Culture and Practical Reason Two Paradigms of ... - Moodle

Chapter Two 120 Culture and Practical ReasonTwo Paradigms of Anthropological Theory121meanings are constituted" (I973a, p. 31) tends to become a sociabilityfetishism, similar to the ecological by its substitution of abstract socialeffects for specific conceptual forms, the latter treated as mere appearancesof the former, with the similar result ofdissolving definite structural logicsinto inchoate functional interests.This is not to gainsay Douglas's fine sense for the human construction ofexperience. Still less is it to deny the critical importance of correspondencesset up in human societies between categories of persons andcategories of things, or between the respective differentiations of thesetaxonomies. I mean only to suggest the limitations of an analysis that aimsto collapse the conceptual structure of an object code into a functionalmessage, as though cultural things were merely substantialized versions ofsocial solidarities, the latter here assumed both as privileged and as practicalYSo in the end, the true logic of the social-cultural whole is utilitarian.Such is the result of adherence to the fateful Durkheimian separation ofsocial morphology from collective representation.Levi-Strauss's refusal to grant that distinction ontological status, on theother hand-his appropriation of the social by the symbolic-was a decisivestep in the development of a cultural theory. 48 It is true that this didnot entirely disengage Levi-Strauss's work from functionalist concerns (cf.47. Another way of thinking about these limitations is to observe that Douglas is traffickingmainly in motivated relations between symbols, so that to define the meaning of one bythe logical connection to the other (the motivation) will necessarily pennit most of thecultural content to evaporate. Douglas is actually concerned with the functioning ofalready symbolic elements (affinal relationships, lineages, concepts of animals, foodtabus, etc.) as signs for one another-using "symbol" and "sign" now in the usualAnglo-American sense. (Indeed most anthropological studies addressed to the "symbolic"are similarly preoccupied with this second-order sign function rather than with theconstitution of symbolic fonn and meaning.) Yet as Roland Barthes points out, animponant characteristic of the motivated sign (French, symbol), by contrast to the unmotivated,is that in the first there is no conceptual adequacy between signifier andsignified: the concept "outruns" the physical sign, for example, as Christianity is greaterthan the cross (1970 [19641, p. 38). It is easy to see, then, that when both signifier andsignified in a motivated sign relation are unmotivated symbols in their own right, thisinadequacy is doubly compounded. For given the logical relation between them, each ofthe elements, say food tabus and exclusive social groups, may act alternately as thesignifier or the signified of the other. Yet each remains, beside the sign of the other, asymbol in its own domain, whose concept also depends on differential relations withinthat domain. Consequently, one can hardly exhaust the meaning of either by the (fractional)analogy to the other. The semiotic analysis of food practices must far transcend thereference to social groups, as much as vice versa.48. "Uvi-Strauss seored because he did not look at cultural facts as somehow expressions ofsocial forces; rather both were analyzed within a single frame of reference" (Kuper 1973,p. 223).Boon and Schneider 1974), but it did at least give such concern much lessroom to operate by precluding all simple reftectionism in the relationbetween society and ideology. It is also true that Levi-Strauss, in carryingthe Durkheimian enterprise to a consistent conclusion by including socialrelations within the general system of collective representations, arrives inthe process at a higher naturalism. One may even remark an apparentclosure of the theoretical circle: from Morgan's insistence that the growthof institutions was predetermined and limited by "the natural logic of thehuman mind" to a structuralist analysis whose coda is composed by asimilar phrase (Levi-Strauss 1971; 1972). But the course has been more aspiral than a circle, since all the appropriation of the symbolic intervenesen route; and, as we have seen, it would be an error to equate Levi­Strauss's invocation of the mind with Morgan's "thinking principle,"which could do no more than react rationally to pragmatic values inherentin experience. "Never can man be said to be immediately confronted withnature in the way that vulgar materialism and empirical sensualism conceiveit," Levi-Strauss writes. His appeal to "/'esprit humain." then,would not short-circuit the symbolic, but rather would draw the consequencesof its ubiquity. The argument proceeds on the simple premise that.inasmuch as the human world is symbolically constituted, any similaritiesin the operations by which different groups construct or transform theircultural design can be attributed to the way the mind itself is constructed.By the same premise, "similarities" here cannot intend the content of thatdesign, but only the mode of ordering. It is never a question of specificmeanings, which each group works out by its own lights, but the waymeanings are systematically related, which in such forms as "binary opposition"may be observed to be general. Nor, consequently, is it ever aquestion of "biological reductionism," a charge that a discussion of culturein the context of mind might otherwise invite. No particular customwill ever be accounted for by the nature of the human mind, for the doublereason that in its cultural particularity it stands to mind as a difference doesto a constant and a practice to a matrix. The human nature to whichLevi-Strauss appeals consists not in an assemblage of substantial and fixedstructures, but in "the matrices from which structures belonging to thesame ensemble are engendered" (1971, p. 561).49 Thus the cultural ob-49. In this passage ofL'Homme Nu. Levi-Strauss turns a phrase from Piaget-based, it seemsto me, on a structuralism deficient in cultural understanding (Piaget 1971 )-into a clearcritique of various biological reductionisms. Piaget had noted in effect that in realityevery fonn is a content relative to its encompassing fonn, as every content is a fonn of the