SYMBOL/SIGN, IMAGE, IMAGINING

Representations & Pragmatisms

• Language & speech – langue and parole – competence & performance

• Text & reading/writing• Symbol & symbolic action• Sign & signification • Image & imagining (work of the imagination)• MEANING & USE – “the pragmatist challenge”• Structure & agency redux

Symbol (Sign, Image, Text)• symbols are multivocal• complexity of associations• many ideas, relations between things, actors, interactions

& transactions represented simultaneously by the symbol vehicle

• enables a wide range of groups & individuals to relate to the same symbol in a variety of ways

– semantically open & manipulable• Ambiguous

• instrumentalities of various forces– triggers of social action– operating in changing fields of social relationships

New kind of capitalist? Or Socialist?

Signs & Significations

analyzing the symbolic content

• what they communicate– “metacommunication” – commentary

• play of “tropes” as an argument of images• ways in which information, ideas, attitudes,

pass among individuals, groups, nations, & generations is socially constituted– rooted in social relationships– produced in the conduct of social life

• social means available to members for the accomplishment of social ends

PATHS OF “DEVELOPMENT”:a brief symbolic study

• Research among indigenous peoples– Fear & expectation that all societies will soon resemble

one another– Disappearing worlds

• Genocides and/or ethnocides• “white man’s burden” – save their souls or zeal to acquire land &

resources?– Researchers – salvage anthropology

• Work with a sense of loss at the prospect of cultural extinction• Preservation & holism

• “convergence thesis” – process of “modernization”

The “modern”

• Human societies organized around industrialism

• Nuclear family• Forces of bureaucracy• Technological specialization• Traditional or tribal societies marginalized or

engulfed by this new social order• Gellner, the convergences thesis, & the “end

of history”

The primitive • Categories

– The primitive & the civilized– Tradition & modern

PRIMITIVISM & THE SAVAGE SLOT IN ANTHROPOLOGY

• Anthropology as research from somewhere– Long standing association with the primitive– Anthropology placed in the savage slot

• Enlightenment notion of nature– Underlying drive of behavior– As the real, objective universe as distinguished from the

spiritual, intellectual, or imaginary world• Cartesian reductionism

– Nature denotes pre-cultural, primitive, uncultivated or uncivilized in humankind

– Nature is independent of social law– Nature refers to sub-human -- animal, plant, physical– Nature remains when the peculiar qualities of sapiens the

sentient, cultural, and technological are omitted– Notions of primitivity, sub-humanity, non-intellectuality,

emotionality linked to nature and non-white

The Enlightenment on Human Diversity: Stages & Progress

• Condorcet (18th century) -- all peoples history fall somewhere between OUR present degree of civilization & that which we see among savage tribes– nature distributes her gifts unequally

• from egalitarian small society to inequality within and among• The primitive mind -- monstrous aberrations of idolatry of first men

– Animatism & superstition– The enlightened mind

• Progress & degeneration– history of world presents to us more than once the spectacle of a civilized

people invaded by barbarians communicating in its manners its language its knowledge & forcing them to make one people with it

• Primitivism– Important trope/episteme/argument for rule

Enlightenment theories of human nature

• Hobbes -- competition & progress; we are all savages• Rousseau -- savage-utopia configuration; also story of

dystopia– savages in the forest – frightened– peace is first natural law– to seek nourishment & peace & the establishment of societies– with establishment of society -- lose feelings of weakness,

equality ceases, state of war begins– The “noble savage”

• Locke – tabula rasa – we are all blank slates/empty closets

Nature and progress: 1915 anthropologists

• “we see that the higher civilized white man has already in some respects out distanced others, that he is rapidly diversifying, and that all about us those who cannot keep the accelerated pace are being eliminated by nature”

• Overemphasis of the naturalism of non-white societies

• some groups adapt by virtue of their natural attributes while others adapt through sentient, cultural, and distinctly human means

PRIMITIVISM & RACISM

• Meld together• T. Jefferson – “blacks, whether originally a

distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to whites”

• Race and racial differences as a state of nature• Sociobiological notion that racism derives

from genes that cause groups to compete against those who are genetically different– Nature outside of culture

race and ethnicity• There are no biological human races

• up until 14th cent. in Europe cultural & social evolution based on the idea of progress from kin-based societies to civil society through governance & law

• after 16th cent. in Europe ideas of blood were used to characterize difference

After 1500• European

exploration – increased contact with other human societies

• exploration turned to conquest and Ethnocentric feeling of European superiority

The Enlightenment: 17th & 18th Century Europe

• race used interchangeably with type, variety, people, nation, generation & species

• race equated with “breeding stock”

• 1700s – Enlightenment science– social phenomena and the world’s peoples into

natural schemes

Formal Human ClassificationLinneaus Systemae Naturae, 1758

• Europeaeus– White; muscular; hair – long, flowing;

eyes blue• Americanus– Reddish; erect; hair – black, straight, thick; wide nostrils

• Asiaticus– Sallow (yellow); hair black; eyes dark

• Africanus– Black; hair – black, frizzled; skin silky; nose flat; lips tumid

1795 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach: ”race” classifications

• Malayan• Ethiopian• American • Mongolian • Caucasian• coined the term "Caucasian"

because he believed that the Caucasus region of Asia Minor produced "the most beautiful race of men".

1830s: Philadelphia doctor and polygenist Samuel Morton

• collected hundreds of human skulls of known races• measured them by filling the skulls with lead pellets and

then pouring the pellets into a glass measuring cup• tables assign the highest brain capacity to Europeans (with

the English highest of all)– Second rank goes to Chinese, third to Southeast Asians and

Polynesians, fourth to American Indians, and last place to Africans and Australian aborigines.

work establish the “scientific basis” for physical anthropology but also the idea that race is inherently biological

Stephen Jay Gould:“The Mis-measure of Man” (1981)

• Re-analyzed Morton’s data

Morton’s racist bias -- prevented identification of fully overlapping measurements among the racial skull samples he used

race and social difference

• Race as social grouping based on perceived physical differences and cloaked in the language of biology

• Charles Wagley’s term social races – groups assumed to have a biological basis but actually defined in a culturally arbitrary rather than a scientific manner

• Racism – systematic social and political bias based on idea of race

AAA statement on race• “Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates

that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups.

• Conventional geographic ‘racial’ groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes….

• ‘Race’ thus evolved as a world view, a body of prejudgments that distorts our ideas about human differences and group behavior….

• The ‘racial’ world view was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth