Culture as communication

This last view of culture is in some sense a return to the semiotic notion of culture as communication, this view holds that culture is a system of signs and meanings. A way of making sense of reality by objectifying it in stories, myths, descriptions, theories, proverbs, artistic performances, rituals, and so on. This perspective, particularly prominent in anthropology since the work of Clifford Geertz, emphasizes that humans do not simply react to the material world, but create symbolic systems through which they interpret and organize experience. To believe or know something, from this perspective, is to be able to participate in a system of communication.

Lévi-Strauss and the semiotic approach

One of the earliest examples of the view of culture as communication is found in the work of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. According to him, cultures are sign systems that express deeply held cognitive distinctions and do so in terms of binary oppositions (Leach 1970; Lévi-Strauss 1963a, 1963b, 1966a, 1978; Pace 1980). Lévi-Strauss came to the assumption that the human mind is everywhere the same and cultures are different implementations of basic abstract logical properties of thinking which are shared by all humans and adapted to specific living conditions. In his view, which is partly a reaction to and a criticism of earlier conceptualizations of “primitive thought,” there is no basic cognitive difference between real thinking about the world in terms of explicit concepts such as algebraic expressions or binary matrices and thinking in terms of totemic names (e.g. eagles vs. bears, earth vs. sky, up vs. down). The difference between the natural world (physical surroundings, plants, and animals) and the human world (humans and partners, for instance) and western, technologically advanced people have to do with the resources they use in building their theories. “Primitive thought” constructs myths by using a limited number of existing characters, metaphors, and plots. Western science, on the other hand, constantly creates new tools and new concepts; for instance, doctors and engineers have instruments specifically designed for their work and their work only. But myth and science work alike, they both use signs and work by analogies and comparisons.

The view of culture as communication is particularly evident in Lévi-Strauss’s use of concepts taken from linguistic theory for explaining the relationships between different cultural categories. For instance, Lévi-Strauss extended the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson’s theory of the acquisition of sounds to the distinction between culture and nature. Jakobson argued that children start to make sense of the sounds they hear by constructing a system of oppositions that has a binary distinction between vowels and consonants on the one hand and a trinary distinction among the three maximally distinct vowels (i, a, u) and the three maximally distinct consonants (p, t, k) on the other. For Jakobson, the triangles of maximal distinction among vowels (figure 2.1) can be described by means of two basic oppositions in acoustic properties of sounds, namely, between what he called compact and diffuse and between what he called grave and acute sounds.

The same contrasts could “symbolically” and “mythically” be used by humans to organize the surrounding world into classes and subclasses. For example, many myths organize the world around oppositions such as raw/cooked, nature/culture, male/female, sky/earth, life/death. Such classifications are not arbitrary inventions but are rooted in the human tendency to organize reality through contrasts and relations.

The structure of myths revealed “transformations” and “relations” among categories rather than isolated meanings. Lévi-Strauss believed that myths from different cultures could be analyzed in terms of the underlying structures of human thought. In this method, scholars study how different elements in a myth relate to each other and how one myth can be transformed into another through substitutions and reversals.

He once wrote:

> “I began to understand that myths are like music.”

By this he meant that myths gain meaning not from isolated episodes but from the relationships among their parts, just as music gains meaning from relations among notes rather than from single sounds alone.

Lévi-Strauss’s work strongly influenced symbolic anthropology and later semiotic theories of culture by emphasizing that culture can be studied as a structured system of signs and meanings rather than simply as a collection of behaviors or customs.