SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

xvi I Introduction
Introduction I xvii
chiefly rhetoric which the audience brings to the event serve to defuse the
speech's political effectiveness. Contextualized performance, as this example
shows, entails risks, for the richness of metapragmatic signals in the speech becomes
a liability in a culture caught between a traditional norm of chiefly "whispering"
and a modern trend toward the explicit display of oratorical prowess.
The chapters in Part III focus on the question: to what degree can complex
semiotic processes be used as the basis for cross-cultural typologizing? In other
words, are there certain semiotic processes that distinguish kinds of social orders,
in much the same way that some social researchers use the notion of modes of
production to typologize the world's cultures (Jameson 1982:173)? Chapter 5
(Tropical Semiotics) investigates the process of metaphorization, that is, the construction
of innovative tropes grounded in but creatively transforming literal or
normative meanings. A reanalysis of tropes found in the myths and exchanges of
the Foi people in Papua New Guinea provides the setting to evaluate one particular
theoretical model, the theory of "symbolic obviation" developed by Roy
Wagner and applied to the Foi by James Weiner. Whereas Wagner and Weiner
insist that the cultures of New Guinea differ systematically from Western culture
in the way that literal and tropic meanings are related, I challenge this global
typologization with the claim that these processes can be found on both sides of
the "great divide." This generally negative conclusion about the explanatory
power of semiotic typology is supported in Chapter 6 (The Semiotic Regimentation
of Social Life) by the three case studies of semiotic "regimentation," that
is, the way one level of semiotic structure organizes, controls, or defines another
level. I argue here that three kinds of regimentation—textual, institutional, and
ideological—do not correspond to types of societies but rather are cross-culturally
widespread in phenomena as varied as ritual, tourism, and advertising.
chosen for study, comparative interpretation and naturalization of convention,
reveal an unavoidable tension between the actor's point of view and the analyst's
point of view. But since both decontextualization and naturalization are familiar
cultural phenomena, the conclusion can be drawn that theoretical discourse is
itself a cultural phenomenon subject to textual forms, pragmatic rules, and complex
semiotic processes. This conclusion should not, however, be taken as a rejection
of the possibility of comparative research but as a reminder that scholarly
discourse can never escape its social groundedness.
Like a good Peircean diagrammatic sign, the organization of this volume is
intended to represent its overall semiotic argument, beginning with the explication
of its analytical foundations, followed by the study of the tension between
text and context, then moving to the issue of comparative typology of complex
semiotic processes, and concluding with the pragmatics of theoretical discourse.
I have intentionally avoided programmatic discussion of the "semiotics of culture,"
not only because such position papers abound (Z. Bauman 1968; Boon
1982; Eco 1975; Herzfeld 1986; Mertz 1985; Posner 1988, 1989; Schwimmer
1977; Singer 1984; Winner 1988) but also because I believe that better theorizing
must await additional semiotically informed ethnographic research. To the
degree that these essays are effective in persuading others of the virtues of practicing
a semiotic approach to cultural analysis, the volume will become, for its
readers, an enacted indexical icon.
Finally, Part IV goes one step farther to examine the relationship between
cultural processes and the theoretical discourse about them. The paradoxical
claim advanced in these two concluding chapters is that theoretical discourse,
whether in the comparative philosophies of religion discussed in Chapter 7
(Comparison, Pragmatics, and Interpretation) or in the social theories analyzed
in Chapter 8 (Naturalization of Convention), shares many of the same semiotic
structures and constraints as the cultural data under study. These chapters, following
both Peirce's insight into the metasemiotic character of all semiosis and
Silverstein's more detailed explication of the metapragmatic function, show that
members of a society are constantly interpreting their social interaction and his-
; torical experience by constructing interpretive models or accounts that represent,
in a limited way, the practices and conventions of the culture. Of course, philosophers
and social theorists are extreme cases, since their work attempts to
decontextualize the very grounds of their discourse—the philosophers by asserting
the absoluteness of their truth claims and the social theorists by naturalizing
the source of cultural conventions in extra-semiotic realms. The two examples