Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

CODE

In particular he is mindful of Bateson’s notion that coded messages are tailored by their senders to fit their intended receivers and hence might represent a ‘metacommunicative attack’. Paine thus examines the individual selection of types of code as means of gaining and expressing power; different sorts of code will impart different sorts of control, by senders, over different sorts of message in different sorts of relationship. The closed messages of restricted code may therefore be said to be tailored to exerting a uniform control over a social group organized in terms of status and consensuality of interpretation. While the open messages of elaborated code may be said to be tailored by their senders to exert control over a social group organized in terms of individuals’ autonomous motives and intentions. Hence, a leader with ‘traditional authority’ (Weber) will control a retinue by emotionally rousing them to do their ritual duty, while a leader claiming ‘rational authority’ will control a citizenry by convincing them intellectually of their best interests. Alternatively, a group of individuals seeking to formalize their relations as a group might turn to a restricted code, an argot of some sort, as a means of signalling (to themselves as well as to others) the restrictions on properly loyal and purposive communication which they now intend to instigate (cf. Rapport 1994b).

Codes and translation

If restricted code is a closed form of communication in which meaning is implicit (and largely non-verbalized), and in which exchange is largely a matter of expressing and maintaining the positions and boundaries of a social group, then, Paine wonders (1976), what might be the consequences for translation and understanding between such codes? More broadly, might not types of codes be differentiated according to the extent to which they serve as vehicles of self-enclosure or social distantiation, giving onto a privatization of meaning (Arendt)? Or is it the case that since every code is a matter of learning, practice and use, translation is a hazardous procedure whatever the code’s nature; so that disagreements ramify as people talk past one another in elaborated code, while non-communication prevails as people resist outsiders’ efforts to engage in restricted code?

As intimated earlier, such questions of translation, of the inexorable loss of meaning between different individual speakers of code, go to the heart of language usage: of the use by human beings of symbolic systems to represent their experience. Theorists of translation, such as George Steiner, will argue that individuals must translate whenever they receive others’ messages: ‘all communication is translation’ (1975: 238).

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Furthermore, guaranteed translation requires guaranteed access to the unique idiolect of the individual interlocutor—something which is never achievable and never demonstrable. Hence, codificatory exchange is always ambiguous and ‘indeterminate’ (Quine). No two individuals’ experience is the same and any translation between them must involve inventive interpretation.Translation, Felstiner concludes, remains ‘the art of loss’ (1994).

Considering these ideas more anthropologically, Roy Wagner (1991) admits that the perceived world is always the reaction to the world by an individual: a refracted world, deflected through the prism of the self. Moreover, while ‘nothing could possibly be more clear, distinct, concrete, certain, or real than the self’s perception of perception, its own sensing of sense’ (1991:39), such subjective perceptions can only be elicited in others via codification in iconic—symbolic forms: a process from feeling to felt meaning to intended meaning which is inexorably entropic. Moreover, the meaning which an iconic—symbolic trope elicits is hermetically sealed within the personal microcosm: there is a perennial uncertainty as to whether one’s ‘green’, one’s ‘Prince Hamlet’, is another’s. Meaning is a personal, subjective, internal perception, and the extent to which intuitively apprehended subjective experience can be objectively described is a question without solution.

The way in which people do try to ‘[do] justice to internal selfperception with external means’ (Wagner 1991:39) is the subject of a formidable body of work by James Fernandez (1971, 1977, 1982) which centres on metaphor and has become known as ‘trope theory’. It is not just anthropologists who struggle against the fundamental solipsism and loneliness of incomprehensible individual lives, Fernandez begins, for individuals do so themselves. The elemental vectors of human existence are simple: we project what are initially psycho-somatic experiences of the body out into the world. However, these experiences are ‘problematic and not precisely defined’ even for the individuals concerned; in a word, they are ‘inchoate’ (1982:544). Using cultural codes, then, is a means by which individuals attempt to make more concrete, graspable and therefore resolvable what is otherwise barely comprehensible in their experience and relations with the world. More precisely, people employ the analogies of metaphor and other linguistic tropes (metonym, simile, synecdoche) so as to try to figure out what their lives are like; then, they build up these tropes into narratives which are recounted amongst others in attempts to compare their compositions of their experiences with others’.The codification of experience as trope can be understood as a kind of hypothesis which is being brought to bear on an inchoate subject out of a need for more concrete identity and

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understanding. In particular, via natural analogies with the physical human body and its concrete circumstances, individuals are better able to grasp their inchoate experiences and those of significant others; hence, the centrality of the body as a symbolic construct.

In order to approach the experiential ‘sensorium’ in which other minds are enmeshed (1992:135), Fernandez advises, the anthropologist must hope empathetically to approach the phenomenological subjectivity of others via the tropes they employ. To discover what others’ lives are like is to accede to the appropriateness of their metaphors. Indeed, this is the only access anyone ever has to the experience of others. Even an individual’s closest socio-cultural consociates know him in terms of the metaphorical associations he brings into play and their feeling of rightness: ‘perhaps the best index of cultural integration, or disintegration…is the degree to which men can feel the aptness of each others metaphors’ (Fernandez 1971:58).

But then is metaphorical usage so statically descriptive? Beginning from an attempt to codify and share experience, does not the employment of tropes itself give onto new experiences, new inchoateness (and an infinite deferring of intended meanings being communicated)? This was certainly the conclusion of linguistic theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) for whom two embattled tendencies characterized the life of language-in-use. On the one hand there was the fixed unity of language which continually convinced its fellow-users that there existed an abstract grammatical system of denotative forms through which their common world-views might find expression. But on the other, there was the continuous becoming of language into something new, something deriving from ongoing perceptions of its users and the contingency of those moments in which the schemata lead its socially charged, intentioned and accented existence.

In their study of codes and codification, and of metaphor in particular, anthropologists tend to have emphasized one or other of these Bakhtinian tendencies. For Fernandez, then, metaphorical communication amounts to a movement between different semantic domains within a culture’s shared ‘quality space’ (1977:459–61); this ‘cross-referencing’ provides a sensation of experiential fixity and of cultural integration. And Michael Jackson agrees: metaphor reveals unities between the intelligible, the sensible and the social; to use metaphors is to make the domains of the personal, the social and the natural co-extensive, and thus achieve a sense of a cosmic ‘wholeness of being’ (1989:152–5). If all metaphoric correspondences were ‘discovered’, Berger concludes, one would secure proof of the indivisible ‘totality of existence’ (1984:97).

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On the other hand, for Paine (1981:188), metaphor is the trope which most develops and extends thought. As Ricoeur elaborates (1981:180–1), the essence of metaphor is the crossing and the breaking of boundaries, the transcending of ordinary usage within any one semantic domain by bringing it into unusual relationship with others. Hence, the most important feature of metaphor is its nascent or emergent character; here, in the provision of previously unapprehended combinations of thought, is an enlarging of the circumference of the imagination. In nascent metaphorical usage, Steiner concludes (1975:23), is a new mapping of the world and a reorganization of the experiential habitation of reality.

Taking these battling emphases together we can perhaps conclude that metaphorization, as a process in the codification of experience, both serves as a means by which individuals seek to formulate and convey their prior perceptions and is itself a significant source of future perceptions to be conveyed.

See also: Classification, Cybernetics, Discourse, Interaction

COGNITION

‘Cognition’ concerns the knowledge which people employ so as to make sense of the world, and the ways in which that knowledge is acquired, learnt, organized, stored and retrieved. More loosely, it covers the major modalities of human experience: the ways in which people think, feel and sense, and so make their lives meaningful and more or less ordered.

Cognition as culture

Clearly there are overlaps between cognition as broadly conceived and the concept of ‘culture’. In this sense, there never has been a time when cognition was not a major anthropological focus. One may recall here, the early debate between Levy-Bruhl and Malinowski concerning ‘how natives think’. For Levy-Bruhl (1985), ‘primitive’ people were characterizable in terms of a pre-logical or mytho-poetic apperception of the world: a mentality governed by emotion, magical contagion and incoherency, and a belief in mystical connectedness. For Malinowski (1948), on the other hand, all people were equally rational and could recognize the same logical principles, and all people applied these principles in their everyday worldly dealings; it was not as if primitives

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inhabited something akin to enchanted dream-worlds from which modern man’s technological practices divorced him. In a later version of this debate, Lévi-Strauss (1966) posited that ‘savage thought’ was characterized by ‘a science of the concrete’ while modern thought was more abstract. Primitives (including their modern-day craftsmen descendants) made meaning and solved problems by way of employing extant and concrete objects and analogizing from them: so that differences between people may come to be conceived of as those between different animal species (totemism), while dreams were explained in terms of spirit-doubles at large in equivalent other worlds. Moderns, meanwhile, were less imaginative in their thought-processes, less wild, and content to solve problems on the basis of reasonable, intellectual models.

The question of the so-called ‘psychic unity’ of humankind lived on in ‘the rationality debate’ (cf.Wilson 1970).The issue was now reformed as one concerning whether the logic of reasoning perforce took one universal form or whether, following notions of Wittgenstein (and Winch 1970), people in different cultures could be said to reason within the criteria and terms of diverse ‘forms of life’. As Evans-Pritchard famously concluded concerning the witchcraft beliefs of the Azande of Sudan, and the rationality of maintaining those beliefs in daily practice: within the conditions and confines of their belief system, the Zande reason perfectly well, but they could not and did not reason beyond or against them (1950). In similar vein, the project of ‘ethnoscience’ (cf. Frake 1980; Atran 1993) set out to collate native categories of thought as constituted in particular places. From elementary ‘units of meaning’ (equivalent to phonemes, the elementary units of meaningful sound), a cultural grammar for normatively constituting the world could be disinterred: from elementary terms for kinsfolk, plants and diseases, say, to the lineaments of social life.

In this way, issues of cognition and rationality also came to merge with those of cultural relativism, and questions concerning the nature of cultural difference as it pertains to individual members’ experiences and mentalities. It is worth noting here, therefore, the challenge to culturalrelativist notions (Boasian and Whorfian) of the direct effects of culture on individual psyches posed by more recent work on innate cognitive tendencies. The Chomskian revolution in language-acquisition, for instance, has substituted a focus on common human genetic programming for earlier (say, Saussurean) ideas of predetermining cultural matrices, so as to delineate how individuals learn and continually transform what they know. More particularly, in opposition to Whorfian notions of colour-words determining colour-cognitions Berlin and Kay

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