symbolic dimensions cultural anthro 1985

Symbolic Dimensions in Cultural Anthropology [and Comments and Reply]Author(s): Mark Kline Taylor, Mario Bunge, Atwood D. Gaines, Yvon Gauthier, Marvin Harris,H. Dieter Heinen, I. C. Jarvie, Robert Layton, Bob Scholte, Anthony Stellato and StevenWebsterSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Apr., 1985), pp. 167-185Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743131 .

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CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Vol. 26, No. 2, April 1985 ? 1985 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, all rights reserved 0011-3204/85/2602-0003$2 00

Symbolic Dimensions in Cultural Anthropology'

by Mark Kline Taylor

Very slowly and very reluctantly, I have come to the conclusion that most of the principles that we have advanced to order our data bear little resemblance in kind to the systems of theory developed in the older physical and biological sciences. They have far more in common with the equally complex, but often unverified and unverifiable, systems outside the realm of science which we know as mythology or perhaps philosophy or even theology.

GEORGE PETER MURDOCK

Anthropologist Murdock at once strikes the keynote of this essay and is its foil. As keynoter, he suggests that anthropology, while seeking to be "scientific," rides on principles that have a marked resemblance to philosophy, mythology, or even theology (Murdock 1971:18). This essay may be viewed as a response to Murdock's concern about "mythology" and "theology" in his discipline in that it deals with a "symbolic dimension" discernible in portions of Western cultural anthropology-a dimension in which symbol, image, metaphor, and sometimes myth play meaningful roles.

Murdock is also foil, however, because he envisions a future for a true "scientific" anthropology in which assumed "unverified and unverifiable" realms are controlled or elimi- nated. This essay's portrayal of a symbolic dimension in cultural anthropology presupposes, to the contrary, that cultural anthropological enterprises accrue meaning and are guided by invoking symbols that are neither the products of anthropological research alone nor subject simply to the logic of empirical verification. Anthropology lives from its symbols. Two con-

temporary anthropological enterprises-those of Marvin Har- ris and Claude Levi-Strauss-may be studied from this viewpoint. They serve as cases within which to reflect on the function of symbols in the diverse hermeneutical exercises of anthropological inquiry.

Here, first, is a discussion of the role of symbols in an anthropological enterprise according to the hermeneutical theory of Paul Ricoeur. The second section offers a portrait of the enterprises of Levi-Strauss and Harris; the final section dis- plays Levi-Strauss's notion of a "world of reciprocity" and Harris's notion of "nature" as images that function symbolically to nurture fundamental and comprehensive visions of human existence.

SYMBOLS IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS

Scholte (1969, 1978, 1980) has been notably persistent in articulating anthropology's symbolic dimension. Along with Stocking and Geertz, he has pointed out that such explorations involve self-critical analysis of anthropological theory and practice, an "ethnology of ethnology" or "ethnography of modern thought" (Scholte 1980:53; Stocking 1968:91-109; Geertz 1983:153).

Citing the works of Thomas Kuhn and Leszek Kolakowski, Scholte (1980:74) calls for careful scrutiny of the ways philosophical tendencies and "quasi-metaphysical commitments" participate in all anthropologists' paradigms. He challenges the easy confidence that facts and data are simply collected and proposes instead a context-sensitive notion of facticity. This notion suggests that cultural anthropology's frequent claims to objectivity presuppose a prereflexive totality often nurtured symbolically: "anthropological paradigms are themselves symbolic forms. They create and posit specific realities; they are not isomorphic with reality. The anthropologic is not a gift of God but a function of paradigmatic context" (p. 76).

Studying the dominant symbols in an anthropologist's texts is a way to begin adverting to the context-specific character of anthropologists' work and also to the prereflexive totalities it may presuppose. Why this is so requires that we say, in a preliminary way, what symbols are.

In a first and most general sense, the word "symbols" can be used-as Ricoeur uses it in the field of poetics-to mean the privileged images that dominate an author's texts. These may be the dominant images of a poem or a school of literature or "the persistent figures within which a whole culture recognizes

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MARK KLINE TAYLOR is Assistant Professor of Theology at Prince- ton Theological Seminary (Princeton, N.J. 08540, U.S.A.). Born in 1951, he was educated at Seattle Pacific College (B.A., 1973), Union Theological Seminary in Virginia (D.Min., 1977), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., 1982). His research interests are philosophy of religion, theology, and cross-cultural hermeneutics. He has published "Levi-Strauss: Evolving a Myth about Myths" (Religious Studies Review 9:97-105), "Truth and a Phenomenol- ogy of Tradition" (Journal of Religion 64:221-28), and Religious Dimensions in Cultural Anthropology (Macon: Mercer University Press, in press). The present paper was submitted in final form 29 VI 84.

Vol. 26 * No. 2 * April 1985

1 A draft of this paper was originally presented to the "Religion and the Modern World" Symposium (The Third Annual Symposium in the Humanities, sponsored by The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio) on May 12, 1983.



itself, or even the great archetypal images which humanity as a whole-ignoring cultural differences-celebrates."2

This first mark of symbols is only a minimal one. A second is their invented or constructed character. Symbols are not reflections in subjects of things outside them but the creations of interpreters interacting with and embedded in complexes of perceptions and experiences. In Cassirer's (1953:75) terms, "The fundamental concepts of each science, the instruments with which it propounds its questions and formulates its solu- tions, are regarded no longer as passive images of something given but as symbols created by the intellect itself." If I experi- ment here with the notion that anthropologists' enterprises are symbolic, I mean not that anthropologists mirror their world in symbols but that they create, build, re-present, and nurture that world by symbols.

The third and final mark, for the purpose of this essay, is the most significant one for the portraits I will offer of Levi- Strauss's and Harris's work. Symbols' special character emerges in their function as "surplus of signification." For example, morning in a poem by Hopkins signifies more than a meteorological phenomenon seen on the horizon. For the Hawaiian, the sea signifies more than the span of waters viewed from shore. Integral to symbols' "surplus" is their ability to move interpreters, through their linguistic qualities, into a very broad vision of experience as a whole. The tensive power of a text's metaphors, for example, is a linguistic quality involving readers, symbolically, in nonlinguistic apprehensions of a totality (Ricoeur 1976:45-69).

Symbols, in this third sense, give rise to an encompassing and enveloping vision of the world and a preferred "mode of being-in-the-world" (Ricoeur 1976:87-88). Thinking nurtured by symbols is not, for Ricoeur, only a tendency of "archaic" or "primitive" peoples; it may also be embedded in the explanations of theoreticians in our own cultures who study texts, action, and history. It is a kind of expansive thinking he often calls "understanding" (Verstehen). If a scholarly enterprise- with its explanatory data, theories, concepts, and techniques for testing-is a symbolic one, then we may discern in it textual images that signal an interpreter's grasp of a whole world. Symbols thrive in what Ricoeur terms a "non-methodic" realm of the inquirer's "understanding."3 They nurture apprehensions of "belonging to the whole of what is" (Ricoeur 1967a:335; 1978:44). Discerning a symbolic dimension involves discerning the moment of "understanding" attending a scholar's inquiry.

This moment of "understanding" is not easily discerned in contemporary inquiries. It often lies implicit in the methods and explanations of the social scientist. It is necessary, therefore, to follow Ricoeur's theory farther as he describes how "understanding" is related to another moment, "explanation" (Erkliren). Ricoeur discusses these two moments as distinctive ideals for the study of human thought and action. The distinction, traditionally, is a German one, set in the context of Wilhelm Dilthey's analysis of the difference between Geistes- wissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften, between sciences dealing with "spiritual" activity and those dealing with "physical nature" (Gadamer 1975:5-8, 499n). Ricoeur sets forth these ideals by reference to their distinctive epistemological and ontological implications (Ricoeur 1976:72-73; 1978:149-66).4

Epistemologically, inquirers guided by the Geisteswis- senschaften ideal seek to "understand" other subjects and minds. Presuming a similarity between themselves and their subject matter allows them to rely for understanding on analogies between their own and others' experiences. They view empathy or intuition, the transference of inquiring subjects into others' psychic lives, as the basic principle of understanding (Ricoeur 1976:73; Parsons 1949:481). Ontologically, inquirers pursuing this ideal often focus on "mind" or the "intentions" of mind (Von Wright 1971:102-8). The others who are inquired about are expressions of Geist. This does not mean that inquirers here are necessarily committed to a common "Absolute Spirit" in Hegel's sense. Rather, they may follow Dilthey, who, after Hegel, argued that humans as individ- uals or groups express Geiste instead of Absolute Spirit (Ricoeur 1979:87).5

Epistemologically, inquirers guided by the Naturwissen- schaften ideal seek to "explain" the thoughts and actions that are their subject matter. Looking to the natural sciences for models, they observe external facts, submit hypotheses to empirical verification, cover facts with general laws, and construct theories to encompass laws in a systematic whole. They may also employ analogies from their experience, but analogy must be checked and tested in the light of empirical studies, observation, and the general laws and theories derived from them. Ontologically, inquirers pursuing this ideal focus on "nature." Nature often becomes the "common horizon" for facts, laws and theories, hypotheses and verifications (Ricoeur 1976:72). Inquirers study others whose being is part of a world made up of complex elements functionally or causally related (Parsons 1949:481-82). The persons and groups studied act and think according to laws like those of natural science because they are part of nature.

Ricoeur goes on to point to the dialectical relation between these two ideals: human inquiry moves (1) from understanding as a guess about the whole (2) to explanation as a moment of testing and structuring one's guesses and (3) back to understanding as comprehension.6

In the first moment of the dialectic, there is intuitive understanding. This is a necessary moment but one that Ricoeur characterizes as a "naive grasping." However preliminary, it is productive for the totality of meaning, drawing into a whole the many particulars of the inquirer's subject matter. This is the "guess" about the whole (Ricoeur 1976:75-80).

Explanation, constituting the second moment, unfolds ranges of propositions and meanings about that which has been guessed. Explanation explores the whole that has been merely designated or intuited by understanding. It orders the whole and fills it out, identifying and relating its parts in "systems" or "structures," in an effort to "verify" or "validate" the guess (pp. 78-79).7

2 Symbols here occur in texts but are not limited to them. Placement in a text may be but one manifestation of the symbols' function for a whole culture of which the text is a part. Hence, historical analysis or "ideology critique" may explore symbols that dominate a text in order to discern their culture-encompassing meanings. In Scholte's (1980:61- 68) terms, textual symbols may be studied in "the social domain."

3 "The rich ambiguity of the word understanding is that it desig- nates a moment in the theory of method, the one we call the non- methodic pole, and the apprehension, at a level other than the scientific, of our belonging to the whole of what is" (Ricoeur 1978:165).

4 Ricoeur is not alone in setting these two notions in relation to characterize human inquiry. Von Wright (1971:2-4) treats the two

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ideals as "two main traditions" in science, the philosophy of science, and the history of ideas, explanation being a "Galilean" way of re- ferring to the contributions of natural scientists and forms of "positivism" which would, with various qualifications, include the philosophies of Comte, Mill, and Hume and understanding being an "Aristotelian" way refusing to see the "pattern set by the natural sciences as the sole and supreme ideal for a rational understanding of reality." Relating the exercises of Erkliren to those of Verstehen is of course a long-standing problem that cannot be explored in full here. For examinations of Verstehen in its diverse relations to human and social science methods, see Dallmayr and McCarthy (1977) and Boutin (1974).

5 Stocking (1974:10-11) shows how the plural term "Geiste" was associated with specific historical periods or cultural traditions.

6 My summary of this dialectic comes mainly from Ricoeur's Inter- pretation Theory (1976) but also from other sources cited below (Ricoeur 1978, 1979).

7 The important role played by explanation should not be overlooked. In Ricoeur's dialectic, though understanding envelops explanation, it also requires the latter's contribution (Ricoeur 1976:75-79).

CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY



Taylor: SYMBOLIC DIMENSIONS In the third moment of the dialectic, explanation has led to comprehensive "understanding" of a possible whole world and a preferred "mode of being-in-the world" (p. 80). Departing from a naive guess, explanation makes it possible for interpreters to "comprehend" the fundamental "boundary situations" and "existential conflicts" of human being-in-the-world. Ex- planation is, therefore, a mediation between the two stages of understanding (p. 75). Ricoeur (1978:165) summarizes the way these moments interplay in his hermeneutical theory: "Under- standing precedes, accompanies, closes and thus envelops explanation. In return, explanation develops understanding ana- lytically. "

It is this understanding, dialectically related to explanation, that is the third mark of the symbol. Symbols in an anthropologist's enterprise, therefore, are neither simply dominant images of their texts nor simply creative inventions of interpreting anthropologists. Their distinctive character emerges most clearly in relation to the understanding that accompanies and envelops anthropological explanation.8

LEVI-STRAUSS AND HARRIS: TWO ANTHROPOLOGISTS OF EXPLANATION

This study of symbols in cultural anthropology, then, focuses on the understanding implicit in the anthropological explanations of Levi-Strauss and Harris. This is not to impose an alien hermeneutical theory on cultural anthropological method. To the contrary, anthropologists themselves have discussed problems of locating their discipline among the Geisteswissenschaf- ten and Naturwissenschaften (Stocking 1974:1-20; Watson- Franke and Watson 1975). At times, both Verstehen and Erkldren are advocated as aims of anthropological method. 9 At other times, anthropologists accent one ideal over another, as Evans-Pritchard (1951:77-85) chose to do when portraying anthropology as "interpretive" or "best regarded as an art and not as a natural science." Recent "reinventors" of anthropology press the claims of what might be called an "anthropology of understanding," stressing the need to attend to personal and social preunderstanding. Reinventors often issue this call to so- called scientistic colleagues who view anthropology as science driving toward explanation. 10 Where both ideals are affirmed,

it is often without discussion of their mutual interdependence. In this section, I presume the dialectical relation of Verstehen and Erklaren discussed above and consider the Verstehen that accompanies and envelops Levi-Strauss's and Harris's attempts to formulate a science of anthropology.

Levi-Strauss and Harris have each made comprehensive anthropological contributions and, therefore, provide excellent cases within which to study the dialectic of understanding and explanation. They are also especially challenging cases in that they are both "anthropologists of explanation," displaying commitment to anthropology as science and cultivating suspicion of claims made by "anthropologists of understanding."" While these anthropologists are not unambiguously committed to Naturwissenschaften ideals of explanation, Levi-Strauss's "structural anthropology" and Harris's "cultural materialism" are both founded on a view of anthropology as a "science" using the conceptual tools of explanation.

In the final volume of his structural analysis of myths (1981:153), for example, Levi-Strauss claims to be preparing the way for a "scientific anthropology" that, like any other science, "should be able to set up experiments for the purpose of verifying its hypotheses and deducing, on the basis of certain guiding principles, hitherto unknown properties of the real world, in other words to predict what will necessarily occur in certain experimental conditions." Partially because of this commitment, "anthropologists of understanding" have described Levi-Strauss as "the academic anthropologist-a for- malist, reductionist and scientific relativist" (Diamond, Scholte, and Wolf 1975:872). He is the "natural scientist of man" in pursuit of humanity's fundamental structure (Dia- mond 1969:402). 12

Similarly, Harris formulates his cultural materialism as a "science of culture," a "pan-human science of society" based on "logical and evidentiary grounds" (Harris 1979: xii, 170): "the final aim of anthropology . .. is the achievement of a scientific knowledge of the causes of the divergent and convergent evo- lutionary trajectories of sociocultural systems, which consist of behavior and products of behavior as well as thoughts." Com- mitted to the Naturwissenschaften ideal for anthropology, he explicitly rejects suggestions by his fellow anthropologists that anthropology be distinguished from the natural sciences as one of the Geisteswissenschaften. Anthropology for Harris remains

Tracy (1981:244 n. 18) retains Ricoeur's understanding/explanation dialectic but, I think appropriately, gives a more critical role to the explanatory moment. For Tracy, explanation not only "develops" understanding but also "challenges and corrects" it.

8 Theories other than Ricoeur's also note the symbol's special tie to an intuited and comprehensive understanding. Cassirer (1953:73-85), for example, stressed that a symbol derives its significance from the whole of experience that in a manner it represents. Geertz (1966:4, 12- 24) also underscores the function of symbols as reaching toward "conceptions of a general order of existence." Turner (1969:3-25; 1975:159- 78) develops his analogue to Ricoeur's notion of symbols' "surplus of signification" in his theory of the "multivocality of symbols. " Schneider (1977:16-17) specifies two functions of a symbolic structure: to define the world "through a process of discrimination and distinction between objects in it" and, in a more existential sense, to articulate a "value- structure in which people can find a place for themselves." These two functions resonate with Ricoeur's claim that a symbol's "surplus of signification" includes both an apprehension of a world and the envi- sioning of a preferred mode of being-in-that-world.

9 Both are advocated, for example, in Mead's (1964:230) attempt to locate anthropology in the humanities as well as in the sciences and in Berreman's (1966) call to be both "insightful" and "scientific" in spite of tendencies to pursue one ideal at the other's expense.

10 A range of positions may be found in Hymes's Reinventing An- thropology (1969). Scholte's work in that volume should be compared with his later article on anthropology since its "reinvention" (Scholte 1980). Continuing efforts toward a "liberation anthropology" persist in texts such as The Politics of Anthropology: From Colonialism and Sexism toward a View from Below (Huizer and Mannheim 1979). For vigorous responses from "anthropologists of explanation," see Kaplan (1974) and Leach (1974). The ideals of Verstehen and the Geisteswis-

Vol. 26 * No. 2 * April 1985

senschaften, which the reinventors value in cultural anthropology, re- ceived notable attention in the wake of the publication of Malinowski's (1966) diary. That diary portrayed the ways in which this renowned fieldworker's pursuit of "the native's point of view" bore marks of European ethnocentrism and clear personal bias. It has been cited as a watershed marking the "emergence of self-consciousness in ethnography" and a "subjectivization" of the discipline (Nash and Wintrob 1972). For other discussions of the effect of Malinowski's diary, see Hsu (1979) and Geertz (1967).

" Because they both self-consciously portray their anthropologies largely in terms of the ideal of Erkliren, my intention here is to show how one might move from explanation to understanding in their thought. While it may be equally important, the aim of this essay is not to trace the movement from understanding to explanation.

12 Many anthropologists see very little that is "scientific" or "empirical" in Levi-Strauss's structuralism. His ethnographies, particularly on the Bororo and Nambikwara, have been seriously challenged (Price 1982). Leach (1970:11-14) sums up some of the typical reactions to Levi-Strauss as fieldworker. There is warrant, however, for treating the structuralist Levi-Strauss as an advocate of anthropology in the Naturwissenschaften mode. On structuralism as a form of explanation, see also Ricoeur (1979:95-96). Concerning Levi-Strauss's intent to ab- stain from the Verstehen ideal of reflecting on conditions of his own thought in formulating his structuralism, see The Raw and the Cooked (1969b:10-11). Ricoeur (1963a:24) has referred to this approach as a "Kantism without a transcendental subject," thereby expressing his disagreement with structuralist explanation that proceeds unmindful of the understanding that envelops it.

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a science of culture which, though having a unique set of cross- cultural epistemological problems, can be modeled after the natural sciences (p. 316; 1964a:3).

Though both are "anthropologists of explanation" in these senses, their modes of pursuing the explanatory ideal are markedly different. Levi-Strauss "explains" the sociocultural life of others largely in terms of dominant mental structures, Harris in terms of technoeconomic and environmental determinants. 13

Before identifying the moments of "understanding" integral to these different forms of anthropological "explanation, " we need to examine portraits of the two anthropologists' enterprises. These enterprises are interpretive processes that take place in both intercultural and intracultural realms. Intercul- turally, they seek to explain sociocultural life by moving across cultural boundaries to confront others. At the same time, intraculturally, they articulate and explain their places within their own cultural tradition.14

Along the way of his development from the fieldwork of the 1930s through the final volume of his Introduction to the Sci- ence of Mythology (1971), Levi-Strauss's intercultural studies underwent a major shift. Though at first attracted by the empirical richness of American anthropologist Robert Lowie's fieldwork experiences and relying on the vast body of Anglo- American data available to him at the New York School of Social Research and elsewhere, Levi-Strauss later began to question many of the empiricist assumptions of American cultural and British social anthropology. Explanations dependent upon fieldwork observations were increasingly subordinated to explanations by structural analysis. His own fieldwork experience, important to him as it was, thus was viewed less as "data" and more as a set of "images" to be related to the "ocean" of images resulting from other ethnographers' reporting (Levi-Strauss 1978:333-34; 1950:li-lii). Levi-Strauss practices what Clifford (1981:553) has called "ethnographic surrealism," according to which ethnology is like an ocean in which the ethnologist swings a net to catch some fish. Levi-Strauss's intercultural interpretation, his "going out" among others, be- came a task of combining ethnographic images-first in kinship and then in mythology-in a structured whole displayed in his own texts and patterned after rules of transformation largely developed by structural linguistics. By "going out" in this way, Levi-Strauss hoped to effect a structural reduction enabling him also to "go below" to the basic "mental patterns" or "elemental structures" of a humanite' ge'ne'rale (1978:389-93; 1969a:100-101; 1966:247-48).

In the intracultural realm, Levi-Strauss's primary conversation partner is Rousseau (Levi-Strauss 1978:390). This intracultural conversation is woven throughout his intercultural analyses. Rousseau's notion of pitie' ("compassion" or "identification") is the human mind's placement in relation to the entire world of beings and things, a state of "totalization" in which all things are embraced in a whole. Pitie' is what pervades Levi-Strauss's intercultural search for a whole world built up structurally from images of kinship and myths. But pitie' is also Levi-Strauss's fundamental notion for integrating several other important figures and disciplines of his own

Western tradition, such as Freud, Durkheim, Mauss, Gestalt theory, structural linguistics, and Marx.15

Harris's intercultural interpretations display an ever more explicit ordering of sociocultural phenomena by reference to technoenvironmental and ecological pressures within given communities. Reference to material infrastructure is the means whereby Harris seeks to explain the motives lying behind a number of classifications he has encountered in his fieldwork, for example, the dichotomy of "town" and "country" among Brazil's urban mountain communities and the categories "white," "black," and "mixed" in the Brazilians' calculus of racial identity (Harris 1956:2 78-90; 1964b:2 1-28). Reference to the infrastructural level, Harris argues, is what cultural anthropology requires if it is to become a "science of culture." Harris therefore prescribes a "strong dose of operationalism" to facilitate efforts to "explain sociocultural differences and similarities" in terms of different communities' infrastructural conditions. Pursuit of this kind of inquiry enables cultural anthropology to be a "transcultural community of scientific observers. "16

In the intracultural realm, Harris appropriates what he views as Marx's "basic research strategy": explaining ideology and social organization as adaptive responses to conditions operating at a sociocultural system's "techno-economic base." This appropriation seeks to rid Marx of what Harris takes to be an unverifiable Hegelian dialectic and an unscientific subjection of infrastructural principles to a political activism (1968:240-41; 1979:55-76, 143-47). Harris proceeds to interpret and evaluate his own Western culture's philosophical and anthropological culture theories, judging all inadequate that do not acknowledge a science of culture built on Marxian infrastructural principles. Contemporary social science theories are also criticized in this light (1979:117-342).'7

These portraits of Levi-Strauss's and Harris's anthropologies show an important unity pervading both the intercultural and intracultural realms. In Levi-Strauss's case, the two interpretive realms reinforce one another for a single interpretive task: the display of "elementary structures" or a humanite' ge'ne'rale made possible not by an exhaustive empirical knowledge of all sociocultural particulars but by the structuralist's model of the relations of a total world of the images presented by ethnographers. Similarly, for Harris, the two interpretive realms reinforce one another in a common anthropological enterprise: the explanation of sociocultural similarities and differences by reference to infrastructural principles identified and formulated by a transcultural community of scientific observers.

TWO SYMBOLS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL "UNDERSTANDING"

On the basis of the preceding portraits of Levi-Strauss's and Harris's work, we may discern in their texts the images that function as symbols to sustain the moments of understanding that envelop, ground, and accompany their explanations.

13 These two modes of explanation are contemporary representatives of what Sahlins (1976:55-125) helpfully describes as "two paradigms of anthropological theory." From the times of Lewis Henry Morgan and Franz Boas, anthropology has featured two dominant logics as its "endemic opposition": one moving from natural constraint to behavior to thought ("ecology"), the other giving thought a more determinative role as mediating nature and culture ("structuralism").

14 These two realms are an application to anthropological hermeneutics of a distinction made by Habermas (1968:176-91) for hermeneutics generally. Habermas speaks of a "horizontal level," interpretation of foreign cultures, and a "vertical level," interpretive appropriation of one's own traditions.

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15 For a discussion of the diverse "intellectual influences" on Levi- Strauss, see Rossi (1974:7-30).

16 The most sustained defense of these themes is found in Cultural Materialism (1979).

17 The intracultural interpretations discernible in Harris's text might provide occasion for sociohistorical and sociopolitical analysis of his own context of inquiry and thus perhaps for an "ideology critique" of his enterprise. Such analysis might focus on the context of research for Harris, and other young anthropologists, working under the direction of Charles Wagley in the "ten minutes to midnight" atmosphere of Latin America's acute problems (see Wagley 1964:27-29 and Harris 1956:174-76, 288). In this context one can observe a striking conver- gence of anthropology, politics, and ecological studies (Wagley 1952:7- 15, 80-81). This essay, however, focuses on the texts rather than moving "behind the texts" to their sociocultural context.




Taylor: SYMBOLIC DIMENSIONS Levi-Strauss's and Harris's understanding features both a transcendence of specific cultural horizons and a fusion of temporal ones. Interculturally, Levi-Strauss and Harris reach beyond their own cultural horizons into the horizons of others they study. They "guess," and so invoke, a whole which grounds this transcendence and which also makes it possible for them to compare peoples of markedly different cultural horizons. Intraculturally, they strive for a fusion of their present horizon with the past that is mediated to them by their traditions.'8 They conduct their intercultural explanations while in dialogue with their own culture's past. Amid this dialogue they invoke a whole within which temporal horizons are fused. The symbols I set forth below, therefore, are presented as giving rise to this sort of anthropological understanding.

The major image recurring throughout Levi-Strauss's writings is contained in his phrase "world of reciprocity." This notion is symbolic according to the three marks specified above: it is dominant throughout his corpus of texts, it is creatively posited, and it nurtures the understanding enveloping his anthropological enterprise.

This image dominates both his intercultural and his intracultural interpretations. In The Elementary Structures of Kin- ship, working through a host of complex kinship practices, he posits a world of reciprocal exchange (1969a:490) that gives kinship formulae their "externally co-existent" features and to which social life "ceaselessly bends itself" (pp. 454, 490-91, 497). A world of reciprocity is what Levi-Strauss takes to lie behind the "confusion of appearances" that he confronts interculturally (1978:333). This "world" is the dominant image behind his various studies of daily trade, marriage practices, and warfare; behind the reciprocity of codes he discerns in myths; and behind his attempts to relate in one reciprocal whole the Bororo and the Ge, the myths of North America and South America, Tupi-Kawahib chiefly songs and Europe's Gregorian chant, Oxford and India (pp. 35, 359; 1969:209). The "world of reciprocity," variously termed by him "world of objectified thought" or "humanite' ge'ne'rale" or the "eternal and universal model," is an image that dominates most of his writings.

Intraculturally, the image is also dominant. According to Levi-Strauss, not only do diverse cultural practices "ceaselessly bend themselves" to this "world of reciprocity" that he posits, but so also do anthropologists and ethnologists in the Western tradition. Levi-Strauss understands the history of ethnological theory in the West as a progressive rediscovery of what in the past had already been discerned by Rousseau. There is in Levi- Strauss's own anthropology and in his history of anthropology this fusion of past and present horizons. Rousseau had clearly seen the vision of a "world of reciprocity" in which systems of exchange unite all things, in which all things are in a state of "totalization," of "original identification" (pitie'). Contempo- rary anthropologists are lured in their work by this vision of a whole world. The "world of reciprocity," according to Levi- Strauss, beckons contemporary anthropologists as it beckoned Rousseau. The union of temporal, intracultural horizons is evident especially when Levi-Strauss insists that Rousseau, le plus ethnographe des philosophes, "conceived, willed and an- nounced this very ethnography which did not yet exist" (1978:392; 1976a:34).

This dominant image of Levi-Strauss's writings is creatively posited, "partly as an act of faith" (1969a:490). It is an "interpretive device" orienting the anthropologist toward a whole that is given before the many parts that he sets in some sort of

relation (p. 100), not the product of his explanatory enterprise. To be sure, Levi-Strauss is not content with positing this world as an "act of faith"; he commits himself to the exercises of structuralist explanation in order to work out the world of objectified thought in which codes reciprocally play. But this effort should not obscure what Levi-Strauss himself stresses: the "world of reciprocity" is an interpretive device creatively posited by the anthropologist. It is a "philosopher's presen- timent" to which is joined an "experimental study of the facts" (p. 490). The "world of reciprocity" signals a whole that is presupposed, guessed, and invoked by him as the condition grounding his monumental search for the architecture of the human mind in the study of mythology.

The image "world of reciprocity" nurtures in Levi-Strauss's explanatory enterprise a comprehensive understanding. It is dominant and creatively posited for a purpose: to re-present the whole that gives unity to his anthropological enterprise. It is this image above all that makes possible his transcendence of cultural horizons and fusion of past and present horizons within his own tradition.

The "world of reciprocity" is an image that re-presents, in Ricoeur's sense, the non-methodic moment of Verstehen. This is a moment in which, for all his claimed sensitivity to cultural and temporal particularity, Levi-Strauss presumes a prereflexive totality that accompanies and envelops his anthropological explanations. The image brings to his analyses the viewpoint that fosters his drive for an "eternal and universal model" toward which all social practices and mythological structures ceaselessly bend themselves. In Levi-Strauss's cosmology, the wholeness of this prereflexive totality persists even when his structuralist elaboration of the whole causes it to vanish into nonbeing, as he claims it does at the end of his four-volume study of myth. Even then, it is the wholeness of this world that matters. The world of reciprocity does not disintegrate. Rather, its parts cohere, following the law of exchange to the point where they cancel one another out. The totality reduces to a fundamental opposition between being and nonbeing and then gracefully flowers and fades into nonbeing (1981:693-95). The non-methodic character of this textual image is signaled when he sets his symbolically nurtured Verstehen in line with the spirit of Buddhism's founding thinker (1978:410):

What else, indeed, have I learned . . . apart from a few scraps of wisdom which, when laid end to end, coincide with the meditation of the sage at the foot of the tree? Every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favor of another . .. until we reach the one lasting presence, the point at which the distinction between meaning and the absence of meaning disappears: the same point from which we began.

The "world of reciprocity" also signals for Levi-Strauss a preferred mode of being-in-the-world, according to Ricoeur the other important feature of comprehensive understanding nurtured by symbols. The world re-presented by this symbol not only grounds Levi-Strauss's comprehensive intercultural and intracultural knowledge but also implies an ethic for judging the present quality of human existence (1978:392):

The study of these savages . . . helps us build a theoretical model of human society, which does not correspond to any observable reality, but with the aid of which we may succeed in distinguishing between what is primordial and what is artificial in man's present nature and in obtaining good knowledge of a state which no longer exists, which has perhaps never existed, and will probably never exist in the future, but of which it is nevertheless essential to have a sound conception in order to pass valid judgment on our present state.

The unity of all beings and things in the "world of reciprocity" is the basis, claims Levi-Strauss, for a "true humanism" and functions for him as humanity's "principle for all collective wisdom and action" (1976a:42, 271-74). There is a "cosmic

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18 Relying on Gadamer's (1975:267-74) philosophical hermeneutics, I ain suggesting that an anthropologist's work in other cultures (what I have called an "intercultural" work) is at the same time the appropriation in the present of a past tradition within which the anthropologist stands.



rhythm" in the world of reciprocity which other cultures respect but which has been neglected by modern Western culture (1978:123):

I see . . . a kind of wisdom which savage races practiced spontane- ously and the rejection of which, by the modern world, is the real mad- ness.... What wear and tear, what useless irritation we could spare ourselves if we agreed to accept the true conditions of our human experience and realize that we are not in a position to free ourselves completely from its patterns and rhythm!

Because the West has spurned this rhythm, says Levi- Strauss, anthropologists suffer keen remorse over their culture's exploitation of the environment and of Third World, indigenous peoples. Borrowing terms from other traditions' languages, Levi-Strauss can even refer to this ethnocentric exploitation as a moral failure that is humanity's "original sin."'19 The essence of the anthropologist's vocation is to "atone" for this "original sin," to go out amidst the waning peoples and thus to redeem the whole (1978:389-92). In such language, Levi-Strauss works out the moral implications of his symbol "world of reciprocity" and in so doing articulates the preferred mode of being-in-the-world intrinsic to the Verstehen enveloping his structuralist explanations.

The major image functioning as symbol in Harris's work is "nature." This notion is again symbolic in the three senses being employed in this essay.

We may do well to pause here to reflect briefly on this designation of "nature" as symbol. Such a designation presumes that "nature" is not simply an idea or concept of a reality excluding human person and mind, something potentially sub- duable and exploitable. Cross-cultural studies of human invocation of the word "nature" suggest that it is susceptible to and often dependent upon human construction and invention (Tel- lenbach and Kimura 1979:177-85). The notion of "nature" as symbol stresses the constructed and invented aspect of the term. Writing from the perspective of a history of the term, philosopher Errol Harris writes (1979:9):

Apart from man's thought and self-reflective consciousness there would be no idea of Nature. It is his own self-determining and free thought that makes him aware of his world and his relation to it. So whatever idea of Nature science generates, it is man's own science, his own construction, his own judgment of the world and the interpretation, self-made, of his own experience.

Nature, then, is not simply a reality given, an "already-out- there, now real" set of forces to which a social scientist can confidently refer. The possibility being suggested here, in this analysis of Harris's cultural materialism, is that "nature" is also an image invoked by an anthropological interpreter to perform significant symbolic functions for cross-cultural inquiry.

This image dominates Harris's texts. Interculturally, Harris repeatedly invokes "nature," the lawful regularities of the material world, in order to ground his transcendence of different cultural horizons. Humans are everywhere dependent on this material world, and it is to infrastructural principles that anthropologists should refer if they wish to speak coherently about human sociocultural existence as encountered in different contexts (1979:56-58). Anthropology, with this infrastructural reference point, becomes an operationalized cultural science that is ecological, technoenvironmental, and technoeconomic in character.

The problems encountered by Harris in his earliest ethnographies are resolved by him through infrastructural analyses that suggest just how dominant is the image of "nature." Do the people of a small village in the isolated Brazilian high- country possess strangely "urban" features? Then, Harris tells us, this ambiguity can be resolved by reference to the village's

past status as a mining center, the subsistence base of which generates "urban" superstructural forms (1956:281). Similarly, puzzling practices of racial classification in Brazil are dealt with by reference to the community's "local habitat"-the infrastructural base for class and racial designations in the con- sensus of a speech community (1964a:158). Harris develops this position in his epistemological treatise The Nature of Cul- tural Things (1964a) and in his restatement of infrastructural principles in Cultural Materialism (1979). Throughout these intercultural studies, "nature" dominates. Infrastructural patterns of production and reproduction can be trusted to found a cross-cultural, panhuman science because they cannot be made to appear and disappear. They are grounded in nature (1979:56, 58).

Intraculturally, Harris invokes "nature" and its infrastructural principles to interpret the history of his own anthropological tradition. He appeals to "nature" and its lawful regularities to explain the gradual emergence of cultural materialism. Ac- cordingly, cultural materialist research strategy is itself a result of widespread infrastructural developments. The forces of "nature," in interface with culture, make probable academics' attending to the technoeconomic and technoenvironmental base of their existence. Infrastructural pressures direct moneys for research toward the general medical sciences, biology, nutri- tion, demography, and agronomy. It is "nature," at base, that prompts "the contemporary premium upon scientism," thus making "the expansion of cultural ecological research almost inevitable" (1968:655). Harris's interpretations of past culture theories (from John Locke to Julian Steward) rest on his invocation of this image. Harris himself is aware of the way his cultural materialist, intercultural theory dovetails with his intracultural approach to history. In fact, as he says, "the present-day polemical point alone makes historical understanding possible" (1968:216).

Harris's image of "nature" is creatively posited by him. It is an interpretive device, not merely the product of his anthropological research. However much his explanatory methods develop, refine, or give evidence for the powers of nature, the notion retains its character as presupposed and constructed. Harris himself acknowledges this at points, view- ing his own cultural materialist strategy as analogous to a Kuh- nian paradigm of "overarching sets of essentially metaphysical assumptions" (1979:23). To be sure, true to the ideals of Erkaii- ren, Harris does not relinquish the important task of compar- ing and evaluating strategies and their metaphysical assumptions. This commitment to comparison of research strategies and his vigorous arguments for the primacy of his cultural materialist strategy, however, do not mean that his use of the image "nature" is free from symbolic creativity.

"Nature" functions in Harris's cultural materialism to re- present a comprehensive understanding. In other words, this image possesses that surplus of signification that we call Ver- stehen. It is not simply a frequently occurring image that is creatively posited by him; it is one that re-presents a comprehensive perspective that allows the transcendence of cultural horizons, in generalizations about contexts in the Americas, Europe, Brazil, India, Mozambique, and elsewhere, and the fusion of past and present horizons of his own tradition. The symbol "nature" makes present in his writings, then, the non-methodic moment of accompanying and enveloping understanding.

In Harris's case, this comprehensive Verstehen includes an especially striking vision of a preferred mode of being-in-the- world. Harris defends his cultural materialism not only as panhuman operationalized science for academic anthropologists but also as good for the world. While disclaiming utopian aspirations, he presents his cultural materialism as a perspective that not only can save contemporary social science from "mystification" and "obscurantism" (1979: xii) but also can il- lui4nine the causes of human exploitation and suffering.


19 For further analysis, see Taylor (1983).

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Taylor: SYMBOLIC DIMENSIONS Harris's cultural materialism, then, is infused with a moral vision. This is particularly evident when he places his science of culture in relation to the moral problems or current "pathologies" of our time (1974:226). This medical science metaphor is especially revealing. War, class conflict, poverty, sexism, pollution, indeed "all the other weird driving forces of our competitive capitalist economy" (Harris 1974:227; 1979:285) are as so many diseases afflicting humans from external infrastructural conditions. War, for example, as a social "pathology," is not instinct but rather something that we may prevent through sober reflection on the "cultural and ecological restraints" that increase its probability. Expanding the metaphor, Harris contends that the current era does not suffer from an "overdose of objectivity" (1974:226). Quite to the contrary, more objectivity is needed, and Harris therefore prescribes a "strong dose of operationalism" (1979:15).

This vision of a preferred mode of being-in-the-world, pre- sumed by and accompanying his cultural materialism, has a significant function in his comparisons of cultural materialism with alternative research strategies. A moral polemic per- meates those evaluations. For Harris, a science of culture based on the regularities of nature in infrastructure best provides the condition for moral judgment because "the absolute precondition for any kind of moral judgment is our ability to identify who did what to whom, when, where, and how" (1979:324). Invoking a moral sensibility in his readers, Harris proceeds to claim that an alternative strategy such as structuralism, for example, "mocks the hungry living and dead by transforming the struggle for subsistence into a game of mental imagery. The idea that cooking is primarily a language is food for thought only among those who have never had to worry about having enough to eat" (1979:189). Similarly, "dialectical materialism," by perpetuating a belief in a historical dialectic that promises to benefit exploited classes, only deceives them and provides new exploitative ideology for totalitarian elites (p. 158). The grammarians and ethnoscientists of "cognitive idealism" are enchanted with rules, codes, and structures which, like so much institutionalized social science of the "Par- sonians," tend toward a conservatism that accepts the system "as given and seeks to account for its stability" (pp. 284-85). "Structural Marxism" offends moral sensibility, in Harris's reading, because its failure to define "exploitation" means that it cannot identify who is exploiting whom (pp. 236-37). "Ob- scurantism," which denigrates objective method in its glorification of subjectivity, should be abhorrent to the moral sensibilities of even its own advocates, for without an operationalized science that cogently discerns "who does what to whom, when, where, and how," their own worst fears of a police-military state, retreatism, and nuclear confrontation are more likely to become reality (p. 326).

The offenses to a moral vision caused by failure to embrace an operationalized cultural materialism are especially striking to Harris in the "epistemological anarchism" of Paul Fey- erabend, who argues (1963:33) for an "aesthetic judgment" in social science; "flexibility, even sloppiness in semantical matters is a prerequisite of scientific progress." Harris tries not only to identify "logical contradictions" in this position but to show that it has dire consequences for humankind (p.23):

It cannot be a matter of taste whether you believe or do not believe that pollution is a nmenace, that the underdeveloped nations are getting poorer, that the multi-nationals are promoting an arms race, that war is instinctual, that women and blacks are inferior, or that the green revolution is a hoax. Let Feyerabend stand before the ovens of Dachau or the ditch at Mylai and say that our scientific understanding of sociocultural systems is ultimately nothing but an "aesthetic judgment."

Harris pits his operationalized science against this aesthetic judgment, claiming that it is cultural materialism that has potential to heal a "pathological" world. Without cultural materialism and its commitment to objectivity, human nature is de-

Vol. 26 No. 2 April 1985

graded. Only with that objectivity, as Harris stresses on the final page of Cultural Materialism, are we set on a path leading to both truth and love (p. 341).

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

Drawing predominantly from Ricoeur's hermeneutical theory, I have presented symbolic dimensions as realms of "understanding" in anthropological discourse. The symbols I have considered here are not only images that are dominant in the texts of anthropologists or are creatively posited by them. They are also, more importantly, images that nurture an "understanding" that is a non-methodic moment in anthropological explanation.

Ricoeur's hermeneutical theory may serve reflection on anthropological knowledge in that it gives place to both anthropology's practice of rigorous explanatory method and its necessary acknowledgment that even the most rigorous methods are mediated by truths disclosed in personal and sociocultural preunderstanding. Ricoeur's hermeneutics does not suggest pitting hermeneutical understanding against what is often called a "positivist" commitment to explanatory method. Rather, both orientations receive a place in a theory of interpretation involving "the whole process that encompasses explanation and understanding" (Ricoeur 1976:74). On the basis of Ricoeur's dialectic of understanding and explanation, it has been possible to focus on understanding in the anthropologies of Levi-Strauss and Harris, two vigorous propo- nents of explanatory method.

In Levi-Strauss's and Harris's cases, "world of reciprocity" and "nature" are two images that symbolically nurture an encompassing and unifying Verstehen. In summation we may identify two major features of this understanding in their texts. First, on the level of the intellectual coherence of their texts, this Verstehen provides continuity between the intercultural and intracultural realms of their interpretations. In the intercultural realm there is a transcendence of cultural boundaries, in the intracultural realm a fusion of temporal horizons, with the result that their anthropological explanations disclose a concern with a fundamental and comprehensive vision of human existence. Second, on a moral level, this Verstehen includes reference to modes of being-in-the-world that Levi- Strauss and Harris prefer and occasionally press upon their readers. Levi-Strauss presents his structuralism as one way for the totalizing anthropologist to attain a "true humanism," the rhythm of which la pense'e sauvage has often already discerned in the cosmos. Harris presents his cultural materialism as a science of culture warranted by the moral imperatives of his era.

Discernment of symbolic dimensions of Verstehen may be an initial step toward further reflection on the matrices out of which diverse explanations are formulated and presented in the anthropological literature. To focus on these symbolic dimensions is, however, to take up this reflection in a particular way-to approach these matrices with an angle of vision wide enough to glimpse the Verstehen that pervades the intercultural and intracultural processes and the advocated modes of being-in-the-world that anthropologists bring together in their texts.

By focusing on symbolically nurtured Verstehen, our reflections on the matrices that generate and sustain anthropological explanation may help prevent several possible reductionist readings of anthropological explanation: either as a matter only of accumulating and reporting intercultural data, as simply the reflection of the particular world in which the anthropologist has been nurtured, or as the working out of the anthropologist's own set of moral sensibilities. Reflection on Verstehen

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suggests that the matrix of anthropological explanation is a multifaceted moment uniting intercultural processes, intracultural processes, and interpreters' moral sensibilities as well.

This moment, a symbolic dimension of understanding, is not the realm of "mythology . . . or even theology" that Murdock lamented as threatening the "scientific" status of cross-cultural explanation. It is a dimension, however, wherein symbols, often studied as nurturing the cosmologies of "other" peoples, also function for the anthropologist "to establish powerful, per- vasive and long-lasting moods and motivations . . . by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and cloth- ing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic" (Geertz 1966:4).

Comments by MARIO BUNGE

Foundations and Philosophy of Science Unit, McGill Uni- versity, Montreal, Que., Canada H3A 1W7. 9 x 84

Taylor's paper is a specimen of what may be called "humanistic," as opposed to scientific, anthropology. This school con- tinues, in anthropology, the historicist or Geisteswissenschaf- ten movement initiated a century ago by philosophers who claimed that human affairs can be understood empathically (by Verstehen) but not explained scientifically. A recent variant of this school is hermeneutics, which originated as a merger of the old tradition of text (in particular Bible) criticism with phenomenology, an idealistic philosophy. The hermeneutic approach to anthropology is strictly glossocentric: it involves the thesis that man is loquens rather than faber or sapiens. There are a number of problems with this view.

First, hermeneutics, or the interpretation of texts, applies only to texts, which happen not to be the staple of the anthropologist. The latter is supposed to study real people in real life rather than the manuscripts or books that his subjects may produce. The only way an anthropologist can claim to do hermeneutic analysis is by treating human actions, feelings, and ideas as if they were phrases in a language-which is of course the way Levi-Strauss treats them. But, since humans are not exclusively speakers, this amounts to a gross distortion of reality.

Secondly, the hermeneutic approach populates the world with images, symbols, and metaphors that are often only in the author's head. Where ordinary humans see a river as good to dive into or fish in, the hermeneutic anthropologist may wish to see an animate being or an obscure symbol for it. It is true, of course, that some primitives do treat certain physical things and processes as animate beings-i.e., they are animists-but this does not entail that those who study them must believe such myths, let alone make them. Scientists are supposed to describe and explain myths, not make them.

Thirdly, the "humanistic" anthropologist tends to read his own myths into the texts of his colleagues. Thus Taylor writes that "the major image functioning as symbol in Harris's work is 'nature.' " This is confusing nature with "nature," the thing with an idea of it. When Harris invokes nature he refers to the noncultural part of the world, not to one of the many possible ideas of nature. When he discusses human reproduction, as different from trading or myth making, he refers to an objective biological process under social constraints. He does not mistake reproduction for any of the myths about it.

Fourthly, since "humanistic" anthropology severs all the ties of the sciences of man with biology, it can make no use of biology to explain human affairs. This deprives it of a rich source of information as well as of an opportunity to test hy-

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potheses about individual development and species evolution. It also cuts anthropology into two totally disjoint fields: paleoanthropology and neoanthropology.

In brief, the hermeneutic approach to anthropology is based on a confusion between real things and processes, on the one hand, and the ideas and words we create in order to describe and understand them, on the other. Anyone who adopts that approach is bound to be a myth maker rather than a student of myth, hence a subject of anthropological studies rather than a scientific anthropologist (see Bunge 1983 for a characterization of science).

by ATWOOD D. GAINES Department of Anthropology and Department of Psychiatry, Case Western Reserve University and Medical School, Cleveland, Ohio 44106, U.S.A. 16 x 84

Taylor's article is a useful contribution to what may now be called the anthropology of science. It is only slightly ironic that the science he studies is anthropology. Citing Scholte, Stock- ing, and Geertz (but omitting Berreman's [1966] "ethnography of ethnography" and ideas regarding insight and scientific explanation) and employing Ricoeur's work on the relationship of insight/understanding and explanation, Taylor suggests it is appropriate to consider not only ethnographic data collection but also the development and perpetuation of theoretical paradigms in anthropology as culturally and personally poly- semous enterprises. He argues, rightly, that the "comprehensive realities" referred to by specific theoretical paradigms are symbolic constructs, not reflections of independent realities.

Taylor focuses on Levi-Strauss and Harris as representatives of kinds of "sciences of anthropology. " Both are rooted in Erk- laren and committed to the ideals of a Naturwissenschaft and evidence markedly distinct "'modes" (actually, levels) of explanation; one "explains" in terms of mental structures, while the other roots about for technoenvironmental/ecological determinants. Taylor shows how the two paradigms are grounded in Verstehen, though dedicated to Erkldren, and are symbolic systems with dominant symbols (mind and nature) that unite their formulators' preunderstandings, intra- and intercultural understanding, and personal moral philosophies. Thus the paradigms are fundamentally similar and share some elemental features with seemingly opposed interpretive or hermeneutic approaches in contemporary anthropology.

Taylor's analysis, though well done, may have limited applicability. It may be seen in the context of the self-reflexive tendencies that increase as the discipline ages. In some ways, his work is easier in that he focuses on now fading and some- what eccentric grand traditions in anthropology rather than on sciences that believe their discourses refer to an empirical world, such as the economic, medical, and biological sciences. Thus, while his case is good for anthropology, readers may take it to be restricted to that discipline. An allied but perhaps more difficult task is the analysis of biomedicine, with its biophysiological paradigm. Some of my work ("Verstehen") and that of others in medical anthropology (Gaines 1979, Gaines and Hahn 1982, Hahn and Gaines 1984) is the discernment of the interpretive nature of biomedical theories and the cultural basis of clinical practice. Outside of medical anthropology, some of the putatively "hard" sciences should like- wise be investigated. For example, the application of Taylor's approach to the Marxism (or, better, Marxisms, since they pro- liferate constantly, indicating a loose grasp on a putatively empirical, economic reality) appearing in all of the social science disciplines would make his points more widely germane. In sum, his work appears a useful contribution to the anthropology of science and that field's future is therewith enhanced.




by YVON GAUTHIER Department of Philosophy, University of Montreal, C.P. 6138, Montreal, Que., Canada H3C 3J7. 4 Ix 84

Symbols have a life of their own. They also have a logic of their own; the combinatorial nature of that internal logic of symbolic constructions should be stressed. Levi-Strauss prefers the language of structures to the language of constructions, but he is fully aware of the combinatorial character of the structural relationships that constitute a "world of reciprocity." Harris, on the other side, insists upon an idea of nature which has the combinatorial attributes of a lawlike universe. However, materialism here is but a different word for the ontological assumptions of a naturalistic anthropology that has,scientific pre- tensions. Both Levi-Strauss and Harris have overlooked the crucial role of language.

The notion of mind or spirit in Levi-Strauss and the idea of nature in Harris are metaphysical presuppositions that should be criticized more deftly than the Verstehen phenomenologists do. Neither regularity of nature nor the dynamic force of the human mind is a sufficient explanation for cultural phenomena, and an "objective" science needs epistemological foundations with more formal constraints. A combinatorial theory of language and symbolic constructions would dispense with metaphysics and would emphasize the inner logic of symbolic interactions without recourse to any "behind-the-scenes" agent. The very idea of a creative linguistic agent, beyond its purely linguistic and combinatorial qualities, is not part of a theory which regards language itself as little more than a stenographic device. Language is some (finite) set of signs- signals and symbols being subsets of that finite set-with an equally finite set of rules or combinations, the set of which constitutes the power set of the same finite set. The production of meaning here is combinatorial and does not possess the Chomskyan features of infinite generation. It is obvious that such a theory can only be alluded to here, but the important point is that language remains the sole building material of an anthropological science once the idea of human nature, the idea of nature itself, or even the idea of man have become singular exhibits in the metaphysical museum of anthropology.

by MARVIN HARRIS Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gaines- ville, Fla. 32611, U.S.A. 19 x 84

I wish to thank Taylor for the generous humanism that pervades his attempt to identify the dominant symbol of cultural materialism. But it is not possible to ignore the fact that his conception of anthropology differs fundamentally from mine and that his interpretation of cultural materialism is incorrect. I have challenged my colleagues to produce a better and more testable integrated corpus of parsimonious yet broad-scope theories under the auspices of an explicit set of epistemological and theoretical principles for explaining the evolution of sociocultural differences and similarities (Harris 1979). Tay- lor's article ignores this challenge. As a symbolist and her- meneutician, Taylor wishes to remain serenely above the problem of evaluating alternative explanations of sociocultural phenomena. In identifying the respective modes-of-being-in- the-world of cultural materialism and structuralism, Taylor makes no claim that such knowledge will help to resolve the conflicting views of causality embodied in their radically different sets of theories. At best, therefore, I could only say of his article that it is redundant: I am already sufficiently aware of the ways my modes-of-being-in-the-world differ from Levi- Strauss's.

However, I cannot avoid registering an additional objection. If Taylor wishes to be taken seriously as a scientific symbolist (as opposed to being taken seriously as an artistic, literary,

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Taylor: SYMBOLIC DIMENSIONS

charismatic, or shamanistic creator of untestable knowledge), he cannot ignore the question of method. Until Taylor specifies how one distills a dominant symbol from a complex "text," I feel no obligation to believe him when he concludes that "nature" is the dominant symbol of cultural materialism. In fact, I can readily produce abundant evidence that it is not. Even a cursory inspection of the relevant "text" shows that "nature" is never used alone but is always part of an etic behavioral conjunction, as in the demo-techno-econo-environmental components of infrastructure or the titles Culture, Man and Nature and Culture, People, Nature. What rules of knowledge, what canons of truth, endow Taylor's distillation of cultural materialism's basic themes (an old-fashioned word for symbols) with greater authenticity than the epistemological and theoretical principles explicitly stated in the "text"? If Taylor wishes to go beyond those explicit statements, I should be glad to answer the questions and to submit to the tests that we require of native participants when we wish to probe their psyches. Re- grettably, Taylor cannot remove himself from the struggle for a science of culture. His effort to dispense even-handed symbolism from an Olympian perch may edify the gods but not the mortals below.

by H. DIETER HEINEN Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas, Apar- tado 1827, Caracas 1010A, Venezuela. 16 Ix 84

In my opinion, the major Western schools of epistemology, and perhaps even philosophy in general, have run their course. Neither positivism and its variants nor phenomenology and its sister focus hermeneutics (see Adorno et al. 1969) have been able to overcome the schism exposed by the nominalism of Duns Scotus (1266-1308), the Magister Sutilis (see also Loner- gan 1957:371-74). To many anthropologists this seems a problem peculiar to their subdiscipline, but the "natural" sciences are in the same boat-a fact hidden from public consciousness only by the strutting behavior of some of their more ignorant members. Relativity theory and quantum physics have not yet been brought into a coherent common framework and probably never will be. There are two major attitudes open to the social sciences today: the anarchic iconoclasm of Feyerabend and his followers (Feyerabend 1975, 1978, 1981; Duerr 1981) and the cautious searching of scholars such as Bourdieu (1972, 1979), who are trying to combine Kantian elements with the "praxis" concept that is associated with Marx but has its roots in the work of Ibn Khaldfin (1958 [1377]), Vico (1978 [1725]) and others.

Given this state of affairs, Taylor's contribution would indeed have been an interesting one-ten years ago. Fifteen years ago it was George Dalton who restaged an economic debate that had already taken place in 19th-century Europe as the Methodenstreit without leading to any results. Now it is the turn of Verstehen, as put forward by Paul Ricoeur without so much as mentioning Max Weber, Alfred Schiutz, Edmund Husserl (see Ricoeur 1967b), or the neo-Kantians except Dilthey, the weakest member of the Baden school.

There are no Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaf- ten as such. Each science uses a wide range of methods according to the problem at hand, and all want to arrive at explanations. In some situations it is easier, however, to predict than to explain. One can easily predict (given mass, velocity, etc.) where a body in flight will land. Once it has come to rest, you need Verstehen, circumstances, witness information, history, and a wide range of factors, and your explanation never will be complete. But why call one procedure science and not the other? Science is any systematic body of knowledge, even la ciencia mistica.

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Here are a few additional fine points: Rousseau's (1962 [1762]) pitie is interpreted by Taylor in too broad a way. It is equal to plain English "pity": "telle est la force de la pitie naturelle, que les moeurs les plus deprav6es ont encore peine a detruir, puisqu'on voit tous les jours dans nos spectacles s'at- tendrir et pleurer, aux malheurs d'un infortune . . . en effet, qu'est-ce que la generosite, la clemence, l'humanite, sinon la pitie appliquee aux faibles" (p. 59).

Instead of having Marx explained to him by Harris, Taylor should have read up on Marxian concepts himself. I fully agree with Harris's diagnosis of our current ills, but "the technoeconomic base" is not what Marx understood as the moving force of history. Marx was not so simpleminded as to repeat the Roman adage primum vivere, deinde philosophari, but had a precise notion of the interrelation between the forces of production (Produktivkrifte) and the relations of production (Produk- tionsverhaltnisse). This in turn implies a predictive power of the exact process of transition from one mode of production to another, e.g., from feudalism to capitalism. This is what "critical anthropology" (i.e., Marxian theory applied to anthropology) is discussing these days (see the recent reader by Kahn and Llobera, 1981, in which Bob Scholte's interesting 1978 article is included).

A discussion of "reciprocity" should not be based on Sahlins (1965, 1972). The work to look at ranges from Thurnwald (1932) to Pryor (1977) and should include, at the very least, Gouldner (1960), Homans (1958), Blau (1964), and Belshaw (1965).

In spite of my harsh criticism, I think Taylor's exercise is worthwhile, especially in throwing light on the anthropological subculture and two of its most powerful shamans. But, as my grandfather used to say when asked if he liked a particular dish: "It was excellent, but please, don't do it again."

by I. C. JARVIE Department of Philosophy, York University, Downsview, Ont., Canada M3J 1P3. 9 x 84

My criticisms of the symbolic mode in anthropology (Jarvie 1976) have always been directed against the attribution of a "surplus of signification" to the results rather than against the results themselves. It therefore comes as no surprise to me that Taylor, stalking the supposedly structuralist or cultural materialist discourse of anthropologists, finds it heavy with images and metaphors that lend themselves to symbolic interpretation. Their discourse embodies a vision of the world and of the nature of anthropology.

A few local criticisms first: Taylor refers to Ricoeur's having a "theory" of symbols but articulates in his paper nothing at all resembling a theory even in the loosest construction of that word and, moreover, no clear problem to which such a theory might stand as solution. Again, in his comments on Ricoeur, Taylor allows that a symbol is various things, including a "surplus of signification." For example, the use of the word "morning" (or perhaps the image of morning-Taylor is not clear) in a poem signifies more than a meteorological (does he not mean astronomical?) phenomenon. In belletristic language this would say that there are overtones to the word "morning" that the poet is deliberately invoking through the appropriate syntactical and semantic placement of the word in the flow of the poem's primary meaning. Taylor's formulation ("surplus") seems to suppose that there is some state of signification in which there is no surplus, that there are words (there are cer- tainly no images) that stand in a one-to-one relation to things. This supposition is highly questionable. Perhaps certain very elaborate proper names, names so elaborate that only one person could be so named, would fit. But, notoriously, proper names, brand names, product names, the names of famous people can be used as figures of literary art just because they

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carry a surplus of signification, a surplus moreover that is not always under control. An example would be the name "Napo- leon." To those brought up in the English-speaking world it has overtones quite different to those it gets in the French- speaking world; the pairs positive/negative, righteous/ bullying, strong/dictatorial, glorious/fatuous are some of the contrasts. Indeed, it is a general feature of language that what is denoted is not the same as what is connoted and that all language, even that stripped down for the purposes of science, mathematics, and the law, has "surplus of signification."

There is, however, a broader objection to Taylor's enterprise. His hidden agenda is to demonstrate that everyone, willy-nilly, is in the idealist camp. Levi-Strauss, who thought of himself as revealing structures of the human mind, and Harris, trying to explain culture as an adaptive survival mech- anism, have their metaphors and symbols deconstructed to show that they are (also?) engaged in poetic and moralistic exercises. Without denying that there are poetic or moralistic aspects to what they do, I wish strenuously to defend the idea that there is a scientific anthropology that cannot be appropri- ated by idealism. Perhaps this can most readily be begun by countering Taylor's suggestion that Harris's concept of "nature" is a construct that comes from the life of human beings and therefore cannot precede or extend beyond the world of human beings.

This argument is invalid, although it is possible that incau- tious formulations by Harris leave him vulnerable. Harris's problem is to explain cultural formations. To this end he finds it convenient to divide his explanation into exogenous and en- dogenous variables. The exogenous variables are nature's laws and particular initial conditions. To counter idealist reductions of this postulate of nature, all Harris need do is show that the idealist adds nothing to, and takes away nothing from, his explanations. The idealist can reply, of course, that what he is interested in is understanding and not explanation. To this in turn those interested in a science of anthropology must counterargue that the vague notion of "understanding" is the source of much of the idealist drift (Jarvie 1972: chap. 2; 1984). Understanding as an aim serves the needs of alienated Hegelianised intellectuals of academe and is even so described by Ricoeur in such metaphors as reaching out, connection, enlightenment, moment. Understanding is for Ricoeur and Taylor restoring a sense of being connected to things, and it obviously appeals most to those who feel disconnected to start with. Taylor's symbol hunting, then, works on his own text, revealing his idealist world view and moralising. None of these italicised metaphors bears on the scientific questions of whether a proposed explanation (by, e.g., Levi-Strauss or Har- ris) is valid, has been tested, and has passed the tests.

by ROBERT LAYTON Department of Anthropology, University of Durham, 43 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HN, England. 11 Ix 84

Taylor appears to be reacting against the once fashionable concept that a scientist sets up hypotheses at random and tests them without motive or prior assumption. But what Taylor calls the "symbols" guiding the work of Harris and Levi- Strauss are surely better termed paradigms (Kuhn 1962). Sym- bols do not exist in isolation; they exist in structured relationships with other symbols. A paradigm may be defined as a structured set of propositions which focuses attention on the flow of events experienced, identifying certain patterns of relevance and connection between them (see also Ardener 1980). Paradigms are not Bad Things. Selective recording of data from the flow of events is not incompatible with objective recording in the chosen field of study. Taylor relies on Ricoeur to characterise three stages in the development of "human en- quiry," from preliminary insight through testing to final com-




Taylor: SYMBOLIC DIMENSIONS prehension. I suggest that he overlooks another aspect of Ricoeur's distinction between understanding and explanation that offers further insight into the work of Levi-Strauss and Harris.

Ricoeur contrasted language, as a timeless system of related signs, with discourse, which is realized by speakers through time and which is about something. He sought to overcome the problem suffered by sociology of penetrating a speaker's subjective intentions, arguing that recorded texts were cut free from the speaker's intention and revealed a possible world (a culture?): "We speak about the 'world' of [Classical] Greece, not to designate any more what were the situations for those who lived them, but to designate the non-situational references which outlive the effacement of the first and will henceforth be offered as possible modes of being" (1979:79). Ricoeur suggested that recorded "texts" of social action could be analysed in the same fashion. He criticised Levi-Strauss's method of studying myth as one which provided explanation of the systematic relations between components of a myth but not understanding, not insight into the possible world of the nar- rator's cultural tradition (p. 96).

This reading of Ricoeur prompts the question, why should Levi-Strauss confine himself to the level of explanation? The answer, I suggest, is that explanation of the way in which the parts of a system are interrelated allows prediction. This is "prediction" in the sense the term has for philosophers of science. That is, it can but does not necessarily predict the future structure of events. If understanding depends on texts, however, it must be gained retrospectively. Future events cannot be understood. There is another reason, not (to my knowledge) proposed by Ricoeur, that this should be so. Discourse is rela- tively unpredictable. Although the structure of grammar is predictable, it generates an almost infinite number of possible statements. Were it not to some degree unpredictable, discourse would not yield information; it would be redundant (Cherry 1957:37, 182, 245-47). The reason for discourse's un- predictability is not that it is generated in a blindly random fashion but that in discourse we see the creativity of human cultural thought in action. This, I believe, is essentially the reason Evans-Pritchard argued, as Taylor notes, that social anthropology should be regarded as one of the humanities, not as a science: it should be concerned with understanding, not prediction (1950:120). Although Evans-Pritchard regarded the structure of language as an exemplification of the structure of culture (p. 122), he argued that history must be taken into account. Anthropology should not treat man as "an automa- ton," should not hope to discover "sociological laws in terms of which his actions, ideas and beliefs can be explained and in the light of which they can be planned and controlled" (p. 123).

I suggest, however, that this does not mean explanation has no place in anthropology. One might explain the rules of football to an alien, although to understand football one would need to know its place in modern Western culture. To what extent is football predictable? The outcome of individual matches is not, because they depend ultimately on the creative skills of players in putting the game together. Nonetheless, the rules they should abide by are eminently predictable. Were this not so the referee would be out of a job, and the game would be impossible to play.

Ricoeur's model of language and discourse suffers from a weakness when applied to social structure and social interac- tion. Words are neutral signs in a way that transactions in goods and services are not. Transactions in tangible items can themselves (as Marx showed) perpetuate, transform, or destroy the structure of the system that generates them. Thus even the prediction of structure becomes uncertain in the long term.

The works of Levi-Strauss and Harris can usefully be viewed as efforts to establish in what realms, and to what extent, human behaviour is predictable. Levi-Strauss has demonstrated that the structure of human thought (but not its con-

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tent) is predictable, Harris that the environment imposes un- avoidable constraints on human action (but not how cultures will adapt). Harris's position resembles Godelier's (1975:19- 21) assertion that there are no genuine alternatives in history, although Godelier is equivocal on this point, conceding that "no general history exists" (p. 6). An analogy with biology may be helpful. Biology has established a scientific basis for explaining the structure of genetic systems and, through ecology, for explaining the effects of the environment upon genetic systems. What biology does not attempt to predict is the future of evolution: what life forms may exist on Earth millions of years in the future. This depends on the random process of mutation generating future variety in the content of genetic systems.

Taylor offers a retrospective understanding of why Levi- Strauss and Harris chose to work with particular paradigms, but paradigms are not true or false; they are appropriate or inappropriate modes of reconstructing relationships between data.

by BOB SCHOLTE Antropologisch-Sociologisch Centrum, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Sarphatistraat 106A, 1018 GV Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 5 x 84

Though I am flattered by Taylor's use of some of my essays as a source of inspiration for his own effort, I have two misgivings. First, the Wissensanthropologie that I have tried to articulate over the years has always made the ideology critique that Tay- lor relegates to footnotes a central focus. I do not deny that "cultural anthropological enterprises accrue meaning and are guided by invoking symbols," but I further insist that a subse- quent radicalization is necessary: the symbolic dimension must at all times be related to its pragmatic use and abuse. In other words, anthropological texts must be squarely placed within their sociocultural, historical, and political contexts. Symbols may indeed be constitutive of reality as Taylor rightly contends, but the additional and crucial ethno-logical question is "Who constitutes what on whose behalf and at whose expense?" (Scholte 1981:97). Once we ask such a question, Tay- lor's "prereflexive totalities" become concrete historical processes, actual vested interests, or specific normative choices. They resemble Gouldner's "domain assumptions" (Gouldner 1970) or Habermas's Erkenntnisinteresse (Habermas 1968) rather than the merely textual "privileged images" of Ricoeur.

Such context-sensitive analyses are, incidently, available for both Harris and Levi-Strauss. Paul and Rabinow (1976) have analysed Harris's anthropology in these terms, and there are several such radical critiques of Levi-Strauss's structuralism, e.g., Bourdieu and Passeron (1967), Diamond (1974), Furet (1967), Lefebvre (1971), Schaff (1972), or Scholte (1974).

The wissensanthropologische dimension is important not because one cannot do without it (Taylor does) but because to do so leaves the analysis of a given author's "advocacy of a preferred mode of being-in-the-world" unanthropological and un- critical. If we ask instead what both the genesis and the result of the moral visions in question are, we are also led to consider their ethno-logic and actual moral praxis.

I do not have the space to deal with the ethno-logical dimension here. The references above will have to do. Suffice it to add that we should be more careful than Taylor appears to be in assessing Levi-Strauss's "appropriation" of Rousseau or Harris's "appropriation" of Marx, for in both cases, it is exactly that: appropriation, that is, intellectual-historical imperialism (for Harris, see Paul and Rabinow 1976; for Levi-Strauss, see Amselle 1979 or Derrida 1967). Harris and Levi-Strauss do not "conduct their intercultural explanations while in dialogue with their own cultural past." Rather, they understand the past presentistically, in terms of what they want to hear, and

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they generate reductive monologues about the "Other" accord- ingly.

This brings me to my second misgiving. Taylor is not even remotely critical. Not only does he bypass ideology critique (which would have helped), but he doesn't even ask what, merely on the basis of his own symbolic analysis, the actual result or concrete moral praxis would be of Harris's or Levi- Strauss's "preferred mode of being-in-the-world."

I don't want to spend much time on Harris from this critical point of view, since Paul and Rabinow have already done so more than adequately. Suffice it to point out that Harris's oeuvre "is at base an attempt to nullify the anthropological concern with the symbolic life of the species" (Paul and Rabinow 1976:124). What I find more surprising is that Taylor doesn't even single out Levi-Strauss's reductionism. Ricoeur, Taylor's major theoretical source, is unequivocal in his critique of structuralism on this point (see Ricoeur 1963b, 1964, 1967c, 1969). In his debate with L6vi-Strauss (1970), he summarizes as follows (p. 74):

as far as you are concerned there is no "message": not in the cybernetic, but in the kerygmatic sense; you despair of meaning; but you console yourself with the thought that, if men have nothing to say, at least they say it so well that their discourse is amenable to structuralism. You retain meaning, the admirable syntactical arrangement of a discourse which has nothing to say.

Not only have others voiced similar misgivings (most recently Fabian 1980:86 and Tedlock 1983:335), but the concrete consequences for L6vi-Strauss's apparent "preferred mode of being- in-the-world" are devastating. If I may cite myself (1974:430; see also 1979),

Structuralist praxis terminates in a silent void-the "zero degree" of scientific discourse. The sentient men and women who inhabit the anthropological universe no longer live in the cosmological edifice that Levi-Strauss built. To understand the activities and aspirations of concrete human beings, we are asked to transform and to dissolve them into a digital pas de deux of a cybernetic danse macabre. Struc- turalist discourse professes to be a poetic celebration of an organic universe, but it resembles a funeral oration giving cosmic comfort to those misguided humanists who refuse to see the objective necessity for a scientific crematory.

In sum, reflexive analyses such as Taylor's are fine as far as they go, but they do not go far enough. A genuine "ethnology of ethnology" requires dialectical and critical analyses as well. They would not detract from Taylor's effort but enhance it.

by ANTHONY STELLATO Department of Anthropology, American University in Cairo, P.O. Box 2511, Cairo, Egypt. 13 Ix 84

Taylor's hermeneutics seriously underestimates epistemological difficulties in cultural understanding and overlooks its critical potential. At the same time, his article presents us with an opportunity to indicate epistemological problems on the way to the development of a critical social science.

Taylor proposes that anthropology is the study of man's self- understanding in and through symbols. He sees symbols in Heideggerian hermeneutical-ontological terms: they are primordial, "prereflexive" comprehensions of "the fundamental 'boundary situations' and 'existential conflicts' of human being- in-the-world." Anthropology cannot, therefore, transcend its ontological rootedness in symbol-mediated understanding. But since in this view symbols are apprehensions of universal human existentialia, our comprehension of symbols would seem to be guaranteed ontologically as well.

Taylor's view of understanding relies heavily upon Ricoeur's theory of textual interpretation, and he argues that the actual practice of even those anthropologists who (he says) claim to be doing positive science conforms to the Ricoeurian model of

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interpretation. Interestingly, Ricoeur himself has pointed out a number of the infelicities in textual metaphors of culture. He has argued (1971, 1976) that the illocutionary and perlocution- ary dimensions of speech are underrepresented or absent in texts, and he has stated that the text (sensu stricto) is "mute" for the interpreter, who does not seek understanding of its author's intended meaning or of the circumstances of the text's production. Taylor's use of a textual metaphor in his own text connotes a one-sided view of the ethnographic encounter. Such a view is also suggested in his treatment of Levi-Strauss's and Harris's work: the posited sources of their symbolic understandings are located overwhelmingly in the "intracultural" realm and seem to owe very little to the others the ethnographers may have encountered in the field. It is therefore un- clear to me how Taylor's hermeneutics would methodically buttress the disposition to listen that would seem prerequisite to a fusion of intercultural horizons. I suggest that Taylor does not appreciate the need for methodology here because his theory of symbolism supplies for him an ontological guarantee of comprehension.

Taylor's view of symbolism is not likely to attract anthropologists who recognize a historical dimension to human existence and are concerned with issues of power and structural reproduction. Symbols of "humanity" have been known to "nurture" the "visions" of agents engaged in the work of destroying, oppressing, and distorting others whom Taylor would consider to be or have been human. The problem is that "man" misunderstands himself and his world in and through symbols too. In dialectical understandings of alienation, the alienated do the work of their own subjection, and their semioses are integrally constitutive of that work; furthermore this work also sustains indirectly the production of the dominant semioses. It follows that bringing semiotic distortions of social practice to consciousness can undermine the disclosed practice. It is precisely because semiosis is integral to social organization that critique can emancipate and that noncritical approaches can contribute to sustaining alienating practices.

Having identified two difficulties-the hermeneutical problem of the Other and the critical problem of dialectical aliena- tions-in Taylor's existent hermeneutics, I would now like to consider the methodological issues these two problems pose for the development of a critical hermeneutics.

Critical hermeneutics endorses Gadamer's notion of the hermeneutical circle; it also adheres to a dialectical notion of alienation. But the attempt to integrate these two traditions encoun- ters a serious problem of method in the form of an antinomy. It seems that the two traditions pull in opposite directions. Her- meneutic sensitivity makes interpretation problematic. The social conditions of ethnographic work require that the ethnographer should ask him- or herself, "What is my effect on the scene of which I have become a part and which is the site of all my observations? Have I fully understood the Other's meaning?" Levi-Strauss (1976b:436) expressed this hermeneutical problem compellingly in his reflection on a first encounter with an "alien" community: "I had only to succeed in guessing what they were like for them to be deprived of their strangeness: in which case, I might just as well have stayed in my village. Or if, as was the case here, they retained their strangeness, I could make no use of it, since I was incapable of even grasping what it consisted of." Awareness of the pitfalls of interpretation may make the boldest critic of ideology shrink from claiming that he has grasped a meaning of a discourse or institution which is different from or even contrary to the understandings of the actors who inhabit it and who have identified and explained it to him. But on the other hand he knows that the web of signifiers is seamless-it does not trace out the site of an alienating discourse or practice; on the contrary, it is precisely the work of an alienating semiosis to present the subject with a sense of unified, intentionally directed experience while insert- ing him in the site of a contradiction. So the ethnographer who




privileges the subjective pole of the actors' experience finds himself in danger of privileging alienating semioses.

I can neither solve nor dissolve this antinomy. Clearly the notion that semiosis is a constitutive dimension of social structure requires a different logic of explanation for social science than the turn-of-the-century logical-positivist one Taylor has- tily dishes out. Nor am I convinced by the argument put forth by some critical theorists that alienated practice is actually become inert activity and so can be explained as such. In his recent work, Habermas has posed a transcendental deduction of the conditions of practical reason as a basis for a critical social theory, but it remains to be seen if such transcendental foundations (or any transcendental foundation, for that matter) will be capable of providing a methodology to guide and validate concrete interpretive work.

by STEVEN WEBSTER Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. 8 Ix 84

I can best pay my respects to Taylor's discussion of symbolism in anthropological discourse by revealing what appears to be the "personal and sociocultural preunderstanding" in his own commentary. As does Taylor, I feel it is important at this time to examine the preunderstandings of our own professional mode of discourse, which have usually been invisible to us. Whereas many of us since Marcus and Cushman (1983) have approached ethnographies as texts, Taylor here approaches the textuality of anthropological theory.

Taylor's commentary stops short of exposing the innocent scientism deep in Levi-Strauss's and Harris's texts, rather pre- ferring (with Ricoeur) to reconcile this with their "symbolically nurtured Verstehen." I think a more resolutely historical approach can suggest a lot more. The symbols of resignation nurtured here in Murdock's text can also be seen as belated echoes of Boas's futile struggle to reconcile natural and moral sciences. This perhaps stillborn American drama in turn echoes, provincially, the much more developed melancholy that Taylor traces from L6vi-Strauss back to Rousseau. But whereas Rousseau's noble savage was the object of an innocent pitie whose romanticist disillusionment was limited to the nas- cent industrial world, L6vi-Strauss's angst is postcolonial, couched in terms of sin, atonement, redemption, or (as Taylor also notes) a totalised world which is relieved to vanish into nonbeing. This ethereally balanced "world of reciprocity" does iAdeed lure contemporary anthropologists but is better traced to Mauss, whose image of reconciliation bore the pathos of the post-World War I era (Clifford 1983), not that of the hopeful general will. This crucial rhetorical difference, as Lukacs was the first to point out with regard to the novel, is that between an earlier struggling bourgeoisie and a later entrenched and resigned one. This is the resignation which is expressed in frank idealism in the matured bourgeois tradition of L6vi- Strauss but petulantly in Murdock's embattled American em- piricism, where innocence has been much more recently lost.

Also from this more historical point of view, Harris's and L6vi-Strauss's forms of explanation can be seen as two sides of the same coin, not at all "markedly different." Whereas the latter's is an abstract "science of the concrete," Harris's Nature of Cultural Things indelibly exposes his evolutionist materialism as a very similar form of philosophical idealism. The ambit of the idealism common to L6vi-Strauss and Harris is still that exposed by Marx in the 19th-century fetishism of commodities and wages, which mystified either historical economic ideas as natural or historical objectivity as mere ideas. The historical objectivity of social change is obscured by Har- ris's multilinear materialist evolutionism and, when so firmly backed by well-meaning moralisms, simply reproduces Pop- per's methodological individualism of social planning in the open society. The bureaucratic reformist faith of both theories

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is implicit in their troubled reduction of history to evolution, however competitively individualist or multilinear.

I think I can fairly claim that this abstraction from historical context is the "personal and sociocultural preunderstanding" of Taylor's writing, as well as that of L6vi-Strauss and Harris. This "transcendance of specific cultural horizons and . . . fusion of temporal ones" is itself one form of a specific historical development concurrent with industrialisation that Gross (1981) calls the "spatialisation of time." This "fusion" bears marks not of Gadamer's tense and contradiction-ridden (i.e., dialectical) historical hermeneutics but rather of Dilthey's positivist hermeneutics. Geertz and Ricoeur appear to be Tay- lor's mentors here. Taylor reveals the many contradictions implicit in the rhetorical conventions of Levi-Strauss and Harris, apparently only for the sake of restoring their full meaning. He seems quite content with the symmetry of an articulate oscillation between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften, Erkliren and Verstehen, as though it were a melancholy but eternal verity of the condition humaine. But the 19th-century origin of this oscillation in positivism and romanticism is clear, and behind that the preunderstanding of industrial instrumental rationality and its irrational alter ego. Perhaps, as Marx said in the Grundrisse, "the bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond the antithesis between itself and the ro- mantic viewpoint, and the latter will accompany it as its legiti- mate antithesis up to its blessed end."

Ricoeur's philosophic method is suggestive of Mauss's yearn- ing for reconciliation, the latter's own interwar foreboding re- placed by the 1960s spirit of detente and its semiotic secular faith of a "second naivete. " Other historically specific symbols which seem to nurture the preunderstanding which Taylor inherits from Ricoeur are the methodically open Jamesian pragmatism of guess and verification, development and envelopment, and the historically accompanying bourgeois individualism of an existentially anxious being-in-the-world. This is the same historical form of dialectical methodology which Geertz derived from Dilthey via Ricoeur. Its orbit remains historically idealist whether structuralist or empiricist. Since the revolutions and depression which set the scene for Dilthey and Durkheim, this preunderstanding has been either melancholy or exuberantly aesthetic in its preoccupations, corre- sponding to the economic era. The widely proclaimed uncer- tainty of the '70s seems indeed to have led to a transitional aesthetic melancholy in the study of anthropological texts. If indeed "anthropology lives from its symbols" in this resolutely detached way, one hopes it is passing on the real food of history at least to its hosts in the field, if not to its readers and listeners at home.

Reply by MARK KLINE TAYLOR

Princeton, N. J., U.S.A. 26 XI 84 I appreciate the criticism offered in these pages and find this discussion another example of why we who work outside professional anthropology need to learn from anthropologists and reflect with them, and with other interpreters, on the nature of anthropological experience. I will group the diverse comments around three issues: (1) how anthropology is to be placed in relationship to the tasks of understanding and explanation, (2) my means of identifying symbols and their roles in anthropology, and (3) the possibility of approaches to L6vi-Strauss's and Harris's work that are in tension with my own.

1. Many of the critics seem to overlook my emphasis on the dialectical relationship between understanding and explanation and the fact that anthropological interpretation involves

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both. I am critical of rigorous pursuits of explanation in anthropology only when and if they deny or ignore the dialectically related Verstehen implicit in their explanatory efforts. Though hermeneutical approaches are well known for em- phasizing Verstehen, it is, as I have said, Ricoeur's special contribution not to pit hermeneutical understanding against more "scientistic" commitments to explanatory method.

Heinen is surely right, therefore, when he says that "there are no Naturwissenschaften or Geisteswissenschaften as such." Ricoeur's hermeneutics would stress precisely that point, and I have attempted to show the unity of these two "sciences" by seeking the understanding implicit in the explanatory methods of Levi-Strauss and Harris. While I know this is nothing new to Heinen, it seems not quite right to say that it would only have been interesting ten years ago. As long as social scientists continue to presuppose what Ulin (1984:xv) calls the "unten- able dichotomy" between understanding and explanation, the implications of Ricoeur's hermeneutics need to be addressed. In spite of the space I have devoted to the dialectical relation of understanding and explanation, several of the critics' comments presuppose this dichotomy. In light of that dialectic it is incorrect to label my article humanistic as opposed to scientific (Bunge), to suggest that I leave little place for explanation in anthropology (Layton), or to argue that I have overlooked "scientific anthropology" to demonstrate "that everyone, willy- nilly, is in the idealist camp" (Jarvie). It is true that I have tried to identify components in anthropological explanation that are often dismissed as idealist or antiscientific, but with hermeneutical approaches like Ricoeur's, as well as Kuhn's (1962) contextual analyses of science, the dichotomies idealism/ materialism, humanities/sciences, and understanding/explanation are inappropriate. It seems to me that critics should respond less with suspicion of idealist reductionism and more with discussion of whether or not the alleged "idealist" components are present in anthropological explanations and whether the roles they play are as I have suggested.

2. Jarvie does not see any theory of the symbol operative here. I can only refer him to my commentary on the three marks of the symbol and maintain that my articulation of those marks counts as a "theory" in the sense of a coherent group of general propositions used to identify and discuss my subject matter. He is particularly concerned that the third mark of a symbol, its function as "surplus of signification," implies some state of signification in which there is no surplus. The term "surplus" depends not on any supposition of a state of signification in which words stand in one-to-one relation to things but only on the supposition that some words signify, invoke, connote a more encompassing meaning than do others. Without presupposing a surplus-free state of signification, therefore, Ricoeur can distinguish in the symbolic function a "primary signification," by which terms have their expected meanings (sea as expanse of waters), from a "secondary signification" (sea as opposed to land and suggesting divisions among humans, indeed invoking a cosmology). As I developed this third mark of the symbol, therefore, what was important was not the mere presence of surplus but that the surplus was a comprehensive understanding in which the invokers of a symbol, in a "non-methodic" moment, signaled their visions of experience as a whole. This non-methodic comprehension does not nullify the operations of rigorous explanatory methods, but it does nurture, encompass, and accompany those methods, even as they may develop, test, and challenge it.

Gauthier's comments on symbols and on the "combinatorial" nature of the internal logic of their construction are especially helpful regarding my linking of symbols to comprehensive understanding. In his reading, symbols have to be understood not only as discrete terms or ideas ("nature," "world of reciprocity") but also as having a combinatorial logic. I have attempted to show that the discrete symbolic terms have particular combinatorial attributes that are identifiable in both the

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intercultural and intracultural realms of L6vi-Strauss's and Harris's anthropological knowledge.

Harris insists that I must show how one "distills" a symbol from a complex "text," say, that of his Cultural Materialism. My approach was not, however, to distill the symbol "nature" from any one of his texts. Rather, a review of his anthropological program, occurring across several texts, highlighted the general features of his comprehensive understanding, and that understanding and its combinatorial attributes provided the context for identifying a dominant symbol, "nature." I have not suggested, therefore, as Harris thinks, that "nature" is used alone. In fact, it would hardly be identifiable apart from its context in an understanding that consistently privileges material conditions in explanations of sociocultural life.

Harris does not often advert to the notion of "nature" in his writings, but when he does it plays an important role. That he may always use "nature" as part of an "etic behavioral conjunction" does not preclude its being a symbol. "Nature" is invoked at the base of this etic behavioral conjunction to give authenticity to and ground his epistemological and theoretical principles. The most weighty things, for Harris, to which a social scientist may appeal are the "lawful regularities of nature" (1979:56). His science of culture gives strategic priority to patterns of production and reproduction, which, he says, are "grounded in nature" (p. 58).

To say as I have that nature is a symbol that creatively nurtures Harris's understanding is not to suggest, as Jarvie and Bunge fear, that it is purely attributable to Harris's subjectivity. There may i,ndeed be "exogenous" factors (Jarvie) or "things" distinct from our ideas of them (Bunge) related to Harris's personal invocation of this symbol. A dialectical view of understanding and explanation allows for a world to be explained even-while stressing that this world is a symbolically understood one. In fact, in my formulation of the second mark of the symbol, I articulated the invented or constructed character of symbols with precisely this in mind, writing of symbols not as pure constructs but as "creations of interpreters interacting with and embedded in complexes of perceptions and experiences. " There is here both creative interpretation and a world of experience created by and conditioning that interpretation. Jarvie's claim that the argument for "nature" as construct is invalid applies only to an idealist reductionism that I have not endorsed.

The question persists, especially for Harris, of the worth of this distillation of symbols for resolving conflicting views of causality. Harris is right in observing that I do not claim to resolve conflicting explanations of sociocultural phenomena. Ultimately, here, I am dependent on the social scientists who work in a disciplined way to understand sociocultural phenomena. But I doubt if social scientists and anthropologists will be as effective as they might be in this regard without reflexively considering the constructive, symbolic dimensions of the theories by which they linguistically invoke divergent views of the whole of what is. In other words, while it may be necessary for sociocultural theorists to argue that some theories are man- dated by, say, "nature" or a "world of reciprocity," this is not sufficient. They must also attend to these totalities and suggest why they invoke them. Evaluating sociocultural theories of causality, then, becomes something much more complex than assessing the adequacy of cross-culturally gathered materials or even being explicit about one's epistemological and theoretical principles. It becomes a matter of assessing the comprehensive understanding a sociocultural theorist symbolically invokes to ground that epistemology and theory. This I have already suggested in asserting that anthropological explanation has to be viewed as a "multifaceted moment" uniting intercultural processes, intracultural processes, and the moral sensibilities that often infuse both.

Ultimately, and I suspect this does not appeal to Harris, this focus on understanding introduces a non-methodic element




into anthropological explanations of sociocultural life. An- thropological explanations may have elements similar to religion as Geertz views it in that their conceptions of a general order of existence are clothed with "an aura of factuality" that makes anthropologists' moods and motivations "seem uniquely realistic." Evaluations and norms, then, rather than something we hammer out by deciding which theories best fit data, tend to be something disclosed to us as we engage in conversation about the diverse forms of symbolic understanding that suffuse our theories and data assessment. Another hermeneutical theorist, H.-G. Gadamer, perhaps points to that on which we should reflect: "Someone who understands is always already drawn into an event through which meaning asserts itself.... In understanding we are drawn into an event and arrive, as it were, too late, if we want to know what we ought to believe" (Gadamer 1975:446). This nonmethodic character of the disclo- sure of norms does not mean the end of thinking, but it does demand from us a different kind of rational effort. Theories of symbol, metaphor, and analogy, as employed especially in the works of not only Ricoeur but also Tracy (1981) and others, may be especially appropriate to the non-methodic dimensions that persist in the depths of anthropological explanations invoking "nature" (or "world of reciprocity") as their sure "ground. "

This may strike Harris as a "shamanistic" conception of anthropology, but I note, as commentator Heinen's language suggests, that Harris too may be viewed as "shaman" by those who do not share his mode of symbolic understanding. Harris's avowed stance among "the mortals below" need not mean he lacks some of the shamanistic qualities he often attributes to others.

3. A number of critics (Gaines, Heinen, Scholte, Stellato, Webster) in one way or another acknowledge the need for a critique similar to the one I have advanced but suggest alternative approaches.

Gaines suggests shifting attention away from the "eccentric, grand traditions in anthropology" represented by Levi-Strauss and Harris toward the more difficult challenge of discerning the "interpretive" character of biomedicine and the putatively "hard" sciences. I can only applaud that effort and add that it points up the applicability of a hermeneutical approach to the "objective biological processes" to which Bunge thinks hermeneutics has little to offer. Gaines's work is a significant challenge to the assumption that hermeneutics "applies only to texts." It is possible to affirm biomedical explanatory methods while also discerning in them their interpretive understanding. As to whether Levi-Strauss and Harris represent only grand, eccentric, "now fading" traditions, not all anthropologists seem agreed on that point (cf. Magnarella 1982:138). Perhaps not many anthropologists would describe themselves as cultural materialists or structuralists in Harris's and Levi-Strauss's senses, but these two anthropologists may still model some theoretically consistent approaches that influence discussion in anthropology and other fields. Their work is appropriate for my project because they are persistent advocates of the ideal of explanation in anthropology and not of understanding.

Layton would also draw from Ricoeur, but from another aspect of his work: the distinction between "language" (a system of related signs) and "discourse." Layton is helpful in suggesting that Levi-Strauss's and Harris's primary focus on explanations of systematic relations (whether structuralist or cultural materialist) is due to their attempt to allow for prediction. I view this observation of Layton's as stressing another component of these anthropologists' commitments to Erklaren. The question remains whether we may discern a symbolic dimension of understanding in their pursuits of systems that allow prediction.

Heinen expresses his preference for a more vigorous critique of Levi-Strauss's use of Rousseau's notion of pitie', which I allegedly interpret too broadly, and of Harris's use of Marxian

Vol. 26 *No. 2 *April 1985


concepts, which I do not assess for their faithfulness to Marx. I am certain that Levi-Strauss and Harris can be criticized concerning the ways they cite Rousseau and Marx and am confident, knowing Heinen's past contributions to the pages of CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY (cf. Heinen 1975), that such a critique can be convincingly performed. My program in this article, however, calls primarily for displaying how Levi-Strauss and Harris utilize these key figures, and it is clear from this perspective that pitie is broadened by Levi-Strauss beyond its "plain English" use to connote a more fundamental psychic state of "original identification" with others (cf. Levi-Strauss 1962:243-44; 1976:37-38, 41; 1963:101). Whether this broad- ening is faithful to Rousseau's meaning is another question, and I suspect Heinen may be right that it is not. Similarly, we might assess a variety of diverse interpretations of Marx, but to do so would be out of place in a study of the way Harris invokes him.

Heinen seems to prefer "critical anthropology" 's reading of Marx, and several other comments are informed by critical- praxis theory. Stellato suggests that my symbolic approach will not attract "anthropologists who recognize a historical dimension to human existence and are concerned with issues of power and structural reproduction." Scholte develops this objection most forcefully, and Webster employs his own "resolutely historical approach" to identify the "personal and sociocultural preunderstanding" discernible in my own article.

The fundamental objection is articulated clearly by Scholte. He insists on a "radicalization" of my portrait of the anthropologists' symbolic dimensions that relates them to their "pragmatic use and abuse." It is not enough for him that I suggest in my footnotes (2 and 17) that the symbolic dimensions may occasion analyses of anthropological knowledge drawing from ideology critique and critical-praxis theory. Such approaches, I repeat, are both possible and important for analyz- ing the contextuality of anthropology, and what I have termed the symbolic dimension would be enhanced by giving more attention than I have here to critical or ethno-logical analyses. Scholte wants something more than this, however. He suggests that the prereflexive totalities that I discern in Levi-Strauss's and Harris's symbolic understanding need to be read as "concrete historical processes, actual vested interests, or specific normative choices." Though I respect Scholte's studies in the contextualization of anthropology and agree with the positions he takes concerning the political crises of our period, I see two problems with this suggestion.

First, it may lead to another form of reductionism. Scholte moves too quickly from preunderstanding disclosed in the text to ethno-logical preunderstanding accessible through analysis of sociocultural contexts. Does his persistent emphasis on ethno-logic allow adequate attention to the distinctive meanings disclosed in the language and texts of anthropological interpreters? Without presuming that texts are unrelated to sociohistorical contexts, my effort acknowledges that an anthropologist's textual meanings cannot be emptied out into the meanings derived by sociological and historical (or ethno- logical) reconstruction of their contexts. Thus it has seemed acceptable to focus on the symbolic understanding suffusing Levi-Strauss's and Harris's textual interpretations, leaving in the footnotes, for the moment at least, the matters so valued by critical-praxis theorists.

Related to this problem is a second one. When insisting on the need to trace symbolic understanding from texts to their ethno-logical contexts, Scholte speaks confidently about our ability to identify "concrete moral praxis," "concrete historical processes," "actual vested interests," or "actual results" (italics added). There seems in this confidence an objectivism or naive realism that is seduced by another "myth of the given" (Sellars 1963)-only here, instead of being enchanted with given, out-

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there-now-real facts, Scholte speaks with puzzling ease of given (actual, concrete) contexts and processes or interests. Does not a critical praxis theory, and so also a "critical anthropology," need to be reflexive about the way critical theorists attend to other people's actual and concrete worlds? If that is done, then critical theory and ideology critique themselves become symbolic enterprises. This by no means dis- credits them, but it does deprive them of some of the privilege that Scholte seems to claim for them.

If critical theory is itself a symbolic enterprise, there is need for a reflexive analysis of, say, the "emancipative interest" that underlies many ideology critics' helpful insistence on breaking down fact/value dichotomies and their important criticisms of colonialism and exploitation. Such an "emancipative interest" is of course evident in Scholte's comments here, as when he decries Levi-Strauss's and Harris's imperialistic and reductive monologues about the "Other" or laments the "devastating ... concrete consequences" of Levi-Strauss's cosmic vision. What remains unattended to is the place from which Scholte hurls these charges. Scholte, and others whose critical postures have led them to portray Harris's context as "bourgeois rationality" (Paul and Rabinow 1976) or Levi-Strauss's as that of the "inau- thentic Jew" (e.g., Diamond 1974), are often adept at identifying others' actual contexts without disclosing the symbolic dimensions that nurture their analyses and judgments about alleged exploitation or devastation. Critical theorists may be as nonreflexive about "actual historical processes" as Harris often seems to be about his "nature."

Such an approach may also involve caricature of the thought of those the ideology critic seeks to contextualize. Scholte, with Paul and Rabinow (1976:124), may overstate the matter in suggesting that Harris's symbolic understanding is an attempt to "nullify the anthropological concern with the symbolic life of the species." Rather, Harris simply does not grant symbolic systems strategic priority for explaining sociocultural similarities and differences. Such priority he reserves to infrastructure, where culture and nature interface, though the symbolic order, together with superstructure generally, may affect infrastructural change as a form of "feedback" (Harris 1979:70-72).

Similarly, it seems an overstatement to respond, as Scholte does, that Levi-Strauss's cosmic vision of the eclipse of humanity necessitates devastating concrete consequences for moral praxis and that I fail to be even "remotely critical" in not seeing this. A more patient reading of Levi-Strauss's position seems needed. The triumph of non-being that he ponders in the final pages of Mythologiques is not testimony to a danse macabre that inevitably undermines the concrete aspirations and activities of humans. Scholte's response to Levi-Strauss here is remi- niscent of the notion that Buddhism's concept of Nirvana pro- hibits its religious experience from being ethical or capable of generating a social ethic. The flowering and eventual vanish- ing of human cultures and structures envisioned by Levi- Strauss (1981:693-94) may mean the ultimate eclipse of humankind but not of a moral praxis among those who still have being. Even for some Christian theologians, the task of articulating an ethic for human life may continue in spite of, perhaps because of, an acknowledgment that "as the beginning was without us, so the end also will be without us" (Gustafson 1981:267-69). Levi-Strauss himself seems aware of the significance of his Buddhist-like "entropology" for revaluing the human and so completing the person's freedom from bond- age in which Marxist critique is also interested (Levi-Strauss 1978:412). I am not arguing here that Levi-Strauss is right or that some vision of an eclipse of the human is necessary for human social emancipation. I am suggesting, however, that his symbolic understanding is not necessarily devastating to a moral praxis.

What I view as Scholte's puzzling confidence about discerning Levi-Strauss's and Harris's actual contexts, and perhaps also his occasional overstatements, may partly be due to the recal-

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citrant antinomy of critical theory that Stellato helpfully discusses. It is difficult for the "critical" ethnographer to privilege the actor's experience (here, that of the anthropologist as actor) without also privileging what he takes to be that actor's "alienating semiosis." My concerns here have been that Scholte moves so quickly to disparage Harris's and Levi-Strauss's alienating semioses, through his contextual analyses, that he may not do justice to these anthropologists' points of view. It is true, given Stellato's antinomy, that the anthropological subject's Verstehen may be so privileged that alienating perspectives are not challenged. This I suspect is Scholte's worry about my symbolic approach. But how does an ideology critique do justice to the textual understanding in an anthropologist's point of view? And can critical theorists acknowledge reflexively that their interest in emancipating culture is itself a symbolically nurtured one, not a supposedly more "concrete, actual" one that is privileged to go behind others' symbol systems?

I detect a greater self-consciousness about the symbolically mediated character of praxis interests among some political and "liberation theologians" than I do among some praxis- oriented "liberation anthropologists." Taking many of their cues from the analyses of Benjamin, Adorno, and especially Habermas, these thinkers (Peukert 1984, Lamb 1982, Gutier- rez 1973) nevertheless often acknowledge the role of their linguistic and symbolic heritages in constituting their senses of justice and oppression. I don't mean that critical theorists have to be theologians. Nor do I at all find acceptable the suggestions of anthropologists Leach (1974) and Kaplan (1974) that the praxis-oriented "reinventors" of anthropology be viewed as "radical enthusiasts" on the order of the Diggers, the Quakers, and the Muggletonians. But I do not see how critical theorists can evade acknowledging that their fervent protests against alienation and their confident evaluations of others' vested interests are themselves rooted in a non-methodic, symbolic understanding and thus do not occupy a privileged position without some argument that their symbolic vision should or, in fact does, inform the rest of us. Ricoeur, who by the way also argues that ideology critique is an essential contribution to his hermeneutical approach, puts the problem in the form of a question: "how do we know that the interest in emancipation stands at the summit of the hierarchy of interests?" (Ricoeur 1973:162).

Webster, with Scholte, suggests that my approach does not go far enough. It "stops short of exposing" the two anthropologists' "innocent scientism." I am allegedly too content with "the symmetry of an articulate oscillation" between explanation and understanding as if this were a "melancholy but eternal verity of the condition humaine." This kind of melancholy, as Marx is said to have predicted, is one product of the "preunderstanding of industrial instrumental rationality and its irrational alter ego." This "preunderstanding" is also expressed in Ricoeur's talk of the necessity of guess and verification and of envelopment and development.

I appreciate Webster's portrait of my own "personal and sociocultural preunderstanding." It is perhaps helpful in articulating what those indebted to Ricoeur's comprehensive hermeneutics are up to, and I myself find it provocative and il- luminating when considering my own project. I wonder, though, who escapes the allegedly melancholy suspension between the need both to explain by way of critical methods and to understand through symbols. This may be more than just the "bourgeois" thinker's "blessed end." If I am right that even ideology critics' "explanations" in terms of identified concrete, historical processes also involve a symbolic "understanding" of emancipation, then they too do not step outside the historical orbit to which Webster assigns many of us.

Webster also seems to overlook the fact that a dialectical view of understanding and explanation is not necessarily "oscillation" between the two and hence need not be the resigna-




Taylor: SYMBOLIC DIMENSIONS tion or the Romanticist aestheticism that he implies is deficient. Once we cease presuming that only "idealists" work out of multifaceted moments of symbolic understanding, we may still set about the task of displaying them and of seeking evaluations of them that resort to neither the privileged neutrality of positivist explanations nor to the privileged actual contexts of vested interests that some critical theorists claim to know.

Finally, I note that Webster writes pejoratively of melancholy and aesthetics as if they can have little to do with "the real food of history." Though I have argued that to embrace the dialectic of explanation and understanding is not a melancholic "oscillation," I do not also wish to endorse Webster's assumption that melancholy has little rightful place in a "resolutely historical" preunderstanding, whether it be Levi- Strauss's or my own. Melancholy is not inimical to hope or to labor in hope against the forces of alienation that such "masters of suspicion" as Freud, Marx, and their interpreters have raised to our consciousness. Such melancholy may in fact be a sober response to the persistent and complex realities of injus- tice and oppression that call forth our emancipative efforts. Nor do aesthetic elements in our preunderstanding necessarily lead away from the supposedly more concrete forces of history. Geertz's Negara, though it may underestimate the need for a historical "mechanics of power," at least rightly reminds us that an aesthetic exuberance, perhaps in its forms of drama and "pomp," has a power too and that it is therefore not im- proper to speak of a "poetics of power" (Geertz 1980:13, 123). This does not mean that Levi-Strauss's aesthetic vision has to be the one we choose to inform a "poetics of power," but it should not be ruled out simply because of the implication that an aesthetic exuberance inevitably cannot help pass on "the real food of history." We might also remember that very human workers, uniting for emancipation from harsh labor conditions and unfair wages, demonstrated for bread but "for roses too" (Kornbluh 1964:164, 195-96). The aesthetic, as well as the melancholic, need not be denied a possible place in a preunderstanding that is resolutely historical and emancipative.

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Workshop on International Social Science Writing

A workshop for approximately twenty social scientists will be held in or near Nairobi for ten days from Saturday, August 31, 1985. It is designed for Anglophone social scientists from east- ern or southern Africa who wish to submit papers for publication in international journals. It will deal, therefore, primarily with the canons of explanation and the technical conventions of presentation which can make the difference between acceptance and rejection of a paper. It will also elucidate the processes of refereeing and after-acceptance editing, which are often a mystery to authors.

The leaders of the workshop are expected to be Cyril Bel- shaw, Ph.D. (London), F.R.S.C., Editor of CURRENT AN- THROPOLOGY; John Ogbu, Ph.D. (Berkeley), Professor of An- thropology, Faculty of Education, University of California, Berkeley; and Barbara Metzger, Copy Editor, CURRENT AN- THROPOLOGY.

The workshop is jointly sponsored by the International Fed-

eration of Scientific Editors' Associations and the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. In principle, twelve places will be reserved for anthropologists, eight plus any unfilled being available to scholars in other disciplines such as political science, sociology, human geography, and history, on a first-come, first-served basis, with due respect for geographical distribution.

Applicants should write C. S. Belshaw, CURRENT AN- THROPOLOGY, 6303 N.W. Marine Drive, UBC Campus, Van- couver, B.C., Canada V6T 2B2, enclosing a curriculum vitae.

Successful applicants will be asked to furnish one unpub- lished paper to serve as a basis for discussion. It is also expected that they will be furnished with a textbook for advanced reading. Application is now being made for financial aid to assist with travel, though at the moment this cannot be guaranteed.

Some applicants may wish to attend the IFSEA Workshop on African Editing and Publishing, which will take place in Nairobi on the three preceding days. Requests for information should be addressed to Helen Van Houten, IDRC, P.O. Box 62084, Nairobi, Kenya.

Wanted * For the Papua New Guinea Collection of the National Li- brary Service, copies of works written in or about that country and its people. Without such contributions, the library often remains unaware of relevant publications. Sharing articles based on research or knowledge of Papua New Guinea with the National Library Service seems a simple way of thanking the people of Papua New Guinea for their patience and help with the original research. Articles should be sent to PNG Collection, National Library Service, P.O. Box 5770, Boroko, Papua New Guinea.

* For the fourth annual volume in the new series History of Anthropology, entitled Anthropology between Two World

Wars: 1914-1945, articles on any subdisciplinary field of anthropology (including applied, archeological, biological, linguistic, and sociocultural), as well as articles of general anthropological interest. Topics may be focussed biographically, institutionally, conceptually, methodologically, within one national anthropological tradition or bridging between them. Au- thors are encouraged to consider topics in relation to specific bodies of documentary material as well as to general historical and cultural trends (intellectual, aesthetic, political, economic, etc.), including the impact of the wars that mark the beginning and end of the period. Although the deadline for completed manuscripts will be August 31, 1985, potential contributors are encouraged to communicate with the editor about their work before submitting drafts. All communications should be addressed to: George W. Stocking, Jr. (HOA), Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1126 E. 59th St., Chicago, Ill. 60637, U.S.A.



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