SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

Introduction
IN REFLECTING BACK on the monuments of its intellectual heritage, modern semiotic
anthropology gazes upon the twin peaks of Charles Sanders Peirce, the
American scientist and mathematician, and Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss linguist.
Among the many ironies of this dual heritage is a disjunction in the work
of these theorists between the nature of the facts they proposed to explain and
the potential of the analytical tools they developed. Peirce, in seeking to account
for the homologous character of physical and mental realities, developed semiotic
tools (especially his notions of indexical signs and chain-like semiosis) that have
proved powerful for research into social, historical, and cultural phenomena, the
study of which, for the most part, remained only an avocation for Peirce himself.
Saussure, while attempting to justify historical linguistics by seeing language as
part of the "life of signs in society" (1974:1.48), produced the framework for a
linguistic theory that removes language from its social embeddedness. It is this
disjunction that motivated me to title this collection of semiotic studies Signs
Society, for I follow Saussure in taking systems of signs as the data I am interested
in explaining and yet I rely on Peirce for many specific analytical distinctions.
Anthropologists, at least in this country, have generally tended to see in
Peirce's semiotics rather than in Saussure's semiology a suitable analog for the
conditions and practice of fieldwork in other cultures. As in field research where
the ethnographer tries to make sense of the sign systems of another culture
through intense, often trying, interpretive abductions, so in Peirce's theory the
meaning of a sign consists of the unforeseen succession of interpreting signs that
serve to represent a common object (Daniel 1984:4z). Peirce offers the possibility
that meaning is more than an operation of mental decoding, since semiosis is
an open-ended process in which each moment of interpretation alters the field
for subsequent interpretations. In contrast, Saussure's theory focuses on the preestablished,
fixed code shared equally by ideal speaker and ideal hearer (Ponzio
1984:274—75). And Saussure's effort to establish linguistic value without taking ,
into account positive semantic meaning, the context of utterance, or worldly ref-
erence is countered by Peirce's close attention to the indexical anchoring of prop- \
ositional reference and to the necessity of adequation between representation and
reality (Steiner 1981:421).
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At the level of the rhetoric of theory, Saussure's reliance on dichotomous opxiii