I intend this post less as a positive contribution than as an invitation to further discussion on a specific question raised in my colleague Tevans-Britchard's latest post. I refer to the provocative but somewhat truncated assertion that "thought is not like language," followed by brisk criticisms of the "culture-as-text school" and its "assumption that culture is language-like." In the context in which these remarks are made, I do not quite follow how they proceed from the foregoing statements advocating a "learning and cognition" approach. As it is summarized here, the ethnography of the Vezo summarized brings into focus a gap between what people may state their beliefs to be and what their behavior would suggest that they "believe." Describing how this kind of cognitive gap works is, of course, relevant to the question of ideology in its classic Marxian formulation: "sie wissen es nicht, aber sie tun es." Also, and very superficially, the experiment seems to suggest that the gap separates two kinds of knowledge/belief about heredity, one kind which is by necessity imbricated in the social imaginary structuring the subject's participation in complex intersubjective networks, another of which bears a less direct relationship to the maintenance of those networks (hence, I assume, the researcher's decision not to use domesticated animals, which of course belong to those networks, in the attempt to elicit alternative assertions about heredity). All this is very intriguing, but I am not clear on what the precise implications for language and linguistic models are here. On one hand, language is part of (the primary instrument of) the experiment, and the medium in which the beliefs that are in question come into view for the researcher; on the other hand, there appears to be a question about whether the category distinctions made by the Vezo with regard to heredity are best understood in terms of linguistic models or innate cognitive apparatus (I am not clear that this is what is being asked, but if so this would seem to me to be a false dichotomy).
In any case, I would be interested to hear in greater detail what the consequences of this kind of experiment, and of the approach (or approaches) that it embodies, are for the use of language as a model of a) "thought" and b) "culture," because I feel like I lost the thread at this point, and the general problem of language as a model/point of reference for social and cognitive processes is in general a matter of great interest to me. Part of my difficulty in following the argument here is that I lack much of the context for these remarks because of my ignorance of how the "linguistic turn" has played out in anthropology post-Geertz, but allow me to add a few of my own observations, which I believe have some resonance with T-B's.
One of the most infuriatingly lazy manifestations of what I have been calling "stupid foucauldianism" as I understand it is the reduction of complex social phenomena to "discourse." One of the conveniences of this approach for literary scholars is that it opens up vast new arenas of study: if "culture" is structured like a language, then it has a "poetics," and the traditional tools of literary analysis can be applied to any area of culture. This is, crudely put, Stephen Greenblatt's (avowedly Geertzian) model of "cultural poetics," which has begotten an astonishing array of studies of practically everything under the sun from within English departments. Much of value has emerged from these efforts, but what tends to get lost when we examine Elizabethan midwifery or the China trade or the colonization of Paraguay from the standpoint of "cultural poetics" is any sense of the the manner in which social and cultural phenomena operate under and respond to constraints which are not coterminous with those of a literary text, such as the availability and circulation of raw materials or the presence of specific diseases; N.B. I am not invoking these latter entities as constituting a "hard reality" against the background of which culture exists, but rather as social constructs as well, but social constructs whose construction does not follow the same rules and patterns as other kinds of constructs such as literary texts. The tendency just described, in which social construction is reduced to one more or less discreet set of rules, constraints, and practices, offers a good example of one potential misreading of the project of interpreting social phenomena "against a background of emptiness." The other obvious problem with the approach just described is that it assumes on some level that linguistics (generally an impoverished third-hand version of Saussure) provides a solid grounding for knowledge of other phenomena: it thus could be described as "vulgar Saussureanism." A more interesting line of inquiry to my mind, beginning in some sense with Jakobson and continuing to some degree with Barthes and especially with de Man, takes the "literary" as a standpoint from which to probe the limits of linguistic models; from this currently unfashionable angle, "poetics" cannot provide a master code in that it marks the limit points of "the code" as such as a framework for analysis and explanation. Although I shall claim a certain degree of agnosticism here, I should make clear that on some level I am fundamentally uncomfortable with rejecting the implications of the "linguistic turn" altogether, particularly insofar as lines of thinking informed by it have brought to the fore in what was at least initially a novel and salutary manner the rhetorical dimensions of social facts, which I believe to be crucial component of any productive description of them.
In any case, I would be interested to hear more from T.T.T-B and our other illustrious contributors on the subject of the "linguistic turn" and linguistic models of both cognition and culture. While Geertz provides one model of reading culture as "language-like," that approach looks very different if we take, say, Lévi-Strauss as an example. In other words, when we say that culture looks or does not look like or follow the same patterns of language, what kind of model of language are we proceeding from? In my own case, the relevance of such models mainly pertains to what has frequently been situated in the realms of "rhetoric" and "poetics," i.e. "figural language," metaphor, metonymy, etc. Despite the reservations stated above, I remain committed to the vitality of a kind of inquiry that foregrounds these dimensions in their pervasive use throughout social life, even as I stand opposed to any form of reductionism that takes their operations in isolation from other structures and constraints.
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