Problems of Ethnosemiotics

Abstract

In researching exchange as an "integral social fact," Mauss and his school, as well as Hocart and Needham, came to the conclusion that in ancient times there existed a nondifferentiated society, in which the exchange of social and material values (including "the exchange of partners"—i.e., spouses—according to Lévi-Strauss), ritualized mutual relations, and activity equivalent to the arts in contemporary society are regarded as virtually indistinguishable from one another. At the present time, it is possible to believe that in phylogenesis (species history), development of human sign systems takes place by means of a growth in the number of various systems breaking away from some hypothetical single system.1 Such a universal or integral sign system simultaneously had functions that partially corresponded to those that would later be performed by linguistic, ritual, religious, scientific, and artistic systems. Natural language, the language of gestures, and other kinds of information, later becoming specialized as individual arts, writing, and so on, belong to the realm of this universal system.2 Early religion and early mythology constituted its content. One of the important ethnological discoveries is the establishment of the unity of early religion and early science. An analogue of this "syncretic" (in the spirit of Veselovskii's definition of the early syncretism of the arts)3 sign system is the comparably universal system identified by Mauss in early exchange: "This early form of exchange is not exclusively or in its very essence economic, but places us before what he (Mauss—V.I.) correctly refers to as an "integral social fact," that is, a fact laden simultaneously with social and religious, magical and economic, utilitarian, feeling-oriented, legal, and moral meaning."4 In describing a society of such an "integral" type, one ought to avoid attempts to transfer to it that specialization of functions (including esthetic ones) that have evolved in contemporary societies thanks to the long-term development of sign systems that comprise culture as a whole. It is obvious that those functions that are divided among the spheres of religion, medicine, dance, drama, and certain other arts in any European society are combined into one in the séances of a Siberian or American Indian shaman.a In exactly the same way, the rules regulating exchange (in the broad sense indicated) among certain Australian (and, to some extent, North American Indian) tribes may be essential for the geographic distribution of labor and its products,5 the establishment of preferential or prescriptive marital unions, and the definition of a spatial model of the composition of the tribe and the structure of the world, as reflected in monuments of the arts as well. As has been established in the latest works of ethnologists, a society with "obligatory" rules for marital unions is characterized by the unity of its system of relationships, which can be seen to differing extents in the realm of "symbolic classification," i.e. in the fundamental semiotic oppositions of the male—female, right—left, red—black, etc. type,6 and in the realm of social organization, this type of society is an example of an "integral social system"; therefore, isolating the economic, political, legal, and religious frameworks may be incorrect, and even inconvenient for description. More likely, the subject of our examination is an integral process organized within the framework of a unified schema of symbolic classification.7 Specifically, in a society with a dual organization, this latter is directly reflected in paired semiotic oppositions associated with two phratries, their two mythical (twin) forefathers,8 and so on. These oppositions determine the structure of the world and the set of ritual actions and restrictions through which all social life is regimented.