SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

i6i I Social Theory and Social Action Comparison, Pragmatics, and Interpretation I 163
time. The paradox arises because instances of failed progress, whether in spatially
distant "primitive" societies or in local irrational superstitions or residual social
inequalities, are problematic "survivals" or "remnants" of modernity's historical
trajectory. Our knowledge of the past, thus, depends on the contemporary persistence
of societies and customs that once had coherent meaning (Stocking
1987:230). Whereas in the late eighteenth century Johann Gottfried Herder
(1988:75) could argue that "remnants of the old, true folk poetry" of Europe
ought to be collected before they vanish with the "daily advance of our so-called
culture," nineteenth-century evolutionists were more likely to urge that such survivals
should, in the spirit of enlightened rationalism, be either reformed or eradicated.
Applied as a general principle of comparison, then, the doctrine of survivals
stipulates that
the fragmentary and disjointed nature of certain customs—their poor integration
into a people's way of life, and the nonsensical nature of people's rationales
for them—is itself one of the telltale signs that they are a survival from
earlier times when they formed a more nearly seamless part of the web of life.
In the West, it is this same fragmentary nature of certain customs that is taken
as justifying the comparativist in arranging them serially across cultures: the
less a custom appears to be integrated into life, that is, the less intelligible it is
per se (or to those who now practice it), the more legitimate becomes the writer's
assimilation of it into a list of similar customs practiced around the world.
(Campany 1990:16)
I have mentioned linear ethnocentrism, self-critical reflexivity, and evolutionary
survivals as three models for comparison that permeate cross-cultural understanding
with moral evaluations. In much contemporary discourse, in contrast,
such blatant evaluative stances are out of favor, as comparativists attempt
to ground their work in more principled research strategies, perhaps reflecting
the fact that scholarship takes place in a (post)modern world characterized more
by the collage of what Clifford Geertz (1986:114) calls "clashing sensibilities in
inevadable contact" than by automomous cultural isolates. Although I will not
attempt to give a comprehensive listing here, several prominent strategies—typology,
reconstruction, hermeneutics, and reductionism—need to be briefly characterized.
3
Comparison by typology involves generating a set of analytical parameters,
the values of which enable the analyst to locate different cultural systems on one
or more continua of difference. As comparative work proceeds both the values
and the parameters are modified, refined, and expanded as additional data are
gathered. Anthropologists are particularly prone to dichotomize the societies
they study into poles such as hot and cold, classificatory and instrumental, egalitarian
and hierarchical, Aristotelian and Heraclitean, and group and grid; similarly,
comparative philosophers still struggle with the simplistic opposition developed
by Hegel of Western subjectivism and Oriental universalism (Hegel
1
9^7'-57 2 -)- Clyde Kluckhohn (1960:137—39) provides a more sophisticated account
of the typological strategy:
Such enquiry, exposing the principles of cultural structure, would take us some
distance toward ranging'cultures in an orderly way as to their respective similarities
and differences. It would also help us to isolate wherein rests the
distinctiveness of each particular culture at a given time level—the "withoutwhich-not"
of that culture. . . . For typological models of structure and process
we need to abstract from immediately visible "reality," disengaging the accidental
by including in the models only those aspects of the observable that are
relevant to the model being constructed.
Typologies can also be constructed by specifying the implicational relations
among a set of variables, such that one variable presupposes a second variable
but not vice versa: for example, do ut des ("give in order to receive") ritualism
and macrocosm-microcosm cosmology (Heimann 1957) or "denaturalized" philosophical
discourse and the assertion of universal truth claims (Griffiths
1990:80). All empirical cases are consistent with the direction of the implication
but the posited universal regularity does not predict the presence of the variables
in specific cases. A third kind of typology, in addition to those based on dichotomization
and implicational relations, is semiotic typology, which organizes cultural
data in terms of some "master trope," such as metonomy or metaphor,
textuality or rules, prescriptive or performative, and signifier or signified (Jameson
1979:68). The logical danger here is that the analyst must locate the comparative
enterprise itself in one of the hypothesized typological spaces, which
implies that comparison is just another trope (Rochberg-Halton i985:4io). 4
The most famous exponent of the comparative method of reconstruction in
religious studies is Georges Dumézil. Without underestimating the situational
creativity and intercultural borrowings from outside the Indo-European heritage,
Dumézil postulates the persistence of "common underlying structures" (Littleton
1974:173) throughout the Indo-European world, from Vedic India to Celtic Ireland,
particularly the representation in cosmology and history of deities, powers,
and social formations belonging to three distinct functions, "magical sovereinty,"
"warrior power," and "peaceful fecundity" (Dumézil 1988:121). Dumézil
asserts that
the comparative study of the most ancient documents from India, Iran, Rome,
Scandinavia, and Ireland has allowed us to give [Indo-European civilization] a
content and to recognize a great number of facts about civilization, and especially
religion, which were common to these diverse societies or at least to several
of them. ... It seems hardly imaginable that chance should have twice
created this vast structure, especially in view of the fact that other Indo-European
peoples have homologous accounts. The simplest and humblest explanation
is to admit that the Romans, as well as the Scandinavians, received this
scenario from a common earlier tradition and that they simply modernized its