It may be objected, however, that the synecdoche {inkblot = symbol} is inappropriate: an inkblot, which does not stand for anything in particular and is indeed so designed, seems quite a deviant symbol. What does an inkblot have in common with, say, the dot-dash of Morse code, a symbol that has a precise referent—a “real” symbol?
Although any figure of speech must be used cautiously, I think the inkblot trope jars us out of a deceptive mode of thought. We regard code units—dot-dash, for example—as better symbols than inkblots because conduit thinking easily accommodates an image of communication as the transmission of code units between cryptographs. But this is a travesty of most real-life communication, where symbols are subject to diverse construals (not one) by biographical persons (not machines). The inkblot trope is a provocation that forwards a narrow but crucial claim about all symbols: neither an inkblot nor dot-dash “has” meaning. It is true that those who know Morse code will make a meaning from dot-dash more automatically than they will from an inkblot.11 But such automaticity is the result of prior learning by discrete persons, not a property of the symbols. The inkblot trope underscores the point that meanings arise in interactions between symbols and human minds, whether those symbols be inkblots, dots and dashes, or ordinary symbols that elicit a combination of conventional and idiosyncratic understandings.12
To summarize: metaphors are not concepts, words are not thoughts, symbols are not culture. I think Reddy’s chief target is not deceptive language but rather a “misleading and dehumanizing” (1979: 308) commonsense cultural model, conduit thinking, which receives powerful reinforcement not only from conduit language, but also from unconscious perceptions. Because we typically experience words and other symbols as suffused with meaning, we sometimes imagine that our ideas and feelings have come, special delivery, from without. Our automatic processing of much everyday symbolic material provides experiential sustenance for conduit thinking: the world seems to speak for itself. Hence the receiver’s meaning-making, essential to any communicative event, gets little attention in our practices of communicating and understanding and, I shall argue, in our theories of culture, which are thereby distorted in two major respects.
Distortions
The First Distortion: Displacing the Natives
For cognitive linguists such as Reddy, symbols are public, concrete objectifications. Meanings, on the other hand, are networks of knowledge accessed or evoked, but not conveyed, by symbols. Such linguists propose a shift from extensional to intensional theories of meaning (D’Andrade 1990: 123). Extensional theories look for reference—for correspondences between words or other symbols and things in the world. If meaning is reference, the mind can be a black box; an account of meaning need not concern itself with cognition. By contrast, intensional theories focus on the sense that symbols have for natives. Intensional semantics insists that what things mean depends fundamentally on what and how people think, not on direct links between signs and referents or on features of language per se.
Because intension mediates between symbol and meaning, communication among toolmakers is a clumsy business; the visiting anthropologist’s job is doubly difficult. It has been tempting for us to collect the messages, which are, after all, readily accessible, discover systematic relationships among them, and present an interpretation. Virtuoso readings of symbols and rituals by informed, sensitive observers well steeped in the local culture—for example, Geertz’s Balinese cockfight (1973a), Victor Turner’s Ndembu milk tree (1967), and David Schneider’s American kinship (1968)—have been highly influential in the elaboration of Anglo-American culture theory. Other readers of cultural “texts” use more formal schemes, drawn from literary criticism, semiotics, structuralism and so on, as keys to unlock the meanings hidden within public symbols. Whether through cultural savvy or formal cryptography, interpretation aims to reveal deeper and more compelling messages hidden beneath an enigmatic or misleading “textual” surface of physical movements, objects, or words.13
The social world in which anthropologists immerse themselves is not, however, a set of boxes within boxes with a treasure (or, perhaps, only more boxes14) at the center. It is people doing things. Communication, rightfully a prime focus of anthropological inquiry, is a social and intrapsychic practice. It cannot be boiled down to a key, a set of meanings “conveyed” or “embodied in” symbols. Indeed, conceiving social and intrapsychic life as a disembodied text rather than a temporal flow makes the anthropologist, not the native, the meaning-maker. The communicative exchanges of the natives among themselves recede into the background, frozen through conduit thinking into the symbols from which the anthropologist generates his or her meanings. The anthropologist’s performance of code cracking occupies center stage; the dramas of natives’ lives, reduced to inert text, become a mere backdrop to the show.
All this is not to deny that the anthropologist, like the native, is an agent who makes meanings: ethnographic meaning-making is a prime task of our fieldwork and writing. But it is precisely natives’ dramas that we should feature in our ethnographies. We cannot do so without a responsible account of their meanings—an intensional account that is the product not of textual interpretation but of an engaged science.15 The issue of fidelity cannot be sidestepped. The object of cultural research is not to clarify a text but to infer as best one can the subjective worlds of other people, meaning-makers in their own right living complex, thoughtful, and emotion-filled lives.
The project makes some people uneasy. Much recent criticism of anthropology is predicated on the notion that cultural accounts are invasions, acts of imperious (or imperial) disrespect. Ethnography is in this view a genre of authoritarian “fiction” passed off as univocal truth (Clifford 1986, 1988; Tyler 1986; see also Geertz 1988).16 There is some sting in the accusations. Unquestionably, an anthropologist’s account is never transparent, always fashioned; it can be insensitive, disrespectful, or collaborative with imperial power; it can arrogantly lay claim to truth, violating the first principle of science, which is that any proposition is tentative. But why should provisional formulations of another’s subjective experience be thought of as intrinsically authoritarian or invasive?17 One could instead consider such formulations as respectful experiments in human imagination, for respect can equally well be viewed as a mode of interpersonal engagement that seeks to discover or cultivate in oneself hitherto unknown, unsuspected empathies or correspondences with others. That such correspondences can never be fully achieved; that they always bear the imprint of one’s own confusions, cultural biases, and idiosyncrasies; that power is an element of the relationships that bring them to light (as it is of all relationships); and that our own objectifications (ethnographic texts) elicit myriad, divergent meanings in readers are not arguments for abandoning ethnography. To the contrary, the very difficulty of stretching imagination and sensibility, all too apparent in the self-absorbed, blinkered nature of so many human transactions, is what makes ethnography compelling.
The idea that an objectification of someone else’s thought is substantially an act of aggression and domination—that words have something like direct physical force—seems strongly tinged with conduit thinking. In this view words are missiles of conceptual imperialism. The tendency to attribute great power to symbols, which are, after all, tokens of communication produced, manipulated, and given meaning by human beings, contributes to a second common distortion in culture theory.
The Second Distortion: Reifying (Deifying?) Culture
From at least the time of Durkheim (1964 [1895]) both sociology and anthropology have considered “culture”—collective representations, rituals, symbols, discourses, what have you—a powerful, even coercive, force on human thought and behavior. The conduit model dovetails nicely with top-down theorizing that strongly privileges social facts. It makes such theorizing good to think, lending it commonsense plausibility in the face of significant contrary evidence suggesting that knowledge is learned imperfectly, erratically, and variably by individual human organisms, and that such learning is not just a passive process. Children, for example, enter the world with no cultural knowledge whatsoever; they eventually become, after a long and arduous passage, imperfectly enculturated, quirky adults.18 The irregular, unpredictable, and discontinuous aspects of cultural “acquisition”