2.3 Culture as communication

theory of culture: an ethnographer goes back to the same materials and adds “layers” – this would be the sense of “thick” as in a thick pile – as well as density, concentration – like in a thick soup. Geertz’s view of culture focuses on culture as a product of human interaction – “culture ... is public ... it does not exist in someone’s head ...” (ibid.). Human beings both create culture and must interpret it. To say that culture is not in someone's head means to emphasize the fact that culture is out there, both produced by and available to humans for interpretation. In this perspective, cultural manifestations are acts of communication. When we observe people engaged in a public debate, participating in a funeral, going to a soccer match, or watching a cock fight, we see people engaged in coordinated behaviors which not only imply but also produce worldviews, including local notions of person (or self), a concept that is central to Geertz’s work as well as to much of cultural anthropology. To be standing in a line to get into a theater not only implies a set of assumptions (and hence knowledge) on how to get access to a seat for a public performance – a theme that would be foregrounded by cognitive anthropologists –, it also communicates notions of public order, individual rights, and social cooperation. It communicates a certain notion of person while bringing it into being. For the same reasons, to refuse to be in a line is also a communicative act which publicly asserts defiance of public norms and criticism of the rights and duties implied by those norms.

2.3.3The indexicality approach and metapragmatics

More recent versions of the view of culture as communication have been informed by work on indexicality (see sections 1.4.2 and 6.9.2). This is particularly the case in Michael Silverstein’s expansion on Peirce’s and Jakobson’s theoretical work. In this new perspective,8 the communicative force of culture works not only in representing aspects of reality, but also in connecting individuals, groups, situations, objects with other individuals, groups, situations, and objects or, more generally, with other contexts. In this view, meaning (of messages, acts, situations) is made possible not only through conventional relationships between signs and their contents – e.g. the word desk means a certain type of material object at which people sit and carry out certain tasks – but also through signs-activated connections between selected aspects of the on-going situation and aspects of other situations. Communication is not only the use of symbols that “stand for” beliefs, feelings, identities, events, it is also a way of pointing to, presupposing or bringing into the present context beliefs, feelings, identities, events. This is what is sometimes called the indexical meaning of signs.

8See Silverstein (1976b; 1981; 1985a; 1985b; 1987; 1993), Hanks (1990; 1996), Lucy (1993), Mertz and Parmentier (1985), Parmentier (1994), Wertsch (1985a).

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Theories of culture

In this type of meaning, a word does not “stand for” an object or concept. It rather “points to” or “connects” to something “in the context” (see section 1.4.2). What it points to is either “presupposed” or entailed (that is, “created”).

This means that communicative forms (linguistic expressions, graphic signs, gestures, live performances) are vehicles for cultural practices to the extent to which they either presuppose or establish some contextual features (for example, who is the recipient of what is being said, the relative social relation between speaker and hearer) that are not necessarily “described” by the message (or its denotational meaning), but are nevertheless understood. This type of meaning covers not only the so-called deictic terms like here, there, now, yesterday, I, you, etc., which must be interpreted vis-à-vis the conventionalized spatio-temporal context of the utterance in which they are used. It also includes highly ideological aspects of language and culture such as the establishment of authorship and recipientship (through the use of pronominal forms and reported speech) and the relative status of the participants (through special lexical or morphological choices) (see section 6.8.2). In this framework, a language, through its indexical uses of its elements, provides a theory of human action, or a metapragmatics

(Silverstein 1985a, 1985b, 1993).

2.3.4Metaphors as folk theories of the world

Finally, the considerable body of literature on metaphors can also be considered as another case in which culture is seen as transmitted through linguistic forms and hence as communication, although the study of metaphors has been particularly attractive to anthropologists who subscribe to the cognitive view of culture (Keesing 1974) (see also section 3.2.2).

From the functional view of metaphors as ways of controlling our social and natural environment (Sapir and Crocker 1977) to the more recent cognitive theories that see metaphors as processes “by which we understand and structure one domain of experience in terms of another domain of a different kind” (Johnson 1987: 15),9 figurative language has always attracted anthropologists, linguists, and philosophers interested in how the specific form and content of our speech can be seen as a guide to our experience of the world (see chapter 3). The cognitive study of metaphors as cultural schemata (or as expressions dependent upon schemata) is closely associated with the idea that we understand the world, language included, in terms of prototypes, which are simplified, generalized views or folk theories of experience (Rosch 1973, 1978). Prototype theory is opposed to any “checklist theory,” which tries to define membership to a class (or words, acts, events) in terms of a discrete set of features or properties – for example, a

9 This concept is discussed in Lakoff and Johnson (1980). See also Lakoff (1987).

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