SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

no I Comparative Perspectives on Complex Semiotic Processes Tropical Semiotics I i n
culture a pervasive tendency to turn historically derived "structural conditions"
into "individual inevitability" (MacKinnon 1987:306) and a corresponding deontological
effort to justify the practices and institutions of the status quo as
good by revealing them as natural (Kitcher 1985:245). It was the great contribution
of John Locke to locate in the "state of nature" the essential building
block of liberalism, private property. Rather than seeing, with Weiner, convention
as the artificial attempt to harmonize innate differences, convention can also
be viewed as the propensity to impose systematic differentiations or discriminations
on the basis of assumed given similarities among people. And rather than
treating, with Weiner, social conventions as imposing constraints on individual
wills, the natural order can be considered as setting constraints on the possibilities
of the social system, or social systems can be calculated to be the deductive
consequence of individual decision making or utility maximization. The difficulties
involved in Wagner's global typology are so severe that, at one point, Wagner
himself reverses the terms of the argument by stating that the "order, structure,
or system" of social contract is regarded in Western social thinking as being "innate"
(19863:176).
Despite these reservations, I believe that a more interesting ethnographic project
can be salvaged: to describe the semiotic constructs of a single culture in
terms of (1) the dialectical hierarchization of the levels of semantic and tropic
semiosis and (2) the contextual play of conventional-N ("collectivizing") vs. innovating
("differentiating") symbolic forms at the second level of semiosis. And
this is precisely the ambitious task that Weiner has set for himself in The Heart
of the Pearl Shell.
Obviational Exchange
Fundamental to Foi conceptualization of their social life are two interlocking
postulates. First, the Foi believe that male and female spheres are complementary,
continuous, and contrapuntal (Weiner 1988:90), so that consanguineal lineality
is the prerogative of men yet requires the "natural" generative powers of women.
As a result, "the responsibility of men ... is continually to transform the sexual
productivity of their own females into the artifice of male patrilineality" (Weiner
1988:90). Second, the impasse of this conjuncture of nature and artifice requires
the mediation of objects of value that, in social exchanges, simultanously objectify
and metaphorize "male" and "female" domains. Exchanges are tropic because
they set in motion a series of analogies between conventional-N images of
social differentiation. For example, the wife-taking group's act of presenting
"male" valuables to the wife-giving group, who give both a female and "female"
items, invokes the standard images of the forces of male/female complementarity
which the Foi see as pervading human and cosmic realms. (Unfortunately, Wei-
ner's diagram [1988:140] reverses the symbolism of this analogy by lining up
"male and female" with "wife-givers and wife-takers.") The ritual alignment of
the domain of intersexual differentiation and the domain of affinal opposition is
itself a trope, not only because the "female" wife-givers are in fact men but also
because the "male" valuables and meat they receive from the wife-takers invert
the reciprocal exchange of the valuables for meat in nonaffinal contexts (i.e.,
aname kobora exchanges of "female" pork and "male" pearl shells). Next, the
presentation of pigs by wife-takers when the first child is born in turn "shifts"
the conventional-N meanings belonging to the standardized image of affines.
Whereas affines are supposed to be normatively differentiated, they have become
related through a child; the wife-givers are now the child's matrilaterals. Finally,
the status of cross-cousins in the next generation becomes ambiguous, since it
uneasily combines two previous idioms of exchange, the sharing consanguinity
of "brothers" and the oppositional stance of affines (Weiner 1988:145); their
exchanges act out the most inclusive metaphor: "affines are consanguines" (Weiner
1988:286).
Weiner uses Wagner's term "obviation" (Wagner 1978:31—33) to describe
the complex discursive process whereby, first, innovative symbolic meaning is
created out of the raw materials of conventional-N associations and, second, the
motivation for the original association is either exposed or rationalized. Obviation
is a "processual form of the trope" (Wagner i988:xi) that tacks back and
forth between conventional-N symbolism, where sign and meaning tend toward
functional separation, and tropic dislocation, where the first symbolization is unified
in the mutuality of metaphor. Although Wagner and Weiner illustrate obviation
with ritual and narrative examples taken from their respective Papua New
Guinea ethnographic cases, the model is not intended to be a local genre rule nor
an emic mode of indigenous interpretation. Presumably, however, part of the
meaningfulness of cultural constructions for the people who produce them depends
on an implicit recognition of semiotically well-formed instances (cf. Hanson
and Hanson 1981, 1983:191). What is special about obviational symbolism
is that the sequence of tropes in a ritual or in a myth achieves a degree of closure
whereby the last metaphor returns to the origin point of the discourse:
As this continues, the effects of the tropic assimilations become cumulative;
eventually the distinction between the modalities, recast into ever more liminal
form, is eroded away, and the initial construction, pushed to the point of paradox,
collapses into its modal opposite. The metaphorizing of one element or
episode by another leads, progressively and cumulatively, to the metaphorizing
of one modality by the other. The effect suggests the closing of the traditional
hermeneutical circle, for, in the final metaphorization, the reflexive component
of construction, normally "out of awareness," becomes apparent as a consequence
of the construction. (Wagner 1978:32-33)