Society as mind

Society as mind

Ryan Schram
ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building 410 (A02)
Week of March 03, 2025 (Week 2)

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2025/2

Main reading: Bashkow (2006)

Other reading: Hanks (1996)

What do you mean?

Did anyone perform any breaching experiments over the weekend?

How did they go?

The linguistic analogy

Language gives us a way to understand the split subject (Saussure [1915] 2013, 13, 16).

• Everyone speaks a language, and they speak their first language automatically (Saussure [1915] 2013, 16).
• Language is not just sound. What makes linguistic sound meaningful is what people perceive when they hear it (Saussure [1915] 2013, 14).
• Two speakers of the same language have identical copies of the same rules for processing the speech they hear (Saussure [1915] 2013, 21, 30).

Language is a system of social facts in the minds of the people who speak it (Saussure [1915] 2013, 17–18).

This has lead anthropologists to apply a linguistic analogy to culture: Possessing a cultural worldview is like being fluent in one’s first language.

Languages are systems

Much like Durkheim redefined society, Ferdinand de Saussure redefined language:

• There is no good or correct way to speak a language. Someone’s utterances either make sense or they don’t; everything else is an opinion.
• The history of a language does not tell you anything about why people understand each other at one moment in time.
• Individual variations in speaking don’t change the language, and don’t need to be explained.

Language is a collective fact

In French one can talk about “language” with several different words, so Saussure defines his words precisely (Saussure [1915] 2013, 16):

• parole, speech, or the ways people speak, or the particular examples of people’s use of their language to communicate
• langue, language, in the sens of a system of rules that everyone shares when they speak a language.
• langage, language, encompassing both langue and parole.

Parole is an individual fact, and is not interesting to Saussure. It takes place in diachronic time, the time of history and change.

Langue is a collective fact, and we should look to the collective to understand why people have a language that works for them. Langue can only be seen in a synchronic perspective, like a freeze frame.

Saussure’s ideas are counterintuitive until you realize that he is also employing his own version of homo duplex as a model of the (speaking) subject.

The basic element of langue is the sign

Langue is a system of signs (Saussure [1915] 2013, 18, 72).

A sign is:

• a signifier, or “sound-image”
• a signified, an idea.

( “horse” | 🐎 )

( “cat” | 😹 )

( Sr | Sd )

Ceci n’est pas une pipe

When we see “horse” we think 🐎. If your first language is English, you cannot not think about 🐎.

And yet signs deceive us.

There is nothing in h, o, r, or s that has anything to do with 🐎. The relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary (Saussure [1915] 2013, 78).

Why does “horse” mean 🐎?

There is an economy of signs

Sr–Sd relationships are determined by Sr–Sr’ relationships.

c-a-t: 😹

b-a-t: 🦇

The only difference between these signs is the difference between the sounds c and b (Saussure [1915] 2013, 139–40).

(A detail more relevant to linguistics than anthropology: Signs are distinguished on the basis of two kinds of opposition, paradigmatic and syntagmatic. See Saussure ([1915] 2013), 93)

The system of oppositions among signifiers construct (think) the world for us

Part of each of our brains is the second, social mind, which works like a mail sorting machine.

Each language, as a synchronic system, is a distinct set of criteria for sorting the world.

In English there are two signs (see Saussure [1915] 2013, 136):

• ( “sheep” | 🐑 )
• ( “mutton” | 🍖 )

but in French there’s one:

• ( “mouton” | 🐑 🍖)

English and French speakers live in the same material world, but they see different things because they each have different systems of signs.

Cultures are like languages because language is a medium for culture

A sign is a sound-pattern that stands for an idea.

Signs can also stand for other signs.

An example courtesy of Roland Barthes (1972), based on Claude Levi-Strauss (1963).

( “rose” | 🌹 )

Signs can be signifiers, a diagram

Here’s a diagram of a sign that is a signifier:

( ( “rose” | 🌹 ) | ___________ )

A closed economy of signs means each culture is ethnocentric

( “ejeba” | 🎈 )

( “boka” | 🧱 )

( ( “ejeba” | 🎈 ) | 🙎🏻‍♂️ 🚀 💵 )

( ( “boka” | 🧱 ) | 😀 )

The limits of a synchronic perspective

• A synchronic perspective lets us see the collective mind of society, which is easy to ignore or deny.
• But a synchronic perspective is like looking at a society from 10,000 feet in the air. You only see what people have in common and what is constant.
• The structural perspective on signs or on cultural categories seems to imply that a culture’s conceptual structure exists in isolation from everything else in the world, but it isn’t.
• How do we retain the value of this perspective yet avoid the pitfalls of its limits?

Extra slide: Collective phenomena, social totalities, closed systems

Durkheim and Saussure do not agree on everything or say the same things; they do think alike in one important way.

• Durkheim: Society is like a machine, or like the body of a living organism. It is a whole, and all of the parts contribute to the whole.
• Saussure: The synchronic view of language reveals that a language is a total system in which each part (sign) has value (or signifies some idea) because it is different from all the other parts.

There is no outside of these systems. Everything one experiences is flitered through, or mediated, by these systems and is perceived in relation to one element or another.

Do Durkheim and Saussure have a bias in favor of monoculturalism?

A question to consider in this week's tutorials: Is there a bias influenced by the political context in which these authors are working?

References and further reading

Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies: The Complete Edition, in a New Translation. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Bashkow, Ira. 2006. “The Lightness of Whitemen.” In The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World, 64–94+12pp (photographs). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hanks, William F. 1996. “The Language of Saussure.” In Language and Communicative Practices, 21–38. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cdocument%7C1677290?account_id=14757&usage_group_id=95408.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. (1915) 2013. Course in General Linguistics. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=f4c0ca6c-2f77-36ce-93c9-8548d380a57e.