Table of Contents
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: