Multiple levels of meaning and the tension of consciousness

Abstract

When can we say that a Bantu smith knows the ‘meaning’ of iron smelting - only when he explicitly recognizes the underlying sexual structure of it or simply when he knows how to go on smithing? Is structuralist theory, which considers meaning as codic and diacritical, really incommensurable with a phenomenological view of meaning as something primarily experiential? In this posthumous paper, Stefan Bekaert argues that the differences between both perspectives are gradual rather than fundamental. Drawing on the sexual metaphors in Sakata iron technology, he presents a tentative scale of meaning levels: the level of typified experience, the level of pragmatic motive, the level of (meta)physical intervention, the level of experiential gestalt, the level of explicit metaphor, and the level of codic oppositions. Rejecting the ‘one-world-ism’ predominant in many social sciences, he argues that humans inhabit and draw on many worlds at once. (DVR)

4 Technology and Morality—Rituals in Iron Working among the Fipa and Pangwa Peoples in Southwestern Tanzania

“…I focus my theoretical concern toward phenomenology, metaphorical imagination and embodiment (Johnson 1987, 1993; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Merleau‐Ponty 1962; Tilley 1994, 1999, 2002a, 2002b), and structuralism, in line with Stefan Bekaert's suggested combination of phenomenology and structuralism (Bekaert 1998).…”

“…Ethnographic data show that we are drawing at various levels not only on lived experiences but more so on metonyms and metaphors, and even binary, codic oppositions (Bekaert 1998:7, 25; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999:97; Merleau‐Ponty 1962:67).…”

“…In his study of Sakata smiths in Congo, Bekaert draws upon phenomenology and structuralism, viewing these two perspectives as the two ends of a line that has six distinguished or separated but integrated levels in the experienced and symbolized repertoire used by the smiths. Thus, in between what Bekaert calls the phenomenological “type” and structural “codic opposition” a host of other semantic operations are at work (Bekaert 1998:16–17). What Bekaert calls “typified experience” is what would be “normal” for the Fipa or Pangwa smiths or iron workers, exemplified by, for instance, the exclusion of women from the smelting camp.…”

“…In addition to these four field seasons of observations, Roy Willis’ (1981) extensive anthropological work among the Fipa during the 1960s and up to the 1980s and Hans Stirnimann's (1976) ethnographic studies of the Pangwa in the early 1960s (see references below) informed this study. Willis’ and Stirnimann's detailed ethnographic research, concerned with social relations, worldview, structures in politics, and cosmologies, relates to the cultural contents and “symbolic repertoires” (after Bekaert 1998) that my informants used in iron making.…”

The “Social” in Archaeological Theory: An Historical and Contemporary Perspective

“…There has in fact been widespread use of semiotics and structuralism in archaeology over recent decades (Bekaert 1998;Helskog 1995;Parker Pearson 1999;Yentsch 1991), and there has been a recent revival of interest as a result of a shift from Saussurean to Peircean perspectives (Preucel and Bauer 2001). There are clearly advantages to be gained from considering material objects as organized by codes and rules that give them meaning.…”