Rationality and Cultural Interpretivism by Yoshida Kei;

Author:Yoshida, Kei;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Culture as a Symbolic Structure

The term “culture” is often taken to be at least multivocal, at best ambiguous. Because of that and other reasons, British social anthropologists of the classical period (early to mid-twentieth century) avoided using it in their explanations. Instead they explained by means of “social structure.” True, Sahlins discerns the ambiguity and elusiveness of the term “culture.” But he uses it nonetheless and claims that it cannot be eliminated from anthropology as a scientific subject. Sahlins explains the idea of culture as follows: “[Culture is] the organization of human experience and action by symbolic means. The persons, relations, and materials of human existence are enacted according to their meaningful values—meanings that cannot be determined from their biological or physical properties” (Sahlins 2000b, 158). Clearly, Sahlins draws this explication from so-called “symbolic anthropology.” According to him, culture is a symbolic organization or system of human action, and it cannot be reduced to nature. We can easily discern here the distinction between nature and convention in that Sahlins differentiates between the physical and the symbolic. But, this does not mean that Sahlins accepts cultural determinism—although some criticize Sahlins as a cultural determinist (Friedman 1987).[5] For instance, Sahlins criticizes Alfred Kroeber and Leslie White’s ideas of culture as a superorganic entity, where an individual is completely controlled by external factors (Sahlins 1982, 1999a). In this regard, Sahlins is more careful than Geertz. Geertz does not seem to take cultural change seriously; Sahlins, however, pays attention to it. In his view, in order to understand cultural change, the dialectic relation between culture and history or between structure and agency is indispensable. But, how is that interaction possible? That is the question that needs to be discussed in this chapter.

Although he does not accept the kind of cultural determinism espoused by Kroeber and White, Sahlins still accepts White’s view that “human existence is symbolically constituted, which is to say, culturally ordered” (Sahlins 1999a, 400). According to Sahlins, human existence is based on culture, a symbolic system, and human beings are not free from it—even if it does not govern them completely. Culture is a guide for us. Sahlins claims as that “[h]uman action is conceived as proceeding in the [sic] terms of a symbolic design that gives order at once to practical experience, customary practice, and the unfolding relations between the two” (Sahlins 1977, 15).

But what does he mean by culture as a symbolic system? In order to explain this point, Sahlins appeals to Saussure’s structuralist view. We need Saussurean structuralism in order to know Sahlins’s view better. According to Harris and Taylor (1989), Saussure differentiates between language (langue) and speech (parole) and contends that the study of language is the primary concern of linguistics. In Saussure’s view, language is a semiological system that is based on mutual relations between signs, and he sees “our understanding of reality as depending essentially upon our social use of the verbal signs which constitute the language we use” (Harris and Taylor 1989, 177). In other words, we cannot separate thought from language.

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