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