Week 2—Society as mind

Week 2—Society as mind

Main reading: Bashkow (2006)

Other reading: Hanks (1996)

This week is concerned with another, separate tradition in cultural anthropology which comes from Durkheim in a general way, but is distinct from his idea of functionalist explanations. A perfect illustration of the subject as homo duplex is language. A speaker of a language has knowledge of that language, but it is not consciously perceived as knowledge. Rather, speaking in grammatical sentences in one’s own language feels natural because it is automatic. Two speakers of the same language also have identical copies of this knowledge, and neither of them had to learn the grammatical rules that they both possess. The grammatical rules of language are social facts. Or, we can say that there is an analogy between culture and language: Cultures are like languages.

• What does it mean to say that a system is an economy of signs?
• If culture is fundamentally a total system in this sense, can two people from different cultures ever really have common experiences? Why or why not?
• Ira Bashkow is an American, white, an anthropologist, a foreigner in PNG, and he is a waitman. Which is the more important thing to know about him? Which is more real or more true? Why?

References

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.