number as a property of classes of objects is not due to Radcliffe-Brown, but is simply an illustrative application of the Frege-Russell logical analysis of cardinal number. In the more general logical analysis, the relation of similarity between classes is specified in terms of a coordinating relation that correlates by one — one correspondence the members of the classes that are said to have the same number. The effect of this definition is to assure that for every member of the one class there is exactly one member of the other class, and conversely. And this, says Russell, is what we mean when we say that "two classes have the same number of elements". "The cardinal number of a given class" is then defined as the set of all classes that are similar to the given class in the technical sense of similarity just defined. Russell extended this kind of logical analysis to the concept of "structure" and arrived at definitions of "the structure of a relation" closely analogous to the definition of "the number of a class". Two relations "have the same structure", or are similar, if there is a correlating relation that establishes a one — one correspondence between their terms as ordered by the given relation. "The structure" of a given relation is then defined as the set of all relations that are similar to the given relation in the sense of similarity just defined. The technical definition of similarity between relations is more complicated than that of similarity between classes because the cardinal number of a class does not depend on the order of its terms. One of Russell's diagrams and explanations of similarity between two dyadic relations Ρ and Q will make clear what is required of a one — one correlation between the terms of these relations. The intention of Russell's definition is to formulate precisely the necessary and sufficient conditions for two dyadic relations to be similar. It will help the reader to follow the intuitive meaning of the definition if one thinks of the "P" as representing the relation "to the left o f ' between two points on a map and "Q" as the relation "to the west o f ' between the two places in the country represented on the map. The definition then states the conditions under which the structure of the map corresponds with the structure of the country of which it is a map. (Russell 1971a: 53-54) With this analysis of similarity between two relations, Russell then constructs the set of all relations similar to a given relation as the "relation number" of a given relation, in exact analogy to the set of all classes similar to a given class as "the number" of that

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class. Russell believes that his definition of "relation number" makes precise the commonsense concept of structure - two relations "have the same structure" when they have the same relation number, and "the structure of a relation" is the set of all relations with the same relation number. This definition of "the structure of relation" in terms of "relation numbers" becomes intuitively clearer if we note that it is extensional, that is, two relations that are conceptually different may nevertheless hold in the same class of instances. The extension of a relation is the class of instances in which it holds. The extension of the relation "father", for example, would be the class of all ordered couples (jc, y ) that are such that χ is father of y. For a simple relation, when its extension is given, it is possible to show its structure by constructing a map of the relation. Russell illustrates this point by taking a relation whose extension consists of the following ordered couples: ab, ac, ad, ce, de, de, where a, b, c, d, e are five terms no matter what. A "map" of this relation's structure is made by connecting five points on a plane with arrows:

e Two relations have the same "structure" when either can be a map for the other.

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Russell notes that the "structure" of a relation so defined does not depend upon the particular nature of the terms that make up the field of the relation. "The field may be changed without changing the structure, and the structure may be changed without changing the field". If, for example, the couple ae were added t o the extension of the above relation, its structure would be changed but not its field (1971a: 60-61). "The field of a relation" is here technically defined as consisting of its "domain" (the class of all terms that have the relation to something) and its "converse domain" (the class of all terms to which something has the relation) when the domain and the converse domain are of the same logical type, say b o t h are individuals, or classes of individuals, or relations between individuals, relations between classes, relations of classes to individuals, relations between relations, and so on. Fathers, for example, are the domain of the relation of father to child and the class of children is the converse domain of this relation. The class of fathers and children would then constitute the field of this relation. The relation of child to father is called the "converse" of the father-to-child relation. The converse domain of a relation is therefore the same as the domain of its converse. "Similarity of structure" between two relations Ρ and Q can then be said t o exist when there is at least one correlator relation S that is one-one, has the field of Q for its converse domain, and is such that Ρ is the relative product of S and Q and the converse of S (Russell 1971a: 54). An important feature of such a definition of similarity of structure between relations, one emphasized by Russell, is that when two relations are similar in this sense, they will share all those general properties of relations that do not depend on the actual terms in their fields. If one relation is transitive, symmetrical, and serial, so is the other. Such general properties of relations are called "structural properties", since they are preserved with the structure of the relations, whatever the actual terms may be. Russell, and Wittgenstein as well, often give the example of how the structural properties of relations between musical notes is preserved in a musical score, a wax record, and an actual performance, in spite of the diversity of empirical materials. From this relative independence of the structural properties of relations from the particular nature of terms related comes the

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great practical importance of Russell's analysis of structure for logic and mathematics, and for applications to physics and other empirical sciences. For once a set of axioms has been constructed for one field, stipulating the logical structure of relations among terms within that field, that same structure may find applications in other fields with very different terms. What matters in logic and mathematics, and to a very great extent in physics, as Russell says, "is not the intrinsic nature of our terms, but the logical nature of their interrelations" (Russell 1971a: 59). I shall return to some of Russell's examples of the application of structural analysis since they are closely related to RadcliffeBrown's and Lfevi-Strauss's applications. For the moment let us note that Russell's logico-mathematical analysis of "structure" defines it analogously to his logical definition of the cardinal number of a class. Relations have structures as classes have numbers, and just as the number of a class does not depend on the particular nature of its members, so the structure of a relation does not depend on the particular nature of the terms it relates. Further, as numbers are properties of classes of individuals, so structures are properties of relations between individuals. In Principia Mathematica, Vol. II, part IV, Russell developed a logical analysis of 'relation arithmetic' for dyadic relations to parallel the logical analysis of cardinal arithmetic of Part III. Whitehead was to have extended the analysis of structure to relations between three terms or four terms. But "after he had done a lot of the preliminary work", Russell writes, "his interest flagged and he abandoned the enterprise for philosophy" (Russell 1959: 99). Russell, however, showed how the conception of structure between dyadic relations could be generalized, and Carnap, among others, formulated the definition schema for the structure of «-place relations (Carnap 1958: 138-139). Carnap, however, replaced Russell's term "relation number" by "isomorphism", defined similarity of structure between relations in terms of "isomorphism", and defined isomorphism in terms of a one-one correlating relation. "The structure of a relation" is thus the class of relations isomorphic with that relation. Carnap also extended the concept of "structure" to classes by making "the structure of a class" the same as its cardinal number. Isomorphism or similarity of structure between classes or between relations is then shown to be an "equivalence relation",

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that is, reflexive, symmetrical, and transitive (Carnap 1958: 7577, 138-142). Russell's views underwent many changes during his long career, as is well known. Those of his views that especially influenced Radcliffe-Brown, however, remained remarkably persistent and consistent: the events - relations ontology, relational logic, the major importance of structure in scientific knowledge, the principle of abstraction as a technique for logical analysis and for construction of concepts. (For recent incisive reviews and assessments of the development of Russell's position on these matters, see Quine 1971; Russell 1959.) In 1969, when I presented to a seminar at the University of Chicago on the history of anthropology a preliminary form of the argument that Radcliffe-Brown's philosophy of science drew upon the ideas of Whitehead and Russell and that this philosophy significantly influenced his theory and analysis of social anthropology, one of my colleagues pressed the question of historical evidence for the argument. He understandably wanted to know whether there was any historical evidence to show that Radcliffe-Brown had ever met Whitehead or Russell or whether he had consulted their works. I replied then that I did not know of such biographical evidence but that it seemed plausible to assume that since RadcliffeBrown was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, during some of the years when Whitehead and Russell worked and lectured there, he would have come into contact with them and their ideas. In any case, the internal evidence from Radcliffe-Brown's writings, especially A Natural Science of Society, seemed unmistakeable to me. About a year later, in 1971, some historical evidence turned up unexpectedly in a seminar on Radcliffe-Brown in which Eggan, Firth, M.N. Srinivas, Stocking, Tax, and I participated. One student in the seminar, Ruth Solie, who happened to be working as a curator of the anthropology department papers in the Regenstein library, found in the archives and brought to class a typed manuscript of about 5800 words that Radcliffe-Brown had written and sent on May 30, 1938 from All Souls College, Oxford, to Professor FayCooper Cole at Chicago. In a letter to Cole accompanying the manuscript, Radcliffe-Brown explained that he intended it as a revision of some of the first and last portions of the material he had presented to the Chicago 1937 seminar for A National Science of Society, and if Cole, Warner, Redfield, and Eggan approved

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the revision, he would rewrite the rest of the material to make a manuscript of about 25,000 to 30,000 words. He preferred that Cole mimeograph the revised version rather than the original stenographic version. There is no record of any further revisions being sent by Radcliffe-Brown to Chicago or that the revised first section was known to those who arranged for the publication of the transcribed notes of A Natural Science of Society in 1957. In his Foreword to the book, Fred Eggan says that although RadcliffeBrown had intended to revise the transcribed manuscript of the 1937 seminar for publication, he was prevented by the Second World War and ill health from doing so. The major interest of the revised first section sent to Cole, apart from the fact that it is more polished, concise, and explicit than the corresponding portions of the book, is that Radcliffe-Brown cites in footnotes specific authors, books with pages or chapter numbers to document his statements in the text. On pages 6 and 7 of the revised manuscript, where he is discussing the new ideas about the relations of logic and mathematics, the importance of nonquantitative mathematics, the replacement of the Aristotelian subject — predicate logic and substance — attribute metaphysics by a relational symbolic logic and a view of phenomenal reality as consisting of events and relations between events, RadcliffeBrown cites the following works in the footnotes to these pages: Russell, Principles of Mathematics ·, Russell and Whitehead, Principia Mathematica; Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, Whitehead, The Concept of Nature and Science and the Modern World. Elsewhere, on pages 9 and 12, when discussing the nature of knowledge and inference, Radcliffe-Brown cites Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic as well as Whitehead, Science and the Modern World', Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and his Outline of Philosophy.3S Additional historical evidence for Radcliffe-Brown's interest in Whitehead and Russell was offered at the 1971 seminar by Fred Eggan and M.N. Srinivas from personal reminiscences of their associations with Radcliffe-Brown. While this support from the 1938 manuscript and personal reminiscences is very welcome, I would prefer to leave the biographical problem to the historians and to turn to the problem of how Radcliffe-Brown applied the Whitehead - Russell philosophy of science to the development of a science of social anthropology.

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3. Social structure and structural form Radcliffe-Brown's application of his philosophy of science t o the f o r m u l a t i o n of t h e nature of social a n t h r o p o l o g y as a theoretical natural science of society is quite straightforward and logical. He simply applies t h e idea of natural systems as consisting of relations of real interconnectedness b e t w e e n events t o f o r m u l a t e a conception of social systems as consisting of social relations of real interconnectedness between individual h u m a n beings. " A system can be defined b y defining two things: (1) what its units are, and (2) what the special kinds of relations are that hold between these units which make u p t h e system. We can determine a social system: its units are h u m a n beings regarded as sets of behavioral events, and t h e relations between t h e m are social relations" (R-B 1 9 5 7 : 26). Identifiable social systems can be " c o m p o s e d of t w o or more people, or of a people like t h e Tlingit, or of t h e United States, and relations between t h e m which can be isolated f r o m relations t o events e x t e r n a l " t o t h e m ( 1 9 5 7 : 26). [. . .] Radcliffe-Brown in fact formulated t w o concepts of "social s t r u c t u r e " . One of t h e concepts is empirical and subject t o direct observation as t h e social relations actually existing at a given time and place t h a t link particular h u m a n beings. The o t h e r is an abstract and analytic concept of social structure, or "structural f o r m " , that is n o t generally directly observable b u t is derived f r o m concretely observed social relations through comparison, classification, and abstractive generalization. This i m p o r t a n t distinction between his t w o concepts of structure is basic t o an appreciation of RadcliffeBrown's t h e o r y . Failure t o give d u e weight t o this distinction had led t o misinterpretations of Radcliffe-Brown's concept of "social s t r u c t u r e " as a simple empiricist c o n c e p t i o n of actually existing social relations. One of t h e clearest statements of the difference and the relation b e t w e e n t h e t w o concepts occurs in his 1940 Presidential Address on "social s t r u c t u r e " (R-B 1952: 192): In the study of social structure the concrete reality with which we are concerned is the set of actually existing relations, at a given moment of time, which link together certain human beings. It is on this that we can make direct observations. But it is not this that we attempt to describe in its particularity. Science (as distinguished from history or biography)

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is not concerned with the particular, the unique, but only with the general, with kinds, with events which recur. The actual relations o f Tom, Dick and Harry or the behaviour o f Jack and Jill may go down in our field note-books and may provide illustrations for a general description. But what w e need for scientific purposes is an account o f the form o f the structure. For example, if in an Australian tribe I observe in a number o f instances the behaviour towards one another o f persons who stand in the relation o f mother's brother and sister's son, it is in order that I may be able t o record as precisely as possible the general or normal form of this relationship, abstracted from the variations o f particular instances, though taking account o f those variations.

This passage is consistent with references to the concept of "social structure" in his other papers. And more to the present point, it is entirely consistent with Radcliffe-Brown's conception of science and scientific method as expounded in A Natural Science of Society. In fact, according to the philosophy of science in that work, RadcliffeBrown's concept of "structural form" cannot be identified either with a particular, concrete set of existing social relations or with a pure abstraction. It is, in my opinion, a specialized application in the field of social science of Russell's conception of the structure of a given relation as the class of all relations that are similar to that relation. I believe this interpretation will become more convincing if we consider in greater detail Radcliffe-Brown's conception of "the structural form" of a relation and the methods for determining it. From a logical point of view, the simplest kind of system with structural form in Radcliffe-Brown's theory is a "social usage" or customary mode of behavior within a given society, as, e.g., the customary relation of mother's brother and sister's son in an Australian tribe. To describe a social usage and its structural form requires, for Radcliffe-Brown, more than a statistical description of the frequency of a particular mode of behavior. One must also describe whether that particular mode of behavior is considered appropriate in that society and by whom. A social usage thus has two aspects: (1) a relative frequency of outward acts of behavior of individuals toward one another and toward their environment, and (2) a social recognition of this behavior as appropriate or inappropriate under the circumstances according to some normative rule. The anthropologist may sometimes succeed in guessing at the normative rule from his direct observation of acts of behavior, but generally he needs to ask his informants about it. The verbal

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formulation of a normative rule by an informant, on the other hand, may not accurately describe the relative frequency with which individual behavior conforms to the rule, or the kind of social recognition the rule has in the minds of different members of that society. In other words, when Radcliffe-Brown writes that when he observes in an Australian tribe "a number of instances of behavior towards one another of persons who stand in the relation of mother's brother and sister's son, it is in order that I may be able to record as precisely as possible the general or normal form of this relationship, abstracted from the variations of particular instances, though taking account of those variations", he is trying to determine the norms and rules of behavior that are implicit in a social usage. He finds out what the norms and rules are not simply by direct observation of recurrent acts of behavior, but by inference and postulation of the structural form of the social relations based on his observations, conversations with informants, and rational analysis. An additional kind of inference is required to arrive at the norms and rules underlying a social usage. If two instances of a postulated social usage resemble one another, whether the usage be a social relation as in the mother's brother-sister's son example or a technical usage such as two Andaman Islanders making bows in similar ways, the two similar instances are not only a class of discrete acts of behavior otherwise unrelated. They are also, Radcliffe-Brown argues, a system of behavioral acts interconnected with each other, because the different instances of behavior derive their similarity from having been learned within a single social system. While such learning of social usage can sometimes be directly observed, more frequently we can only infer or postulate its existence as an explanation of directly observed similarities between different instances of individual modes of behavior. In A Natural Science of Society Radcliffe-Brown says he would like to invoke a taboo on the word "culture" and replace it with "social usage" and systems of social usages. The effect of this replacement is to define "culture" in terms of specific standardized modes of behavior, inner and outer, that is, standardized ways of behaving, of thinking, of feeling emotion (R-B, 1957: 53, 92-104). Such a definition of "culture" was in fact current among American anthropologists in the 1930s and 1940s and reflected the great influence of behaviorism and behavioristic learning theory at that

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time. Somehow "culture" became a more scientific concept if it were reduced to "standardized behavior" or to "learned behavior". In Radcliffe-Brown's case, however, as in that of other anthropologists who used this behavioristic definition of culture, the reduction was only pro forma and somewhat specious. "Culture" was not a descripion of concrete, observable behavior but an abstraction from such behavior. It was a set of rules for behavior, rules that existed through their recognition in the minds of members of a given society. This recognition, along with other forms of "inner behavior" such as emotions and beliefs, cannot be directly observed in others but must be inferred from their verbal and other behavior. What is most distinctive, then, of the anthropological conception of culture is that it consists of a body of common sentiments and beliefs expressed in a system of common symbols and rituals. It cannot be reduced to directly observed outward behavior, but needs to be inferred and abstracted from both "inner" and "outward" behavior (see Singer 1968 for the historical development of the "culture" concept). Radcliffe-Brown wrote that "it does not much matter whether one regards the social usages as constituting culture or the rules behind them as doing so. Social usages perhaps better lend themselves to objective consideration: you can observe people carrying them out. The recognition of the rule is in people's minds. Both aspects — rule and usage — have to be taken into account." (R-B 1957: 103-104). The observability and objectivity of social usages, moreover, is subject to the limitations already mentioned - that the structural form of a usage is arrived at from repeated observations of concrete acts of behavior, comparison of the similarities and differences between these observations, abstraction of their invariant form, and inferred postulation of a single social and cultural system within which the similar acts of behavior were learned. In the end, the social relations embodied in a social usage are themselves not directly observed but are inferred from directly observed behavior. Thus even the structural form of the social relations in the simplest kind of system, a social usage, needs to be inferred and abstracted from comparative observation of concrete acts of behavior. The above analysis of Radcliffe-Brown's concept of "social usage", taken together with his definition of a social relation as a purposive and voluntary mutual adjustment of interests between

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two or more human beings, and his conception of "interest" as a "logical fiction" — "a short-hand description of a series of acts of behavior — not itself a real entity, but valuable in describing phenomenal reality" (similar to the concept of force in physics; R-B 1957: 43-44), shows why even his empirical concept of "social structure" as the sum total of social relations in a society cannot be completely reduced to directly observable acts of behavior. The complete reducibility is even less plausible, a fortiori, for his analytic concepts of "structural form" and of "social system". A social system for Radcliffe-Brown is a set of social usages (i.e., a "culture") within the framework of a social structure (i.e., a given network of actually existing social relations). Neither social structure nor culture can be studied independently of the other because "if you study culture you are always studying the acts of behavior of a specific set of persons who are linked together in a social structure", and if you study social structure you are always studying the norms, rules, and structural forms of social usages and of systems of social usages. You cannot have "coaptation" [fitting together] in human society without culture, i.e., some socially recognized rules for the mutual adjustment of interests ("complete disregard of the interests of one organism by another is unadjusted conflict and precludes social relationship", 1957: 44). And you cannot have continuity of culture without continuity of social structure, i.e., without continuity of its structural form. [. . . ] Radcliffe-Brown's 1952 letter to L6vi-Strauss has sometimes been cited by Lfevi-Strauss, Murdock, Leach, and others as clinching proof for the argument that since Radcliffe-Brown has a purely empiricist concept of "social structure" reduced to actually existing social relations, he failed to understand that L6vi-Strauss's theoretical concept of "social structure" referred to the model of a given set of social relations rather than to a concrete set of social relations. This is a puzzling argument, especially if taken together with L6viStrauss's finding in Totemism that Radcliffe-Brown achieved a genuine structuralist analysis in his 1951 paper on a second theory of totemism. Did amnesia then set in between the 1951 article and the 1952 letter? If our preceding analysis is valid, then there is a much simpler explanation of Radcliffe-Brown's letter. By 1952 Radcliffe-Brown had developed two concepts of "social structure". One of these concepts referred to a concrete set of actually existing social relations in a given place and time: it was an empirical descrip-

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tive concept subject to direct observation and operational definition in terms of acts of behavior. The second concept, usually labeled "structural f o r m " , was a theoretical and explanatory concept, arrived at as the end-product of a procedure of abstractive generalization f r o m systematic comparison of many instances of concrete social relations in different places and times. In terms of RadcliffeBrown's philosophy of science, t h e empirical concept of "social s t r u c t u r e " refers t o a system of interconnected "R-relations", while t h e theoretical concept of "structural f o r m " refers t o a class of logical and mathematical "r-relations". Radcliffe-Brown's concept of "structural f o r m " is, in other words, a specialized application of Russell's logico-mathematical concept of "the structure of a relation" as t h e class of all relations similar to the given relation. On this interpretation, the structural form of a given system of actually existing, interconnected social relations would be the class of all systems of actually existing, interconnected relations similar t o the given system, or " t h e s t r u c t u r e " of the given system. While the "structural f o r m " of a given social relation or of a given social system is arrived at by comparison and abstractive generalization, it is not a "mere abstraction" as distinct from reality, for it is the abstractive class of similar systems of actually existing social relations. If one reads Radcliffe-Brown's letter to L6vi-Strauss in the light of such an interpretation of the concept of "structural f o r m " , it becomes clear that Radcliffe-Brown was not trying t o impose a naive empiricist concept of "social s t r u c t u r e " on L6vi-Strauss's theoretical concept, but was rather raising questions about the different levels of abstraction at which t h e concept of "social structure" might be formulated and whether the concept of social structure as a " m o d e l " referred to t h e mathematical formula describing the structure of a particular set of relations or t o the reality designated by the formula. He adds that his own concept of social structure refers t o the reality, not t o t h e mathematical formula. This I take to be an assertion of the reality of the structural form of the relations and not simply the reality of the particular concrete set of relations. The interpretation of Radcliffe-Brown's concept of "structural f o r m " in terms of t h e class of all social relations similar to a given social relation, clears up, I believe, many of the puzzles anthropologists have found in the concept, and restores it t o the central

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place it occupied in Radcliffe-Brown's theory of social structure. (See Fortes 1949; Lfevi-Strauss 1953; Leach 1954; Firth 1954 for some of the leading efforts to find a place for 'structural form' in Radcliffe-Brown's theory of social structure).

4. Dual opposition — social and logical The preceding sections have argued that in A Natural Science of Society Radcliffe-Brown presented in 1937 a philosophy of science inspired by Whitehead and Russell and that he applied this philosophy to the formulation of concepts and of methods for building a theoretical science of society, or social anthropology. It has sometimes been suggested by critics who recognize Radcliffe-Brown's philosophical and theoretical ambitions that not much ever came of them so far as social anthropology is concerned, — that his formulations remained programmatic and formal and had very little connection with empirical ethnographic studies, his own or others'. This suggestion, I believe, underestimates both his theoretical and his ethnographic contributions. His structural theory was well integrated with his ethnographic studies. A careful reading of his most distinctive ethnographic papers will bear this out and fill in just that gap in his intellectual development that L6vi-Strauss found between the 1929 and 1951 theories of totemism. Until Lfevi-Strauss introduced his distinctive concept and method of structural analysis, the generally accepted meaning of "structural analysis" in social anthropology was that of a method of analysis that attempted to coordinate specific social usages and forms of customary behavior with specific kinds of social relations, often, but not invariably, specific kinds of kinship relations. RadcliffeBrown's example of the customary behavior toward one another of persons who stand in the relation of mother's brother and sister's son in an Australian tribe is a paradigmatic illustration of the kind of coordination that the earlier method of structural analysis sought to discover. The nature of such coordinations, for Radcliffe-Brown and those influenced by his ideas, was not to be found by investigating isolated cause-and-effect relations between a particular kind of kinship relation, for instance, and a particular form of customary behavior, but through intensive and first-hand field study of systems of particular kinship relations and associated social usages. The

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coordinations of specific social relations and social usages that emerged from such intensive studies and their comparative classification and generalization were regarded as relations of functional interdependence among the parts of the given system, or between its subsystems and the larger encompassing system. This view of the nature of the coordinations between social structure and culture is, of course, a corollary of Radcliffe-Brown's general theory of social systems as concrete interconnected social relations embodied in social usages and cutomary behavior. L6vi-Strauss regards the function and interpretation of the coordinations between kinship relations and customary behavior and attitudes as a legacy from Dürkheim, Mauss, and Malinowski, and accepts it in the form of the concrete "total social fact" as the starting point for his own method of structural analysis that looks for the hidden structures behind the informants' cultural categories and the functional interrelations among the different planes of the total social fact. The interrelations between the unconscious structures so discovered are not simply functional but logical and dialectical as well (L6vi-Strauss 1966). Is there a comparable development of structural from functional analysis in Radcliffe-Brown's analysis of specific social systems, subsystems, and social usages? [. . . ] Radcliffe-Brown's reference to structural principles as the mechanism by which certain categories of kin are selected for ordering actual social relations and behavior is not, for him, a return to causal analysis, for both the social relations and the kinship terminologies are applications of the same structural principles. But the introduction of "structural principles" carries Radcliffe-Brown's theory of kinship systems beyond a purely functional analysis. For the structural principles establish "type relations", and these "type relations" are our old friends the "structural forms" of a social relation: By the principle of the unity of the sibling groups, a type relationship is set up between a given person and all members of a sibling group to which it is related in a certain way. . . . By the principle of the unity of the lineage group, a type relationship is set up between a given person and all members of a lineage group to which he is related in a certain way. (1952: 87)

Lfcvi-Strauss identified as "the decisive step" in Radcliffe-Brown's second theory of totemism the raising of the question of why

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particular paired species of birds, such as eaglehawk and crow, are selected to represent the exogamous moieties of the dual division among the Darling tribes of Western Australia. The significance of this question and Radcliffe-Brown's answer to it decisively solve, for Lfevi-Strauss, the problem of totemism: The animals in totemism cease to be solely or principally creatures which are feared, admired, or envied; their perceptible reality permits the embodiment of ideas and relations conceived by speculative thought on the basis of empirical observations. We can understand, too, that the natural species are chosen not because they are 'good to eat' but because they are 'good to think'. (L0vi-Strauss 1963a [1967]: 89)

What makes these pairs of birds "good to think" are certain resemblances and differences between the paired animal species and the paired social divisions for which they are the totems. These resemblances and differences are of two kinds: (1) Those based on observation, e.g., that eaglehawk and crow are prominent meat-eaters and the Australians regard themselves as meat eaters, that eaglehawk is a bird of prey and crow is a scavenger. At this level eaglehawk and crow are considered "contraries" or "opposites". (2) That in the tales and myths about the birds the above resemblances are translated into terms of friendship and conflict, solidarity and opposition, as they are known in the social life of human beings. At this level eaglehawk and crow are thought of as friendly antagonists in human-type stories with human-type social relations. In one story version, e.g., eaglehawk is mother's brother to crow and a potential father-in-law. The essential thesis of Radcliffe-Brown's second theory is that the social relations between pairs of animal species thought of as friendly antagonists in the stories are not only a personification of similar social relations between human groups, but also the personification is based on accurate observations of resemblances and differences among animal species, and of the similarities of such resemblances and differences to those between exogamous moieties or between other paired social segments. These observed similarities and differences are then the explanation for the choice of particular animal species and their names as the totems of particular social segments. Radcliffe-Brown recognizes that there are two kinds of "oppositions" involved — the opposition between a pair of "contraries"

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that resemble each other in one respect (say meat eating) but differ in others (hunting versus scavenging, for example); and the opposition between friendly antagonists that combines friendship with hostility. The first kind of opposition is usually called "logical" opposition and the latter "structural" opposition by RadcliffeBrown. In the case of the Australians, however, he says that the two kinds of "opposites" are combined: The Australian conception of 'opposition' combines the idea of a pair of contraries with that of a pair of opponents. In the tales about eaglehawk and crow the two birds are opponents in the sense of being antagonists. They are also contraries by reason of their difference of character — Eaglehawk the hunter, Crow the [thief]. (R-B 1958: 118)

It is quite clear from the other examples in this passage and in the rest of the article that Radcliffe-Brown does not restrict the combination of the two kinds of opposition to the Australians: After a lengthy comparative study I think I am fully justified in stating a general law, that wherever, in Australia, Melanesia, or America, there exists a social structure of exogamous moieties, the moieties are thought of asbeing in a relation of what is here called 'opposition'. (1958: 118)

The particular pairs of contraries and the forms of opposition differ but the general structural principle remains valid. And that principle is the principle of "the union of opposites", the same principle that was enunciated by Heraclitus and in ancient China as Yang and Yin. L6vi-Strauss's incisive formulation of the general principle b o t h summarizes Radcliffe-Brown's structural analysis of totemism and links it to his own form of structuralism: The alleged totemism is no more than a particular expression, by means of a special nomenclature of animal and plant names (in a certain code, as we should say today), which is its sole distinctive characteristic, of correlations and oppositions which may be formalized in other ways, e.g., among certain tribes of North and South America, by oppositions of the type sky/earth, war/peace, upstream/downstream, red/white, etc. (livi-Strauss 1967 : 88-89)

Is this kind of structuralism to be found in Radcliffe-Brown's writings before the second theory of 1951, or does it represent, as L6vi-Strauss suggests, a mysterious intellectual meteor that lit up the very last years of Radcliffe-Brown's career? The preceding discussion should incline us to the first alternative. Radcliffe-Brown's

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second theory is entirely consistent with his general philosophy of science and his application of that philosophy to social anthropology. The principle of the unity of opposites in social relations and nature was included in his very definition of social relations as a mutual adjustment of interests and of the relation of similarity as including both difference and similarity. The Australian association of opposed pairs of birds with opposed pairs of moieties is but an example of how the method of arriving at generalizations through comparison of perceived analogies is practiced by "savages" as well as by scientists. This kind of association of dual oppositions, moreover, is an example in concrete form of that logical-mathematical conception of structure defined by Russell. The association sets up a one-one correspondence between two dyadic relations - the relation of contraries between natural species and the relation of friendly antagonism between social segments such that for any pair of natural opposites there is a correlated pair of social opposites. This, it will be recognized, is a special application of Russell's definition of similarity between dyadic relations, as is L6vi-Strauss's more general theory of an isomorphism between the natural series and the cultural series in savage thought (L6vi-Strauss 1966: 115). For Radcliffe-Brown, at least, the structural similarity between the relation of contraries and the relation of friendly antagonists does not imply that these two relations are the same kind, logically or empirically. (For further discussion of this point see pp. 218-220) Another important example of double opposition is analyzed by Radcliffe-Brown in his two papers on joking relations (R-B 1940, 1949 in 1952). These papers are usually cited as examples of Radcliffe-Brown's demonstration of the social meaning and function of customary usages, namely, how customary avoidance and joking, e.g., between particular relatives or between particular groups, function to mitigate the conflicts and hostilities inevitably generated by the "structural positions" of the separated individuals or groups. Joking and avoidance relations are not the only ways in which such relations are formed and maintained. RadcliffeBrown lists intermarriage, exchange of goods or services, and blood brotherhood or exchange of names or sacra as other forms of "alliance" that prevent or reduce the conflicts that would otherwise result. He was interested in developing a general theory of such "alliance" relations.

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The "structural" opposition of friendly antagonists that combines hostility with friendship in a stable set of social relations is only one kind of opposition. The link with another kind, the logical opposition of contraries, which is often overlooked, is made explicit in Radcliffe-Brown's second paper on joking relations. One of the first facts that strikes the sociological inquirer is that the custom of 'joking' with a wife's brothers and sisters is very commonly associated with a custom of strict avoidance of the wife's mother, frequently of the wife's father, and more occasionally the wife's mother's brother. Since it is clear that the avoidance custom and the joking custom are direct contraries or polar opposites, the problem immediately becomes one of dealing with both these types of customs. (R-B 1949: 106) [ · • .]

Srinivas points out in his introduction to Radcliffe-Brown's selected essays on Method in Social Anthropology (1958) that Radcliffe-Brown formulated "the law of opposition" in his address on applied anthropology to section F of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Advancement of Science (Brisbane, May-June, 1930). A universal "law of opposition" was also formulated by Tarde in his two treatises, L'Opposition universelle and Psychologie öconomique (see Ogden 1967 for summaries). There is an interesting difference between the dual opposition of the two moieties and their respective totems, such as eaglehawk and crow, and the dual opposition of the joking and avoidance relations. In the first case the relation of logical opposition or contraries is between two animal species, while in the second it is between two human relations. Moreover, since the relations between the animal species are expressed in myths and tales, while the joking relations between human beings are expressed in customary behavior, it might be concluded that the totemic contraries such as eaglehawk and crow constitute a genuine symbolic model for the moiety divisions, while the joking — avoidance opposition does not constitute a symbolic model for the correlated kinship relations. Radcliffe-Brown takes note of such a possible difference between the two kinds of dual opposition in his second paper on joking relations, but does not draw the above conclusion. The second paper was intended as a reply to a criticism of his and Mauss's theories of joking and "alliance" relations by Griaule

Dual opposition - social and logical 219 that had been published in 1948. Griaule had argued that the explanation of joking and respect relations which he had observed in Africa between the Dogon and the Bozo could not be explained by a general theory of such relations, for that would be like classifying together the ceremonies at which church bells are rung, such as funerals and weddings, and calling them all cärömonies ά cloches. The proper explanation, Griaule believed, is to be found by reference to what the specific relations mean to the natives in terms of their cosmological systems of myths and ideas. Griaule suggests that the explanation of the Dogon-Bozo alliance relations is to be found in the Dogon cosmological ideas about twins. Radcliffe-Brown regards this as a too particularistic kind of explanation, although he accepts it as a starting point for a wider comparative type of general explanation. Such a comparative approach is called for, he argues, because the Dogon symbolic representations are strikingly similar to those found in North and South America, Melanesia, and Australia. Radcliffe-Brown admits, however, that the Dogon may be "unusual when they represent the relation between paired groups by reference to human twins", since "the most usual way of representing this unity in duality, linking two groups into one society, is by pairs of opposites, such as heaven and earth, war and peace, red and white, land and water, coyote and wildcat, eaglehawk and crow" (R-B 1952: 114). He assimilates the Dogon conceptions to the general principle by seeing them as "only a special development of a conception that is very widespread in Africa, by which twins are regarded as a single entity divided into two parts" and by suggesting that the most fundamental conception of unity in duality in the Dogon cosmology is not that of twin births but "rather the opposition of the masculine and feminine principles, just as in the yin and yang of China" and in "the Heraclitean union of opposites in the sexual union of husband and wife". In any case, Radcliffe-Brown concludes, "the conception of unity in duality has been used by man not only in the establishment of systems of cosmology but also in organizing social structures" (R-B 1952: 115). I take this conclusion to imply not only that dual social organizations and social relations can be symbolically represented by all sorts of pairs and contraries similar in structure, whether human or animal, whether expressed in myths and stories or in customary behavior, but also that cosmological systems of ideas can be used to organize societies because cosmic structures and social structures are similar.

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We can see, in terms of the above interpretation of RadcliffeBrown's conception of "dual opposition", that Lfevi-Strauss's formulation of Radcliffe-Brown's second theory of totemism as employing a cognitive principle of binary and complementary oppositions of categories is justified. This interpretation of "dual opposition" is incomplete, however, to the extent that it subsumes RadcliffeBrown's "structural opposition" as a special case of logical opposition and does not also recognize it as a distinct nonlogical kind of opposition. [ . . .] L6vi-Strauss has noted in his essay on totemism (1963: 78-83) that Evans-Pritchard introduced a structural interpretation of the relation of twins to birds to account for some aspects of Nuer totemism. Evans-Pritchard's later study of Nuer religion, he states, did not quite achieve a genuine structuralist explanation because the explanation invokes local features of Nuer theology (see Radcliffe-Brown on Griaule) and because it did not take account of Radcliffe-Brown's second theory of totemism. In the next section I shall try to show that Radcliffe-Brown identified structural homologies between the natural order and the social order as early as The Andaman Islanders and that he constructed on the basis of such homologies a general theory of the structural relations between nature and man as expressed in myth and ritual, a general theory of which Australian totemism and cosmology became a specialized case. 36

5. T h e c o n s t r u c t i o n of primitive cosmologies In A Natural Science of Society Radcliffe-Brown outlines a subfield of social anthropology that he calls, following Dürkheim, comparative epistemology. This is to be a systematic comparative study of the cosmological belief systems of primitive peoples, their beliefs about the nature of the universe, not from the point of view of the truth or falsity of the beliefs, their logical or prelogical character, but in relation to the social structures in which they are embedded. Such studies might include, Radcliffe-Brown suggests, consideration of the relations of the cosmologies to language and linguistic categories, to the primitive "science" underlying technical procedures, and to the beliefs underlying ritual practices and expressed in ritual and in mythology. Radcliffe-Brown emphasizes that anthropologists should, in undertaking such studies, concentrate

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o n t h e functional relations and n o t o n t h e logical relations, o n t h e i n t e r a c t i o n s b e t w e e n t h e cosmologies and t h e s u b s y s t e m s of belief w i t h i n t h e t o t a l social s y s t e m . T h e familiar D ü r k h e i m emphasis o n t h e m e a n i n g and social f u n c t i o n s of t h e belief systems ( " c o l l e c t i v e r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s " ) in m a i n t a i n i n g t h e given t y p e of social s t r u c t u r e w o u l d seem at first glance t o j u s t i f y t h e i n f e r e n c e t h a t R a d c l i f f e - B r o w n was n o t i n t e r e s t e d in t h e s t u d y of cosmologies as cognitive systems and s t r u c t u r e s , and t h a t this is precisely w h e r e L6vi-Strauss's s t r u c t u r a l i s m as well as t h e n e w e r d e v e l o p m e n t s in cognitive a n t h r o p o l o g y part c o m p a n y w i t h British f u n c t i o n a l i s m . If t h i s i n f e r e n c e were valid, it would of c o u r s e leave t h e cognitive structuralism of t h e second t h e o r y of t o t e m i s m u n a c c o u n t e d f o r . I believe t h e i n f e r e n c e is e r r o n e o u s and seriously u n d e r e s t i m a t e s R a d c l i f f e - B r o w n ' s interest in, a n d c o n t r i b u t i o n s t o , cognitive a n t h r o p o l o g y . N o d o u b t t h e p r e d o m i n a n t e m p h a s i s in his discussions of cosmologies a n d religious systems was o n t h e i r f u n c t i o n a l relations t o t h e social systems of w h i c h t h e y were parts. But such e m p h a s i s did n o t e x c l u d e f o r him a strong and persistent interest in t h e belief s y s t e m s as logical systems of classification and k n o w l e d g e in their o w n right. His interest, e.g., in t h e Chinese c o n c e p t of yin and yang a n d in Heraclitus's c o n c e p t of t h e u n i t y of c o n t r a r i e s was in h o w these principles used analogical t h i n k i n g t o build u p t h e i r respective cosmologies. One proceeds on the basis of conceived opposites to a classification of all things: day and night, winter and summer, twilight and darkness. Everything in the universe is brought into the classification: mountains and lakes, rivers and seas. Now there is a system of logic - a full system for handling analogies. (R-B 1957: 119) This interest e x t e n d e d t o t h e " l o g i c a l " s y s t e m s t h a t u n d e r l a y A n d a m a n and Australian cosmologies as well as t h e cosmologies of o t h e r primitive peoples. C o m p a r a t i v e e p i s t e m o l o g y can disclose universal " l o g i c s " , s y m b o l s , and even universal moral principles such as a principle of j u s t i c e , o n t h e basis of s y s t e m a t i c c o m p a r i s o n . Radcliffe-Brown's functionalist approach to comparative epistemology, I a m suggesting, is n o t a n t i t h e t i c a l t o a genuine structuralist analysis, b u t r a t h e r e n c o m p a s s e s it. In s u p p o r t of this thesis let us consider a p r o b l e m in c o m p a r a t i v e e p i s t e m o l o g y t h a t h e c o n c e n t r a t e d o n f r o m s o m e of his very earliest t o s o m e of his latest writings - t h e p r o b l e m of h o w primitive p e o p l e s u n i f y in their cosmologies

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the social order and-the natural order. This example will, I believe, reveal his structuralist solution to the problem and also illuminate some of the logical processes underlying the construction of primitive and modern cosmologies. I shall not attempt to summarize Radcliffe-Brown's functionalist and Durkheimian formulations of the problem and its solution, since that is too well known to need repeating. One of Radcliffe-Brown's clearest and earliest statements of the problem and of a solution occurs in the last chapter of The Andaman Islanders. There he points out that Andaman legends express and formulate a cosmology that includes both the social order and the order of nature. The two orders are unified by the conception of a single set of moral laws that govern both: The Andaman Islander finds himself in an ordered world, a world subject to law, controlled by unseen forces. The laws are not for him what natural laws are to the scientist o f today, they are rather o f the nature o f moral laws . . . custom and law are indeed here t w o words for the same thing. (R-B 1 9 4 8 : 3 8 4 - 3 8 5 )

The problem that arises in connection with such an interpretation of Andaman legends is where this conception of a single set of moral laws governing the universe comes from, not in the sense of their historical derivation but in the epistemological sense of what are the Andamans' grounds of belief in such a cosmology. RadcliffeBrown's first answer to the problem is that such cosmological conceptions are grounded in everyday Andaman experience. This view o f the world is the immediate and inevitable result o f the experience o f man in society. It is a philosophy not reached b y painful intellectual effort, by searching out o f meanings and reasons and causes; it is impressed upon him in all the happenings o f his life, is assumed in all his actions; it needs only t o b e formulated . . . ( 1 9 4 8 : 3 8 5 )

Assuming, for the moment, that Andaman everyday social experience constitutes a sufficient basis for the conception of a social order regulated by a moral law, what is the basis for subsuming the natural order under the same conception? Radcliffe-Brown answers this question by saying that Andaman cosmology distinguishes two different aspects of the natural order: those that have some direct practical value to the society, e.g., features of weather and landscape, edible plants and animals; and those that have no apparent practical value but are nevertheless objects of observation,

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curiosity, and legend (birds and insects, e.g.). Since the Andamanese are "interested in natural phenomena only in so far as such phenomena are really parts of the social order", they confront an intellectual dilemma in noticing those natural phenomena and plants and animals that do not have any immediate practical value for their social life. They resolve this dilemma by incorporating into the social order that part of nature that is only good to observe along with that part that is also good to eat. The mechanism of incorporation is the same for both, a personification of natural phenomena and of natural species. From a functionalist point of view, the personification of the natural order enables the Andamanese to express their sentiments and ritual attitudes toward it as objects of social value and also to explain away the lack of relation between their fundamental interest in persons and personal relations and a segment of nature that has no apparent practical value. Personification of natural phenomena, and of animal species, is then: . . . one of the methods by which the Andaman Islander projects into the world of nature the moral forces that he experiences in society. . . Perhaps rather than speaking of it as a projection of moral forces into nature, we should regard it as a process of bringing within the circle of social life those aspects of nature that are of importance to the wellbeing of the society, making the moon and the monsoons a part of the social order and therefore subject to the same moral forces that have sway therein. (1948 [ 1 9 5 7 ] : 381)

So far, Radcliffe-Brown's interpretation of Andaman cosmology is not especially structuralist. It becomes so, however, when he shows that in their personifications of natural phenomena or natural species, the Andamanese legends, myths, and ritual ceremonies sometimes establish direct analogies between social relations and relations in nature, and that these analogies are based on their experience and observation of the natural order as well as of the social order. In one example he practically formulates in a rudimentary form the principle of "structural opposition" in society and in nature: The forces with which the Andaman Islander is most familiar as affecting his welfare are those of solidarity or opposition: it is solidarity that maintains the harmony of social life, opposition that destroys it. The forces of nature in so far as they affect the society are therefore represented as being of the same nature; there can be either solidarity or opposition between man and nature; the former leads to well being,

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the latter to misfortune. . . . The Andaman Islander represents this fundamental law of the society as though it were the fundamental law of the universe. (1948 [1957]: 381, and cf. 307)

The kinds of ordered social world and ordered natural world that are analogized in the legends are based on observed characteristics or on assumptions derived from observation. The legends assume, e.g., the uniformity of natural and social processes and the dependence of the present on the past. "Forces that originated the world continue to act uniformly, in the legend, ever since" (1948 [ 1 9 5 7 ] : 386). And "the part played in the legends by any particular animal is determined either immediately or indirectly by its observable characteristics" (1948 [ 1957]: 388). Not only Andaman legends and myths but rituals and ceremonies as well express a cosmology, a certain way of feeling and thinking about the society and its relation to the world of nature. And in the rites and ceremonies, as well, direct analogies are assumed between the natural and social orders, assumptions that are derived from direct observation. An unusually striking example of this is "the calendar of scents". I shall quote Radcliffe-Brown's description, since it makes very explicit the structural analogies between the natural and social orders: In the jungles of the Andamans it is possible to recognize a distinct succession of odours during a considerable part of the year as one after another the commoner trees and lianas come into flower. When, for example, the species of Sterculia called in the North Andaman jeru comes into blossom, it is almost impossible to get away from the smell of it except on the seashore when the wind is from the sea. Moreover these various flowers give their scent to the honey that is made from them, so that there is also a succession of differently flavoured kinds of honey. The Andamanese have therefore adopted an original method of marking the different periods of the year by means of the different odoriferous flowers that are in bloom at different times. Their calendar is a calendar of scents. (R-B 1948: 311-312)

The naming of girls at the onset of puberty after the trees and plants in bloom at the time is not a "personification" in this case, i.e., a transfer of characteristics of the human social world to nature, but conversely, a kind of "naturalization" of the human world by transferring characteristics of nature to it. The "calendar of scents" marks a specific succession of natural events, an "order of odors", and coordinates that order of succession with an order of succession

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in social events and in the female individual life cycle. Cosmological interpretation generalizes from these analogies to a theory of universal generative forces and processes. Radcliffe-Brown's analysis of Andaman myths and legends, rites and ceremonies, led him to formulate a theory of primitive cosmology whose major theses remained essentially unchanged throughout his later studies, although some additions were made to the theory. The major theses of the theory as it emerges from the Andaman Islanders are six : (1) A functional and contextual analysis of primitive rites and ceremonies, myths and legends shows that they express and to some extent formulate a set of collective beliefs and social values about their society and its relations to the natural world, i.e., a cosmology. (2) A prominent feature of primitive cosmological thought is the drawing of analogies between the social world and the natural world. Frequently these analogies are drawn between structures of social relations and structures of the natural order, including structures of binary oppositions in both society and nature. (3) The analogies and the structural and nonstructural properties analogized are to some extent derived from direct observation and experience, individual and collective. The scope of the analogies is greatly extended by a process of "personification", which takes familiar characteristics of human beings and of social relations as a model to symbolize the characteristics of natural phenomena and natural species. Its scope is also extended by a converse process of "naturalization" that takes observed characteristics of the natural world to symbolize features of the social world. (4) Through the operations of an analogical logic starting from perceived analogies and extended by the double processes of personification and naturalization, supplemented by rudimentary speculative thought, there develops the conception of a single cosmos that includes both the natural order and the social order, a cosmos animated by the same generative forces or "powers" and governed by the same moral laws. (5) The social functions of legends and myths are not only to express and formulate a collective world view and value system, but also, in so doing, t o strengthen the collective sentiments and interests toward those features of nature and of social life on which a given type of society depends for its continued existence.

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(6) Myths and legends, rites and ceremonies are t o some extent alternative and parallel means for expressing a cosmology and, consequently, for helping to maintain a given t y p e of society. And they are alternative and parallel means for performing these functions because they each articulate similar structural correspondences between the social order and t h e natural order. [. . .] The essential continuity in Radcliffe-Brown's theory of primitive cosmology between The Andaman Islanders of 1922 and the second theory of totemism of 1951 can be documented from lectures on primitive religion that he gave at the University of Chicago in the Winter of 1932. Notes of these lectures taken by Sol Tax have been published in the student journal, Anthropology Today, Vol. 4, No. 2, for April, 1956. From these lectures it is quite clear that Radcliffe-Brown continued to regard the method of analyzing m y t h s and rituals in the Andamans and the theory of cosmology to which it led as still valid when applied t o totemic societies. One quotation will suggest the way in which totemism is incorporated into the more general t h e o r y : A totemic society is subdivided into groups (moieties and clans). Here they often divide up nature in the same way and establish especial ritual relations between homologous parts of society and nature. . . . Totemism is a process by which the whole universe is built up into a single structure, and you establish between parts of the structure relations of the same kind as social relations. . . . Moieties are carried out on the basis of a sex dichotomy. All relatives through father are in one moiety, and the relatives through mother in the other. The moieties have reciprocal functions. There is a conception of dual opposition; this is the basis for choosing opposing pairs of animals, etc., to represent the moieties. The people with moiety systems proceed to bring in all of nature, or that part of it which affects them. . . . Very frequently man will seek a general principle of dichotomy on which to make his classification. (1956: 24)

Other brief but explicit statements on how Australian totemism operates t o establish t h e same kind of relations between man and nature that are established in Andamanese m y t h and ritual will be found in Radcliffe-Brown ( 1 9 5 8 : 20-22, 58-63.) In describing the totemism of local Australian totem centers, Radcliffe-Brown emphasized that it is "the intimate association of a group of persons with a certain stretch of country, with its rocks and water-holes and o t h e r natural features, and with the natural species that are abundant in i t " that f o r m s the basis for

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that wider structure that organizes relations between human society and natural species through myth and ritual (R-B 1931: 29-32).

6. The homology between nature and culture as a postulate in primitive thought The logical and cognitive processes underlying Andaman, Australian, and perhaps all primitive cosmologies, Radcliffe-Brown's theory suggests, exhibit similarities to the cognitive processes involved in the building of modern scientific cosmologies. Perceived analogies in structure between different fields of experience are elaborated by wide comparisons and classifications (usually dichotomous) into unified and comprehensive systems of correspondences that encompass both the natural and the social orders. In one important respect, however, primitive cosmologizing differs from the scientific variety, according to Radcliffe-Brown: primitive thought does not include the operation of "abstractive generalization", the formulation, with the help of abstract concepts, of general laws and theories. It remains concrete and metaphorical as art, stories, and dreams are, tolerant of inconsistencies and improbabilities. The absence or minimal use of abstractive generalization in primitive thinking presents a kind of epistemological puzzle for RadcliffeBrown's theory as well as for Lfevi-Strauss's which paints a similar picture of the "savage mind". If, as both theories assert, primitive thinking establishes "a philosophy of nature, particularly a classification of nature, usually by analogy with the social structure" (R-B 1956: 28), then how can such a philosophy be derived and formulated without some process of abstractive generalization and inference from experience and observation? Radcliffe-Brown's answer, as outlined in his 1932 lectures, is that the primitive philosophy of nature is established by means of ritual and myth through the use of "symbolic action" and "symbolic thought". The characters and the actions in the myths and tales and in the rites and ceremonies are "symbols" that represent other aspects of nature and society. "When an Australian tells about a ' "crow" ' he means the whole crow species anthropomorphized" (R-B 1956: 29). In themselves, the objects selected as symbols may be insignificant, but their function as symbols depends on the "appropriate-

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ness" of their forms in expressing sentiments or in representing what they stand for. In the Andamans, e.g., "The cicada (an insect) is important ritually, cannot be killed, etc.; it represents the procession of day and night and the seasons [its routine: it sings certain hours in certain seasons]" (R-B 1956: 7-8). In both ritual and mythology, "there is a process of substitution whereby something comes to represent something else. Symbolism is an example of such a process, and it is of two kinds: (1) a purely conventional sign stands for something else, and there is no good reason for the symbol - like language symbols; no correlation of form of word and meaning; (2) the symbol is by its form appropriate to represent the thing to which it refers" (R-B 1956: 5). The appropriateness of objects selected as symbols of the second kind derives in part from their physiological effects, which may be universal; e.g., the color red symbolizes energy "over most of the world" and blue represents depression, but "the production of social symbols is a social matter". Society builds up a system of communication based on both kinds of symbols, using the second kind more in ritual, myth, and art. Oppositions, between red and blue, black and white, up and down, are included in such systems of communication to symbolize oppositions between vitality and depression, euphoria and disphoria, superior and inferior, and other opposed meanings that are considered appropriate in a given society (1956: 5-8). Primitive myth and ritual thus embody in concrete form "symbols" that represent for the natives meanings and structures beyond the objects that serve as "symbols". The objects can perform this representational function because they are "indexical" or "iconic" signs, as Peirce would say, not because they are conventional "symbols". As indexic l signs they tend to act directly on their interpreters through psychophysical associations; as iconic signs, they exhibit in their structure the structures of many other systems of relations that are similar to the structures of the symbols. In primitive cosmologies such systems of "symbols" and their meanings are tied together not by abstractly formulated cosmic principles and laws but through totemic and nontotemic religions that relate the given society as a whole to the natural order as a whole, and both orders to a spirit world. The structures, meanings, and principles the anthropologist finds in these cosmologies are not generally

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verbalized by the natives, but are elicited by a contextual and functional analysis of the myths, rituals, and social organization of a given society. L6vi-Strauss's theory of primitive cosmological thought is very similar to Radcliffe-Brown's except that it is far more developed in terms of the concepts of information theory, cybernetics, and structural linguistics. Primitive thought uses a "concrete logic" by putting together from the "debris of events" a bricolage of small-scale concrete models whose structures symbolically represent or encode both social and natural structures. Close observation, comparison of analogies, and classification are the major cognitive operations in this concrete logic, which eventually arrives, in the case of totemic societies, at "a pure totemic structure" of homologies between two systems of differences, one of which occurs in nature, the other in culture (1966: 115 and passim). Sometimes the natives are aware of the metaphorical and symbolic character of their thinking and formulate "conscious models", which may turn out, says Lfevi-Strauss, to be more accurate than the anthropologist's models. L£vi-Strauss quotes what an Osage told J.O. Dorsey: "We do not believe that our ancestors were really animals, birds, etc., as told in traditions. These things are only wa-wi-ku-ska'-ye (symbols) of something higher" (1966: 149). Compare Radcliffe-Brown to the same effect: When I was beginning my work in Australia in 1910, a native said to me, 'Bungurdi (kangaroo) [is] my kadja (elder brother)'. This simple sentence of three words gives the clue to an understanding of Australian totemism. The speaker did not mean that individuals of the kangaroo species are his brothers. He meant that to the kangaroo species, conceived as an entity, he stood in a social relation analogous to that in which a man stands to his elder brother in the kinship system. (R-B 1952: 169)

More generally, both Radcliffe-Brown and L6vi-Strauss find that the structure of primitive thought is unconscious and needs to be elicited by the specialized methods of analysis developed by anthropology. For L£vi-Strauss the best method is that of structural analysis, which he has so brilliantly applied to the corpus of North and South American Indian mythology. The answers that L6vi-Strauss and Radcliffe-Brown give to the epistemological puzzle are very similar. The cosmologies of primitive peoples and the cognitive processes underlying their construction do

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not depend on the use of abstract concepts and explicit theoretical formulations, but rest on a concrete sensory logic of symbolic thought and symbolic action embedded in myths and rites, and in social organization. Through the use of such concrete logic, correspondences and analogies of structure in and between the social and natural orders are perceived, represented, thought about, and classified into a comprehensive and closed cosmological system. This answer, in turn, raises another and more difficult epistemological question: what is the truth value of the symbolic thought and symbolic action implicit in primitive myths, rites, and social institutions; and what is the ontological status of the cosmology constructed from a concrete sensory logic? For Radcliffe-Brown, comparative epistemology does not have to answer these questions! The anthropologist, in studying the cosmologies of primitive peoples, should not pronounce on their truth-value or ontological status; he should study them in "a purely objective way", as "a phenomenal reality", as systems of belief and alternative "logics". If, in discussing the cosmology of the Australian aborigines, I used the word 'knowledge' with reference to their beliefs about the relation of man and animals, that it.totemism, I should be understood to be implying their beliefs were sound and true. As an anthropologist, I have no business to do that; nor may I imply that they are false. If the Australians believe in the Great Law-Giver who established in the beginning of time the social system in which they now live, I have no business to say 'that is false', and equally no business to say, 'it is true'. What I have to do is investigate the belief as a phenomenal reality. (R-B 1957: 117-118)

This is the brave answer of cultural relativity! It is not, however, quite the same answer that emerges when we put together what Radcliffe-Brown has to say in the several contexts of his comparative analysis of cosmologies. Totemic classifications, for example, he regards as classifications of natural objects that are based on accurate observations and a logical principle of dichotomy. The translation, however, of such natural classifications, in the cosmologies, into social classifications depends on the appropriateness of the natural distinctions t o serve as symbols of social distinctions. "Two symbols must be of the same kind but show conflicting differences" (1947: 21). Eaglehawk and crow are appropriate symbols to represent the two moieties, e.g., because they are both meat eaters, while eaglehawk is a hunter and crow a scavenger. The concrete sensory

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logic of primitive thought may be implicit in legends and rites, but, since it is based on accurate observations and is extended by a logic of analogy, it has both epistemological and ontological validity. Most of the natural species and phenomena that serve as symbols in the legends and classifications really exist and so do the differences and similarities between them, as do the social relations, groups, and divisions. Sometimes 'fictitious physical differences are alleged in order to stress the social differences' between moieties or other social groups (1947: 21). The systems of classification also exist in the minds of the natives, at least implicitly and unconsciouly, through expression in the legends, rites, art, and ceremonies. Radcliffe-Brown's functionalist theory of cosmologies, the existence of a cosmology in the minds of the natives as sentiments and beliefs is an absolutely essential condition for the continued existence of a given society. Destroy the cosmology, says Radcliffe-Brown, and the society will fall into chaos. The dependence of a given social structure on a given cosmology is mutual: no cosmology, no society; no society, no cosmology. It must also be remembered that Radcliffe-Brown believed that his comparative studies of primitive cosmologies, based on his own field work and on that of others in the Andamans, Australia, Melanesia, Africa, and North America, established the near universality of thinking by a logic of contraries and a unity of opposites. He associated these principles, as well, with the philosophies of Heraclitus in ancient Greece and of Yang and Yin in ancient China. Considering all this, it does seem that Radcliffe-Brown was not able to enforce the self-restraining ordinance of not judging the truth-value of primitive beliefs and "logics". At least he seems to have felt that their beliefs were not all "superstitions" and their "logics" not entirely invalid. Perhaps the most eloquent implicit testimony to the rationality of primitive logic and cosmology is to be found in the fact that he built the principle of the unity of opposites into the very definition of his concept of social relations as a mutual adjustment of conflicting interests, and the logic of contraries into his definition of the concept of "difference" as a contrast between elements that are in some respects also similar. L6vi-Strauss grapples more directly and vigorously than RadcliffeBrown with the questions of the truth-value and ontological status of primitive cosmologies. His conclusion, however, is in the end

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not so very different from Radcliffe-Brown's. In his discussion of totemic institutions in The Savage Mind, L6vi-Strauss writes that they are based on "the postulate of homology between two systems of differences, one of which occurs in nature and the other in culture" (L-S 1966: 115, italics in original, also 1966: 224-225). This postulate is referred to in another passage as "a perfectly legitimate hypothesis" with an "objective basis" because "there really are natural species, and they do indeed form a discontinuous series; and social segments for their part also exist". Since "social segments are instituted, . . . it is in the power of each society to render the hypothesis plausible by shaping its rules and representations accordingly" (1966: 227). The status of the postulate of homology is left somewhat ambivalent by this passage - its objective validity is strengthened by its "doubly objective basis" in the existence of differentiated natural species and differentiated social segments. On the other hand, the postulate's plausibility also depends on its being a self-fulfilling hypothesis in the power of each society t o confirm or disconfirm by shaping its rules and representations according to the hypothesis. The epistemological status of the postulate becomes even more precarious in the light of "a paradox" that confronts the interpretation of totemic systems, as their "virtually synchronic nature is engaged in a never-ending struggle with diachrony. Ex hypothesi the elements of the system are on the side of myth, but, in terms of its destination, the set lies always beyond; myth as it were, runs after it to catch up with it." And when myth does in exceptional cases catch up, "a new doubt makes itself felt: do mythical representations correspond to an actual structure which models social and religious practices or do they translate only the congealed image by means of which native philosophers give themselves the illusion of fixing a reality which escapes them?" (L-S 1966: 231, cf. also 66-71). This paradox is, of course, a special case of the more general paradox of structural change as societies try to maintain their structural forms through equilibrium adjustments, as RadcliffeBrown would put it. When they fail in this inertial tendency because of demographic and other external changes, they do not die, but change their structural forms. In such cases, at what point in the process are we to say that the old structural form no longer

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prevails? L0vi-Strauss worries a good deal about one particular kind of structural change, one he analyzes as a theoretical possibility and describes in terms of several ethnographic cases. In this type of change there is a transformation of the system of homologies between relations in the natural and social orders into a system of identifications between the separate terms in the two series. "In this case the implicit content of the structure would no longer be that clan 1 differs from clan 2 as for instance the eagle differs from the bear but rather that clan 1 is like the eagle and clan 2 like the bear" (1966: 115). Each group identifies itself with a natural species and "will tend to form a system no longer with other social groups but with particular differentiating properties regarded as hereditary, and these characteristics exclusive to each group will weaken the framework of their solidarity within the society" (1966: 116-117). The totemic classification is "a grammar fated to degenerate into a lexicon" (1966: 232). For L6vi-Strauss, as for Radcliffe-Brown, such degeneration in a society's cosmology leads to chaos and confusion: 37 The classification tends to be dismantled like a palace swept away upon the flood, whose parts, through the effect of currents and stagnant waters, obstacles and straits, come to be combined in a manner other than that intended by the architect. In totemism, therefore, function inevitably triumphs over structure. (1966: 232)

Anticipating the criticism that this position seems to give primacy to ideological superstructure over the social infrastructure, L6viStrauss says that he does "not mean to suggest that the relations between man and nature are a projection or even a result, of a conceptual game taking place in the mind". "Without questioning the undoubted primacy of infrastructures", he believes there is always a conceptual scheme mediating between praxis and practices, and it is to this theory of superstructures that structural analysis directs its attention. The study of the infrastructures is not the ethnologist's concern; it must be left to history and auxiliary sciences; "ethnology is first of all psychology". But to study superstructures is "merely studying the shadows on the wall of the cave without foregetting that it is only the attention we give them which lends them a semblance of reality" because "men's conception of

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the relations between nature and culture is a function of modifications of their own social relations" (1966: 117, 130). In spite of the ambiguities in the epistemological status of the totemic postulate, Lfevi-Strauss's overall evaluation of primitive thought is unequivocally positive. Although the logic of primitive thought is concrete and deals with sensible qualities, it has "discerned, as through a glass darkly, principles of interpretation whose heuristic value and accordance with reality have been revealed to us only through very recent inventions; telecommunications, computers and electron microscopes". Primitive thought is also heir to a legacy of a positive science that "flowered in the neolithic period, whose theory of the sensible order provided the basis of the arts of civilization (agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, weaving, conservation and preparation of food, etc.) and which continues to provide for our basic needs by these means. . .". LdviStrauss's final tribute to the savage mind recognizes that "the scientific spirit in its most modern form will, by an encounter it alone could have forseen, have contributed to legitimize the principles of savage thought and to re-establish it in its rightful place" (1966: 268-269).

7. Conclusion: F r o m a n " o r d e r of o d o r s " to the logical construction of the world The ambiguities in the epistemological and ontological status of the totemic postulate of homology between the natural and the human worlds, and of primitive cosmologies generally, arise for modern scientific cosmologies as well. What, e.g., is the status of the cosmology assumed in Radcliffe-Brown's philosophy of science that reality in nature and in society consists ultimately of events and relations between events rather than of substances with attributes? Is this a postulate, a legitimate hypothesis, a mythical representation constructed by native philosophers? And what is the relation of such a "scientific" cosmology to the concrete sensory experience and logic of everyday life? Radcliffe-Brown does not worry himself about such questions, even in A Natural Science of Society. Beyond giving a brief summary assertion about the nature of reality as viewed by modern science and the nature of scientific method, natural laws, and causality and probability, he is willing to leave

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the discussion of the epitemological questions to philosophers of science. He was, of course, justified in delegating such problems to the philosophers, especially since the two philosophers, Whitehead and Russell, from whom he drew his philosophy of science spent most of their careers writing about them. From the broader perspective of a comparative epitemology, however, there is an interest and justification in comparing the epistemological status of the scientific cosmology and method that Radcliffe-Brown accepted with the status of the cosmology and modes of thought he found among primitive peoples. While many differences are, of course, obvious as between the abstract mathematical formulations and technical experiments of modern science, and the concrete, sensory, and empirical practical character of primitive thought - already stated by Radcliffe-Brown and Lfevi-Strauss — there are also some striking parallels. I have noted one of these parallels in method: the use of careful observation of similarities and differences in the local environment, wider comparisons based on the perceived analogies, dichotomous classifications, and some tendency to construct comprehensive systems of classification that have some indirect relation to experience and practical social life. L6vi-Strauss has also drawn the parallel between information theory and the use in primitive thought of a concrete logic of gross sensory qualities as codes and messages. I should like to develop this parallel further to show that the concrete sensory logic of the Andamans, the Australian Aborigines, the Bororo, and of our own neolithic ancestors is still alive and well among modern scientists, philosophers, and anthropologists. The epitemological problems raised by modern scientific cosmology and method were attacked by Whitehead and Russell in two distinct but closely related ways. One strategy, initiated by Whitehead, was to reduce the number of ontological entities in the cosmology through a method of logical and mathematical analysis that redefined the entities in terms of a smaller number of entities. Employing this method, which he called "the method of extensive abstraction", Whitehead eliminated points of space, instants of time, and particles of matter in motion from the ontology of modern science (Whitehead, The Concept of Nature). Russell used an analogous method, which he called the principle of abstraction, to reduce the ontological inventory further by trying to get rid of numbers, classes, relations, mind, and matter as independent

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ontological substances and attributes. While from one point of view this strategy looks like an application o f Occam's Razor to cut d o w n the inventory of ontological entities, from another point of view it can be seen as a method for logically constructing a world most o f whose entities are logical fictions. One o f Russell's early popular descriptions of the method brings out its t w o sides (Russell 1957: 150-151):38 The supreme maxim in scientific philosophising is this: Wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities. Some examples of the substitution of construction for inference in the realm of mathematical philosophy may serve to elucidate the uses of this maxim. Take first the case of irrationals. In old days, irrationals were inferred as the supposed limits of series of rationals which had no rational limit; but the objection to this procedure was that it left the existence of irrationals merely optative, and for this reason the stricter methods of the present day no longer tolerate such a definition. We now define an irrational number as a certain class of ratios, thus constructing it logically by means of ratios, instead of arriving at it by a doubtful inference from them. Take again the case of cardinal numbers. Two equally numerous collections appear to have something in common: this something is supposed to be their cardinal number. But so long as the cardinal number is inferred from the collections, not constructed in terms of them, its existence must remain in doubt, unless in virtue of a metaphysical postulate ad hoc. By defining the cardinal number of a given collection as the class of all equally numerous collections, we avoid the necessity of this metaphysical postulate, and thereby remove a needless element of doubt from the philosophy of arithmetic. A similar method as I have shown elsewhere, can be applied to classes themselves, which need not be supposed to have any metaphysical reality, but can be regarded as symbolically constructed fictions. Radcliffe-Brown's analysis and definitions o f the concepts of social structure, social system, culture, and personality in terms o f behavioral events and relations b e t w e e n events can be seen as an effort t o apply to the field o f social science the method o f logical construction used b y Whitehead and Russell in physics, mathematics, and logic. The second strategy that Russell and Whitehead b o t h used was t o show h o w the "things" o f everyday experience and observation were related t o the world described b y theoretical physics. The results of the first strategy to some extent simplified the problem b y reducing the number of "things", but still left a considerable

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gap between the world of common sense observation and experience and the world of physics. In their pursuit of this strategy, Whitehead and Russell took somewhat divergent paths and came out with different results. Whitehead, e.g., found an immediate apprehension in direct experience of causal efficacy, temporal duration, and an organic, psychic character for all events. Russell's direct perception of his experience was more like Hume's, without direct observation of causality or of organic events. It consisted of "sense-data" - certain patches of color, sounds, tastes, smells, etc. with certain spatiotemporal relations. Since the contents of the physical world as described by modern science are colorless molecules, soundless atoms, tasteless electrons, and odorless corpuscles, how can the world of physics be verified through observation? Russell's solution to this problem is to apply the method of "logical constructions" in order to show that physical objects, even if they cannot be directly observed or their existence inferred from sense-data, are nevertheless some kind of function of sense-data. The specific way in which Russell "constructs" the physical world from sense perception offers a modern scientific parallel to the way in which primitive thought is supposed to "construct", with the help of a concrete sensory logic, a cosmos with a homology between the two systems of differences, one in the natural order and the other in the social order, according to both Radcliffe-Brown and L6vi-Strauss. The most lucid statement of Russell's theory will be found in his Analysis of Matter (1928), although it was adumbrated in earlier writings. There he shows that a connection can be established between, on the one hand, perceived space, perceived time, perceived motion, and perceived colors and sounds, and their physical counterparts, on the other, by assuming that the structure of the perceptions is similar or "semi-similar" to the structure of the physical stimuli: 39 (Russell 1928 [1954]: 400) Russell's analysis of the relation of perception to the physical world is more complex than it looks at first sight, since it presupposes the use of language and calls for a semiotic theory of perception. Russell's later writings take account of the linguistic factor. The analogue in primitive thought to a logical construction of the world on the basis of sense-data would be found in the structural relations of the cosmology expressed in myth and legend to the structures of perception. Radcliffe-Brown's analysis of the observa-

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tional basis of Andamanese beliefs and "symbolic thought" tends to elicit such structural relations. In L6vi-Strauss, the analogue is much more explicitly semiotic: the semantic meanings and functions of objects that appear in the myths are to signify the systems of binary sensory contrasts that encode their messages. The possibility and effectiveness of such signification and encoding depends on the isomorphic character of the binary systems of sensory contrasts, as between the different sensory modalities, and on the choice of objects to serve as symbols in the myths that can convey the isomorphic equivalences of the sensory contrasts. Primitive myths thus convey only the structure of the perceived world, as does modern physics! (See L6vi-Strauss 1964 [ 1 9 7 0 ] : 153, 164, 177, 187.) 40 Whether Radcliffe-Brown or L6vi-Strauss read any of Russell's Analysis of Matter, I do not know. The relative chronologies make it more probable that they were exposed to his works than he to theirs. In any case, whatever the historical facts may have been, Russell's theory that all science can know of the physical world is its structure, and that it comes to know that be extrapolating from qualitative perceptions the systems of purely structural properties whose similarities with the structures of physical systems is a major postulate of scientific thought - provides one of those surprising testimonials to the principles of savage thought that both RadcliffeBrown and Lfevi-Strauss formulated. The theory also provides, e.g., a good paradigm for Radcliffe-Brown's interpretations of the Andamanese "calendar of scents", of "the killing of the cicada", and of other forms of primitive symbolic thought and symbolic action. In Radcliffe-Brown's interpretation of "the calendar of scents", the order of successsion in the flowering of trees and plants that marks the seasons and months is an observed order, as is the order of succession of the stages in the female life cycle of puberty, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, etc. The fact that the two orders can be correlated for individual girls is then the basis for applying names of the months to them and also the metaphors of "blossoming", "ripening", "flowering", etc. In other words, the two orders, natural and social, are linked in social usage, in language, and in myth and ritual because their structural similarities are matters of common observation. In this example, as in that of "the killing of the cicada", the homologies between the two systems are not simply between systems

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of binary oppositions; they are correlations between two systems of periodic series with discrete qualitative intervals. This type of structure, which combines discrete qualities with periodic series, is similar to the structure of music as a combination of harmonic intervals and medlodic progression that L6vi-Strauss takes as his model for his analysis of myths as structures that combine discrete binary categories and narrative story lines. Russell shows in The Analysis of Matter how these types of structure in physics can be analyzed with the help of mathematical logic (Russell 1928 [1954]: 345-351). In his reanalysis of "Kimil" as a category of Andamanese thought, Leach identifies two kinds of sequences observed by the Andamanese that probably provide a concrete structural basis for their conceptions of cosmic order. One of these is the sequences of ritual feasts associated with three different foods, whose effect "must be to present the participants with a conception of the cosmos ordered in the particular three-tiered fashion which Radcliffe-Brown himself diagnosed as implicit in the mythical system" (Leach 1971: 42). The other kind of sequence is the direct parallel between the use of the term Kimil to refer to transformations of the seasons and to social transformations. After collating and making these parallel usages explicit, Leach concludes that in all cases the term is "applied to the intermediate condition between flood and drought, childhood and adulthood, life and death". He also notes that the taboo condition described by the term corresponds to van Gennep's rite de marge and provides a confirming instance for the "Leach theory of taboo" (Leach 1971: 43-44). Radcliffe-Brown, on the other hand, was on the "brink" of a genuine structuralist analysis, but did not achieve it, in Leach's judgment, because he was too much concerned with the nature of magical potency, the psychology of sentiments, and the symbolic meaning of discrete objects, instead of considering "the possibility that there may be some common factor which links the relationship between persons who are kimil and persons who are not kimil on the one hand and the relationship between periods which are kimil and periods which are not kimil on the other" (1971: 44). Radcliffe-Brown may not have analyzed this specific correlation of kimil periods and persons as explicitly as Leach has done, but in his descriptions and interpretations (R-B 1948: 147ff., 35Iff., 376) of the calendar of scents, the killing of the cicada, and the

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melting of the beeswax, he does identify important correlated social and natural sequences that recur in Andamanese experience as well as in myth and ritual. And Radcliffe-Brown analyzes these correlated sequences not only to show that "the savage is a reasonable man who makes reasonable inferences from rationally observed events" (Leach 1971: 41), but also to suggest that the structural homologies between the natural and the social orders implicit in Andamanese myth and ritual have a basis in their experience and observation, a suggestion congenial to Leach's conclusion as well. An intriguing question for further research is whether the Andaman folk system of correlations of seasons and months, regions, deities, trees and plants, rains and droughts, life cycle, and other social transformations had some historical connection with a similar but highly codified system of correlations between nature and culture to be found in the ancient Tamil grammar, The Tolkappiyam (Ramanujan 1967; Zvelebil 1973). It may be that the anthropologist's predilection for using concrete logic could have brought Radcliffe-Brown to the same kind of theory of primitive thought without benefit of Russell's and Whitehead's philosophy of science and of scientific method. However that may be, this paper has tried to show that there was in fact an important influence exercised by that philosophy of science on Radcliffe-Brown's contributions to anthropological theory, method, and ethnographic results. This influence, moreover, furnishes an important source for that genuine structuralism that so surprised Ldvi-Strauss in Radcliffe-Brown's second theory of totemism. In a widely popular myth about the origin of anthropology, the story is told of how at the turn of the century anthropology became a science when a handful of natural scientists, such as Haddon, Rivers, Boas, Radcliffe-Brown, and Malinowski, made intensive field trips to test and correct by scientific observation and analysis the armchair speculations of philosophers, classicists, lawyers, and travelers. If the argument of this paper is valid, another episode should be added to the story. The new episode will tell how the same natural scientists, as a result of their field travels and studies, were reborn as social scientists and humanists. Perhaps the new episode should give some credit for the rebirth not only to modern philosophers of science such as Whitehead and Russell, but also to the ancient doctrine of correspondences between the

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microcosm of the everyday human world and the macrocosm of the cosmos. There, perhaps, is another neglected source of structuralism - in Heraclitus and Plato, in ancient Indian and Chinese thought, in medieval Arabic and Jewish mysticism, in the "secret knowledge of Christian symbolism". That, however, is another story, for historians of ideas to tell.41

8. 1983 postscript: The problem of historical evidence When various colleagues of mine first read and discussed the preceding paper in 1973 in Chicago, some were quite sceptical about its major argument. Several believed the historical evidence insufficient to prove that Radcliffe-Brown had any direct contact with Russell and Whitehead or with their works, certainly not before 1937, and probably not very much after that either. Several other colleagues were willing to admit that he may have had some direct contact and probably read and pondered their books, but doubted that he was capable of understanding them. One of these colleagues wrote that the paper was reading the thoughts of a great mind - Russell's — into the writings of a mediocre one — RadcliffeBrown's. A third group of colleagues took for granted the contacts, and a reading with understanding, because "every intelligent and educated person who grew up in that milieu" was influenced by Whitehead and Russell, but that, they said, was of no importance and not relevant to L6vi-Strauss's "discovery" of "genuine structuralism" in Radcliffe-Brown's second paper on totemism. In fact, it was argued, there was no such discovery; L6vi-Strauss was simply looking for some British anthropological ancestors. Fortunately for the paper and my own hypothesis, not all my colleagues were sceptical. At least four found the argument of the paper persuasive and volunteered confirming evidence from their own experience with Radcliffe-Brown. Eggan remembered that Whitehead's Science and the Modern World was a recommended reading in an anthropology course at Chicago in the 1930s, Fortes and Srinivas mentioned lectures at Oxford in the 1940s and Turner some lectures at Manchester in 1949-51. Surprisingly, L6vi-Strauss wrote to Eggan that he found the paper "quite convincing" as regards Radcliffe-Brown, although he himself "never read Whitehead or Russell. But probably some of

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their teachings did seep through the literature" (personal communication to Eggan, June 18, 1973). Quine wrote that he was pleased to see that the concluding section of the paper made the connection between Russell on the relation of science to sense-data (preservation of structure) and L6vi-Strauss's structuralism, since he himself was reminded of Russell when structuralism became the vogue in France and took up L£vi-Strauss to see whether Russell's theory and his own on the indeterminacy of translation were structuralist (Quine, personal correspondence, July 11, 1973). The question of historical evidence and interpretation was not a principal interest of the paper, but was one I hoped historians would investigate. As early as 1969, 1 wrote to my colleague, George Stocking, who was then doing archival research on the history of British anthropology in Cambridge, England, "to keep a lookout for any material that might throw light on Radcliffe-Brown's relation to Russell and Whitehead". Although 1 did not refer to ίένΐStrauss's historical speculation in Totemism about the sources of Radcliffe-Brown's "genuine structuralism" — which probably triggered my own interest — I did write Stocking that "in going through A Natural Science of Society recently, I have noticed several unmistakable indications that he was acquainted with some of their logical and philosophical notions - especially of events, class, relations, structure and I have become curious about how far back this acquaintance goes". The question opened up, the letter added, "another line of interpretation of R-B's comparative method, social structure, social relations, etc., an interpretation that would bring him closer to L6vi-Strauss" (personal correspondence, May 27, 1969). This question of historical evidence for Radcliffe-Brown's interest in and use of Russell and Whitehead continued to haunt my discussions with colleagues, especially in a series of seminars between 1969 and 1971 and in 1973, organized by Eggan, dealing with different phases of Radcliffe-Brown's career. These discussions stimulated me to draft the paper on "A neglected source of structuralism" and later to write to people who might be able to recall anything that would throw some light on his relations with Russell and Whitehead. The selection of correspondents grew pretty much out of suggestions made by various participants in the RadcliffeBrown seminars at Chicago, including visiting participants such

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as Firth, Fortes, and Srinivas. Copies of my paper were not sent to the correspondents; they received only a brief summary of its major thesis and a few words about its controversial reception among some of my colleagues. This procedure obviously did not follow the canons of good historiography and was not intended to. At times it may look more like a Proustian recherche du temps perdu or a Freudian study of "screened memories". The results, however, do tend to support the major thesis of the paper and suggest besides some interesting hypotheses about the development of Radcliffe-Brown's thought and the complexity of his personality. Official information about Radcliffe-Brown's contacts with Russell and Whitehead during his student days in Cambridge is meager and tantalizing, as the following 1973 letter from the Senior Tutor at Trinity College indicates: A.R. Brown came up in 1902, not 1901. He took both parts of the Moral Sciences Tripos - Part I in 1904 and Part II in 1905. In Part I he was placed in the upper division of the second class, with special distinction, presumably one particular paper. In Part II he got a first - again with special distinction - specialising in Metaphysical & Moral Philosophy. At this time the College Lecturer in Moral Sciences was McTaggart, and presumably he was Brown's principal teacher in Trinity. I don't know what extra teaching he may have had. Whitehead was a College Lecturer in Mathematics, and possibly some parts of his course were relevant to Brown's work. Russell left Cambridge in 1901 and didn't return as College Lecturer in the Logic & Philosophy of Mathematics until 1910. It is possible, but unlikely, that he came back occasionally during this time and did some coaching. I am afraid this is as far as I can get at present. If I discover anything else, I will certainly let you know. (Dr. R. Robson, personal correspondence, December 3, 1973) 4 2

Radcliffe-Brown apparently did have a good deal to say about Russell and Whitehead to some of his students, and the argument of "A neglected source of structuralism" suggests that he made a significant use of their structuralist philosophy of science and reality. Specific references in his published works are quite rare, two or three to Whitehead and none to Russell except for the footnote lists in the revised 1938 manuscript of A Natural Science of Society referred to above. 43 Among Radcliffe-Brown obituaries, Firth's (1956) and Elkin's (1956) do not mention Russell and Whitehead, while the one written by Eggan and Warner (1956) refers to his interest in the new develop-

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ments in philosophy at the turn of the century and his contact with Whitehead. It is also interesting to observe that although Radcliffe-Brown's theoretical and methodological contributions to social anthropology have been widely recognized and debated, there has been little recognition and discussion of the modern philosophic sources of his structural functionalism and of his conception of a generalizing natural science of society. Notable exceptions are Gluckman's articles in 1942 and 1944, and Ldvi-Strauss's discovery of a "genuine structuralism" in Radcliffe-Brown's second paper on totemism (Gluckman 1944, 1958; L6vi-Strauss 1963). That Lfevi-Strauss (1953, 1963), Leach (1961, 1976), and other critics should persist nevertheless in regarding Radcliffe-Brown as a semi-rationalist "butterfly collector" who believes that social structures are as directly observable as the structures of sea shells shows the unfortunate consequences of deprecating his philosophy of science, structure, and reality. When 1 wrote to Stanner in 1973 to ask whether he recalled anything that would throw some light on Radcliffe-Brown's possible interest in Russell and Whitehead, he replied that he did not recall that "he ever spoke to me about Russell. . .". Radcliffe-Brown "did not conceal, indeed, seemed to make a point of referring t o his dependence on Spencer, Rivers, Haddon and R.B. Perry. Why should he have been so silent, comparatively, about Russell?" Stanner found "something quite strong and convincing" in his memory which made him associate Radcliffe-Brown with Whitehead rather than with Russell. Stanner agreed that "there is a lot in RB's writings of a Russellian kind". He made a list that ran "to something like a dozen significant resemblances" but none of these drove him to "an irresistable inference" (Stanner, personal correspondence, January 11, 1974). Stanner goes on in his letter to say that he sees Radcliffe-Brown as "very much a product of the realist revolt of the 1890s and 1900s against the philosophical idealism (Green and Bradley) which had ruled the roost". The climate of opinion at Cambridge already was showing the influence of Russell and Whitehead: When he went up to Cambridge the influence of Russell and Whitehead had already made itself felt. There was a sea-change in the air. That was the case also in America (hence of course the appeal of Ralph Barton Perry to RB: I read Perry's General Theory of Value in 1929, at RB's insistence; Perry's 'new realism' fitted well with RB's central theory of

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relations, and my own instructor in philosophy (John Anderson) was sympathetic to the naturalism and realism which, in my understanding, were central to RB's outlook at this time. All of this tends to make me feel that RB may have thought and written from a general sympathy with the philosophical realists of the time rather than from a close and conscious dependence on any of them. (Stanner, personal correspondence, January 11, 1974)

Since Stanner had been an undergraduate under Radcliffe-Brown at Sydney in the late 1920s and probably also saw something of him in England in the late 1930s, there is no reason to doubt Stanner's recollections or to disagree with his conclusion. To accept both, however, is also to accept the implication that RadcliffeBrown's use of the Russell and Whitehead philosophy of events and relations was a "construction" he may have made in the 1930s and 1940s. We are led, in other words, to the historical hypothesis that Radcliffe-Brown revisited Russell and Whitehead as living intellectual ancestors while he was at Chicago and Oxford, and Whitehead perhaps while still in Sydney. The role of logical constructions in Radcliffe-Brown's work was noted by Stanner in his 1968 Encyclopedia article: "In constructing his theory of social systems, Radcliffe-Brown considered a phenomenal intelligible reality to consist of objects or events and the relations between them" (1968: 288). Although Stanner's article gives an excellent account of how Radcliffe-Brown conceived the use of a relational logic and nonquantitative mathematics in the development of social anthropology — an account similar to that in A Natural Science of Society — the article does not mention Russell or Whitehead as possible intellectual sources. It refers only to Spencer and to Radcliffe-Brown's better known legacy from Rivers, J.S. Mill, Whewell, and Dürkheim. Compared to the Sydney evidence, that from Chicago is more positive about Russell. The philosopher Albert William Levi, whose graduate studies at Chicago extended from Fall 1932 to January 1935, wrote that he knew Radcliffe-Brown well during the time: An undergraduate named Florey introduced us; we often went out drinking beer together (mostly on 61st or 63rd) and I was often at his apartment on Kenwood which I shall never forget for its elegantly simple furniture and beautiful old Chinese wall scrolls. R-B and I talked endlessly about 'comparative epistemology', he asserting, and I denying that there was any such thing. His evidence was the variations in primitive languages: mine the Kantian faith in a universal sensibility and under-

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standing. But he also talked a great deal about his Cambridge days. He mentioned Whitehead, Russell and Keynes (as well as, I think, Pitt-Rivers), but I do not recollect that he ever mentioned G.E. Moore. But he spoke relatively little of Whitehead. It was Russell whom he remembered most of all. (Levi, personal correspondence, March 20, 1974)

Levi also recalled the "marvelous seminar Systematic Social Science of 1934 organized by Adler and regularly attended by RB, Knight, Wirth, Redfield, Morris, Laswell, and sometimes Blumer, Ogburn and Merriam" at which Radcliffe-Brown presented a paper on "Functionalism" and his synchronic-diachronic distinction (Levi, personal correspondence, March 20, 1974). The highly selective nature of Radcliffe-Brown's philosophical conversations even at Chicago is underlined by the fact that two young philosophy professors, Charner Perry and Charles Morris, both of whom participated in the 1934 or 1937 seminars, could not recall any discussion with Radcliffe-Brown about Russell and Whitehead (personal correspondence - Perry, January 19, 1974; Morris, March 28, 1974). Radcliffe-Brown's Oxford and Manchester lectures and discussions about Russell and Whitehead's relevance for social anthropology, on the other hand, were well remembered by Max Gluckman, M.N. Srinivas, and Victor Turner. Max Gluckman, who has written extensively about these recollections, remembered hearing RadcliffeBrown's lectures and talking about Russell's and Whitehead's influence on him on at least two particular occasions, during 193839 at Oxford and during 1949-51 at Manchester, when Gluckman asked Radcliffe-Brown to give lectures on the same theme as the Oxford lecture; "in which he drew largely on Russell and Whitehead, and recommended us to their books" (Gluckman, personal correspondence, December 12, 1973). Gluckman's description of what Radcliffe-Brown did in the Manchester lectures is quite pertinent: What he did do in the course of his lectures was say that after scientists had to cope with matters like rays and particles, they had to abandon the substantial view of reality, and out of this came the notion of reality as a passage of events (Whitehead), and that this clarified all our problems and got rid of a lot of our controversies. The logical steps were *we observe a passage of events, we detect regularities in that passage, we make the assumption that some of the regularities depend on one another, and that means we have an assumed view that some kind of system exists, and then we seek for the structure of the system'. I think that is the

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logical series of steps that I got him to insert a paragraph about in the introduction to 'Structure and function in primitive society', in which the influence of Russell and Whitehead [is] manifest. Presumably, that enabled him to combine his new approach, with the kind of approach adopted by Dürkheim to a social system as organic — that if you had such a system, in some way it had to be maintained, and therefore we could get back to the functional processes. (Gluckman, personal correspondence, December 1 2 , 1 9 7 3 )

Independent confirmation of Gluckman's and Turner's recollections of Radcliffe-Brown's lectures at Manchester came from Dorothy Emmet, who was present at the lectures. A philosopher of social science, Emmet wrote the article on Whitehead for the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Unlike Gluckman, Emmet emphasizes the changing conception of 'nature' that RadcliffeBrown got from Whitehead and Russell rather than the resulting changes in the conceptions of "society" and "culture" emphasized by Gluckman. "He seems to have got from them the notion of nature as an on-going process of events rather than a collection of substances" (Emmet, personal correspondence, December 22, 1973). Radcliffe-Brown's Manchester lectures included several lectures on Russell and Whitehead, according to Gluckman, Turner, and Emmet. Elizabeth Colson, who took shorthand, typed and transcribed two of the 1950-1951 series on "Theories of social evolution" and listened to the fifth, but unfortunately missed the first two lectures in the series. She wrote that the lectures she heard "throw no light on the influence that Russell and Whitehead may have had upon him. . . . The philosopher I remember his once telling me had had great influence on himself and his generation was Moore" (Colson, personal correspondence, February 4, 1974). One of the lectures transcribed by Colson includes statements by Radcliffe-Brown about "the shift in a point of view" in modern science from a study of attributes to the study of structure and process that sound very much like Russell and Whitehead. The following passage, for example, indicates that the shift is not to be confined to physics: If you ask a physicist what is an electron, he will is a connected set of electrical events. . . . Fifty physicist thought of physical phenomena it was as matter . . . and fifty years ago, people thought of

say that an electron years ago, when the little hard lumps of society as little hard

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lumps. I suggest that we abandon this and think of society as a succession of events. (Radcliffe-Brown, Lecture 4, at Manchester, 1950-51)

Gluckman found Radcliffe-Brown's lectures and statements "a clarifying influence . . . on the problem of material we study" and cited two of his own articles, "Analysis of a social situation" (1942) and "The difficulties, limitations and achievements of social anthropology" (1944), as providing further substantiation of his recollections. These articles are quite cogent because, as Gluckman notes, they were written only a few years after the Oxford lectures and "therefore . . . so-to-speak a hot-from-the-press statement of his views that clearly coincides with the views of Russell and Whitehead about the scientific approach to reality" (Gluckman, personal correspondence, December 12, 1973; January 5, 1974). In addition these articles show that Radcliffe-Brown's references to Russell's and Whitehead's philosophy of science were interpreted by some students under his influence as practical guides for ethnographic research and analysis, and not simply as an intellectual genealogy or as pure theory. M.N. Srinivas, who had been a student at Oxford in the later 1940s, agrees generally with Gluckman and with the recollections of other former students and also adds several novel items: I remember R-B mentioning Russell with great respect, and I have the distinct impression that as far as matters regarding the philosophy of science were concerned Russell was his authority. As is well-known, Whitehead influenced his thinking on symbolism, and R.B. Perry, on values. He also respected Susan Stebbing whom he once described to me as 'a clever girl'. . . . It is also interesting that Russell, like Kropotkin, was a Philosophical Anarchist. (Russell speaks of Rivers in laudatory terms in an essay or preface.) R-B's own undergraduate anarchism ('Anarchy Brown') was probably the result of his admiration for Kropotkin and Russell. (Srinivas, personal correspondence, December 10, 1973)

Stanner, Gluckman, Levi, Srinivas, and others who remembered Radcliffe-Brown also mentioned his recollections of his student days at Cambridge. These "remembrances of remembrances" are not always sufficiently confident and definite to be self-warranting. Independent documentation for the Cambridge period is hard to come by. The overlap of dates (1902-1910) when Radcliffe-Brown was at Trinity College and when Whitehead and Russell taught and worked there creates a presumption that he attended some of their lectures or may even have been taught by them tutorially, for Cam-

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bridge "wouldn't then have been the large society it is now", as Emmet pointed out. Emmet suggested to me that Victor Lowe, the American philosopher "who is writing a life of Whitehead and chasing up every detail he can of his early Cambridge associations" might know more. Lowe's letter is a bit conjectural on the Cambridge associations, although full of interesting comments. The paragraphs on Cambridge are worth quoting in full: Unfortunately I have never come across any biographical evidence of links between Radcliffe-Brown and Whitehead. This negative result isn't hard to understand. The records of the Moral Science Club at Cambridge show that Whitehead didn't attend its meetings. I don't think he kept a diary — anyhow, none is extant; and he was not a letter-writer, nor did letters to him survive the destruction of his papers which Mrs. Whitehead carried out after his death in accordance with his wishes. Whitehead and A.R. Brown must have talked at the High Table and at College Meetings when the latter was a Fellow of Trinity, 1908-14 (Whitehead was a Fellow from 1884 until his death), but the only information in my files is that Brown was one of the Fellows who in 1910 signed a protest to the Council of Trinity College - a protest probably organized by Whitehead; the occasion was the Council's too prompt acceptance of A.R. Forsyth's resignation of his life fellowship. (Lowe, personal correspondence, January 11,1974) In a more recent letter Lowe pinpointed the possibility of Radcliffe-Brown attending lectures or tutorials by Russel or Whitehead at Cambridge : I've looked up the records of lecture courses offered by Whitehead, and by Russell. None by R between the Lent term of 1902 (on his Principles of Math), when Brown hadn't yet arrived in Cambridge, and Michaelmas 1910, when Brown would have left. W lectured every term during Brown's stay: most of his courses were on standard mathematical subjects, but from 1903 to 1910 he always offered one course on some aspect of the work he and Russell had been doing from Principia Mathematica. Most of the collaboration between W and R was done by mail, between W in Cambridge and R in Bagley Wood, near Oxford; they would meet in Cambridge to iron out sticky points. Your 'presumption', then, is reduced to the possibility that Brown audited some of W's lectures on 'the mathematics' (I'm quoting from the Preface to Principia), and the possibility that W informally met with Brown for mathematical discussions. The most likely occasions for W's influencing Brown, I think, were High Table conversations at Trinity between 1908 and 1910. (Lowe, personal correspondence, January 3,1983) Lowe also called my attention to the fact that Whitehead was at the University of Chicago for a week in October 1933 to give

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two lectures on "Nature and Life" and "to be available to interested people". I have not found any evidence that Radcliffe-Brown looked up Whitehead on this occasion. He may have attended the lectures and very probably read them when they were published in a small pamphlet by the University of Chicago Press in 1934. Because these lectures gave a very concise and lucid statement of the transformation in the Cartesian-Newtonian-Kantian philosophy of science and of the implications of an organic process philosophy for an understanding of the relations of nature to life and mind, it seems likely that they influenced Radcliffe-Brown's formulations in the 1937 lectures and the 1938 revisions. Gregory Bateson, who was a student of natural science and of anthropology at Cambridge University between 1922 and 1926 and also did anthropological field work in New Britain and New Guinea from 1926 to 1929 when Radcliffe-Brown was in Australia, was in a favorable position to learn of Radcliffe-Brown's interest in Russell and Whitehead. He wrote, however, that he knew of no evidence connecting Radcliffe-Brown to either. Bateson did recall that under the influence of Waddington, the geneticist, he himself started to pay some attention to Whitehead in 1929-31, after his first New Guinea trip. His interest in Russell did not develop until much later, in 1946, when Warren McCulloch, a neuropsychiatrist and student of Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, pushed him in that direction. Bateson wrote that he "respected Russell highly" and got "a lot of mileage out of Principia" but never met him. Bateson did meet Whitehead at Harvard in 1947-48 and found him "a very beautiful and very sweet and entertaining creature" (Bateson, personal correspondence, December 6, 1973). Bateson's use of Russell and the Principia undoubtedly refers t o the logic of relations, the paradoxes of self-reference, and the hierarchy of logical types, all of which figure in Bateson's theories of deutero-learning, the double-bind explanation of schizophrenia, and his contributions on animal play, metacommunication, and a monistic epistemology (Bateson 1972). Margaret Mead's principal contact with Radcliffe-Brown, she recalled, was his lectures at Columbia in the Summer of 1931. She attended these with Reo Fortune but could remember no mention of Russell or Whitehead. Her impression at the time was that Radcliffe-Brown "was mainly influenced by the French socio-

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logists, with, of course, a certain amount of dialectic relationship to Malinowski" (Mead, personal correspondence, June 25, 1974). 44 Mead also remembered an indirect contact with Radcliffe-Brown in 1934, mediated by Bateson, who lectured at Columbia and Chicago. Her discussion of the difference between culture and society in the last chapter of Cooperation and Competition in Primitive Cultures "was the outcome o f t h a t three-way discussion". Why did Radcliffe-Brown talk to Stanner in 1929 at Sydney about R.B. Perry and realism but not mention Russell? Why in Chicago between 1932 and 1935 did he talk especially about Russell and his Cambridge days to a graduate student in philosophy, but hardly seems to have mentioned him to two graduate students in anthropology, and apparently not at all to two young philosophy professors, who participated in the social science seminars? Why did Max Gluckman have such a vivid memory of Radcliffe-Brown's 1938-39 lectures, making use of Russell and Whitehead to replace the 'discrete entities' analysis of society and culture with a processual and relational structure analysis? And isn't it equally striking that Radcliffe-Brown should have told M.N. Srinivas at Oxford that Susan Stebbing was a "clever girl" and Elizabeth Colson at Manchester that G.E. Moore had been an important influence on him? It would be too obvious and incomplete an answer to say that Radcliffe-Brown was a personality of many-sided interests and that his interests and knowledge changed with his travels and intellectual growth. It would help to take account of the varying interests and knowledge of his interlocutors and of Radcliffe-Brown's sensitivity to these variations. Unfriendly critics have sometimes interpreted this sensitivity of response to others as self-dramatization, empty pretense, "largely bluff". A more sympathetic observer would see in such responsiveness to different people and situations the essence of a dialogical interaction with one's environment and a necessary condition for the formation and growth of a "social personality", to use one of Radcliffe-Brown's concepts (R-B 1952: 194-195). To bridge the gap between "social personality" and the biological individual it would be useful to add Peirce's dialogical analysis of thought and the self as the product and agent of inner and outer conversations (see "Personal and social identity in dialogue"). From this dialogical point of view we can understand RadcliffeBrown's intermittent and changing interests in Russell, Whitehead,

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and other philosophers. We can understand, too, why he would propose "A natural science of society" at Chicago in 1934 and 1937. Finding himself in interdisciplinary seminars organized by a new social sciences divisional dean in a new Soical Sciences Research Building, dedicated with the new president's support to dissolving departmental separateness, Radcliffe-Brown rose to the occasion. As Eggan reports it, after he listened to Mortimer Adler present the case for a unified social science to be based on Aristotelian logic and psychology, Radcliffe-Brown replied with a counter proposal for a single social science to be based on a comparative sociology founded on a non-Aristotelian logic of relations and a Heraclitean philosophy of change and process (Eggan 1957: ix-xii).4S These dialogical interactions with people and ideas were characteristic of Radcliffe-Brown's career — his relations to Rivers, Kroeber, Malinowski, Dürkheim, L6vi-Strauss, and other colleagues. They were expressions of a double opposition: a regulated antagonism and friendliness - social opposition — and a binary opposition of categories and ideas - "logical opposition". Historians will undoubtedly retouch and redo the picture of Radcliffe-Brown's debt to Russell and Whitehead presented in this paper as they collect and collate additional information from other recollections, letters, diaries, and memoirs, but the fragmentary evidence I have gathered seems to suggest the following historical hypothesis: In the 1930s and 1940s, especially while at Chicago and Oxford, Radcliffe-Brown emerged from being an empiricist "butterfly collector" to become a structuralist, guessing with inspiration at mathematical and logical patterns. He continued to use the nineteenth-century language of "butterfly collecting" to describe his conception of scientific method — observe similarities and differences in societies and cultures, classify them into natural kinds, compare their regional and continental variations, and formulate general laws for a natural science of society. But this language took on new meaning and power when Radcliffe-Brown combined it with a set of concepts defined in terms of relational structures that are expressed and observed in customary cultural activities and processes — when, in other words, he combined "butterfly collecting" with structuralism and a philosophy of process. The groundwork for the construction was laid in earlier ethnographic observations and ethnographic analysis, but not until the 1930s and 1940s did the construction reach such a level of explicit

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and systematic connectedness as to justify the opinion that RadcliffeBrown's theoretical position in social anthropology was not merely that of functionalism, such as Malinowski's or Durkheim's, but that it was also a theory of structural functionalism. The roots of Radcliffe-Brown's structuralism can be found in his Andaman and Australian studies of ritual and kinship. His explicit formulation of the concepts of social structure, structural principles, and kinship system as components of a paradigm for the structural analysis of social systems first appears in his monograph The Social Organization of Australian Tribes (1931). Fortes has emphasized Radcliffe-Brown's debt to Rivers for this contribution (Fortes 1969: 42-45), a debt that has been reemphasized recently by a historian who examined Radcliffe-Brown's correspondence with Rivers (Langham 1982: 267-300). Perhaps the primary source of inspiration for the structural-functional paradigm was River's debate with Kroeber over classificatory kinship and its relation to social organization (Singer 1968: 534-535; Firth and Schneider in Rivers 1968; Eggan and Tax in Eggan 1955). In his second lecture on totemism Radcliffe-Brown observed that "after a lengthy comparative study" he was able to generalize the Australian conception of "opposition", which "combines the idea of a pair of contraries with that of a pair of opponents" into a general law that applies to exogamous moieties wherever they occur, in Australia, Melanesia, or America: The structure of moieties is . . . one of a unity of opposing groups, in the double sense that the groups are friendly opponents, and that they are represented as being in some sense opposites, in the way in which eaglehawkand crow or black and white are opposites (R-B 1958: 118, 125)

The lengthy comparative study included Heraclitus's philosophy and the yin-yang philosophy of Ancient China, in both of which Radcliffe-Brown found the principle of the unity of opposites elaborated. Because the structural concepts were essential ingredients in Radcliffe-Brown's construction of social anthropology, and of a theoretical science of society as well, one can see in that construction an early and strong family resemblance to Lfevi-Strauss's aspiration to find structure in nature, culture, and society. In his 1952 letter to Lfevi-Strauss, Radcliffe-Brown suggested that the difference between their respective uses of the term "social structure"

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was "so different as to make discussion so difficult as . . . unlikely to be profitable. While for you, social structure has nothing to do with reality but with models built up, I regard the social structure as a reality" (Tax et al. 1953: 109). Citing his own example of the helix as the general structural form of a species of sea shells, Radcliffe-Brown wrote that he is not sure whether "model" means the structural form itself, which can be discovered by observation, or his description of it (Tax et al. 1953: 109). In the Wenner-Gren discussions L6vi-Strauss denied that what he had meant by a model of social structure was a mathematical formula, the concrete observed social relations, or an abstraction. His positive characterization, illustrated with the examples of a chromosome map and the spiral-like growth of crystals, sugests, as has already been noted, that "model" and "structural form" bear a close family resemblance (Tax et al. 1953: 115-116). Greenberg's interesting suggestion that the distinction between "the model of a sea shell" and "the sea shell" may be a semiotic one, between a symbol and the thing discoursed about, was, unfortunately, not followed up in the Wenner-Gren discussions (Tax et al. 1953: 17). Another possible difference between Radcliffe-Brown's and L6vi-Strauss's conceptions of social structure derives from the former's Whiteheadian interpretation of natural laws as immanent in the universe (and in society) and the latter's insistence on "genetic definitions" of social structure that describe a method of construction (R-B 1938: [see n. 34, p. 316 below] 16; Emmet 1968: 534535; L6vi-Strauss in Tax et al. 1953: 15-16). For Radcliffe-Brown, the "immanence" of "structural principles" would mean that they exist in societies, to be discovered by observation, comparison, and abstractive generalization; the principles are not "imposed" by God or anthropologists (R-B [1957] 1937: 129-140; 1938: 16-21). In conclusion, I should like to return to Radcliffe-Brown's 1938 letter to Cole and the revised pages that accompanied it. Retrospectively, these documents take on a significance that was not previously apparent: they become a kind of Rosetta stone for reconstructing and interpreting the gist of what Radcliffe-Brown probably said at the first meeting of the 1937 Chicago seminar, at the lectures that Gluckman found so clarifying at Oxford in 1938-39, and at the first 1951 Manchester lecture that Gluckman, Turner, and Emmet heard but Colson missed.

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Because, in his letter to Cole, Radcliffe-Brown described the 1938 pages as representing "a revised version of what I said in the first seminar and of some parts of later seminars", we can plausibly infer that what he says in these pages about "the revolutionary change in our ideas of the nature of science" since the beginning of this century, and the implications of this change for the possibility of a natural science of society, represents in a more complete and polished form a part of what he said in the missing lectures. In any case, the remembered fragments of these lectures do agree with the revised 1938 statements about the changes in the ideas about the nature of science. The more important of these changes included the unity of logic and mathematics and the existence of a nonquantitative mathematics, replacement of the subject-predicate Aristotelian logic by a symbolic relational logic, and replacement of a substance-attribute metaphysics by the view that "phenomenal reality consists only of events and their relations", and changes in ideas about laws of nature. The sources cited for this modern philosophy of science are chiefly works by Russell and Whitehead (R-B 1938: 6 - 7 , 9 ) . Radcliffe-Brown leaves no doubt in these revised pages that he intends to apply this new philosophy of science to the construction of a natural science of society and thereby to leave the ranks of those who as "they write about what are called the social sciences still retain the nineteenth-century view of the nature of science" and "still think in terms of Aristotelian and Cartesian and Newtonian metaphysics. . .". The 1938 letter and revised pages seem to be persuasive evidence for the proposition that Radcliffe-Brown had adopted a structuralist philosophy of science by the 1930s. His 1951 paper on totemism is proof that he remained a "genuine structuralist" to the end. His alleged relapse to a naive empirical concept of structure in the 1952 letter rests on the failure to note that the analogy between sea shells and an Australian tribe in that letter is an analogy of general structural form (Tax et al. 1953: 109). The analogy does not imply that the social structure of certain Australian groups is as directly observable as the structural form (a helix) of certain sea shells. Social structures are not usually directly observable for Radcliffe-Brown; they can be observed through the customary social usages in which they get expressed (pp. 30-37 above; R-B 1952: 181; Fortes 1969: 45-48). L6vi-Strauss recognized this dis-

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tinction when he contrasted the spiral form of crystal growth with social structures that may remain hidden (Tax et al. 1953: 115-1 16). If we agree that Radcliffe-Brown was a structuralist in the 1930s and 1940s and into the 1950s, what about the 20s and 10s and the Cambridge period? The evidence for these earlier periods is scanty and inconclusive. The structural analysis of the "calendar of scents" in The Andaman Islanders and of "The mother's brother in South Africa" already show a strong sense for coordinating relational structures in ethnographic analysis. But for these earlier periods nothing has yet turned up as explicitly and self-consciously theoretical and structuralist as the 1938 revised statement or even as the 1952 letter to Lövi-Strauss. The general methodological papers of the 1920s focus on the debate between historical and functional analysis and do not yet advocate a structural functionalism. Even if we assume that the reports by Levi, Gluckman, and others of Radcliffe-Brown's Cambridge recollections are accurate, we cannot rule out the possibility that those recollections are retrospective syntheses that incorporate nostalgic "screened memories". Until more historical evidence becomes available, we shall have to agree with Stanner and some of my Chicago colleagues that by the time Radcliffe-Brown arrived in Cambridge in 1902, the realistic revolt by Moore and Russell against Bradley's absolute idealism had already begun, and that an intelligent and educated young man would have been sympathetic to such a revolt. A more specific influence of Cambridge realism and structuralism probably did not begin to shape Radcliffe-Brown's thought until the 1920s, when Russell's and Whitehead's more popular works on the philosophy of science started to appear. All the works by Russell or Whitehead cited by Radcliffe-Brown, with the exception of Russell's Principles of Mathematics (1903), were published after Radcliffe-Brown left Cambridge in 1910. 46 Victor Lowe mentioned in his letter "the great difference between Whitehead's and Russell's conceptions of science" that began to appear about 1914 when Russell published his Harvard lectures, Our Knowledge of the External World. There's a shared conviction of the importance of structure, of course, and a common desire to replace 'substances' by 'events'; but Russell relates events to each other in a Humian manner, Whitehead sees them as internally related — a notion which Russell always opposed. (Lowe, personal correspondence, January 1 1 , 1 9 7 4 )

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Russell's critique of "the doctrine of internal relations" was directed against Leibniz, Spinoza, Hegel, and Bradley and was part of his critique of the subject-predicate logic, a substanceattribute metaphysics, and a monistic theory of truth. The doctrine held that a relation between two terms expresses the intrinsic nature of the terms and was replaced by 'the doctrine of external relations', which denied that every relation depends on the nature of the terms related. "A given relation may hold between many different pairs of terms, and a given term may have many different relations to different terms" (Russell 1959: 54-64). Whitehead and G.E. Moore shared Russell's critique of internal relations during the Cambridge period, but after Whitehead left Cambridge, he developed an organic theory of nature as an alternative to the classical mechanistic and materialistic theory. The organic theory included a doctrine of "internal relatedness" that was unacceptable to Russell (Whitehead [1967] 1925:75-80, 93-94, 123-124,131-132, 160-166; 1934: 20;Passmore 1968: 201-239, 335-342). Radcliffe-Brown's conception of social structure as the totality of interpersonal relations within an organically unified social system reflects something of Whitehead's philosophy of organism, while his conception of the general structural form of a society abstracted from the variations and changes in concrete actual social relations, to be compared with types of social structure, is closer to Russell's relation of similarity between relational structures. In any case, the distinction in A Natural Science of Society between the relations of real inter-connectedness ( " R " relations) within organic and functionally consistent systems, and mathematical relations ("r" relations) of similarity between classes emblematizes the ambiguous testimony to the Cambridge sources of Radcliffe-Brown's structural functionalism (compare Stanner 1968: 288-289). Radcliffe-Brown's well-known classification of the problems of social anthropology into problems of social morphology, social physiology, and development was, as he himself pointed out, an attempt to apply the organic analogy to human societies (R-B 1952: 78-80). In this context, Radcliffe-Brown's concept of social structure is closely affiliated with Durkheim's and Rivers's earlier uses of the organic analogy (Langham 1982: 280-282). But there are two important respects, noted by Radcliffe-Brown, in which the organic analogy breaks down: (1) social structure cannot be observed independently of the activities in which the social relations

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function, while the structure of an animal organism can be observed to some extent independently of its functioning; and (2) a society in the course of its history can and does change its structural type, while an animal organism does not (R-B 1952: 180-181). Radcliffe-Brown, in other words, uses the organic analogy with considerable caution and defines the concept of function in terms of an abstract notion of structure "consisting of a set of relations amongst unit entities, the continuity of the structure being maintained by a life-process made up of the activities of the constituent units" (R-B 1952: 180; italics in original). Such a definition of social structure and function in terms of activities and life-process is emphasized by Radcliffe-Brown in his Introduction to Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952). As Gluckman pointed out in his letter, the influence of Whitehead and Russell is manifest in the Introduction, although it is combined with Durkheim's approach to social systems as organic. The structural functionalist paradigm in anthropology, and L6viStrauss's structuralism as well, we must conclude, are linked to revolutions in science and philosophy that include the Darwinian evolution of organisms replacing Linnean classifications of fixed species; Einsteinian relativity of space, time, and matter replacing Newtonian absolutes; and non-Aristotelian logics, mathematics, and philosophy replacing Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant. Because Russell and Whitehead, at Cambridge and later, were among the first to understand the implications of these developments and to formulate the consequences for structural analysis in mathematics, logic, physics, and the philosophy of science, they came to symbolize for scientists and scholars in many fields the new structure-andprocess philosophy of science. The hypothesis that Russell and Whitehead were a source for Radcliffe-Brown's and Lfevi-Strauss's anthropological structuralism, and probably for Saussure's and Jakobson's as well, does not imply that all the passages from Russell and Whitehead I have quoted or paraphrased were a matter of common knowledge in the academic community. There were many popular, nontechnical expositions of the new ideas of structure, function, and process, including some written by Russell and Whitehead themselves. The availability of such popular accounts stimulated much interest in the "scientific and philosophic revolution" and encouraged its extension into newly developing fields such as psychology, sociology, and an-

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thropology, among others. The very notion of structure as a similarity of the structural properties of relations not dependent on the qualitative properties of the objects related held out hope for a generalized method of logical construction and structural analysis of systems of all kinds. Because Russell and Whitehead's philosophy of science represents an important development in the intellectual history of the twentieth century, and accounts, besides, for many distinctive features of Radcliffe-Brown's and L6vi-Strauss's structuralism, it deserves to be taken as a plausible abductive hypothesis for further research on the historical sources of structuralist anthropology, linguistics, and semiotics.

Peirce, Malinowski and the emergence of semiotic anthropology

1. Prologue In his book Symbols: Private and Public (1973), Raymond Firth, the British social anthropologist, notes that "the first anthropological reference to Peirce's ideas" about signs and symbols is by E.R. Leach in 1957 (Firth 1973: 62). Since Firth edited the book on Malinowski in which this reference occurs, we may reasonably assume that its problematic and ironic character was transparent to him. Leach's thesis in his essay on "The Epistemological Background to Malinowski's Empiricism" is that Malinowski found in the pragmatism of William James a body of theory which "could somehow combine the 'materialist' basis of nineteenth-century evolutionism with the attribution of free will to the individual soul" (Leach in Firth 1957: 121). Leach adds that "Malinowski's pragmatism is that of James rather than Peirce" and invokes a contrast between the two kinds of pragmatism made by Gallie in his book on Peirce and Pragmatism (Leach in Firth 1957: 122). Going beyond Gallie, Leach sees in the contrast between the Pragmatism of James and the Pragmatism of Peirce a close parallel to "the analogous contrast between the Functionalism of Malinowski and the Functionalism of Dürkheim, Mauss and Radcliffe-Brown". This parallel implies a far-reaching contrast between empiricism of direct observation and abstract theory, both in pragmatism and in anthropology. The validity of the contrast depends on the accuracy of Gallie's contrast as well as on Leach's contrast between the two kinds of anthropological functionalism. Firth later qualified Leach's and, by implication, Gallie's contrasts by noting the relevance of Peirce's theory of signs and symbols for anthropology and also finding Peirce's pragmatism "echoed to some degree in Malinowski's treatment of symbolism" (Firth 1973: 60-63). Gallie seems to be correct in the contrast he draws between James's emphasis on the pragmatic theory of truth and Peirce's

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emphasis on a pragmatic theory of meaning. He is also essentially correct in finding James more of an individualist than Peirce. On this basis, Malinowski's pragmatism would have to be divided; his individualism going to James and his theory of meaning to Peirce. There is also the difficulty that neither James nor Peirce is cited by Malinowski. If Leach is the first anthropologist to mention Peirce, the attribution to Malinowski of a Jamesian rather than a Peircean pragmatism creates a dilemma and stimulates our curiosity. A most dramatic challenge to Leach's affiliating Malinowski with Jamesian Pragmatism has recently been issued by the anthropologist Ernest Gellner. He traces Malinowski's empiricist epistemology to Ernst Mach's positivism and pragmatism. Gellner also points out that there is no evidence for a James influence on Malinowski, while the recent translation of his Cracow Ph.D. dissertation and other Polish writings indicate Malinowski's preoccupation with the theories of Mach and "empirio-criticism". Mach's anti-transcendentalist and instrumental, pragmatic view of science as a human, social activity are singled out by Gellner and the Polish commentator Flis. Of course, it is precisely this that according to Leach, Malinowski had found in William James. We now see that the Jamesian-origin hypothesis not merely lacks supporting evidence, but is unnecessary: those ideas were clearly present in Mach, and constituted the central theme of Malinowski's doctoral dissertation. William James, like the deity, is a redundant hypothesis (Gellner in Ellen, et al. 1988: 174).

It is tempting to try to adjudicate Gellner's claims for Mach and Leach's for James as root sources for Malinowski's functionalism and empiricism. I resist that temptation, for to deal with it adequately would require a full-length biography of Malinowski. As an illustration of the kinds of complications which quickly enter the story as one tries to identify the significant others in Malinowski's academic career, we might point out that Mach and James were near contemporaries, admired and cited one another, and actually met in 1882 when James sought out Mach in Prague. In fact, the core of their shared beliefs and attitudes about science was so great we might reasonably surmise not only that it was a product of mutual influence, but that it represented a growing convergence among scientists and philosophers who called themselves empiricists, pragmatists, or positivists. Their high valuation of direct observation

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and experience as a means of acquiring knowledge, of regarding theories as hypotheses to be tested by experiments and predictive explanatory power, of judging scientific constructions in terms of biological survival value for the individual and the species, were becoming the progressive conception of scientific knowledge at the beginning of the twentieth century. Gellner may be correct in pointing out that Malinowski did not cite James. But Leach was also probably correct in observing that by 1910 when Malinowski first came to London, James's philosophy and psychology was already well-known and popular, not only among philosophers and scientists such as Russell, Whitehead and Pearson, but also among anthropologists and sociologists like Rivers, Seligman and Westermarck who were to become his teachers and advisers. What is surprising about all of this is not that Malinowski should have encountered such empiricist and anti-metaphysical views in London, but that he was already grappling with them in his Cracow Ph.D. dissertation, in the persons of Mach and Avenarius. The evidence of the dissertation is not altogether unequivocal. It represents rather a critical interpretation of the limitations of Mach's "Principle of the Economy of Thought" and Avenarius's "least effort" idea, than a positive acceptance and application of them. While Malinowski seems to accept Mach's conceptions of functional analysis in both the mathematical and the teleological sense of biological needs, he seems to doubt that such analysis can be applied to closed physical and psychological systems, or that it is permissible to transfer the analysis from biology to psychology. His general conclusion in the dissertation is negative, that neither Mach nor Avenarius succeeded in providing an empirical foundation for philosophical beliefs and world views! Judging from the biographical and textual information Polish scholars have recently published, it almost seems as if in his dissertation, Malinowski was trying to steer some kind of middle course between the empiricism of two of his Cracow teachers, Heinrich and Straszewski, and the romantic positivism and Catholicism of a third teacher and adviser, Pawlicki (Flis in Ellen et al. 1988: 108). There is little evidence in Malinowski's 1908 dissertation that he was interested in applying Mach's functionalist physics and biology to anthropology. He had probably already read Frazer's Golden Bough and was inspired by it to shift his academic interests from philosophy and natural science to ethnography and ethnology.

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There are practically no references in the dissertation t o anthropological literature and very few concrete examples of any kind. The level of discussion in the dissertation is very abstract, general and conceptual. Mach's style, in contrast, is far more concrete and contains more references t o anthropological literature (Mach 1886 [ 1 9 5 9 ] ; 1905 [ 1 9 7 6 ] ) . Gellner's suggestion that Malinowski's ahistorical, functionalist anthropology had its roots in his dissertation on Mach would be difficult to confirm at a conscious and explicit level. Perhaps at an unconscious level Mach's empiricism, positivism and pragmatism came to the surface as Malinowski began t o deal with the concrete ethnographic materials of Frazer's Totemism and Exogamy (1911, 1912, 1913), his own The Australian Family (1913), and The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). In the 1908 dissertation there is only one explicit reference that prefigures his later anthropological concerns. This is quoted t o indicate Malinowski's ambivalence about an "objective" and instrumental evaluation of scientific progress: What we wanted to justify in this digression can be formulated thus: the value of scientific laws is objective in this sense, that to recognize the value no reference had to be made either to any typical, normal individual or to any plebiscite of humanity. Even if in the world one normal man remained, and everyone else lost the ability to give judgments which can be regarded as normal and logical, then even this one man would not have to despair of the values, both material and scientific, of the achievements of mankind. He would not have to use psychological arguments to convince himself and others. The enormous practical importance of both instruments would allow him outright to destroy his adversaries. The relation of the white man to his less civilized colored brethren illustrates this sadly and emphatically. (Malinowski, The Principle of the Economy of Thought, 1908. Translated by Edward Martinek, 1985.)

While t h e evidential testimony of Malinowski's dissertation for Mach's influence is at best enigmatic, Gellner's broader and more hypothetical interpretation of Malinowski's relation t o the wider context of European thought is plausible and interesting: Malinowski can be seen as a unique phenomenon: a thinker who fused epistemological machismo, the here-now positivist orientation (giving it a specifically anti-past twist) with the organic sense of institutional interdependence and of functionality; these he might equally well have derived either from historicizing romantics or from the biologizing pragmatists(Gellner in Ellen etal. 1988: 91).

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Gellner's further suggestion that Malinowski's antihistorical functionalism "was ideally suited . . . to shrug off the insult and injury meted out to Poland by history, or equally to seek exemption from the obligation to reverse and invert i t " is too hedgy to fit the Austrian Poland of pre-1914 in which "Polish culture was respected and political conditions were g o o d " (ibid., 192-193). Malinowski, in any case, was not a very vocal Polish nationalist. Except for occasional identification with Joseph Conrad, he preferred the career of an expatriate, and a British wife from Melbourne (Firth 1957: 6). Short of a full-length biographical study it would be very difficult to sort out and evaluate the relative influences of the diverse personal, political and intellectual circumstances in Malinowski's development. His early interest in the natural sciences and the history of philosophy, the reading of Frazer and Dürkheim, and the study at Leipzig with Wundt and Bücher, followed by the move to the University of London and the commitment to an academic career in ethnography which sent him to Australia and New Guinea for at least the four years of the First World War, 1914-1918, all look in retrospect like the unfolding of a preordained plan of a unique personality. In a wider context of European politics and movements of thought, as Gellner suggests, Malinowski's functionalist anthropology can also be seen as a product of Darwin, Einstein and Freud. The intellectual revolutions launched by these three thinkers decentered humanity's place in the animal kingdom, in the cosmos, and in the mind. One side-effect of these revolutions was, as Freud suggested, an injury to human pride and vanity. So much so that even Kant's earlier Critique of knowledge in order to make room for faith in an objective world of things-in-themselves and of transcendental egos failed to stem the tide of empiricism. Russell and Peirce, among other turn-of-century scientists and philosophers, seemed to be riding the crest of the high tide of a scientific empiricism denuded of transcendental egos and things-in-themselves. As if to compensate, these same thinkers stirred an undercurrent of doubt and uncertainty about science, especially its materialism, mechanism, and causal determinism. Fallibilism, relativity and contextualism, subjectivism and the romantic idealism of a free man's worship, as well as anti-materialism and a neutral monism, indeterminism and even biological teleology had begun to reenter the scientific world view. Malinowski was an heir to these intellectual currents and

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cross-currents at Cracow, Leipzig, London, Melbourne, New Haven and Berkeley. Through his personal talents he succeeded in riding in the tropical canoes as a virtuoso ethnographer, author and world citizen. (For the Polish background see especially Malinowski between two worlds, ed. by R. Ellen, et al, 1988; cf. Singer 1984b, Barrow and Tipler 1986, Chandrasekhar 1987.) 47

2. "Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology; I shall be the Conrad." Malinowski's lively and vivid literary style attracted a wide circle of readers beyond the ranks of professional anthropologists and sociologists. These readers soon became familiar with many of his distinctive writings and theories about the Trobriand Islands and the human nature they presumably exemplified. Their canoe trading activities in the Kula; their use of magic, religion and a protoscience on the ocean voyages, as well as in the local lagoons and yam gardens; their telling of myths, legends and tales to enhance and legitimate ordinary present practices and activities as social charters; the replacement of Freud's oedipus complex by a matrilineal complex — became familiar topics of discussion and controversy from the 1920s when first published and through subsequent editions and later critical commentaries (e.g., Weiner 1988; Spiro 1982). Overarching and undergirding these specific contributions was the comprehensive, functionalist conception of cultures as organized wholes, whose component parts were so closely interrelated and integrated that they could not be classified by the conventional categories of economics, religion, science, and the like. To learn how the functioning cultures worked and what they meant to the "natives", Malinowski urged anthropologists to come down from the verandah and the hotel room, pitch their tents in the middle of a native village, dispense with interpreters and participate with the "natives" in their daily lives. In his foreword to The Argonauts of the Western Pacific, his first field monograph, Malinowski includes the holistic, functional conception of culture as a condition of field work: One of the first conditions of acceptable Ethnographic work certainly is that it should deal with the totality of all social, cultural and psychological aspects of the community, for they are so interwoven that not

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one can be understood without taking into consideration all the others. (Malinowski 1922 [1961: xvi].)

The vivid and compelling imagery of Malinowski's style has become so well known that it has become a kind of standard of allusive reference for travellers and tourists as well as for professional anthropologists. On our first visit to Madras in 1954 as our plane from New Delhi skimmed the tall cocoanut palm trees on the beaches of the Bay of Bengal, and the temporary lagoons on the land formed by the October rains, Malinowski's famous opening line from The Argonauts involuntarily came to mind: "Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village. . . ." Of course we did not land on the beach, I was not alone, and Madras then was the third largest city in India. Eventually we did live in a hotel across from the beach and saw a good deal of the near-naked fishermen and their long catamarans. They and their children did flock around us when we ventured on to the beach, attracted, not by tobacco, but by the desire for money and other gifts. "Others, the more dignified and elderly, remain seated where they are" (Malinowski 1922 [1961: 4]). The parallel soon ended. I was not doing a study of the fishermen but of what happens to the sanskrit tradition in a metropolitan center. Yet Malinowski's literary image continued to recur each time we returned to Madras in later years, as if to beckon me to a missed opportunity to do an ethnographic study of a tropical island. Not so widely known to non-specialist readers of Malinowski is his theory of pragmatic speech and meaning. This was a distinctive contribution to ethnographic method and anthropological theory and shows as well a close connection with American behaviorism, Peirce's semiotics and semiotic anthropology. Although some linguists have been critical of Malinowski's pragmatic theory as a general theory of language, anthropologists and linguistic anthropologists have acknowledged its heuristic value in field work and have incorporated some of it as a subfield called "the ethnography of speaking" (J.R. Firth 1957; Berry 1965;Hymes 1961). From all accounts, Malinowski was a gifted person who learned languages easily. His knowledge of Polish, Latin, German, French, English was taken for granted and his quick mastery of the Trobrianders' Kiriwinian is attested by the large corpus of linguistic texts he collected, translated and analyzed. His designation of

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this collection as a Corpus Inscriptionum Kiriviniensis not only marks it in Latin, but probably also evoked a half-ironic reference to his father, who had been a professor of philology at the same university in Cracow where Malinowski did his graduate studies. The son's pragmatic theory of language was not interested in written scripts but in living speech and its functional role in social situations. The frequency with which the adjective "pragmatic" is repeated in volume II of Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935 [1965]) to qualify utterances, words, efficacy of formulae, speech, and acts leaves little doubt that for the ethnographer the meaning of words will be found in use and function, not in dictionaries and grammars. Even the apparently meaningless words and phrases of magical formulae have a meaning in terms of the effects which the magical expressions exercise in ritual contexts, according to native belief (Coral Gardens, II: 249-250). Malinowski distinguishes magical speech from secular, technical speech not only phonetically, but also in terms of the associations and active effects in the immediate situations: An order given in battle, an instruction issued by the master of a sailing ship, a cry for help, are as powerful in modifying the course of events as any other bodily act (Coral Gardens II, p. 53).

The function and meaning of the verbal utterances in such situations, according to Malinowski, exist in the direction and coordination of the actions of different participants: An imperative, a noun, an adjective, even an adverb, screamed from a distance in the dark might reorientate completely the movement of the rescuers or those in danger. Now . . . what is the meaning of the word here? It is above all a stimulus to action. It is a stimulus correlated to the situation, i.e., to the environment, the people and the objects they handle, and based on past experience (Ibid., pp. 56-57).

Anticipating the possible caveat that such situations of danger and cries for help represent a very limited, primitive kind of situation, Malinowski suggests that his analysis be extended to include "modern transport and industrial activities" where "there is a strict need of symbolic communication, at times mechanical, at times verbal". He does not shrink from applying his pragmatic theory to the abstract and technical language of the sciences: The real understanding of words is always ultimately derived from active experience of those aspects of reality to which the words belong. The

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chemist or the physicist understands the meaning of his most abstract concepts ultimately on the basis of his acquaintance with chemical and physical processes in the laboratory. Even the pure mathematician, dealing with the most useless and arrogant branch of his learning, the theory of numbers, has probably had some experience of counting his pennies and shillings or his boots and buns. In short there is no science whose conceptual, hence verbal, output is not ultimately derived from the practical handling of matter (Coral Gardens, II: 57-58). This begins to sound like Peirce on "How to Make Our Ideas Clear", using the laboratory habit of mind of the experimental sciences to clarify the meanings of hard words and phrases and intellectual concepts. It also raises the question whether Malinowski had some contact by this time with American pragmatism, behaviorism, and operationalism. A possible answer to this question appears in a footnote on pp. 59-60 of Vol. II of Coral Gardens: A point of view closely akin to the one here adopted has been set forth in an excellent monograph by Grace A. De Laguna, Speech; its Function and Development, 1927, who follows the lines indicated by John Dewey in Experience and Nature (1925) and G.H. Mead in numerous articles, and expounds a general theory of language from a moderate behaviouristic point of view. Professor De Laguna critically analyses the old point of view and gives a number of additional examples of unsatisfactory definitions of meaning which will be of interest to readers of the present pages. Markey's Symbolic Process, London, 1928, is a book written on excellent lines but unfortunately not very clear. Compare also my earlier articles on 'Classificatory Particles' in the Bulletin of Oriental Studies, Vol. II, 1921; and 'The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,' in The Meaning of Meaning, by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, 1923. Equally of interest is the fact that Malinowski's footnote is an answering echo to several footnotes in De Laguna's book Speech: It Function and Development ( 1 9 2 7 : 20-21n, 53n, 61n). In the longest of her footnotes De Laguna not only refers to Dewey and Mead, but also to Malinowski's 1923 essay in Ogden and Richard's Meaning of Meaning and to Pierre Janet: During the last few years there have been signs of a reawakened interest in language and of a new attitude toward the whole subject. A point of view similar to that just indicated has been adopted by a number of important writers. Among them are Pierre Janet in Les medications psychologiques, Malinowski in the supplementary essay appended to Ogden and Richards's Meaning of Meaning, John Dewey in Experience and Nature, and G.H. Mead in various articles in the philosophical journals.

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Why Malinowski's footnote should have omitted the Janet is not transparent. Perhaps De Laguna's more explicit evolutionary orientation is one possible explanation. She devotes a good deal of space to the animal cry, the Craig-Whitman observations on pigeons, Köhler on the Mentality of the Apes, the relation of gesture to speech, and is less critical of Dürkheim than is Malinowski. In any case, Malinowski's description of her theory of language as one of a moderately behaviorist point of view is accurate enough and underlines his own turning away from a Cartesian introspectionism. Functional and behavioristic psychology were already well established by 1927 through the pioneering of Dewey, G.H. Mead, J.R. Angell, Watson at Chicago, Columbia and Hopkins, William James at Harvard. Dewey on the reflex arc concept (1896), Mead on the behavioristic account of the significant symbol (1922), Angell on functional psychology (1903), Watson on behaviorism (1913), and James on consciousness as a function, not a substance (1892) were by then well known critiques of hereditary doctrines of psychological development (cf. Boring 1957: Chaps. 22, 24). De Laguna's book on Speech, Its Function and Development reflects a critical knowledge of these developments in psychology and philosophy and to a lesser extent in anthropology. Mead's idea of "a conversation of gestures" among animals and humans was probably suggested by Darwin and Wundt.

3. " D ü r k h e i m reduced to Behaviouristic psychology" It is probable that Malinowski's kinship with the moderate behavioristic point of view, expressed in the Coral Gardens footnote of 1935, dates from 1926 when he attended the Social Science Research Council Hanover Conference. The associations formed with the Rockefeller Foundation at that time and the subsequent visits to the United States helped to establish his reputation as a field worker and brought American anthropologists to his London seminars (Stocking 1983: 111). Surely his 1936 lecture on "Culture as a determinant of behaviour" on the occasion of receiving an honorary degree at the Harvard Tercentenary marked his assimilation of American social science usage, as did his appointment at Yale, although "behavior" is spelled in the British manner with a "u". Yet his pragmatic theory of speech and meaning predates the 1926

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visit. Its most distinctive feature, its contextualism, which held that the meaning of utterances depended on their effects in a "context of situation" and a "context of culture", were already introduced in his 1923 essay on "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Language" published as a supplement to Ogden and Richard's Meaning of Meaning. One can even find some indications of this contextual theory of meaning in The Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922, but not as explicitly and systematically argued as a general theory of language as in the Ogden and Richards essay (cf. Malinowski 1961, Introduction, Chap. XVIII). Ogden and Richards's invitation t o Malinowski that he contribute a supplementary essay to their book on " T h e Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages" provided him with a stimulus and context for formulating explicitly his general pragmatic theory for language and meaning. Their book worked o u t , according to Malinowski, "a new science of symbolism which is sure to yield most valuable criteria for the criticism of metaphysics and of purely formal logic", and also has "practical importance in dealing with the special, purely scientific problems of meaning, grammar, psychology and pathology of speech". He saw his own studies of "primitive mentality, culture and language driven into a linguistic theory very much on lines parallel t o those o f " Ogden and Richards. Malinowski wrote that he was driven to similar "semantic theories based on psychological considerations" when he tried t o translate the texts he collected in New Guinea " b y writing out the vocabulary and grammar and consulting existing grammars and vocabularies of Oceanic languages". He soon found that Such words can only be translated into English, not by giving their imaginary equivalent — a real one obviously cannot be found — but by explaining the real meaning of each one of them through an exact ethnographic account of the sociology, culture and tradition of the native community. (Malinowski 1923 in Ogden and Richards [1956]: 299-300) He then proceeds t o illustrate his approach by showing how a verbatim word-for-word translation of a native statement into English fails to take account of its emotional nature and the "background of their tribal psychology in ceremonial life, commerce and enterprise" (1923 [ 1 9 5 6 ] : 301). The conclusion Malinowski draws f r o m his illustrations is that a primitive language "is essentially rooted in the reality of culture, the tribal life and customs of a people, and that it cannot be explained without reference to

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these broader contexts of verbal utterance" (1923 [1956]: 305). And the context of the verbal utterance in turn "becomes only intelligible when it is placed within its context of situation" (1923 [1956] : 306). This conclusion is again generalized: The study of any language, spoken by a people who live under conditions different from our own and possess a different culture, must be carried out in conjunction with the study of their culture and of their environment. (Malinowski 1923 [1956]: 306)

This conclusion and the distinction between verbal context and context of situation sound very similar to the pragmatic theory of meaning in Coral Gardens and Their Magic, Vol. II. In fact, the main theses of the supplementary essay to The Meaning of Meaning also summarize the main points of emphasis in the Coral Gardens discussion: that primitive speech is a mode of action rather than a counter sign of thought, that the different genres of speech — tales, legends, myths, conversations, magical formulae, secular technical speech, statements by informants — are correlated to different kinds of social situations, and that the meaning of a given utterance depends on the context of other utterances as well as its functions in different social situations. One significant difference between the 1923 essay and the 1935 book, apart from the difference in length, is that the earlier account focuses on the formulation of a general theory of primitive language, with a few illustrations from the Trobriand ethnographic texts, while the 1935 account foregrounds a large number of the actual texts, their translations, and pragmatic interpretations. The pragmatic theory of meaning is discussed in the 1935 account more as a method of analysis and interpretation of specific ethnographic texts and social situations than as a generalized theory of primitive language. Somewhat paradoxically, the more ethnographic specifications of the later account is accompanied by the suggestion that the pragmatic theory also be applied to modern culture, science, technology and philosophy. Another interesting difference between the two accounts is that the concept of cultures as superorganic functionally organized wholes, transmitted by education, drill, play, games and other forms of social interaction is more prominent in the later account. In the earlier account, an evolutionary and Darwinian conception of the

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development of speech in infants, savages, and illiterate adults still seems to be assumed (Malinowski 1923 [1956]: 318). Malinowski's emphasis on the difference between biological and cultural evolution is explicitly formulated in his book on Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927). At that time it may have been reinforced by Kroeber's 1920 critique of Freud's Totem and Taboo as a "just-so story" based on speculative prehistory and Lamarckian heredity. Malinowski endorsed and cited Kroeber's criticism and, presumably, the concept of culture as superorganic. While he continued to discuss in 1935 and later the acquisition and articulation of speech by infants, savages and adults, he no longer linked this sequence to Darwinian natural selection and organic evolution. The process of cultural evolution requires another medium the medium in which the experiences of each generation are deposited and stored up for successive generations. This medium is that body of material objects, traditions, and stereotyped mental processes which we call culture. It is supraindividual but not psychological. It is moulded by man and moulds him in turn (Malinowski 1927: 157).

At this point, in Sex and Repression in Savage Society, Malinowski also emphatically declares that "no competent anthropologist now makes any such assumption of mass 'psyche', 'of the inheritance of acquired psychic dispositions', or of any 'psychic continuity', transcending the limits of the individual soul". In a footnote to this declaration Malinowski gathers to his side "all the anthropological authorities" and "leading sociologists", leaving only Dürkheim verging on "this metaphysical fallacy". Malinowski's description and analysis of how the significant speech of infants, savages and civilized adults is acquired recurs in Coral Gardens (e.g., [1965]: 252-259), but is said to be based on his pragmatic ethnographic method, including direct observations of his three children. In a 1937 review of a book on Infant Speech, by M.M. Lewis, the objective behavioristic method is commended, identified with his own approach, and again also attributed to John Dewey and G.H. Mead.

4. " M r . Malinowski, meet M r . Peirce!" After the accumulating evidence of Malinowski's kinship with American pragmatism and moderate behaviorism, British empiricism

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and individualism, and continental European positivism, it may be surprising to find no mention of Peirce in Malinowski's works. This is surprising because even if we apply Gallie's distinction between James and Peirce, we should have to say that Malinowski's preoccupation with a pragmatic theory of language and meaning is closer to Peirce's semiotics than to James's popular pragmatic theory of truth. Malinowski's individualism may also align him with James, and some of the British anthropologists and sociologists, but his concept of culture as supra-individual and superorganic, implies a process of transmission through education and social tradition. Rather than attempt to assess the relative distances of Malinowski from James and Peirce, it is more fruitful to point out that Malinowski did meet Peirce in 1923 between the covers of Ogden and Richard's The Meaning of Meaning. There are at least three occasions for such a meeting. In the first place, Ogden and Richards acknowledge in their book that Peirce was one of the foremost contributors to the Science of Symbolism which they aimed to develop. One of Peirce's definitions of a sign is actually quoted in The Meaning of Meaning and, as a recent biography of I.A. Richards has pointed out, is used as an organizing principle for their book (Russo 1989: 110-125). A second Peircean mark in The Meaning of Meaning is its "sign situation" (symbol, referent, thought) which adapts Peirce's definition of sign-action as a triadic relation of sign, object, and interpretant. Malinowski points out in his 1923 supplementary essay the close similarity between his "context of situation" and Ogden and Richards's "sign situation" and the correspondences in their implications for a theory of magical speech (Malinowski 1923 [1956]: 305; Singer 1984a: 27). A third link to Peirce is indicated in Fisch's statement that "The Meaning of Meaning was the first book in any language from which it was possible to get a grasp of Peirce's semiotic at first hand in his own terms" (Fisch 1986: 345). This refers specifically to the extensive quotations from Peirce's writings on the theory of signs which Ogden and Richards included in an appendix in The Meaning of Meaning (1923 [1956]: 279-290). Whether Malinowski had an opportunity to see those quotations before he wrote his supplementary essay is an intriguing question. The description of his context of situation remains inconclusive (in Ogden and Richards [1956]: 298-299):

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Finally, I myself, at grips with the problem of primitive languages from Papuo-Melanesia, had been driven into the field of general Semantics. When, however, I had the privilege of looking through the proofs of the present book, I was astonished to find how exceedingly well the theories there presented answered all my problems and solved my difficulties; and I was gratified to find that the position to which I had been led by the study of primitive languages, was not essentially a different one. I was therefore extremely glad when the Authors offered me an opportunity to state my problems, and to outline my tentative solutions, side by side with their remarkable theories. 1 accepted it the more gladly because I hope to show how important a light the theories of this book throw on the problems of primitive languages.

The selections from Peirce in Appendix D of Ogden and Richards's The Meaning of Meaning summarize the essential passages on his theory of signs - his triadic definition of a sign (pp. 288-289), the definitions of icons, indices and symbols (pp. 282-283), the ten principal classes of signs (p. 284), the division of semiotic into logic, grammar and rhetoric (p. 280), the relation of semiotics to pragmatism (pp. 285-287), and the comparison between Peirce's conception of meaning and Lady Welby's (pp. 287-288). This last is especially important since it was from Peirce's correspondence with Lady Welby that many of the quoted passages are taken, and it was she who first acquainted Ogden with Peirce's theory of signs, and also wrote Peirce that she found him a disciple at Cambridge. Whether or not Malinowski had seen the Peirce passages in the proofs of The Meaning of Meaning, there is not much doubt that Ogden or Richards, or both, had studied them well and had been influenced by them to construct their "contextual theory of reference" (pp. 73-74). Their famous triangle of meaning showing the triadic relation of symbol, thought and referent (p. 11) is an obvious adaptation of Peirce's triadic relation of sign, interpretant, and object (pp. 9n, 10-12). Ogden and Richards's definition of "symbol" includes Peirce's distinctive usage - "its being used by someone to stand for a referent" (pp. 11-12), as well as "those signs which men use to communicate with one another as instruments of thought", i.e., "words, arrangement of words, images, gestures, and such representations as drawings or mimetic sounds . . ." (p. 23). When we speak, the symbolism we employ is caused partly by the reference we are making and partly by social and psychological factors — the purpose for which we are making the reference, the proposed effect of our symbols on other persons, and our own attitude. When we hear

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what is said, the symbols both cause us to perform an act o f reference and to assume an attitude which will, according to circumstances, be more or less similar to the act and the attitude of the speaker (Ogden and Richards [ 1 9 5 6 ] : 10-11).

No wonder, then, that Malinowski saw in The Meaning of Meaning's "sign situation" and contextual theory of reference a kinship with his own "context of situation". Ogden and Richards returned the compliment in a generous acknowledgment of Malinowski in the preface to the first edition of The Meaning of Meaning ( [ 1 9 5 6 ] : ix) and more specifically in a footnote explaining their triangle of interpretation: In Supplement I, Part I. infra, Dr. Malinowski gives a valuable account o f the development o f the speech situation in relation to the above diagram (Ogden and Richards 1923 [ 1 9 5 6 ] : 1 2 n ; t h e diagram is o n page 11).

That the source of Ogden and Richards's triangle in Peirce may not have been known to Malinowski does not diminish its effective role in mediating that "moderate behaviorism" and pragmatism whose kinship with his own pragmatic theory of language and meaning Malinowski later recognized in De Laguna, Dewey, and G.H. Mead. To facilitate a direct comparison between Malinowski and Ogden and Richards, and of both with Peirce, we should juxtapose the two sets of diagrams and the comments about them. The Ogden and Richards diagram, which occurs on page 11 of The Meaning of Meaning, is well labeled by the authors and is surrounded by their comments. In order to see how Malinowski's and the Ogden and Richards diagrams are transformations of Peirce's definition of semiosis as a relation of sign, object and interpretant, it is necessary to construct a Peirce triangle of signification in which the corners are labeled "symbol", "interpretant", and "object". This produces a triangle almost identical to the Ogden and Richards triangle. To get from this to Malinowski's earlier stages, it is only necessary to recall that Peirce distinguishes "symbols" from "icons" and "indices", whose relations to their objects are "natural" rather than "conventional", that is, direct by contiguity or resemblance. Ogden and Richards provided for iconic and indexical signs (e.g., onomatopoeia and gestures) in a footnote (Ogden and Richards [ 1 9 5 6 ] : 12n).

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Malinowski's labeled diagrams and commentary indicate that he viewed the Ogden and Richards triangle of meaning as representing a development out of a situation in which there is no articulate speech, thought, or referent, only a dyadic "real connection" between "sound reaction" and a "situation". The speech, symbols, imagery, and referents begin to emerge in the second and third stages of the development, in active processes in which the sounds are detached from the referents, to become symbols. It is not clear from Malinowski's account whether he regards the stages of language development as biological or evolutionary stages or as cultural stages. His application of the "stages" to the development of speech in human infants and also in prehistoric "primitive" and civilized adults still connotes the evolutionary context of discussion. But by the time of Coral Gardens (1935), the analysis has become explicitly and moderately behavioristic, cultural, and pragmatic. The vocabulary of "conditioning" appears to describe how culture builds on a few "physiologically conditioned" responses (Coral Gardens II: 59). The description of how "infantile speech" develops is now drawn from his observations of his own children {ibid., p. 65). In a critical comment on Durkheim's theory of effervescence, Malinowski emphasizes the role of cultural influences on the growing organism: The influence of society, or as I would prefer to say, the influence of culture — that is, of all the institutions found within a community, of the various traditional mechanisms such as speech, technology, modes of social intercourse — this influence works on the individual by a gradual process of moulding. (Malinowski 1935 [1965]: 236)

It is probable that by 1935 Malinowski had read De Laguna's book on Speech (1927), Dewey's Chapter V in Experience and Nature (1925), and some of G.H. Mead's articles, to which reference is made in the Coral Gardens footnote on page 60. Nevertheless, this more explicit shift to behaviorism and pragmatism does not imply that Malinowski has repudiated his 1923 "Supplementary Essay". On the contrary, he insists in Coral Gardens that he has not changed his general theory of language and meaning sketched in the Supplementary Essay except for several minor qualifications ( [ 1 9 6 5 ] : 65). This claim is certainly justified so far as his pragmatic and contextual theory of language is concerned. The analysis of the magic power of words and spells and of infant speech in Coral

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Gardens is an ourgrowth and detailed application of the theory sketched by Ogden and Richards and elaborated by Malinowski in his "Supplementary Essay". That the magician's spells and magical formulae in ritual acts play a role analogous to that of an infant's cry or an SOS signal may not be all that needs to be said about that role. It is, however, an important and significant insight which, as Tambiah has shown in his papers on "The Magic Power of Words", and "A Performative Approach to Ritual", is capable of being updated with J.L. Austin's theory of performatives, and backdated to Peirce's semiotics (Tambiah 1968, 1979 in 1985). I.A. Richards's biographer, Russo, comments on the relation of The Meaning of Meaning to James and Peirce along lines that are consistent with Gallie's contrast between the two founding fathers of pragmatism, and that also suggest a possible analogous influence on Malinowski's functionalism. That influence in Malinowski's case, however, may not have been a directly encountered source, but an influence mediated by Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning. Richards and Ogden felt that Peirce's earlier attempts had been on the right track, the one James had traveled, which led to behaviorism and operationalism. On the other hand, they disapproved of James's narrowly nominalist view of language — the weak link in this system — which could account only for the most highly specialized linguistic function of scientific statement. For linguistic theory, the authors greatly preferred the richness and depth of Peirce. The Meaning of Meaning holds the Jamesian line of psychology, but not its nominalism; it suppresses Peirce's logic, while adopting Peircean concepts in semiotics towards the development of its own instrumental concept of language. (Russo 1989: 117)

5. Synchronic functionalism and the semiotics of history If Malinowski fashioned a pragmatic theory of language and meaning in his 1923 Supplementary Essay for The Meaning of Meaning, a theory which converged with and elaborated the Ogden and Richards program for a science of symbolism that incorporated both Peirce's general theory of signs (semiotics) and James's functionalist and behavioristic psychology, what has been the consequence of such a pragmatic theory of meaning for ethnography and anthropology in Malinowski's work, as well as in that of other

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anthropologists? This is a controversial issue but an enlightening one, so far as the rise of semiotic anthropology is concerned. Commenting on Malinowski's reputation as a pioneering field worker who redirected ethnology and ethnography from armchair speculations about origins to direct observation in the field on the present functioning of cultures and social institutions, Stocking writes that Malinowski "had sought more or less consciously in Argonauts to provide a mythic charter for its central ritual" (Stocking 1983: 110). This myth was created, Stocking believes, through Malinowski's seminars in London and Yale, but also through the literary constructions in his published works. Characteristically . . . Malinowski writes in the active voice and present tense, employing what one critic called a "syntax of agency" . . . it was Malinowski's Argonauts that validated the temporal context in which modern ethnography is normally situated: the vague and essentially atemporal moments we call "the ethnographic present" (Stocking 1983: 107).

A similar observation about Malinowski's ethnographic writing style has been made by Geertz who calls it "1-witnessing". Geertz emphasizes the epistemological problem of the relation of the literary construction to the original observations, and to other writings, such as personal diaries (Geertz 1988: 75ff). A student, colleague and friend of Malinowski, Raymond Firth, has protested Stocking's characterization of Malinowski's ethnographic method as a "Euhemerist Myth", and suggests that "Stocking confused the setting of standards and ideals with myth" (Firth 1988: 31-32). At the same Cracow memorial conference to which Firth presented his paper, Gellner took Malinowski's ahistorical, synchronic and holistic functionalism as the problem to be explained by a psychological interpretation of his desire "to kill and supplant Frazer, and thus become the New King of the Sacred Grove of Anthropology", as well as "to shrug off the insult and injury meted out to Poland by history" (Gellner in Ellen et al. 1988: 182). What is at stake in such interpretations of Malinowski's functionalism, apart from questions of the sincerity of the literary construction raised by A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, are the precise temporal boundaries of the ethnographic present. As Stocking notes the concept is "essentially vague" and subject to varying interpretations. The interpretation of "the context of

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situation" as referring only to a momentary present situation, excluding past situations or a succession of situations is certainly too narrow. Malinowski's analyses in Coral Gardens of the language of garden agriculture and of magic spells and formulae extend the ethnographic present well beyond a present moment interpretation of situational contexts. In fact in one passage, he freely admits that he did not record the actual speech at the time he heard it, but later recorded it from his memories of having heard it many times (Coral Gardens, II: 60-61): Unfortunately, I have not noted down any actual texts of such speech, being unaware of the importance of this form of utterance when in the field. I have witnessed such work dozens of times and remember quite well that it is accompanied by such simple imperatives as "lift it higher", "grip it from underneath", "move it hither", "push it there", and so on.

Numerous other exceptions to a narrow definition of "the ethnographic present" can be found in Malinowski's own interpretations. Narrative genres of language, for example, including myths, he acknowledges, include essential references to the past. His theory of myths as social charters tries to explain present practices and beliefs by myths and legends, which themselves refer to past events whether real or imagined. His distinction between the context of situation and the context of culture or reference embraces just this dual temporal reference to the present and to the past (Coral Gardens II: 18, 51-53). Trobrianders have a sense of their traditions even as they may deviate from them or change them. Weiner's recent observations and quotation from a film indicate the continuing cultural vitality of Trobriand traditions: Across this warp, change has been woven in; but in coming from internal and external demands, from nationals and Europeans, and in the name of God, Country, Cash, and Independence, it is change that Trobrianders continually refashion in their own image. This cultural vitality is summarized in a scene from the film "Trobriand Cricket". When a young Trobriander asks a chief about the game, he replies, "We rubbished [the missionary way of playing cricket and now] it is our game". With masterful zeal, Trobrianders make manifest who they are through what they exchange, thus making them expert at transforming into their own Trobriand style whatever encumbers or encroaches on their resolute sense of self. (Weiner 1987: 167)

Firth's distinction between Malinowski's theory of myths as social charters and his standards and ideals for ethnographic field

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work also implies a dual temporal reference - to the past in the case of the myths and to the future in the case of the instructions to ethnographers. Such a future reference is of course a distinctive feature of pragmatism, both the James kind as well as Peirce's, Dewey's and Mead's. As Malinowski tried to deal with problems of cultural history and cultural change, particularly in Africa, he came to appreciate the limitations of an exclusively synchronic conception of culture. In one of his statements on culture change, Malinowski discusses the dangers to Freedom in an evolutionary perspective of human history, makes unequivocal value judgements against the totalitarian regimes, reaffirms his commitment to science, and in retrospect, acknowledged that his synchronic functionalism did not deal adequately with the problems of change and tradition: I was thus forced to observe the facts of contact and change, but I want emphatically to state that my attitude, both in theory and practice, on this point was false. . . The principle of studying the changing native as he really is enables us, not by guess-work or by fortuitously brushing away a piece of calico, a Christian belief, an irksome European taboo, but by studying how these things work, how they clash with his original culture, or else how they have been incorporated into it. On the other hand, the process of diffusion of culture, as it is going on now under our very eyes, is one of the most important historical events in the development of mankind. To neglect its study is definitely to fail in one of the most important tasks of anthropology. . . This perhaps is the most serious shortcoming of my whole anthropological research in Melanesia. (Malinowski 1966a (i): 4 8 0 4 8 1 ; Paluch in Ellen et al. 1988: 83)

The limitations of a synchronic functionalism are not, however, an inherent feature of Malinowski's pragmatic theory of language and meaning. This theory takes account of different time perspectives in different genres of speech, the different contexts of situations and of reference, the differential lags between observations and writing of monographs, the different kinds of interactions between cultural traditions and cultural changes, the ontogenetic and the phylogenetic development of speech, as Malinowski recognized. His theory of meaning also has many interesting consequences which are being made explicit and are being developed by anthropologists and linguists into a semiotic anthropology. Since these developments have become prominent over the last twenty years, it would be premature to attempt a comprehensive survey of them in this paper. There are, however, several strands in this development which are

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clearly linked to Peirce's semiotics and, indirectly, to Malinowski. I should like to trace their genealogy briefly. 48

6. Syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics Soon after Malinowski published Coral Gardens and Their Magic in 1935 and came as a Visiting Professor to Yale, a small monograph appeared on The Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938), which probably had more to do with reviving and spreading Peircean semiotics than any publication since Ogden and Richards's The Meaning of Meaning. The author of the monograph, Charles W. Morris, a student of George Herbert Mead at the University of Chicago, had succeeded him in the Department of Philosophy in 1931 when Mead died. An active traveler, Morris had established contacts in the 1930s with members of the Vienna Circle and helped some of them migrate to the United States. One of its leading members, Rudolf Carnap, joined the University of Chicago in 1936. Together with Carnap and Otto Neurath, Morris organized an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science to be published by the University of Chicago Press. The first volume appeared in 1938 and included, besides Morris's monograph, articles by Bloomfield, Bohr, Carnap, Dewey and Russell. In addition to Morris's monograph, the Encyclopedia published monographs by Bloomfield, Carnap, Lenzen, Frank, Brunswick, Nagel, Mainx and FinlayFreundlich. Publication of the Encyclopedia was interrupted by Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 and was not resumed until 1946. Morris's monograph not only used and redefined many of Peirce's terms such as "semiotic", "semiosis" and "sign", but also divided semiotics into three branches — syntactics, "the study of the syntactical relations of signs to one another, in abstraction from the relations of signs to objects or to interpreters"; semantics, "the study of the relations of signs to their designata and so to the objects which they may or do denote"; and pragmatics designates "the science of the relation of signs to their interpreters" (Morris 1938 [1955]: 91, 99, 108). Morris specified a rather broad interpretation of "interpreters": Since most, if not all, signs have as their interpreters living organisms, it is a sufficiently accurate characterization of pragmatics to say that it

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deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological, biological and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs. (Morris 1938 [ 1 9 5 5 ] : 108)

Morris's three-fold partition of semiotics into syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics was derived, with some modifications, from Peirce's tripartition of semiotic into pure grammar, logic proper, and pure rhetoric, or the respective conditions for "the meaning, truth and fertility of any sign used by a scientific intelligence" (Singer 1984a: 23). Peirce, in turn, refined and updated the mediaeval trivium, which he studied and greatly admired. The full semiotic characterization of a language in terms of these subdisciplines was defined by Morris as "any intersubjective set of sign vehicles whose usage is determined by syntactical, semantical, and pragmatical rules" (Morris 1938 [ 1 9 5 5 ] : 108). Morris's 1938 monograph is sometimes read as a Utopian, programmatic scheme which is to be realized in an indefinite future. A more accurate interpretation would regard it as an attempt to systematize and codify about a hundred years of intensive developments in the foundations of mathematics and logic and the philosophy of science and of language (cf. Singer 1940, 1984a: 21-31; Quine 1981: 148-155). The landmark analyses in semiotics by Peirce (1931 ff.), in syntactics by Camap (1934 [ 1 9 3 7 ] ) , in semantics by Tarski (1935, 1936), and in pragmatics by G.H. Mead (1922, 1934, 1938) as well as in the philosophy of language and symbolism by Wittgenstein (1922) and Ogden and Richards (1923) are all cited in Morris's monograph. After World War II, Morris published his own contribution to pragmatics in Signs, Language and Behavior (1946). Because of its insistently behavioristic vocabulary, this work provoked some criticisms and objections to his interpretations of Peirce's semiotics. (See, e.g., Morris' behavioristic definitions and comments on Peirce, 1946: 216-220, 287-289). Ironically, one of the severest criticisms of Morris's classification was made by a fellow pragmatist — John Dewey. In 1946 Dewey published an article charging that Morris misinterpreted Peirce's semiotics by introducing an "interpreter" into the sign-relation of sign, object and interpretant. Since Dewey had attended Peirce's classes at John Hopkins in the 1880s, some commentators have tended to give Dewey the benefit of the doubt. Morris's reply to Dewey (1948-1949) and an independent reading of Peirce will show,

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I believe, that Morris deviates less from Peirce, and from Dewey, than Dewey's criticism asserted (Singer 1984a: 66-69); Errington 1987: 247 η). More interesting is the fact that Morris emphasized, in later writings, that Peirce's semiotics, and his own, is a pragmatic semiotics, and proceeded to spell out the precise relationship in Peirce's semiotics between the pragmatic conception of meaning in terms of habits of action, and the interpretants of a sign: Elsewhere . . . he had located the pragmatic maxim within his general semiotic; now he is bringing action (in the form of habits) into the very core of his semiotic (Morris 1970: 24).

In one of the Ogden and Richards selections, Peirce defines his interpretants in terms that seemed very much like Morris's: This doctrine in nowise conflicts with pragmaticism, which holds that the Immediate Interpretant of all thought proper is conduct . . . the Final Interpretant is the one Interpretative result to which every Interpreter is destined to come, if the sign is sufficiently considered (The Meaning of Meaning 1923 [1950]: 285,288).

Some readers of Peirce disagreed with Morris's interpretation because they probably assumed since signs can only be translated by other signs, according to Peirce, an interpretant of a sign for a given interpreter must also be a sign, and cannot be a feeling or action of an interpreter. There are two fallacies here: one, the assumption that feelings and actions cannot become signs; and two, that there are no interpreters apart from some given interpretant. Morris's distinction between "interpreters" and "interpretant" avoids both of these fallacies and follows Peirce in so doing. The definition of "pragmatics" as including a reference to the users of a sign continues Peirce's precedents, albeit technically refined in terms of the subjects and objects of indexical signs, i.e., speakers and hearers. The interpreter of a sign is an organism; the interpretant is the habit of the organism to respond, because of the sign vehicle, to absent objects which are relevant to a present problematic situation as if they were present (Morris 1938 [1955]: 109).

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7. A puzzling gap Between Malinowski's pragmatic, contextual theory of meaning discussed and systematically applied in Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935) and the emergence of semiotic anthropology in the 1970s, there seems to be a puzzling gap. One would have expected someone with his early interest in Mach's philosophy of natural science and functional analysis, who recognized by 1935 the relevance of American pragmatism and behaviorism, British empiricism and logicism, and continental positivism to his own ethnographic methods and theory, would have taken note of the interesting developments in the Science of Symbolism that were taking place in the 1930s — when Wittgenstein had returned to philosophizing about language and meaning at Cambridge, Russell had come to the United States in 1938 to lecture on meaning and truth, Carnap and other members of the Vienna Circle brought logical positivism to Chicago in 1936. There is little evidence in Malinowski's writings or in his posthumously published books of 1944 to 1947, that he was interested in these developments of the 1930s and 1940s. It is probable that some of his students and colleagues did see the connections and attempted to follow up their implications for anthropology. While I have not had the opportunity to survey the extensive literature involved, 1 should like to mention several significant references. Hilda Kuper whose recent reminiscence of her days in London as a student and research assistant to Malinowski (Stocking 1984) wrote t o me in response to my inquiry that although she could not recall the sources of the references to De Laguna, Dewey and Mead in Coral Gardens, she did recall that Sigmund Nadel, another student at the time, was interested in Dewey and Mead. Following up this clue, I was at first disappointed not to find confirmation in Nadel's contribution to the Malinowski 1957 Festschrift edited by Firth. However, Nadel's The Foundations of Social Anthropology, first published in 1951, proved more rewarding. Not only does this sophisticated anthropologist cite Dewey, G.H. Mead and Morris, but also, for good measure, Mach, Russell and Whitehead, Wittgenstein, behaviorism, gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, and many other authors relevant for Malinowski's theory of meaning, as well as for the status of social anthropology among the sciences.

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There is a curious feature in Nadel's discussion: although he develops a mode of analysis similar to Malinowski's theory of institutions and contextual meaning, Malinowski's contributions are not specifically acknowledged as such. The references to Malinowski's works tend to be peripheral, idiosyncratic and mostly critical. Perhaps by 1951 the climate of anthropological opinion had begun to turn against Malinowski's functionalism, pragmatism and behaviorism. The natural science model of anthropology was beginning to be challenged on a wide front by Evans-Pritchard (1951), Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952), Redfield (1953), L6vi-Strauss (1953) among others. In this context, Firth's 1957 Festschrift appears as a defensive response which attempts to emphasize Malinowski's more humanistic and individualistic side as against his naturalistic and biological grounding of culture and human nature. Malinowski's war-time tract, published posthumously, Freedom and Civilization (1944), tried valiantly and persuasively to reconcile this conflict between science and human values. In this book Malinowski acknowledged and endorsed the views of Dewey and Russell on freedom, as well as of writers on the history and politics of freedom such as Shotwell, Walton Hamilton, Harold Laski and F. Schumann, among others. Books by several anthropologists — Robert Lowie, Audrey Richards, and others — are included in the bibliography, not for any direct contributions to the study of freedom. As far as I know . . . no anthropological contribution to freedom has yet been made. An article by Professor Franz Boas recently published cannot be considered in any way satisfactory (Malinowski 1944: vii).

After the second World War, in 1948, Malinowski's 1923 essay on "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages" was reprinted together with his essays on magic, science and religion; myth in primitive psychology; the spirits of the dead, and the analysis of war. These were selected and introduced by Robert Redfield. In his introduction Redfield emphasized the more humanistic side of Malinowski's work: Anthropological sicence, he is in effect telling us, is also an art. It is the art of seeing perceptively a human and social situation. It is the art of taking a warm interest in the particular while seeing in it the universal (Redfield 1948: ix).

Redfield himself was reconsidering the natural science model in anthropology and beginning to add explicit studies of history,

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civilizations, and symbolism and values to functional and causal analysis (Singer 1976; Redfield 1948, 1953, 1955, 1956, 1958, 1962, 1963).

8. Contextualism in historical perspective After Nadel's 1951 discussion of Malinowski in Foundations of Social Anthropology, the most important discussions of Malinowski's theory of language and meaning in the 1950s were the papers by J.R. Firth, the linguist, in "Ethnographic Analysis and Language with Reference to Malinowski's Views", and Leach's "The Epistemological Background to Malinowski's Empiricism". Both of these papers appeared in the volume Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Branislaw Malinowski (1957), edited by Raymond Firth, which consisted of contributions by former students of Malinowski. All of these papers have interesting things to say about Malinowski's anthropological contributions, but only the papers of J.R. Firth and Leach concentrate on the issues immediately relevant to his theory of language and meaning. A professional linguist and colleague of Malinowski at the University of London, J.R. Firth was especially well qualified to evaluate the linguistic contributions to ethnographic analysis. He tempers his appreciation of the value of those contributions with a criticism of Malinowski's lack of technical linguistic analysis, a criticism that has been repeated by other linguists (Berry 1965; Langendoen 1968). J.R. Firth's commentary includes a useful description of Malinowski's methods of textual translation and of how he correlated the verbal translations with the "contexts of situation" and "contexts of culture". Firth attaches particular importance to the "context of situation" concept, traces it to Wegener's situationstheorie (1885), and to the special attention that work pays to imperatives, interrogatives, demonstratives and pronouns, a feature that Malinowski found attractive in his "search for concepts likely to assist him in developing a technique for the elucidation of ethnographic data" (Firth 1957: 104-105). J.R. Firth also summarizes "the interior relations of the context of situation" with the following table: A. The Relevant Features of participants, persons and personalities (i.) The Verbal Action of the Participants

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(ii.) The Non-Verbal Action of the Participants B. The Relevant Object C. The Effect of the Verbal Action

Curiously, J.R. Firth has little to say about the connection between the contextual analysis of meaning and pragmatism. He does place Malinowski's emphasis on language as a mode of action in the tradition of British empiricism and utilitarianism, whose echoes he notes in the Vienna Circle and Wittgenstein ("The meaning of words lies in their use" [Wittgenstein 1953: 86; Firth 1957: 94]). J.R. Firth does say that the situational approach requires "a classification of types of function, in which Malinowski pioneered the way in his Supplement and in Coral Gardens and Their Magic'". But apart from a footnote to Coral Gardens, Vol. II, Part IV, Division I, pp. 52-62 and Part VI, Division V, pp. 236-237, Firth does not describe or discuss the classification of functions. The pages cited contain a very explicit statement of the distinction between "pragmatic speech" and "magical or sacred speech". Malinowski's description of this distinction is applied to our modern Western culture as well as to Trobriand culture and is usually formulated in behavioristic language. The following analysis, for example, of the verbal warning signals among villagers keeping watch over a sick person to ward off sorcerers is probably one of the most lucid and concrete explanations of his pragmatic theory of meaning: In all such cases the direct effect of the word, uttered as an imperative, as an environmental direction or as technical advice, is clear. The meaning of a single utterance, which in such cases is often reduced to one word, can be defined as the change produced by this sound in the behaviour of people. It is the manner in which a sound appropriately uttered is correlated with spatial and temporal elements and with human bodily movements which constitutes its meaning; and this is due to cultural responses produced by drill or "conditioning" or education. A word is the conditioning stimulus of human action and it becomes, as it were, a "grip" on things outside the reach of the speaker but within that of the hearers... (Malinowski 1935 [1965, II]: 59-60).

Malinowski's pragmatic definition of meaning implies another distinction, between "the context of situation" and "the context of reference", which cuts across the distinction between "magical speech" and "pragmatic speech". Since both kinds of speech can be subjected to both kinds of contextual analysis, there is a kind

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of ambiguity in the concept of "magical speech" which may be confusing. It may refer to "sacred speech" before contextual analysis when it may sound weird and unintelligible, or it may refer to "sacred speech" after it has been subjected to contextual analysis and has acquired pragmatic meaning and intelligibility. Unlike J.R. Firth and other linguists, Malinowski does not tabulate and enumerate the elements of a "context of situation" and a "context of reference", but makes the distinction in terms of what the given verbal utterance is about, or its subject matter (its context of reference or culture), and the social situation in which the utterance is made (its context of situation [Coral Gardens II: 18, 51-52]). Beyond this, a holistic and functional description becomes specific and particular to the concrete situation and the specific utterance, as in his analysis of Trobriand texts. This is, so to say, the nature of the contextual specification of meaning. Kluckhohn's description of Malinowski's method as one of "the well-documented anecdote set firmly in a ramified context" is fair enough, except for the connotation that there is available to anthropologists a superior decontextualized method, as in theoretical physics or pure mathematics. Leach's paper in the Firth volume concentrates on the epistemological background of Malinowski's empiricism and finds it not so much in British traditions as in William James's individualistic, anti-mechanistic pragmatism. In some ways, Leach's interpretation of Malinowski's functionalist and contextualist theory of meaning is itself contextualist (as is Gellner's interpretation). The context of situation, and of culture, in Britain around 1910 when Malinowski arrived, according to Leach, was a period when "James's philosophy had its maximum vogue" and the intellectual climate was being revolutionized by Einstein's relativity, Whitehead and Russell's symbolic logic, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Malinowski, like William James, was a rebel against the mechanistic implications o f late nineteenth century thought and . . . his 'functionalism', like James's 'pragmatism', was in aspect o f this revolt. (Leach in Firth

1957: 127)

The same could be said of Peirce, although Peirce did not share James's militant individualism and nominalism. Leach also said Malinowski was uninterested in symbolism and verbal expression, a finding that is contestable:

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Truth was 'pragmatic', objectively observable; it lay in what men did, not in what they said they did (Leach in Firth 1957: 135). Malinowski was grounded in William James (Leach 1957: 137).

Leach's imputation to Malinowski of a dichotomy between words and deeds reflects a prevailing separation between speech and action that was foreign to Malinowski and perhaps to most pragmatists. To detach the linguistic side of sacred and binding speech from its sociological and cultural context is to sterilize both linguistics and sociology (Coral Gardens II: 54-55). . . . in all communities certain words are accepted as partially creative acts . . . you utter a vow or you forge a signature and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or a prison (Coral Gardens II: 53).

Because the relevance of words for particular situations may vary, and may actually be abstracted from particular situations in formal, structural analysis, it does not follow that speech exists and develops independently of action. Peirce avoided such a nonsequitur in his pragmatic semiotics ·, Jakobson and Silverstein have restated the issue by distinguishing the "semantic-referential function" of language from "indexical" and other pragmatic functions, a distinction already implicit in Malinowski's "context of reference" and "context of situation" (Jakobson 1957; Silverstein 1972, 1975, 1976). A possible explanation for the failure of many anthropologists to appreciate Malinowski's contribution is suggested by a comment that Fortes makes in his 1957 essay. He wrote that "Malinowski's frame was not adapted to the study of kinship systems in their own right, as part of the total social structure" (Fortes in Firth 1957: 185). Combined with his scorn for "kinship algebra" and his biographical theory of kinship, Malinowski's work fell out of step with mainline social anthropology and the analysis of social structures and social systems that Radcliffe-Brown and his students pioneered. Although Leach dismissed Radcliffe-Brown as a "butterfly collector" of social systems in 1961 in contrast to L6vi-Strauss's inspired guessing at mathematical patterns, Leach was still a structuralfunctionalist in the 1957 essay (Parsons 1957; Firth and Schneider in Rivers 1968; Singer 1968a; Schneider 1984; Friedrich 1964, 1966 in 1979). 49

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My colleague, Paul Friedrich, a linguist and anthropologist, has cited Malinowski's 1923 Supplementary Essay and the 1935 Coral Gardens book in two of his papers (Friedrich 1964 and 1966 in [1979]). When 1 asked him how he happened to cite Malinowski at a time when he was no longer current or popular, Friedrich gave three answers: (1) "The great swarm of buzzwords surrounding the ethnography of speaking" (Hymes had published his paper in 1962): "While impressed by the real research going on under this rubric, I also heard vibrations that BM had 'done the job' ' very profoundly and long ago, so 1 went back and actually read lots of Coral Gardens". (2) The essay in Ogden and Richards was "basic in the anthropological semantics and ethnographic theory of the '60s, so I read the BM essay". (3) As a Slavist, Friedrich "always felt an affinity for BM . . . it has not been sufficiently recognized that he was a Polish Intellectual first and deepest, and not a British social scientist until later". Friedrich's appreciation of Malinowski in the 1960s was probably exceptional among linguistic anthropologists and linguists (cf., however, Sebeok note 47). In any case, it helps to locate the kind of transmission route through which Peircean semiotics was entering anthropology incognito. Friedrich's own debt to Peirce is acknowledged in the paper on "The Symbol and Its Relative NonArbitrariness" in which Peirce's classification of indexical, iconic, and symbolic signs is explained (Friedrich 1975 [1979]: 15-18). The concern of linguists with indexicality, especially as related to Jakobson (1957) on "shifters", is also noted in this paper. Friedrich's 1975 paper was presented in 1972 at the AAA meetings. Tambiah has reanalyzed Malinowski's theory of the magic power of words and of ritual by deploying a sophisticated knowledge of Trobriand, Zande, South and Southeast Asian ritual, and reinterpreting the relation of words to action in terms of J.L. Austin's classification of performatives. In his paper on "A Performative Approach to Ritual", he also has recourse to Peirce's classification of indexical, iconic and symbolic signs. Although aware of Malinowski's pragmatic theory of language and meaning, Tambiah was critical of its applications in Coral Gardens and preferred to formulate his own analysis with a little help from Austin and Peirce (Tambiah 1968, 1973, 1977, 1981, in Tambiah 1985). Tambiah's papers are valuable for the rich ethnographic details they discuss which are relevant for some general anthropological theories. In

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addition to the papers mentioned above, see especially his 1969 paper on animal classifications in Thailand and in France, a most interesting application of L6vi-Strauss' "postulate of homology" to two complex situations.

9. The semiology and/or semiotics of culture By the end of the 1950s some anthropologists had recognized that a combination of Malinowski-style functionalist ethnography with a pragmatic theory of meaning was one way to analyze cultural symbolism in anthropology. The indirect use of Peirce's theory of signs by Malinowski was not yet widely recognized, nor was the combination yet called "semiotic anthropology". An occasional use of Peircean semiotics by an anthropologist, as for example in Redfield's 1958 article on "Art and Icon" was hardly noticed, although it was a striking specific illustration of the approach Redfield had proposed in his Anthropology Today paper (1953) of how anthropology could add symbolic models of analysis to causal and functional analysis. By the early 1960s, anthropologists began to explore other theories of cultural symbolism. One of the most influential was Saussure's semiology, which he defined as "a study of the life of signs at the heart of social life" (Saussure 1915 [1966]). Lfevi-Strauss enrolled his structural anthropology under Saussure's banner in his Inaugural Lecture at the College de France in 1960. Claiming for anthropology "that domain of semiology which linguistics has not already claimed for its own", L6vi-Strauss suggested that anthropology study such sign systems as military signals, myths, oral and gestural signs of ritual, marriage rules, kinship systems, customary laws, economic exchange (Lfevi-Strauss 1976: 9-10). One recognizes in this enumeration the program for his mythologiques studies of the 1960s and 1970s as well as for the general discussions of structural anthropology and the "savage mind". This is not the place to elaborate on the voluminous commentaries on these studies. 1 do want to mention an important difference between Saussure's semiology and Peirce's semiotics which influenced Lfevi-Strauss's structural anthropology. The sign-relation in semiology is a dyadic relation of sign and signified, while in semiotics it is a triadic relation of sign, object and interpretant.

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When L6vi-Strauss applied semiological analysis to myths and rituals, he identified homologous structures of binary oppositions without identifying the particular subjects and objects opposed. A semiotic analysis makes possible the addition of particular subjects and objects to the analysis (Singer 1973 [1984b]; 1984a: 39-48; cf. Boon 1982: 128-137). Besides Saussure's semiology and Peirce's semiotics, anthropologists also turned to psychoanalytic and literary theories of signs and symbolism (See, e.g., Spiro 1979; Culler 1981; Obeysekere 1984, 1987; Fernandez 1974). The scope and power of L6vi-Strauss's program for a structural and semiological anthropology did not become apparent until its applications began to appear in French, and then in English, translation. One of the first of these was the little book on Totemism ([1963] 1962) soon followed by The Savage Mind ([ 1966] 1962), and Structural Anthropology I ([1970] 1964) and The Raw and the Cooked ([1970] 1964). The popular Tristes Tropiques (1958), written after the manner of an explorer's travel memoir, had already attracted wide attention and quickly became a stimulating text to teach. But it was the books that appeared in the early sixties that established "structuralism" as a serious contender with Malinowski's "functionalism", Radcliffe-Brown's "structural-functionalism", and the Benedict-Kroeber "configurationism" for a place as the dominant theory of culture. And of these books, the shortest and the most challenging was Totemism. Tackling an old-standing problem with selected concrete examples and witty quips ("natural species are chosen as totems not because 'they are good to eat', but because 'they are good to think' "), Totemism persuasively argued for a structural analysis based on ä "postulate of homology" between two systems of differences, natural and cultural. L6vi-Strauss's additional claim that RadcliffeBrown's 1951 second lecture on totemism also employed a "genuine" structuralist analysis, perhaps derived from structural anthropology, aroused my personal curiosity and sent me looking for a neglected source of structuralism in Russell and Whitehead (Singer 1973 [1984b]). L6vi-Strauss's apparent deployment of Saussure's structural linguistics and "semiology" gave his analysis of the "totemic illusion" an irresistible appeal. The contrast between "good to eat" and "good to think" was not for L6vi-Strauss merely a clever bit of phrase-making. In the

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book on Totemism and in The Savage Mind he argued that what made totems good to think was their relations of similarity and difference, not their positive qualities. In fact, he generalized the process of comparison involved into "a postulate of homology". Eagle Hawk is to Crow as the Eagle Hawk moiety is to the Crow moiety. This postulate expressed a powerful tool for structural analysis, for it could be applied to marriage rules as well as to myths and rituals, and to all sorts of other comparisons of similarities and differences. The "postulate of homology" was soon recognized as a modern form of comparing proportions and of reasoning by analogy: A is to Β as C is to D (Lloyd 1966). By interpreting his postulate as an application of Saussure's structural linguistics L6vi-Strauss placed an unnecessary restriction on its generality: the terms compared and related, he said, were nothing positive in themselves; they existed only by their differences, their differential relations. He even cited the testimony of a mathematician to the effect that relational thinking was characteristic of mathematics (Levi-Strauss 1953: 528). Curiously, Lfevi-Strauss heard Jakobson's 1942-1943 lectures in New York City in which Saussure's structural linguistics was lucidly explained, with one important critical caution — that the negative definition of phonemes which constituted them only by their relational differences did not necessarily imply that other kinds of entities, linguistic and non-linguistic, were similarly constituted (Jakobson 1978: 65-67). When L6vi-Strauss recognized a genuine structural analysis in Radcliffe-Brown's second lecture on totemism, the recognition may have been suggested by Radcliffe-Brown's formulation of the Australian idea of "opposition": The Australian idea of what is here called "opposition" is a particular application of that association by contrariety that is a universal feature of human thinking, so that we think by pairs of contraries, upwards and downwards, strong and weak, black and white. But the Australian conception of "opposition" combines the idea of a pair of contraries with that of a pair of opponents. In the tales about Eagle Hawk and Crow the two birds are opponents in the sense of being antagonists. They are also contraries by reason of their difference of character, Eagle Hawk the hunter, Crow the thief. . . . After a lengthy comparative study I think I am fully justified in stating a general law, that wherever, in Australia, Melanesia or America, there exists a social structure of exogamous moieties, the moieties are thought of as being in a relation of what is here called "opposition". (Radcliffe-Brown 1951 [ 1 9 5 8 ] : 118; Singer 1984b: 37-46)

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Dual opposition bears a striking resemblance to the postulate of homology, especially when Radcliffe-Brown calls attention to its widespread distribution, and even aligns it with the philosophy of Heraclitus and of Yin and Yang. There is one important difference between "dual opposition" and "the postulate of homology" "dual opposition" does not imply that only the relations of "contraries" and "antagonists" exist, that there are no positive terms. In this respect, Radcliffe-Brown's structuralism has more in common with Russell and Whitehead's relational structures than with Saussure's structural linguistics (cf. Singer 1984b). By not restricting structural analysis to the model of phonemic analysis, we are free to add Russell's "egocentric particulars" and Peircean indexical and iconic signs, the study of la parole to the study of la langue, pragmatics to syntactics and semantics (Greenberg 1948). Thomas Sebeok, who also listened to Jakobson's lectures in New York City in the early 1940s, seems to have taken the reservations about Saussure more seriously than L6vi-Strauss. While always appreciative of Saussure's structural linguistics, Sebeok followed Jakobson's and Morris's revival of Peirce's general theory of signs, or semiotics, as an organon for the human sciences, including linguistics, the field in which he was trained. Jakobson's 1957 article on "Shifters" and the Russian verb, was probably one of the first by a linguist to use Peirce's semiotics as an alternative to Saussure's semiology. Acknowledging his source in Peirce's classification of indexical, iconic and symbolic signs, especially as interpreted by Burks' 1949 article, Jakobson introduced the notion of an indexical symbol, an idea and designation that was to become prominent in the branch of semiotics called pragmatics (See Singer 1984a: 21-26). In 1962, Sebeok was one of the organizers of a conference of linguists, psychologists, anthropologists and philosophers on paralinguistics and kinesics at which Margaret Mead made her now famous definition of "semiotics" as the study of "all patterned communication in all modalities". This usage caught on and was spread through the title of the conference proceedings as well as through the series Approaches to Semiotics which Sebeok organized and edited. Thus, although "semiology" and "semiotics" were sometimes used interchangeably by Greimas and Kristeva, e.g., the use of "semiotics" by Jakobson, Sebeok, Margaret Mead and Eco tended to associate it with Peirce's theory of signs rather than

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with Saussure's "semiology" (cf. Sebeok 1974 [1976]; Sebeok, T.A., A.S. Hayes, M.C. Bateson, eds. (1964). In 1976, at a public lecture Sebeok invited me to present in Bloomington for a conference on semiotics, I contrasted sharply the differences between a semiology of culture and a semiotics of culture (Singer 1978). This was my first public plea for a "semiotic anthropology" and was soon followed by the other lectures and articles that were published in my book in 1984 as Man's Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology (cf. UmikerSebeok 1977). By the 1960s scholars interested in semiotic studies of culture, folklore and literature were organized in the Soviet Union, Poland, Italy and several other countries. An International Association for Semiotic Studies was organized in 1969 and publishes the journal Semiotica whose editor is Thomas A. Sebeok. Semiotic Society of America was founded in 1976 and publishes the American Journal of Semiotics (see Sebeok 1976 for a brief history of these organizations). The development of semiological and semiotic theories of culture in the 1960s undercuts the conventional separation of social anthropology, chiefly British usage, and cultural anthropology, chiefly French, German and American usage. Lfevi-Strauss's recognition of "genuine structuralism" in Radcliffe-Brown's second lecture on Totemism was a dramatic expression of the new detente between the cult urologists and the sociologists. In fact, Kroeber and Parsons had already announced a non-aggression pact between "Culture" and "Society" in 1958, and Redfield had defined Culture, Society, and Community as complementary concepts in 1941, and elaborated the implications in 1955. By explicitly restricting the cultural concept to systems of signs and symbols, semiological and semiotic anthropology seemed to become sciences of the "superstructure" and to delegate material cutlure, economics, ecology, geopolitics, and social relations to the "infrastructure". The introduction of Marx's distinction at this point has generated much unnecessary polemics, for the important issue is not whether L6vi-Strauss's structural anthropology (or Radcliffe-Brown's structural-functionalism, or Malinowski's functionalism, or Kroeber's configurationism) includes the "infrastructures" of modes of subsistence and production, technology, ecology and geography within their respective theories. They all do, almost by definition of their

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holistic functionalisms. The problematic question is whether their theories also include an account of cultural symbolism whose relations to the "infrastructure" and to the real subjects and objects of the signs are pragmatically meaningful, if not always empirically falsifiable. This issue has created a new agenda for intercultural and interdisciplinary research and discussion in anthropology and related fields. Such research is bound to contribute to the decline in the use of positivistic natural science models in the social sciences and the humanities, whether or not it leads to a general adoption of Peirce's general theory of signs. 50

10. Is there a Chicago dogma that cultures are systems of symbols and meanings? It has taken anthropologists a good many years to catch up with Malinowski's contributions to the anthropology of freedom and warfare. Even Firth's 1957 Festschrift, Man and Culture, contains only a few incidental references to " f r e e d o m " and "warfare". Firth, however, has made some amends for the earlier underestimation of Malinonwski's contributions to an ethnography and theory of speaking. In the book Symbols: Public and Private, Firth places those contributions in the historical perspective of anthropology and related disciplines. While conceding some of the criticism by linguists such as J.R. Firth (1957) and Berry (1935 [1965]), he corrects many misinterpretations of Malinowski's synchronic functionalism. More positively, he links Malinowski's ethnographic theory of language to Peirce's theory of signs, which is also briefly summarized. In the introduction to his book on Symbols,

Firth wrote:

When I was asked to become Sara H. Schaffner Lecturer at the University of Chicago for the Fall Quarter of 1970, I was stimulated to expand those themes in the direction of specific studies of symbolism, which seemed appropriate in view of the very lively interest in symbolism in the Department of Anthropology there.

This is not mentioned to suggest that Chicago influenced Firth's views on symbolism, or on Malinowski, although he acknowledges the stimulus from some Chicago colleagues while preparing his

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book. Leach has referred to "the Chicago dogma" that cultures are systems of symbols and meanings (Leach 1985: 154-156). If this epithet implies the existence of a dogmatic consensus, restricted to Chicago, one needs only to compare and contrast Firth's eclectic theory of symbolism with the varied views represented in the department in 1970 to falsify that implication. The definition of culture as a system of symbols and meanings has usually been attributed to David Schneider, and his "cultural account" of American kinship (Schneider 1968, 1984). Schneider himself has cited Talcott Parsons (1951) as his source for the symbolic definition of culture (Schneider 1977). In a longer historical perspective, the definition of culture in terms of symbolic systems represents a contraction and pluralization of Tylor's famous global definition: Culture or civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society, (cf. Stocking 1987: 299-314)

Tylor's inclusive definition of "culture" competed with an equally inclusive definition of "society" deriving from Comte and Spencer. The rivarly between culturological and sociological concepts did not give way to a complementarity of social and cultural systems until the late thirties and early fourties. A public truce was announced in 1958 by the Kroeber and Parsons joint article on "The Concept of Culture and Social System". The price for peace was a bifurcation of Tylor's "culture" into a plurality of "symbol systems" and "social systems", with an occasional addition, as in Parsons case, of "personality systems". (See Radcliffe-Brown 1937 [ 1951 ] ; Redfield 1941, 1955a; Parsons 1951, 1970; Singer 1968, 1984a, 1984b.) Schneider, Geertz, and Fallers brought the Parsonian scheme of the three relatively independent systems to Chicago about 1960 where it fitted in with the earlier Radcliffe-Brown versions formulated by Redfield, Eggan, Tax and Warner. Another former Parsons student, James Peacock, recalls that the label "symbolic anthropology" originated in 1965 at Princeton when he and several colleagues "embarked on the task of launching a new program of anthropological studies" which emphasized "the symbolic aspects of behavior" (Peacock 1975: n3).

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Schneider's definition of culture as a system of symbols and meanings, if it is a dogma, is as much a Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, and Ann Arbor dogma as a Chicago dogma. And at Chicago it expressed an interest in cultural symbolism shared by many members of the Anthropology Department. The kernel of truth in Leach's slogan, "the Chicago dogma", is that in 1970, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was an unusual convergence of interest on the theory of cultural symbolism. But the members of the department who shared this interest did not share a common background of professional training, of fieldwork, or of theoretical commitment. One common factor was the provocative stimulus that originated in Paris in the form of L6vi-Strauss's structural anthropology. This challenged anthropologists, and nonanthropologists, to convert to "structuralism" and Saussurean "semiology", or to find an alternative theory of cultural symbolism; just as L6vi-Strauss's Totemism book stimulated me to look for a neglected source of structuralism. An unexpected byproduct of the research and writing for my 1973 paper on "A Neglected Source of Structuralism" was the realization that none of the major anthropological schools had developed a theory of cultural symbolism from their own premisses. To the extent that they dealt with the problem, they appealed to psychoanalysis, or structural linguistics, or literary, or logicalphilosophical theories of symbolism. It then occurred to me to propose that Peirce's general theory of signs be applied to some of the problems of cultural symbolism. Accordingly, I started to include in my Theory of Culture course around 1974 a section on Peirce's triadic semiotics which 1 contrasted ideal-typically with Saussure's dyadic semiology. When Thomas Sebeok invited me in 1976 to a Bloomington conference on the teaching of semiotics, I read a paper then titled "Culture Theory Tilts to Semtiotics". After the favorable reception of the paper, its title was changed to "For a Semiotic Anthropology", which had been the subtitle of the paper's last section. On the recommendation of Sebeok, I also signed a contract with Indiana University Press for a book to be called Man's Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology. I had started to use the designation "semiotic anthropology" around 1974 to honor Peirce and his "ethics of terminology" and to distinguish it from "symbolic anthropology", "structural anthropology", and several other theories of cultural symbolism. Sebeok published

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the Bloomington paper in 1978 in his book Sight, Sound and Sense (1978). Following in fairly quick succession I presented the paper on "Signs of the Self" as the American Anthropological Association's Distinguished Lecture in 1978 (published in 1980), the paper on "Emblems of Identity" to a symposium on Symbols in Anthropology organized by Professor Jacques Maquet in 1980 (published in 1982) at UCLA, and the other papers which were brought together in Man's Glassy Essence and published in 1984. All this writing on semiotic anthropology did not come as a bolt from the blue. As early as 1951, when Robert Redfield invited me to collaborate on his project to develop methods for comparing living civilizations, I suggested that symbolic models of analysis be added to the causal and functional models then prevailing in anthropology (Redfield 1953). Redfield's expansion of his theory of a folk-urban continuum into a folk-civilization continuum framed my explorations in India, and generated the concept of "cultural performances" in Madras (Redfield 1956; Singer 1955, 1959 ed., 1964a, 1972a, 1976). The fact that my 1936 Master's thesis at the University of Texas was a sympathetic and historical study of "George Herbert Mead's Social Behavioristic Theory of Mind" based in part on Peirce's pragmatic and anti-Cartesian papers, and my Ph.D. dissertation was a historical study of "Formal Method in Mathematical Logic" (1940), written under the influence of Rudolf Carnap, Charles Morris and Bertrand Russell, predisposed me to look favorably on the vision of a general Science of Symbolism projected in Ogden and Richards's The Meaning of Meaning. In fact, reading the Ogden and Richards book and listening to three professors in Austin who had been students of Mead in Chicago persuaded me to leave social psychology and Austin for philosophy of science and Chicago. Given this prehistory, the move to a semiotic anthropology may not seem so bold in retrospect. Independently of my efforts to apply Peirce's semiotics to some anthropological problems of cultural symbolism, my colleague Michael Silverstein was introducing Peirce into linguistic anthropology. Trained at Harvard under Roman Jakobson, Silverstein came to the University of Chicago in 1970. In 1975 he published a short article on "Jakobsonian Semiotic and Social Anthropology", in French, in the journal L'Arc, which devoted an entire issue to Jakobson (60: 45-49). In his article, Silverstein pointed out the significance of Jakobson's application of a Peircean semiotics for

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social anthropology. In particular, he argued that Jakobson's functional analysis of language as a pragmatic system was superior to Saussure's analysis, which was restricted to the semantic-referential function. A Peircean semiotics added the indexical and other functions as well. In a longer article presented for a conference in 1974 and published in 1976, Silverstein spelled out in detail how the concept of "Shifters" developed by Jakobson in 1957 in an article on Russian verbs could be applied to linguistic categories in cultural anthropology. These 1957 and 1976 articles established an important channel for transmitting Peirce's semiotics into linguistic anthropology, at Chicago and wherever Silverstein and his students lectured or taught. A distinctive feature of this transmission was the interpretation of the grammatical category of "shifters" as combining Peirce's indices and symbols. Jakobson called them indexical symbols (Jakobson 1957 [1971]: 131-133). Later Jakobson added symbolic icons for the mixed genre of Peirce's iconic and symbolic signs (Jakobson 1971: 702). The fruitful Jakobsonian interpretation of "shifters" has been applied by Jakobson to Russian verbs (1957), by Silverstein to Australian and American aboriginal languages and to English pronominal usage, by Urban to English pronouns (1986, 1987, 1988), by Errington to Javanese (1988), and by Hanks to Yucatan Maya (1989). One result of the semiotically oriented studies has been a clarification of Peirce's indexical signs and their relations to the deictic terms of time, place and person. Another unexpected result has been the application of Peirce's classification of indexical, iconic and symbolic signs in the study of history. A student of Silverstein's, Richard Parmentier, who did his doctoral research in Western Micronesia, has published a book, The Sacred Remains: Myth, History and Polity in Belau (1987), in which he has interpreted native arrangements of sacred stones and other material objects in terms of Peirce's concept of diagrammatic icons. He quotes Peirce's concise summary of the relation of indexical, iconic and symbolic signs to time perspectives: Thus the mode of being of a symbol is different from that of the icon and from that of the index. An icon has such being as belongs to past experience. It exists only as an image in the mind. An index has the being of present experience. The being of a symbol consists in the real fact that something surely will be experienced if certain conditions be satisfied. (Peirce CP 4: 447; Parmentier 1987: 108)

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Parmentier is aware that the application of Peirce's correlation between kinds of signs and past, present and future, does not provide an automatic discovery procedure. Parmentier's studies and the discussion above of Malinowski's synchronic functionalism suggest that the boundaries between an "ethnographic present", an "ethnographic past", and an "ethnographic future" may also be vague and blurred, permeable and changing. Differences in culture, education, religion, cosmology, social class, gender, age, family background, etc., may change the perception of time and its divisions (Cohn 1987, Geertz 1966; Silverstein 1979, 1984, 1985; Sahlins 1985; Singer 1987a, 1988; Srinivas 1976; the iconic diagrams of Belau social relations are summarized and diagrammed by Parmentier on pages 109-113 of his book). Radcliffe-Brown, whose structural-functionalism is usually regarded as slighting culture, history and symbolism, nevertheless included cosmology and symbolic analysis in his Chicago (19311937) courses and lectures on Australian cosmology, primitive religion, and a natural science of society (see his A Natural Science of Society [Radcliffe-Brown 1937 (1957)], and the Festschrift volume edited by Fred Eggan [1937 (1955)]; also Tax in Eggan [1955], and Tax's lecture notes on Radcliffe-Brown's courses [in Special Collections, Regenstein Library]; my papers on "Culture" [1968] and on a "Neglected Source of Structuralism" [1973 (1984b)] also include some historical materials about Radcliffe-Brown). When I analyzed the Radha-Krishna Bhajans in Madras City in 1954-55 and 1960-61 as "cultural performances", I had not yet applied Peirce's semiotics. That step came when I wrote the paper on "The Semiotics of Indian Identity" in 1982. It had been suggested by the "Yankee City" observations (Singer 1976 [1987a]; cf. 1966 [1968]: 137-138 and 1984a: 185-188). In the Madras studies and in the "Yankee City" studies, historical and textual materials were included with the contemporary observations. In fact, the Radha-Krishna Bhajans in Madras City and the Massachusetts Bay Tercentenary in "Yankee City" were cultural performances of texts in context, designed by professional and amateur local historians and reenacted by the local actors, (cf. Marriott 1966 in Singer 1966 [1968]) The relation of "symbolic interactionism" in its Meadian version to Peirce's sign-relation or "semiosis" is a bit of a puzzle (cf. Lewis and Smith 1980). So far as both theories emphasize significant

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communication and role-taking in social relations and in the formation of perceiving, thinking, and feeling selves, they are in agreement. But Peirce's theory is often interpreted as restricted to abstract scientific and intellectual concepts, while Mead, James, and Dewey are usually considered t o be more interested in the analysis of colloquial language and human affairs. This difference is partly true. At least Peirce's knowledge and use of symbolic logic, mathematics, chemistry and physics exceeded anything in the writings of the other pragmatists. Yet a major aim of Peirce's "pragmaticism" and "semiotics" was to make the esoteric language of science intelligible in terms of practical activity and colloquial communication, and to nonscientists. That is why his conception of logic as a form of inquiry that practices the laboratory habit of mind is as relevant today for a critical analysis of nuclear policy or for an ethnography of speaking as it was in the 1870s or the 1920s. (Cf. Singer, ed. 1988). The contemporary relevance of Peirce's pragmatism and semiotics to a wide range of problems does not by itself assure effective and successful application. That will depend on collateral observation and information about the objects of the signs, and on meeting Peirce's conditions for achieving communication between utterers and interpreters of signs. 51

11. A trial summary and conclusion If the universe is perfused with signs, as Peirce claimed, is the application of semiotic analysis to any field simply a matter of inductive and deductive analysis of any particular cluster of signs? Peirce thought his own efforts were only a very modest beginning. He described himself as a backwoodsman clearing away some of the underbrush. Semiotic anthropology too, cannot make more ambitious claims for the application of Peircean semiotics to cultural symbolism. Whether it proceeds inductively or deductively, or combines b o t h modes of inference to make "abductive" inferences about the life of signs in different cultures, procedures and results are still at a rudimentary stage of development. If Dewey and Morris could disagree so sharply on whether Peirce's semiotics recognized "interpreters" as well as "interpretants", then dogmatism about these and other questions would be very unbecoming. Peirce's

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fallibilism and belief in the self-corrective capacities of science would seem to be a reasonable epistemological stance. In this spirit, I would like to add some concluding observations. Malinowski's pragmatic and contextual theory of meaning does not show any direct and explicit knowledge of Peirce's semiotics. Indirectly, it seems to have absorbed some features of Peirce's theory of meaning from Ogden and Richards, and from American pragmatists and behaviorists such as Dewey, Mead, De Laguna, probably James, and others. The application of these insights to the analysis of Trobriand and "primitive" speech was largely Malinowski's contribution to an ethnography of speaking. The criticisms by linguists and linguistic anthropologists have not so much invalidated Malinowski's contribution, as they have clarified the limits of its validity, and codified the analysis of contexts of situation and of reference. The empirical studies of the pragmatics of indexical and deictic, iconic and symbolic signs in different languages are both a tribute to Malinowski's pioneering Trobriand studies and to the logicians and linguists who fashioned pragmatics, semantics, and syntactics as different branches of a general theory of signs. An objection sometimes urged against applying Peirce's theory of signs to anthropology and other empirical fields is that it is too formal and decontextualized. Certainly his contributions to logic and mathematics, e.g., the papers on the algebra of relatives, exhibit such features. There is also evidence that he participated in the early twentieth century movement toward formalization of mathematics and logic (Singer 1984a: 121-131, 1989: 286 n2). More importantly, he pioneered a semiotic interpretation of logic and mathematics as sign systems, by analyzing deductive and inductive inferences as relations of signs. This device in effect allowed him to incorporate all of logic and mathematics within semiotics. Beyond this, he regarded mathematical and logical diagrams and arrays as iconic signs, the observation and manipulation of which could lead to the discovery and demonstration of new truths. In this sense, both mathematics and logic were observational sciences for Peirce (Singer 1984a: 21-31, 1989: 239 ;cf. Esposito 1980: 149, 229). Can such a semiotic interpretation of mathematics and logic find a place for Malinowski's contextual specification of meaning? Peirce's semiotics provides at least three ways to bring in contextual

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meaning and historical prespectives. First, indexical signs by definition are in touch with their objects which are unique individuals. As in Peirce's interpretation of the personal pronoun "I" — this is an indexical sign which refers to the person who utters "1" in the present instance of discourse (Burks 1948-1949; Benveniste 1971: 218). Second, and more generally, Peirce postulated that the interpretation of a sign presupposed "collateral observation" or acquaintance with its object. Such acquaintance not only included a knowledge of other signs (James's "knowledge by description"), but also included some form of direct perception and experience of the object ("knowledge by acquaintance"). Closely connected with this second provision is a third: Peirce formulated the pragmatic maxim in such a way that it turns semiotics into a pragmatic semiotic, as Morris pointed out (Morris 1970: 19-20, 24). The consequence of making the interpretants of a signs depend on its pragmatic meaning brings the meaning of intellectual concepts into a direct connection with action and experience. Peirce pointed out that this connection includes not only the particular concrete effects on a person produced by a sign, but also the habits of action which the given sign will tend to produce under given conditions and motives (the final interpretant). The most perfect account of a concept that words can convey will consist in a description of the habit which that concept is calculated to produce. But how otherwise can a habit be described than by a description of the kind of action to which it gives rise, with the specification of the conditions and of the motive (Peirce CP 5: 491; Morris 1970: 24; Singer 1984: 157-160).

If a definition of the pragmatic meaning of a sign includes its physically contiguous objects, with which the sign user has a previous direct acquaintance, as well as the sign's particular direct effects on a person, and the person's conceivable habits of action it would tend to produce under particular conditions and motives, then we are well on the way to specifying the contextual meaning of the sign. A pragmatic semiotic analysis may not include all the components of Malinowski's "context of situation" and "context of reference". It does not, e.g., include the immediate grammatical context or the etymologies of particular words, but it does cover some of the essential elements in Malinowski's conception of "pragmatic meaning". The pragmatic semiotic analysis of meaning

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also includes Malinowski's specific sociological and ritual contexts and modes of recitation. These, however, are not so much components of a general conception of "pragmatic meaning" as they are additional ethnographic descriptions of particular ceremonies and rituals observed at a particular place and time. Such descriptions are never instantaneous; they all take time to produce and always lag behind the "original" experience. Nothing in Peirce's pragmatic semiotics precludes the addition of such empirical specifications. In fact, his conception of a personal identity as an "outreaching identity", which includes other individuals in a person's "circle of society" producing "a sort of loosely compacted person", provides for a wide range of possible rituals and ceremonies for anthropologists to observe, describe and interpret (cf. Singer 1984a: 63-64). Peirce's semiotic is a pragmatic semiotic, quite at home in a world of objects, events and people, not a "mere" symbolic or linguistic solipsism in search of reality (Singer 1984a: 29).

My paper, "Pronouns, Persons and the Semiotic Self' (Singer 1989) illustrates how Peirce's triad of the pronouns "I, it and thou" can be analyzed as the iconic diagram of a loosely compacted person which is designated by a cluster of indexical, iconic and symbolic signs. The "loosely compacted person" in this case consists of three subjects in unspecified interpersonal relations. Interpreters of the diagram are free to specify the relations in grammatical, logical, economic, social, theological and other terms, and thus to construct meaningful sentences about them. One possible interpretation of the diagram is the sign relation itself as a triadic relation of sign, object, and interpretant. Another interpretation, or better, specification of the relation, would be the nuclear family relation of mother, father and son. As Fisch noted, this family interpretation constitutes a nuclear relation of semiosis. Peirce once wrote, "a sign mediates between its object and its meaning . . . object the father, sign the mother of meaning". Fisch commented, "he might have added, 'of the son, the interpretant' " (Fisch in Peirce, 1982: xxxii; Singer 1986: 360-361; 1989: 265-274 in Lee and Urban 1989). The interpretation of "I, it and t h o u " as an iconic diagram of a loosely compacted person, or of a semiotic self, removes much of the mysticism from Peirce's semiotics of signification and of communication. The pronominal cluster is not a sentence but can

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be made into a series of sentences by interpretations that specify the triadic relations between the persons designated by the pronouns, e.g., "I gave it to you", etc. The first and second person pronouns remain indexical signs which denote the speaker who says " I " in the present instance of discourse and who says " y o u " to the addressee. In a strict sense, the pronoun " i t " is not an indexical sign since it does not refer to a person or object in the present instance of discourse, but to or about an absent person or object. Perhaps that is the reason Benveniste called the third person a "non-person". The possibility of interpreting the iconic diagram "I, it and t h o u " as a loosely compacted person consisting of several individuals, in English, French, and other languages, is suggested by the use of the editorial and official " w e " and " I " , or, in French, " n o u s " and "je". These usages may be vague, but they are not simply multiplications of the singular first person pronoun. As Peirce, James, Royce, Cooley, Mead and Schutz all observed, such usages suggest that a "we-consciousness" may exist alongside of, or prior to, an "I-consciousness". "We think (cogitamos), therefore we are". That the personality structure of the individual may incorporate some form of group consciousness is implied by Freud's concept of the "superego", Mead's "taking the role of the generalized other", and similar social-psychological theories. In fact, there is a striking parallel between Peirce's "I, it and t h o u " and the Freud-Groddeck "ego, id and superego", a parallel that may in part be explained by a common source in Schiller's three impulses Spieltrieb, Stofftrieb, and Formtrieb. There is a partial parallel between the Peirce-Freud conception of the self and the advaitin conception, especially if the Sanskrit tat twam asi is translated as "you are it" or "I am it" (cf. Heiman 1964; van Buitenen 1981). There is also a contrast between the Judeo-Christian conception of the self which sees it as a "seething inner cauldron" which gradually develops an "I-we" consciousness (Erikson 1981) and an advaitin conception which sees the self in everything and everything in the self (Nehru 1946; Ramanujan 1981; Singer 1989: 268-275; Roland 1988; cf. Sebeok in Eco and Sebeok 1 9 8 3 ) . " Pronominal iconic diagrams provide a useful method for applying Peirce's theory of signs to a semiotics of personal and social identity. Incidentally, they also provide a possible interpretation of how L6viStrauss's suggestion of including the exchange of words, women,

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and goods and services in a unified structure of communication can be realized with limited linguistic means (See Singer 1989). There are, of course, other ways to apply Peirce's theory of signs to an analysis of personal and social identity (Daniel 1984; Gold 1988, 1989; Lee and Urban 1989; Mertz and Parmentier 1985) and there are also non-semiotic theories — some ethnopsychological (Marriott 1966, 1989), some psychoanalytic (Roland 1988), and some political and representational (Cohn 1989; Comaroff 1985). The present paper has touched on the semiotics of personal and social identity only in the broader context of tracking the emergence of semiotic anthropology from an encounter between Peirce and Malinowski in 1923 in Ogden and Richards's book, The Meaning of Meaning. Malinowski may well have started to speak semiotic prose in his Supplementary Essay, "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages", unaware that he was speaking a language fashioned by Charles Peirce and modified by Ogden and Richards for a science of symbolism.

June 28,1989

Notes

1. An earlier version of the paper "Search for a Great Tradition in Cultural Performances" was published in the Far Eastern Quarterly vol. 15, 1955: under the title "The Culture Pattern of Indian Civlization". The present version is based on the version published in my book When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization, Praeger, 1972, and now available in a paperback edition, University of Chicago Press, 1980, copyright Milton Singer. This paper contains the observations of my first trip to Madras in 1954-1955 and the first formulation of the "cultural performance" concept. 2. Robert Redfield, "The Social Organization of Tradition", FEO 15, No. 1 (November, 1955): 13-21. 3. Robert Redfield and Milton Singer, "The Cultural role of cities", EDCC 3, No. 1 (October, 1954): esp. 64-73. 4. Srinivas, 1982. 5. McKim Marriott, "Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization", in Marriott, ed., 1955. 6. Redfield, "Social Organization of Tradition". 7. Oscar Lewis, "Peasant Culture in India and Mexico: A Comparative Analysis", in Marriott 1955. 8. An ancient manual on the classical dance beautifully expresses this organic interrelationship of different media: "The song should be sustained in the throat; its meaning must be shown by the hands; the mood (bhäva) must be shown by the glances; time (täla) is marked by the feet. For wherever the hand moves, there the glances follow; where the glances go, the mind follows; where the mind goes, the mood follows; where the mood goes, there is the flavour (rasa)" {The Mirror of Gesture: Being the Abhinaya Darpanaof Nandikesvara, trans, by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Duggirala Gopalakrishnayya, New York: E. Weyhe, 1936: p. 35). 9. Redfield, "Social Organization of Tradition", 1955. 10. The paper "Yankee City in Renaissance" was written for the symposium "Can American Historic Cultures Survive and Revitalize?" held at the American Anthropological Association Meetings, November 21, 1976 in Washington, D.C. A summary of the paper was made available on request. The symposium included the following papers and discussants: Progress and Conservatism among the Hopi — Fred Eggan The Dynamics of Pueblo Survival — Alfonso Ortiz The Yaqui — A Persistent Identity System — Edward H. Spicer Aftermath of the Hispanic Frontier — Frances Swadesh Yankee City in Renaissance — Milton Singer

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Notes The Amish - A Dialogue with Technology and Progress - J.A. Hostetler Discussants: Clifton Kroeber, John W. Bennett

My paper was published in somewhat abridged form in Hockings (ed.), Mouton de Gruyter, 1987. 11. A major portion of this paper together with 32 pages of illustrations, was presented to a workshop on "Meanings of the City" held October 25-27, 1984 at Wingspread in Southern Wisconsin. The workshop was organized by Professor Paul Wheatley of the University of Chicago and was sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences with support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Center for Psychosocial Studies (Chicago), and the Johnson Foundation. 1 am indebted to Paul Wheatley for the opportunity to participate in the workshop and to the participants for their comments on my paper. After the workshop, the following scholars kindly read the paper and gave me some helpful comments on it: Michael M. Ames, Bernard S. Cohn, Murray Leaf, McKim Marriott, James Nye, Sam Parker, David Pingree, Gregory Possehl, and Frits Staal. The Postscript, Summary and Conclusion, and Epilogue were drafted after the Wingspread Conference, between 1984 and 1986, partly in response to comments on the paper made by several readers. The paper is now published for the first time. 12. A recent description of the Wittgenstein house by the writer Gary Indiana in Art in America highlights the close relation between Wittgenstein's philosophy and his architecture. It's as if Wittengenstein invented architecture from scratch as a game, limiting the possible moves to certain minimal criteria for urban, residential, upper-class housing. The building's structural logic imposes an austere harmony of materials on the eye at every point. It's like walking into a blueprint. . . . The spirit of gemometry seems the only plausible inhabitant. . . . Semper's three requisites of formal beauty — symmetry, proportion and direction — comprise the total contents of the building. (Indiana 1985: 126) Indiana notes some differences from the modern architecture of LeCorbusier and Gropius, but accents the similarities with that of Adolf Loos: Wittgenstein's architecture is not just rigorously logical . . . but logically clear. As Loos untiringly demonstrated, a thing that makes sense to the person who uses it will be delightedly used however new the form. (Indiana 1985: 128) The striking resemblances between the Wittgenstein house and Loos' Villa Karma of 1906 and Scheu House of 1912 may have been influenced by Wittgenstein's writings rather than vice versa, in Indiana's opinion, for "Wittgenstein treated architecture as a tabula rasa - just as he treated philosophy" (Indiana 1985: 129). Wittgenstein's own comment on his house does not deny the connection

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with his early philosophy but emphasizes the more contextual outlook of the later Investigations. . . . the house I built for Gretl is the product of a decidely sensitive ear and good manners, an expression of great understanding (of a culture, etc.). But primordial life, wild life striving to erupt into the open — that is lacking. And so you could say it isn't healthy. (Quoted in Indiana 1985: 130; italics in original) 13. I was aware of the traditional identification of the seven "sacred cities" and was tempted to study one of them as an "orthogenetic center". My early meeting on my arrival in India in 1954 with Dr. V. Raghavan, the Madras Sanskritist, soon convinced me that Madras city would be a better choice. M.N. Srinivas' Coorg monograph with its concepts of an all-India "Sanskritic Hinduism" and of the process of "sanskritization", which he elaborated in a 1954 paper on "Sanskritization and Westernization" also influenced my choice (the papers by Raghavan and Srinivas, which were written for a seminar on "Interdisciplinary Indian Studies" in 1954 at the Deccan Postgraduate College, were later published in the Far Eastern Quarterly, 1956). 14. In a recent study of the Minakshi Temple priests, Fuller concludes that the priests "do not accept that the royal role of protection has been inherited by any of the institutions or agencies of the modern government: not the government itself, nor its courts, nor the HRCE Department, nor the latter's agency in the Temple, the administration" (Fuller 1984: 134). In spite of the fact that the members of the government and of the HRCE department believe that they are the temples' protectors and that increased administrative and ritual centralization is the way to reform the Hinduism of the Shaiva Temples, "the net outcome . . . is not so much ritual reform as a chimerical reformism, whose most marked social consequence to date, at least within the Minakshi Temple (but probably elsewhere too), appears to have been the progressive demoralisation of the priests" (Fuller 1984: 1960-1961). 15. The contrast in value configurations between "Yankee City" and Madurai is not one between discontinuity and continuity, for there is continuity and discontinuity in both cases. Nor is the contrast one in the sheer physical accumulation of past structures and the greater age of Indian civilization as compared with American civilization. The Minakshi temple murals and their associated legends depict many destructions of the temple and of the city of Madurai by fire, by water and other means. These destructions are always followed by reconstructions, usually based on some surviving fragments of the old temple and city. These reconstructions are said to conform to the architectural plans described in the classical texts. Continuity is then achieved through a restoration of antique architectural forms, and only secondarily through preservation of antique substance. In Yankee City there is also an interest in preserving or restoring antique substances but more as a "renaissance" in the traditional facades and the renewal of depressed communities, than as a means for the recovery of

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past forms and social structures. Is it possible, then, for a new capital city designed and built by the most modern architects to have anything in common with such "traditional" and "orthogenetic" cities as Madurai? 16. A twenty-minute summary of this paper was presented to the symposium on "A Sense of the Past and a Sense of Guilt" at the 1975 meetings of the American Anthropological Association. 1 am grateful to David Buchdahl, Roy Harvey Pearce, and Melford Spiro for their contributions to the symposium and for their comments on my paper. William and Elizabeth Harris, Peter Latham, and D'Arcy van Bokkelen made valuable critical comments on a 1975 long draft manuscript that included most of this paper and additional material. Elaine Sciog assisted me with some of the interviews in the summer of 1974. William Stamets made a film record of some of the Bicentennial events in 1976, and also found an interesting exchange of letters between Marquand and Warner in the Houghton Library at Harvard. The following additional papers based on my Yankee City research have been presented as follows: "Nostalgia and Yankee Ingenuity", Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Chicago, December, 1975. "Yankee City in Renaissance", American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., 1976, in the Symposium "Can American Historic Cultures Survive and Revitalize?" "Urban Renewal and Restoration as Cultural Performances", The Association for the Anthropological Study of Play, San Diego, March 1977. I returned in the summer of 1977 to Yankee City to collect data on the changing character of ethnicity in the community since the 1930s with the help of a small grant from NIMH. Douglas Goodfriend assisted me on that occasion with the taping of interviews and with photography. I am thankful to Eliot Liebow for his support. The data collected on the 1977 visit have not yet been analyzed or written up. I am grateful to the Lichstern Committe of the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago and to the former Dean of the College, Charles Oxnard, for assistance with travel and research expenses. To my wife, Helen Singer, I am indebted for her illuminating perceptions of people and places, her assistance with library research, and her reading of the manuscript. In the spring of 1975 Mildred Warner kindly came to my Workshop on American Culture and gave us her highly informative personal reminiscences of the year she and her husband lived in one of the old houses when the "Yankee City" study was getting under way. She will, I hope, soon make these available to a wider audience. To the many citizens of the Newburyport area who responded with cordiality, information, and insight to our visits and questions I can extend only a general expression of gratitude. I should like to thank them individually, but will not do so because I assured most of them that I would not quote or attribute opinions to them by name. They may be surprised by the use I have made of the information they gave me and the interpre-

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tations I have placed on it, but I hope that they will not find my descriptions inaccurate or unsympathetic. I especially want to thank for his kindness former Mayor Bryon Matthews who took time out of a very busy schedule to tell us his personal views on a wide range of questions and made available to me several official documents. The present version of the paper is reproduced by permission of the American Anthropological Association from Ethos 5: 4, 1977. 17. For this view of cultural traditions see my book When a Great Tradition Modernizes and "Robert Redfield's Development of a Social Anthropology of Civilizations". 18· Even for Proust, the recollections were premised on the individual's having experienced a complex network of social and cultural relations: . . . Life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and event with another, and . . . these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infinite variety of communicating paths to choose from. {The Past Recaptured, 1970, p. 258.) 19. I develop this complementary interpretation of the dramatization theory of ritual in my book: Man's Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology. 20. S. Freud, "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis", in Collected Papers, Vol. ν (London, 1950). 21. A case described by Erikson indicates that the sense of guilt and the doubts may return to haunt the traveller. Responsibility and Insight, pp. 87-88. 22. The paper "The Semiotics of the Id" was written to answer Melford Spiro's question "What ever happened to the Id?" Because Professor Spiro has made a valiant effort to recognize and study pan human emotions in their varying social and cultural contexts, I dedicate this paper to him. In a personal communication Professor Spiro has expressed approval of my interpretation of how the id can be semiotically constituted. 23. An earlier version of this paper was drafted in 1977 as the introduction to a volume of selections, mostly previously published, by members of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS) at the University of Chicago. The volume was intended as a companion to the Committee's Programs and Dissertations in Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago (1977). It was not possible to publish the volume at that time, though an updated and revised version of the volume may still be published. This version of the paper is reprinted by permission of the American Institute of Indian Studies from Aspects of India: Essays in Honor of Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. (Margaret Case and N. Gerald Barrier eds., New Delhi: AIIS, 1986). I was particularly pleased to have it included in this collection of essays honoring my colleague Edward C. Dimock. As scholar, teacher, and administrator, Professor Dimock has played a vital and creative role in America's conversations of culture with South Asia. At Chicago, beginning

314

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

Notes as a Carnegie Intern in the Indian Civilization course in 1958, he quickly assumed a primary responsibility for teaching, organization, and publication in the field of Bengali language and literature. His many administrative appointments at the University of Chicago are too numerous to list, but as Director of the South Asian Language and Area Center, and as Chairman of the Committee on South Asian Studies and of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, he provided the imaginative and stabilizing leadership the South Asian program needed in its formative years. He has played an equally vital role at the national and international levels as President of the American Institute of Indian Studies since 1972 and as a member of the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture and of other national committees. His recent award by the Tarak Nath Das Foundation, making him only the fourth American scholar to be so honored (A.K. Ramanujan was the third), is an indication that Professor Dimock's contributions are amply appreciated by the Indian community also. Professor Dimock's publications have been distinguished for their sensitivity and fluent translations, a deep understanding of the Bengali and general Indian literary and theological heritage, and his broad knowledge of Indian cultural history. He represents a living embodiment of the ideal language and area specialist and he continues to be an inspiration to both students and colleagues. I am indebted to Chauncy Harris who as Director of the Center for International Studies in the 1970s asked me to assemble and edit the volume on "The Conversation of Cultures" and made many helpful suggestions. This later phase of Red field's thought is traced in my paper, "Robert Redfield's Development of a Social Anthropology of Civilizations "in Murra, ed., American Anthropology, the Early Years. These lectures were published in the collection of Redfield's papers assembled and edited by his wife. Margaret Park Redfield, under the title Human Nature and the Study of Society (Chicago, 1962). The story is told in J.W.N. McCrindle, Ancient India as Described in Classical Literature, p. 74. See my "Passage to More Than India" for an account of this and other images of India in Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes, (Chicago, 1972 [1980]). For a recent application of the approach, see E.V. Daniel and J.F. Pugh, eds., "South Asian Systems of Healing" in Contributions to Asian Studies, 18 (1984). Other reports of recent research on indigenous South Asian concepts include Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, edited by Wendy O'Flaherty, 1980; Karma and Anthropological Inquiry, edited by C.F. Keys and E.V. Daniel, 1983; and Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, edited by Barbara Metcalf, 1981, all published by the University of California Press. See my When a Great Tradition Modernizes (1972 [ 1980]) and Man's Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology (Indiana, 1984) for further applications of the method to the interpretation of Indian and American cultural identities.

Notes

315

29. Human Relations and International Obligations. A Report of the UNESCOIndian Philosophical Congress Symposium held at Ceylon December 1954. Edited by Ν .A. Nikam, 1956, pp. 257-303. 30. See Corners of a Foreign Field: Discussions About American Overseas Advanced Research Centers in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Edited by R. McC. Adams and C.S. Schelling. New York, 1979. 31. Robert Redfield, "Does America Need A Hearing Aid?" Reprinted in Redfield, The Social Uses of Social Science. Chicago, 1963. 32. This paper on "A Neglected Source of Structuralism" was prepared for the British Association Conference on New Directions in Social Anthropology held at St. John's College, Oxford from July 4 through July 11, 1973. Although I was unable to attend the conference, the introduction and conclusion of the paper were circulated at Oxford and several copies of the complete paper were made available for those who requested it, according to Maurice Bloch, one of the convenors of the section in which the paper was to have been discussed. The 1973 text of the paper (Semiotica 48: 16-69) has not been changed except for the correction of typographical errors, several deletions of marked passages, the deletion on p. 29 of a colleague's name at his request, and the addition of some footnotes. I am grateful to colleagues who have taken the time to read and comment on a long and difficult paper and to the many correspondents, as well as Mrs. W.E.H. Stanner and Mary Catherine Bateson, who answered my queries without seeing the paper. Donald Collier, Fred Eggan, Edward Spicer, and Sol Tax have kindly made available some of the class notes they took in Radcliffe-Brown's Chicago classes in the 1930s and have discussed their recollection of Radcliffe-Brown with me. 1 am indebted to Thomas A. Sebeok for making the pages of Semiotica available to me. The Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago has facilitated the stenographic preparation of the manuscript. My wife, Helen Singer, has done her best to improve the paper's readability. 33. Through conversations with Jakobson in New York during the second world war Levi-Strauss became acquainted with some of the major contributions to structural linguistics by Saussure, Trubetzkoy, and Jakobson (Lövi-Strauss 1963: 233, 1976: 116; see Levi-Strauss's Preface in Jakobson (1978). 34. For Leach, generalization or speculative generalization, which he urges social anthropologists to practice by "thinking of the organizational ideas that are present in any society as constituting a mathematical pattern", is "guesswork, a gamble, you may be wrong or you may be right, but if you happen to be right you have learned something new" (Leach 1961: 2,5,27). "In contrast, arranging butterflies according to their types and subtypes is tautology. It merely reasserts something you know already in a slightly different form" (Leach 1961: 5).

316

Notes The importance of guessing at patterns that make data intelligible has been discussed by Hanson (1965: 85-92) in physical theories, by Thompson in biology (1951), and by Whyte (1951) in nature and art. Hanson acknowledges Peirce and Aristotle as sources for his own formulation. Peirce recognized a mode of inference he called abduction or retroduction, consisting in the operation of adopting an explanatory hypothesis that would account for the observed facts and capable of being tested. "Typical induction", on the other hand, "has no originality in it, but only tests a suggestion already made". Deduction Peirce defines as a necessary inference of the truth or falsity or probability of the hypothesis from given facts (Peirce 1955: 150-156). "Deduction proves that something must be; Induction shows that something actually is operative; Abduction merely suggests that something maybe" (Peirce CP 5.171). Leach's 'butterfly collecting' seems to be a combination of typical induction and deduction and presumably lacks abduction. A major argument of this article is that Radcliffe-Brown and his followers are not "butterfly collectors" in Leach's sense; their classification of societies into types and subtypes was not wholly deductive inference, but involved abstractive generalization producing hypotheses that needed to be tested. It was therefore also an abduction, a guessing at patterns. The classifications, moreover, were of types of social structure and customary patterns that attempted to explain observed and observable social relations and behavior (R-B 1957: 60-61, 117-123). The book A Natural Science of Society, published in 1957, was based on a stenographic record of Radcliffe-Brown's lectures to a seminar in the Social Sciences Division of the University of Chicago in the spring of 1937. The book was edited by Fred Eggan. The typescript of the lectures was titled "The nature of a theoretical science of society".

In the spring of 1938, Radcliffe-Brown sent from Oxford to Fay Cooper Cole, then Chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, a letter and an untitled typescript approximately 23 pages long consisting of about 5800 words. In the letter, Radcliffe-Brown said the typescript represented "a revised version of what I said in the first seminar and of some parts of the later seminars", and was intended to replace the stenographic transcript of the seminars which he felt "very strongly was not worth mimeographing in full. And in any case there is no transcript of the first meeting." He asked Cole to show the revised typescript to Eggan, Redfield, and Warner, and if they and Cole approved, he would "get on as soon as leisure permits with a similar rewriting of the rest of the seminar" (RadcliffeBrown to Cole, May 30,1938). 35. Apart from the references to Russell's works in the manuscript sent to Cole, Radcliffe-Brown does not seem to refer to him anywhere else, although he does refer to Whitehead in about a half-dozen other places. 36. The relation of symbolic (or "logical") opposition to social (or "structural") opposition is a recurrent theme in the work of Dürkheim and Mauss (1903),

Notes

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

317

Hertz (1909), and Granet (1933), as well as in Radcliffe-Brown (1952) and Levi-Strauss (1963). For discussion of the classic formulations and of recent research see Maybury-Lewis (1960), Leach (1976), Ortiz (1969), Needham (1973), and T. Turner (1982). Radcliffe-Brown probably saw the relation of the two kinds of opposition as an application of his belief that "all science is based on analogy" and that "the scientist records the exact analogies arrived at by analysis". "The specific meaning of "analogy" is a similarity of relations, and in this consists the difference between the argument from example and the argument from analogy. In the former we argue from the mere similarity of things, in the latter from the similarity of their relations" (R-B 1936 italics in original). Dumont has analyzed this kind of structural change in the Indian caste system and calls it a "substantialization" of caste (Dumont 1966 [1980]: 217-238; see Singer 1971: 53-60 for a brief comment on the relevance of the analysis for a theory of modernization). Russell never attempted a complete application of the method of logically constructing the physical world on the basis of sense-data. Carnap, however, did make that heroic effort in his Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (1928). In his Preface to the second edition (1967) Carnap describes the relation of this work to the "Vienna Circle" and to his own later ideas. A principle of isomorphism for perception was enunciated by Köhler in his Gestalt Psychology (1929: 193), based on earlier formulations by Köhler himself, Wertheimer, G.E. Müller, and Ernst Mach. Experimental psychologists have recently designed experiments to test this principle (see Shephard and Chipman 1970). James Boon (1972) has traced some surprising affinities between LeviStrauss's structuralism and some of the doctrine and practice of "sensory correspondences" among such French literary symbolists as Baudelaire, Mallarmd, and Proust. Joseph Needham reviews briefly and comprehensively the history of the macrocosm-microcosm analogy in Chinese and European thought in Vol. 2, Ch. 13, of his Science and Civilization in China. His quotation from a third-century commentary on the Chuang Tzu could well have served as an epitaph for Radcliffe-Brown's principle of "structural opposition": Commenting on the passage about relativity in the 17th chapter, they said, concerning "If we look at things from the point of view of the services they r e n d e r . . .": There are no two things under Heaven which do not have the mutual relationship of the 'self and the 'other'. Both the 'self and the 'other' equally desire to act for themselves, thus opposing each other as strongly as east and west. On the other hand, the 'self and the 'other' at the same time have the mutual relationship of lips and teeth. The lips and the teeth never (deliberately) act for one another, yet Vhen the lips are gone, the teeth feel cold'. Therefore the action of the 'other' on its own behalf at the same time helps

318

Notes the 'self. Thus though mutually opposed, they are incapable of mutual negation.

42.

43.

44.

45.

Reference to the analogy and even identity between tribal space and cosmic space is made by Dürkheim and Mauss 1963: 65). In this same context they also refer to the "double opposition of moieties", with respect to function and to spatial location (1963: 63). Dürkheim and Mauss's predominant emphasis, however, is on society as the origin and model for natural classifications: "Logical relations are thus, in a sense, domestic relations" (1963 : 84). Radcliffe-Brown added his mother's maiden name, "Radcliffe", to his surname in 1926 by deed poll (Firth 1956: 287). Russell's Autobiography indicates that he was in and out of Cambridge often between 1901 and 1910. The explicit references to Whitehead in the 1937 seminar lectures are very few; one is a reference that links him to Heraclitus as believing that ultimately "there are only events". Another reference distinguishes Whitehead's use of "symbolism" and "meaning" as "sign" from Radcliffe-Brown's more limited definition of "social symbols" (R-B 1957: 23, 102). A note at the end of the Frazer lecture on "Taboo" makes special acknowledgement to the third chapter of Whitehead's Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect, as well as to R.B. Perry's General Theory of Value. An implication of this paper is that Radcliffe-Brown often referred to ideas so distinctively associated with Russell, or with Whitehead, that he probably did not feel it necessary to make the identification explicit in each reference. This must have been the case, for example, in his use of Russell's logical definition of the cardinal number two and Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" (R-B 1957: 21, 1958: 167). His use of Perry's definitions of "social structure" and social system" probably belongs with this group of terms (Perry 1926 [1954]: 460-461). In her autobiography, Blackberry Winter, Mead gives a fuller account of her many contacts with Radcliffe-Brown and of her indebtedness. These contacts were often mediated by Fortune or Bateson. In an article on "Changing styles of anthropological field work" (Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 2) she wrote: "Forty years ago Radcliffe-Brown suggested a system of nomenclature that was not only cross-cultural but also a way in which kinship relationships could be read back as reciprocals. . . . I put the system on my typewriter in 1931." Mortimer Adler's autobiography does not mention the 1937 seminar or Radcliffe-Brown, but it does describe the first seminar on "Systematic Social Science" in 1933-34 organized by Dean Ruml and Adler, and attended by Radcliffe-Brown, according to A.W. Levi. Adler's lectures, which ran through the Autumn, Winter, and Spring quarters, were intended to present the "prolegomena necessary for unifying the social sciences". When he finished, "the assembled professors allowed their three graduate students [two of them anthropologists] to unleash an attack on the very idea of unified social science and on the total irrelevance of all the logical

Notes

319

distinctions and metaphysical principles with which 1 had been wasting their time" (Adler 1977: 153). Adler's descriptions evoke his and Hutchins's battles against the social sciences - against their alleged "raw empiricism", "anti-intellectualism", pluralism, and pragmatism (Adler 1977: 134-135, 163-165). In his address to the University of Chicago faculty at the 1934 Trustees' Dinner, Hutchins said that "facts are the core of an anti-intellectual curriculum" and then went on to quote Whitehead, Russell, Jevons, Bernard, and Poincard to support his position that "ideas are the essential elements in the development of science". James and Dewey, he said, were "the leading anti-intellectuals of our time", who believed there are no principles and that "the world is a flux of events" (Adler 1977: 163). Sol Tax recalls that he was one of the graduate students who was unleashed. Tax reports that after Adler finished his lectures at the end of the Autumn 1933 session of the seminar on "Systematic Social Science", he asked for and was granted time to reply on the issue of the relevance of Adler's presentation for the building of an empirical social science. According to the mimeographed outlines in Tax's files, Adler had lectured on the following topics: Grammar and Logic, the Application of Logic to the Analysis of Science including Statistical Inference and the Mathematical Theory of Probability, the Applicability of Formal Logic, the Analysis of Man: Human Acts, and Philosophy versus Pragmatism. Tax's original notes reveal that Adler had already given two of the lectures on the Logic of Science the preceding Spring session of the seminar when members of the different social science departments had been invited by Dean Ruml to discuss the social science course in the College. Because of the "inconclusive nature of Adler's interpolation" and the efforts of the different departments to codify the generalizations already achieved by each, according to Tax, Dean Ruml asked Adler to continue his lectures during the 1933-34 session with the expectation that Radcliffe-Brown would then make a presentation. Tax's interpolation expressed doubts about the relevance of Adler's lectures "to everything in the history of the natural sciences and to everything in the current notions of the social sciences". After reviewing the history of physics, chemistry, and biology in detail, Tax concluded that his history was "a fairly complete summary of what makes the life and substance of a Grand Science" and that he was "at a loss to see how Mr. Adler could find a way to put his system in as a necessary part of the development, and certainly, if in some way it could be surreptitiously introduced, . . . [he] is at a loss to see how it could be of much more use than Swedenborg's guide book to heaven and hell in a medical school dissecting room". Tax nevertheless declared his optimism about the prospect of a social science and referred to the symmetry of kinship systems and his own recording of a Mescalero dance as illustrations of positive possibilities. Tax recalled in 1982 that Adler agreed with his charge of total irrelevance, but did not remember whether Adler also considered Tax's description of all scientific reasoning and logic in one simple rule ("I saw

320

Notes with my own eyes or instruments — that so and so occurred in such and such a representative case. Therefore the same thing occurs in all cases") as an illustration of "raw empiricism". Fred Eggan, the second graduate student in anthropology who was unleashed by the professors in the 1933-34 seminar "On Systematic Social Science" gave a comprehensive description of the state of anthropology at that time. Eggan's notes include a six-page mimeographed document called "Systematic social sciences" summarizing Radcliffe-Brown's presentation at the seminar. Only the first paragraph will be quoted here: "The following propositions are selected as suitable for directing discussion to significant points in reference to the possibility of a systematic social science and the nature of such a science if it be possible. They are current doctrines of what is known as 'sociology' in the University of Paris, which is different in many respects from what is known as sociology in America. The science or study referred to is represented by the fourteen volumes of the Αηηέε Sociologique and the published and unpublished work of Dürkheim, Bougte, Fauconnet, Meillet, Hubert, Mauss, Hertz, Boutte, Maunier, Granet, Simiand, Halbwachs, Bourgin, etc.. The formulation of the propositions is in terminology selected by myself for this occasion."

Since Radcliffe-Brown's presentation was intended to answer Adler's, it is interesting to find in Eggan's notes of Radcliffe-Brown's discussion that Adler's Aristotelian terminology was sometimes used to translate Radcliffe-Brown's distinctions. For example, Radcliffe-Brown applied Aristotle's four causes to his distinction between synchronic (final and formal) and diachronic (efficient and material) analysis; and the genus, species, individual triad to social systems, kinds of social systems, and particular social systems respectively. This indicates that Radcliffe-Brown was already comparing different systems of cultural categories and was willing to translate a modern system into a more traditional system. Tax's files also contained a mimeographed four-page document titled "Some Questions for Drs. Radcliffe-Brown and Adler. To aid in clarifying the notion of a general social science on a functional basis". This document was formulated by two economists, Frank H. Knight and H.C. Simons, and a graduate student in philosophy, A. Bergholz. The questions raised difficulties with Adler's and Radcliffe-Brown's definitions of science and Radcliffe-Brown's definition of function, for example, "why is a rational empirical social science concerned only with activities making for persistence, and/or for integration and adaptation?" The document concluded with a suggestion that "if the term science is taken in a fairly strict sense economic theory is perhaps the only possible science — at least the only rational science — dealing with human social phenomena in functional terms". Presumably this document was presented to the 1933-34 session of the seminar that continued in 1934, according to Levi. Professor Allison Davis, who attended the 1937 seminar, recalls that after listening to Radcliffe-Brown's first lecture, Adler said he agreed with him and withdrew from the seminar. Eggan believes that Adler had decided

Notes

321

that Radcliffe-Brown's choice of philosophers to follow being different from his own, the outcome would differ. It may also be observed that Ruml was no longer Dean of the Social Sciences Division by 1937, having been succeeded in 1934 by Robert Redfield. In the first lecture for his course on Comparative Science of Culture, probably given in 1936, Radcliffe-Brown cites as readings on the twentiethcentury philosophy of science Whitehead's Science and the Modem World and Adventures of Ideas, N. Campbell's What is Science?, A.D. Ritchie's Scientific Method, M. Cohen and E. Nagel's Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method, and M. Cohen's Reason and Nature (notes in possession of Fred Eggan). Much in these lecture sounds like a rehearsal for the 1937 seminar on a theoretical science of society. 46. Whitehead's Concept of Nature (1920). Science and the Modem World (1925), and Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect (1927), appeared only after Whitehead left Cambridge for London and America and a philosophical career. Russell's important and lucid criticism of Leibniz's attempt to reduce relations to a subject-predicate logic was made in a series of Cambridge lectures in 1899 and published as The Philosophy of Leibniz in 1900. Radcliffe-Brown cites Russell's more technical attempt to reduce mathematics to logic, the Principles of Mathematics, which was published in 1903, and the Russell and Whitehead monumental culmination of this effort in the Prinicipia Mathematica, published between 1910 and 1913. Russell's more popular books on epistemology and mathematics, Outline of Philosophy (1927) and Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), were published years after the Cambridge period. Radcliffe-Brown does not cite Whitehead's Nature and Life (1934), two public lectures given at the University of Chicago in 1933. 47. Malinowski attended lectures in mathematics, physics, philosophy and psychology at Cracow (Kubica in Ellen 1988: 102-103). Leon Chwistek, painter and logician, was a fellow student and friend of Malinowski. After Chwistek simplified Russell's theory of types, he was appointed a professor of logic in Lwow at the John Kasimir University. The philosophy departments at Lwow and Warsaw produced an outstanding group of logicians. Alfred Tarski, the most famous member of this group, came to the United States in September of 1939 to participate in a Congress for the Unity of Science at Harvard. Stranded by the German invasion of Poland, Tarski was unable to return and eventually was appointed a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. I met Professor Tarski in 1939 at the Harvard Congress and remember well his anxiety about his family when he heard about the German invasion. Abraham Kaplan and I, fellow graduate students then at the University of Chicago, had been delegated by Carnap and Morris to serve as reporters of the Unity of Science Congress. We published our impressions in The Scientific Monthly (Singer and Kaplan 1941). 48. Malinowski's reaction to "kinship algebra" was in part a reaction to the trend towards treating kinship terminologies as independent systems from

322

49.

50.

51.

52.

Notes which to infer correlated social and marriage systems which may have produced them, sometime in the past. One of Malinowski's teachers, W.H.R. Rivers, expressed this trend in his book Kinship and Social Organization, published in 1914. Both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown believed that by concentrating on the observation of the present functioning of cultural and social systems as interconnected wholes they would obviate the need for "conjectural histories", hence their focus on synchronic functional analysis. Kenneth Burke, the literary critic, published an article in 1962 in Anthropological Linguistics in which he interpreted Malinowski's concept of "context of situation" as a nonverbal or extraverbal context of words whose meanings are "symbolic" or "symptomatic" in "the strictly psychoanalytic sense", i.e. "secretly infused with some repressed or forgotten context of situation that was traumatic". (Burke 1966: 39). In the 1966 revision of this article, Burke mentioned that the article was first presented as a lecture at Boston University in 1956. He also acknowledged a story told him by the anthropological linguist, Dell Hymes, as a stimulus for the idea behind the paper, namely, that things may be signs of words. Burke connected this idea with his own analysis of "scene-act" ratio and "dramatism", and with the related analytic schemes of Talcott Parsons and Aristotle (Burke 1968). In 1957-1958 Burke was a Fellow at the Behavioral Sciences Center at Stanford along with Parsons, Hymes, Kroeber, Redfield among other anthropologists and social scientists, including myself. The polemics over the relation of culture to "infrastructure" and "superstructure" is reminiscent of Lenin's attack on Mach and his followers in Russia in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909). Mach's position was not anti-materialistic but that of a "neutral monism" which included both physical and psychological phenomena. In this respect his position was similar to James and Russell, a position that was later restated in the two-language theory of phenomenalism and physicalism. The current problem is how to relate the two languages in mutually intelligible discourse. (cf. Umiker-Sebeok 1977; Boon in Umiker-Sebeok and PorterWinner 1979, Boon 1982; Singer 1988). In his informative article on "the Range of Peirce's Relevance" 1983 [1986], Max Fisch describes applications of Peirce in many different fields — philosophy, linguistics, literature, anthropology, sociology, psychiatry, and others. For sociology he lists C. Wright Mills's book Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America [1964], a posthumously published version of his University of Wisconsin 1942 Ph.D. dissertation. Mills attended the University of Texas at Austin in the 1930s about a year or two after I was there. He once told me that the same three professors — Clarence Ayres in economics, George Gentry and David Miller in philosophy — stimulated his interest in Dewey, James, Mead and Peirce who had interested me in pragmatism. After reading Paul Friedrich's explanation of his 1960s interest in Malinowski's Coral Gardens, Professor Sebeok has written that he was himself responsible for the second edition brought out by Indiana University

Notes

323

Press in 1965 with the introductions by Leach and Berry. He was also involved with the publication of a second edition of Grace De Laguna's book on Speech by Indiana University Press in 1965. As a student of Charles Morris at the University of Chicago in the late 1930s, and of Roman Jakobson in New York City in 1941-1942, Professor Sebeok belongs to an intellectual lineage that descends from the two founding fathers of the modern theory of signs: Charles Peirce and Ferdinand Saussure. This heritage has uniquely equipped him to coninue a structural study of linguistic, literary and logical forms (iconicity), with their respective contexts of local habitations (indexicality), and with their relatively conventional names as linguistic signs (referentiality). In Jakobson's formulations Sebeok's work brings together the mirroring, indexical, and referential functions of language. In terms of Morris's classfication, Sebeok's research has contributed to the syntactics, pragmatics, and semantics as the three branches of a unified general theory of signs, or semiotics. That in addition Sebeok should have discerned the prefigurement of these sign functions in animal communication (zoosemiotics) and in biological structures and processes (the genetic code) testifies persuasively to the power and profusion of signs in the universe, as Peirce claimed. Professor Tambiah has also added to my comment on his work the following information: I might add that in my book Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of the Amulets (Cambridge University Press, 1984) I employed the concepts of "indexical symbol" and "indexical icon" to discuss the same forms. One application concerned the biography of the forest saint Acharn Mun, which as an indexical symbol referred backwards to Buddhist hagiographical traditions, and was at the same time implicated via the biographer in contemporary sectarian politics. The second application was to the present day cult of amulets: the amulets as 'objectifications of charisma' are shown to have a double presence. They embody memories of past historical traditions and heroes, and they are linked to present day living saints who are in contact with followers and disciples to whom they radiate their saintly virtues. Again, the amulets embody a 'conjunction' of saintly vocation and lay worldly interests, each party following its own divergent objectives. I discuss how the amulets figure in the transactions of urban ruling elements, intelligentsia and businessmen. The modern intensification and amplification of the cult is directly linked to the internal and external political circumstances confronting Thailand today (see BSF\ 262-63,34445).

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Index

Adler, Mortimer J. 17. 246, 252, 318321 n.45 "Alliance" relations 217,218 American culture 7-8, 42-47, 55, 5859.61,64-66,129-145 American Institute of Indian Studies (AUS) 173,187, 313-314 n.23 Analogy, social/natural 223-225, 227, 230,316-317 n.26, 317-318 n.41 Anand, Mulk Raj 125 Architectural symbols 7 2 , 7 4 , 7 8 , 9 9 , 103,113 Ashrama system 30 Austin, J.L. 277,290 Bacon, Sir Francis 75 Barthes, Roland 78 Benedict, Ruth 9, 13, 119, 165, 167, 191,292 Benveniste, Emile 153-158,161, 306 Berkeley, Bishop 78 Bettelheim, Bruno 151-153,158, 161 Bhagavatapurana 35 Boas, Franz 14, 118-119,240 Boas, George 6 Bricolage 229 Brown, W. Norman 172-173 Buitenen, J.A.B, van 9 0 , 1 0 7 , 1 7 9 Burgess, Ernest W. 86 Burke, Kenneth 6, 322 n.49 Carnap, Rudolph 13, 23, 281, 282, 284, 299,317 n.38 Cities 3, 86 Chandigarh 8, 96-109, 113-115, 119,120,123-125 Chingleput 27 Conjeevaram 27 Gaya 110-112 "heterogenetic" 24, 88, 90, 92-93, 95,104,110,112

Indian 2 5 , 7 3 Jaipur 85 Kashi 111 Madras 5, 7, 8, 27-28, 32, 46, 73, 88-95, 100, 102, 109, 112-113, 1 1 5 , 2 6 6 , 3 0 1 , 3 0 9 n.1,311 n.13 Madurai 8, 91-95, 100, 113, 311312 n.15 Mahabalipuram 27 Modern 8, 85, 91, 93-95, 112-113, 118,140 Newburyport 7, 47-58, 60-67, 71, 132, 135-136, 139, 142, 145, 312 n.16 ("Parcel 8" 61, "Watt's Cellar" 31) "orthogenetic" 24, 88-90, 92-94, 110, 112-113, 311 n.13, 311-312 n.15 Ranchi 111-112 symbols 8 5 , 1 0 3 , 1 0 4 , 1 1 3 Traditional 8, 72, 85, 86, 93-95, 112-113,118, 311-312 n.15 Washington, D.C. 108-109 "Yankee City" 6-7, 10, 13,49-51, 57-62, 64, 70, 74, 96, 112, 132134, 138, 140-145,301,311 n.15, 312 n.16 Civilizations 2-3, 13-14, 20-21, 24-26, 38-39, 68, 85, 87-88, 95, 110, 145, 146, 170, 177, 179-180, 185, 186, 1 8 7 , 2 9 9 , 3 1 1 n.15 Class/systems 197-202 Cohn, Bernard 179,186 Cole, Fay-Cooper 205-206,254-255 Colson, Elizabeth 247,251, 254 "Community of interpretation" (Royce) 81-84 Comparative cultural studies 2-3 "Comparative epistemology" 220-221, 230,235,245

376

Index

"compartmentalization" 5 , 9 0 , 1 0 9 "Condensed symbol" 61 -64 "Context of culture/reference" 279, 286-289,303,304 "Context of situation" 278-279, 286289,303,304 "Conversation of cultures" (Redfield) 20, 80,169-171,174,178, 187-188 Cooley, C.H. 12,83, 163,306 Coulanges, Fustel de 87 Cultural continuity and change 38, 3940,70 Cultural media 35-38 Cultural patterns 2, 5 , 2 1 , 3 2 , 3 9 , 1 6 5 Cultural performances 4-7, 2 4 4 1 , 43, 59, 61, 65, 89, 90, 132, 133, 144, 185, 299, 301, 309 n.l Cultural revitalization 44,52, 58 Cultural role of cities 3 , 8 , 4 2 , 7 2 Cultural specialists 27,32-34,38 Cultural theory 4, 13, 14, 42, 146149,269-272, 273, 276,292, 297 Darwin, Charles 264, 269, 271 -272 De Laguna, Grace 268-269, 275-276, 284, 303, 322-323 n.52 De Morgan, Augustus 195 Descartes, Rene 11,191,258 Dewey, John 23, 82, 163, 268-269, 272, 275-276, 280, 282-285, 302303, 322 n.51 Dialogic (see Tuism) 80-81,251-252 Dimock, Edward C„ Jr. 175,176,313 n.23 "Dramatism" 6 Dual opposition 213-222,294 DuBois, Cora 9 Dumont Louis 119,192 Dürkheim, Emile 6, 10,13-15,18, 59, 87, 107, 133, 137, 140, 142, 144, 147, 191, 194, 214,220-222, 245, 247, 252-253, 257, 258. 260, 264, 269,272, 276, 317-318 n.41 Dyadic relationship 199-201,217.291, 298 Dyson, Freeman J. 21-22

Eco, Umberto 7 8 , 2 9 4 Eggan, Fred 16, 17, 119, 147, 175, 189, 192, 193, 205-206, 241, 242. 243, 252, 297. 301 n.10, 318-321 n.45 Ego 148-151.154,160,306 Einstein, Albert 264, 288 Emeneau, Murray B. 73 Empiricism 260-265, 288 Erikson. Eric H. 12, 129-130, 313 n.21 Ethnographic present 2-4. 278-279, 301 Evans-Pritchard. E.E. 147,193, 220 Evenson, Norma 97-99,101, 104,123 Fernandez, James W. 22 Firth, Raymond 16, 19, 147, 189, 193, 205, 243. 260. 278-280, 286288,296-297 Fisch. Max H. 10, 21, 79, 82. 163, 278, 306,322 n.51 "Folk-urban continuum" (Redfield) 86-87,299 Fortes, Meyer 4, 16, 193, 194, 241, 243,253 Frazer, James G. 262, 264, 278 Frege, Gottlob 75,201 Freud, Sigmund 6. 10. 13, 61, 133, 142-145, 146-162, 166, 264-265, 272,288,306 Friedrich, Paul 19,23,290 "Friends of the Newburyport Waterfront" 51, 55-56, 66-67, 68 Functionalism (see Structural functionalism) 1-3, 189, 194, 214, 221223, 225, 229, 231, 244, 246, 253, 260, 263-265, 269, 277, 285, 288, 291-296 Synchronic functionalism 278-280, 296,301 Gallie, W.B. 260-261, 273,277 Geertz, Clifford 14, 23, 89, 119, 176, 278,297 Gellner, Ernest 261-264,278

Index Gluckman, Max 15, 16, 244.246-248. 251.254.256,258 Goffman. Erving 157 Goidenweiser. Alexander 119 Griaule. Marcel 218-220 Groddeck, Georg W. 150-151, 153. 161-162.306 Hallowell. A. Irving 10, 147,148 Heraclitus 216, 219, 221, 231, 241, 252, 253, 294, 318 n.43 "Historie Facade Restoration" 5 4 , 5 8 Historie reenaetments 134-144 Hobbes, Thomas 75 Homology, natural/social 232, 233, 234, 237-240 "Homology, Postulate o f ' 291, 292294 Hume, David 198,237 Icon (see Signs) Id 148-151, 154, 156-157, 160-162, 168,306 Identity, personal and social 9-13, 18, 110, 129-132, 142-145, 149, 163, 305-307, 314 n.28 Innovation and tradition 7, 84 Inoue, Kyoko 22 International relations 170 Jagadguru 31 Jakobson, Roman 4, 23, 156, 190, 191, 195, 258, 289, 290, 293-294, 299-300, 315 n.33, 322-323 n.52 James, William 2, 10, 12-13, 19, 23, 162-163, 260-262, 269, 273, 277, 280, 288, 302-303, 306, 322 n.50, n.51 Janet, Pierre 268-269 Jencks, Christopher 74, 79 Jung, Carl G. 6 , 1 1 5 , 133 Kant, Immanuel 12 Kardiner, Ab ram 9 "Kimil" 239 "Kinship illusion" 15-16 Kluckhohn, Clyde 147

377

Kramrisch, Stella 117-118, 121-122 Kroeber, Alfred L. 2-4, 14-15,23,42, 119, 146, 147, 189, 191, 194, 252, 2 5 3 , 2 7 2 , 2 9 2 , 2 9 5 , 297 Lacan, Jacques 154,157-158 Language (see Words/things) 268-271, 274,287, 300, 322-323 n.52 Le Corbusier 8, 72, 75, 96-107, 109, 113-115, 119-120, 122-125, 310 n.12 L'Enfant, Pierre Charles 108-109 Leach, Edmund 15-16, 19, 192-196, 197, 211, 239-240, 260-262, 286, 288-289,298,315 n.34 Lee, Benjamin 22 Leslie, Charles 6 Levi, Albert William 245-246, 256, 318-321 η .45 Iivi-Strauss, Claude 4, 15-18, 23, 43, 78, 84, 146,147, 157,167,189-196, 211-217, 220, 221, 227, 229, 231234, 235, 237-242, 244, 252-254, 256, 258-259, 289, 291, 292-295, 306,315 n.33 Lewandowski, Susan 91, 113 Locke, John 7 5 , 7 8 Loos, Adolph 75, 310 n . l 2 Lowe, Victor 2 4 9 , 2 5 6 Lowie, Robert H. 119 MacAloon, John J. 22 Mach, Ernest 23, 261-263, 284, 322 n.50 Mahabharata 35,107 Maine, Henry S. 13,87 Malinowski, Bronislaw 1-2, 4, 6, 14, 19,23,119,159-160,166,181,191, 193, 194, 214, 240, 251, 252-253, 260-291,296,301-307,321 n.47 Malraux's "museum without walls" 7071 Mandala 105 Mandelbaum, David 43 "Market Square" 53-54,112 Marquand, John P. 46, 48, 50-52, 129,138

378

Index

Marriott, McKim 2 3 , 2 5 , 1 7 8 , 1 7 9 , 1 8 6 Matha 31 Mauss, Marcel 1 0 . 2 1 4 , 2 1 8 , 2 6 0 , 3 1 7 318 n.41 Mayer, Albert 96-98, 101,109, 124 McKelvey, Blake 47 McKeon, Richard P. 186 Mead, George Herbert 6,10, 12-13,23, 83, 133, 157, 163, 268-269, 272. 275-276, 280-282, 284. 302-303, 306, 322 n.51 Mead, Margaret 4, 13. 21, 119, 145. 191,250-252,294 "Meanings of the City" (Wheatley 73 Melting-pot 3 2 - 3 3 , 4 2 4 3 Mill, John Stuart 196,245 "Misplaced concreteness" 16, 318n.43 Modernity 93, 100 "Modulor" 8, 72, 102, 104-107, 114115, 119-10, 122-123, 125 Moore, G.E. 246, 251,256, 257 Moos, Stanislaus von 109 Morgan, Lewis H. 44, 87 Morris, Charles W. 6, 13, 18, 22. 23. 80, 82, 149, 281-283, 294, 299, 302, 304, 322-323 n.52 Mus, Paul 107

Parsons, Talcott 4 , 6 , 1 4 , 2 3 . 147. 189, 191, 295, 297,322 n.49 Perry, R.B. 244,248, 251,318 n.43 Peirce, Charles S. 9-13, 18-23, 43, 61, 78, 7 9 , 8 3 , 103-104, 112, 120, 122, 123, 149, 156, 161-164, 193, 228, 251, 260, 261, 264, 266-268, 273277, 280, 282-283, 288-289, 291296, 299-307, 315-316 n.34, 322 n.50, 322-323 n.52 Pragmatic semiotics 63-64,80,162, 283. 289, 302-305 Peircean signification triad 10-11, 1820, 81-82. 163-164, 273-275, 291, 298,305 Phenomenological 3 Poleman, Horace 172 "Portraiture" 8 Pragmatics 281-282,294 Pragmatism (see Peirce — pragmatic semiotic) 80, 260-263, 268, 272277, 280, 284-285, 287, 322 n.50 Pragmatic theory of language/meaning (Malinowski) 266-271, 273275,280,290,291 "Primitivism" 133, 140 Pronouns, personal 10, 12, 153-154,

Nadel, Sigmund 284-286 National Trust for Historic Restoration 58 Nativistic movements 4 4 4 5 Nehru, Prime Minister Jawarhalal 73, 96-97,99-101, 113, 186 Nominalism 192, 277,288

161-164,304-306 Psychoanalytic theory 146, 150-159, 163 Public Law 480, 170, 172. 174, 187188 Puranas 29 Purusha 72, 105, 106, 114-116, 118122,125

Oedipus complex 146, 152, 158-161, 164, 165-168,265 Ogden, C.K. 6. 19, 23, 133, 268, 270, 273-277, 281-283, 290, 299. 303, 307 Orwell, George 132 "Parcel 8" as a symbol 61 Park, Richard 8 6 , 1 7 2 Parmentier, Richard 300-301

Ouine, W.V. 1 7 , 2 4 2 , 2 8 2 Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1, 6, 14-18, 23, 43, 87, 119. 133, 147, 190-201, 205-259, 260, 289, 292-295, 297, 301, 315-316 n.34, 317 n.41, 318 n.43, 318 n.43, 318-321 n.45 Ramanujan, A.K. 22, 93-94, 181, 313-314 n.23 Ramayana 3 5 , 3 7 , 4 1

Index Rapoport, Amos 74,79 Red field, Robert 2-4, 10, 13-14, 2021, 23, 24, 32, 39, 83, 86-88, 110, 119, 120, 147, 160, 167, 176-180, 182, 186, 188, 189, 246, 285, 291, 295,297,299,318-321 n.45 Research 9, 63-65 Revivalistic movements 44-45 Richards, I.A. 6, 19, 23, 133, 273277,290,299,303,307 "Rites of passage" 30 Rivers, W.H.R. 15, 191, 194, 240, 244, 245,252,253,257,262 Rosaldo, Michelle 165-167 Royce, Josiah 21, 81-84,163, 306 Russell, Bertrand 1, 13, 16-17, 23, 190, 192-202?, 205-206, 208, 212, 213, 217, 235-252, 255-259, 262, 264, 284-285, 292, 294, 299, 318 n.43, 322 n.50 Rykwert, Joseph 78 Sanskritic Hinduism 25-26, 28, 88, 109-110,311 n.13 Sanskritization 25, 40-41, 90, 311 n.13 Santayana, George 1 Sapir, Edward 6,61,119,147,191 Saraswati, Baidyanath 111 Saussure, Ferdinand de 18, 23,78,79, 149, 157, 191, 258, 292-295, 298, 315 n.33 322-323 n.52 Schneider, David M. 14, 15, 20, 23, 297,298 Schwartz, Theodore 44 Sebeok, Thomas A. 18, 294-295,298, 322-323 n.52 Seidenberg, A. 106-107, 114 Self/Selves 9-13,129, 146 Semiotics (semiology) 8, 14, 15, 1823, 63, 78-84, 112, 113, 119, 149, 156, 237-238, 259, 273-274, 277, 282, 290, 291-296, 298-302, 322323 n.52 Semiotic anthropology 18, 21·, 23, 43, 72, 118, 194, 266, 278,284, 295, 298-299, 302, 307

379

Semiotic self 10-12,18, 163, 305 Semiotics of identity 129, 146, 167168 "Shrine centers" 7 Signs 10, 23, 73-74, 78, 79, 81-82, 122, 147, 149, 156, 164, 273-274, 291-292, 294-296, 300, 302, 322323 n.52 Iconic 10, 12, 43, 61-64, 103, 115, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 136-137, 228, 274-275,290,294, 300,302,305 Indexical 10-11, 115, 119,228,274275, 283, 289, 290, 294, 303, 305,306 Symbolic 10-11, 16-23, 60-64, 72, 75, 115, 119, 122, 155-156, 227228,274-275,290,300,305 Silverstein, Michael 19, 22, 23, 289, 299-300 Simmel, Georg 86 Sinha, Surajit 111-112 Smarta Brahmans 28 Social anthropology 191-192,195-196, 205-206, 207, 213-217, 220, 245, 253,257,289,295,300 "Social Usage" 208-214,238 Sperber, Dan 84 Spiro, Melford E. 10, 146-149, 157, 159-161,164-168 Srinivas, M.N. 16, 25, 90, 205-206, 218,241,243,246,248,251 Stanner, W.E.H. 16,23, 192,244-245, 248,251,256 Staal, Frits 106-107, 115, 120-122 Stocking, George W„ Jr. 205,242, 278 Structural analysis 133,140, 190, 199, 213,223-224,233,289,292 Structural anthropology 1, 154, 191195,259,291-292,298 "Structural Form" (Radcliffe-Brown) 208-212,214, 232 Structural functionalism 253, 256258,292,301 Structuralism 15-19, 43, 189, 216, 221, 240, 244, 252-253, 258-259, 292,294-295,298,317 n.40

380

Index

"Structure of a relation" (Russell) 201 205.208,212 Superego 148-149, 151,160, 306 Superorganic 2, 271-272 Swift, Jonathan 74 Gulliver 74-77 Symbolic analysis 133, 146-148, 157, 301 Symbolic anthropology 189, 193, 298 "Symbolic interactionists" 83, 157, 163,301 "Symbolic Representations" 62 "Symbolic traditionalization" 6, 90, 95 "Symbolism, Science o f ' 270, 273, 277,284 Symbolism theorists 6 Synchronic functionalism 1 Systems (see Class) 87, 207-214, 200, 221

Vedic 106-107.114. 114-122 "Tuism" (Peirce) 11,79-80,163 Turner, Victor W. 16. 23, 61. 241, 246-247.254 Twain, Mark 129 Tylor, Sir Edward B. 14,297 Unconscious 147-151, 153-159. 166167,214,229 Urban, Greg 22 Urban renewal/restoration 52-58, 61, 66-69, 133,137 Urbanism 7. 72, 85-87,90, 104,112 Vatsyayan, Kapila 116-117 Venturi, Robert 75 Vidyarthi, Lalita P. 110-112

Wallace, Anthony F.C. 44 Warner, W. Lloyd 4, 6-7, 13, 18, 43, Tambiah, Stanley J. 277, 290, 32246. 49-51, 61, 63, 65, 96, 112, 132323 η.52 141, 144-145, 1 9 2 . 2 0 5 , 2 4 3 , 2 9 7 Tarski, Alfred 282, 321 n.47 "Watt's Cellar" 51 Tax, Sol 16, 205, 297, 318-321 n.45 Weber, F. Max 5, 13,23, 168 Thernstrom, Stephan 46, 49, 63, 133, Welby, Lady Victoria 274 145 Wells, H.G. 46 Wheatley, Paul 8, 72, 84-86, 89, 95, Thomas. William I. 86 Tocqueville, Alexis de 130-131,145 9 9 , 1 0 3 , 1 1 2 , 310 n.l 1 Toda tribesman 73 "Astrobiology" 8, 89, 91, 99, 103, Tönnies, Ferdinand 87 113-116 Totems/totemism 15-16, 43, 49-51, Whewell, William 196,245 133-134, 137, 140, 141, 190, 194, White, Leslie 4, 14,23 195, 211, 213-220, 221, 226, 229- Whitehead, Alfred North 1,16-17, 23, 234, 240-241, 242-244, 252, 255, 156, 190, 192-196, 205-206, 213, 292-295 235-237, 240-252, 255-259, 262, Traditions 9 3 , 9 7 , 1 0 0 284, 288, 292, 294, 318 n.43 "Autodefinition" 41 Wittkower, Rudolf 114 Dravidian 9 5 , 1 1 0 Wirth, Louis 8 6 , 1 0 4 Great 2, 24, 28, 30, 37, 38, 40-41, Wittgenstein, Ludwig 23,75,284,287, 95, 110-111, 145, 177, 186, 314 310 η.12 n.24 Words/things 74-76 Little 2, 24, 28, 30, 37, 38, 1 ΙΟ- Wren, Sir Charles 77 Ι 11, 177,186 "Social organization and structure "Yankee Homecoming" parade 70 of'32 Yucatan 87

m Benjamin Lee m Greg Urban m

(Editors)

Semiotics, Self, and Society

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w m m m

m

1989. 23 χ 15.5 cm. XVIII, 311 pages. With 1 illustration. Cloth DM 118ISBN 311 0119781 (Approaches to Semiotics 84)

This collection of 10 essays deals with semiotic anthropological approaches to the self, how the "self" is constituted in signs, and how those signs vary cross-culturally.

m

The essays, written by anthropologists and a psychoanalyst, are devoted to the problem of self in language, discourse and culture. They explore the range of sign phenomena, from pronominal usage to literature and philosophy, which form the basis for culturally-specific self constructs. Each contribution reflects, in varying degrees and ways, the influence of Milton Singer, in whose honor the volume was originally conceived, and who is himself a contributor.

m

The volume includes an introduction by the editors and a preface by Thomas A. Sebeok.

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mouton de gruyter Berlin · New York

m Myrdene Anderson m Floyd Merrell (Editors) On Semiotic Modeling m 1991. VII, 619 pages. Cloth. DM 268.00 m m m m m m m m m

ISBN 311012314 2 (Approaches to Semiotics 97) This collection of 24 papers covering fields ranging from art through literature and linguistics, to anthropology and biology is a response to the present state of confusion about representation, metaphors and models in the humanities and human sciences. This reflects on a larger disenchantment with theory in literary and cultural criticism, and with positivism in the sciences. The volume as a whole addresses distinctions between and, when possible or necessary, integration of various and disparate contemporary approaches to semiotics by addressing theory, methods, and the practise of semiotic modeling. This concern with modeling is consonant with problems of representation recently emerging in the philosophy of science, and the social and natural sciences per se.

m m m m m

mouton de gruyter Berlin · New York