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# Metaphors of kinship and performativity of symbols # 

## Metaphors of kinship and performativity of symbols ##

Ryan Schram 

ANTH 2654: Forms of Families

3 September 2015

Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/2654/6

## Lecture outline ##

* The social construction of reality
  - Durkheim's idea: Collective representations
  - We see the world through symbols
  - Schneider: A culture's theories of conception are a symbolic representation of kinship
* Metaphors we live by
  - Lakoff and Johnson's concept of metaphor: The mapping of attributes from a source onto a target.
  - Argument is war
  - Health is up/Sickness is down
  - Love is a journey
  - Huli marriage is bridewealth
  - Family is...?
* How to do things with words
  - Carsten argues that kinship is created through symbolic action
  - Semantic and pragmatic values
  - J. L. Austin: constative and performative
  - J. L. Austin: locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary
  - Shifters
  - Kinship as performance 

## References ##

Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor.

Danesi, Marcel. 2004. Messages, Signs, and Meanings: A Basic Textbook in Semiotics and Communication. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Richter, Duncan J. 2004. “Wittgenstein, Ludwig.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H6.

Wardlow, Holly. 2006. Wayward Women: Sexuality And Agency in a New Guinea Society. University of California Press.

## See also ##

In Weeks 5 and 6, the lectures introduce basic ideas of semiotics and symbolic anthropology. Here's some articles which sketch some of the ideas in more detail: 

* [[:alternating sounds]]
* [[:semantics and pragmatics]]