PREVIOUS PART HERE
In Habu: The Innovation of Meaning in Daribi Religion, Roy Wagner writes:
The words defined in a dictionary are all based on the principle of signification, and in most cases their signification is what is called lexical, that is, each word refers to one or more specific elements (which may be objects, actions, attitudes, or many other things). In such cases the relation between the word and the things to which it refers is establishedby definition or precedent (usage) alone, and is otherwise arbitrary. […]
[…] Because their signification is based on definition alone, and is otherwise arbitrary, lexical signifiers, as well as the classificatory systems built upon them, can embody only a tautologous meaning. Although they may enter into meaningful constructs (by assuming figurative significances), their sole effect, when taken literally, is to repeat the terms of their definitions.
Nontautologous meaning can only be produced through the innovative extension of signifiers into metaphors, that is the formation of symbols whose contrast with the element signified is supplemented by a relation of similarity, or analogy, with that element. […]
Metaphor constitutes the dynamic expression of a meaningful relation in a culture: through its combination of contrast and analogy, it generates relations of opposition in which elements remain distinct from one another and are yet interdependent. […] The metaphor extends notions […] by drawing them into a new relation and a new meaning: it is an innovation upon the meanings of a culture.
The significance of this kind of innovation can be better appreciated when viewed in another perspective. The continual formation of metaphors has the effect of bringing “established” signifiers into new meaningful relations, of “extending” them, but the continued use or repetition of any particular metaphor leads to its “decay” into a lexical signifier as the analogically link between signifier and signified, the relation to which it refers, comes to be both ignored and taken for granted. […]
Every meaning in a culture is generated through metaphorical opposition(⧁)
Thus, for example:
when I (a) metaphorise my identity as that of a “parakeet,” I (b) form a relation that stresses both my distinctiveness from other men (e.g. those who, belonging in a different tribe, call themselves toucans instead) and my similarity to other me (those who are parakeets like me because we belong in the same tribe, respectively), and I do so to (c) satisfy notions of tribal classification, totemism, etc.;
when I (a’) metaphorise my identity as that of a “jaguar,” I (b’) form a relation that stresses both my distinctiveness from other men (e.g. those who, among the people of my own tribe and in contrast to me, are not shamans) and my similarity to other men (those who, despite belonging in a different tribe, may be shamans like me), and I do so to (c’) satisfy, in this case, notions of shamanic theriomorphism, other-becoming, perspectival shift, etc.
when I (a’’) metaphorise my identity as that of a “man” (e.g. by calling myself a “bow”),(⊗) I (b’’) form a relation that stresses both my distinctiveness from other people (e.g. those who call themselves “baskets” instead,(⊗) i.e. the women of my family, those we call our “children,” and our elder, all of whom share a single social “body” in which I myself belong) and my similarity to other men (e.g. those who, beyond my family but within my own tribe, and in spite of being as distinct from me as a parakeet since each one of us is unique, for which reason we all have distinct names, call themselves “men” or “bows” like me, in contrast to their own elder, women, and children), and I do so to (c’’) satisfy, in this case, notions of progeny (as a father), kinship role (as someone who, unlike my sisters who despite marrying will remain in our mother’s home, will have to move to my wife’s home when marrying, since my tribe is uxorilocal), social status (to be a “bow” means to be a hunter and a warrior), etc.(⦼)
Arguably, then, every meaning in a culture is generated through metaphorical opposition – in the previous three paragraphs we have merely attempted to explain this mind-blowing thesis with three examples of our own (⧀) –
but not all the meaningful relations [in a culture] are those of opposition(⊕)
adds Wagner. For – going back to our own examples – I can be both a “man” (i.e. someone who belongs in an ontological class that involves notions of progeny, kinship role, and social status) and a “parakeet,” a “toucan,” or a “jaguar” (i.e. someone who simultaneously belongs in an ontological class that involves some sort of theriomorphic analogy); in fact these two modes of being need not necessarily oppose one another (e.g. a shaman can be both a “man” and a “jaguar,” a single social group can divide into two moities or clans: of “parakeets” and “toucans,” etc), although they may eventually display specific relations of opposition (e.g. a shaman who becomes too much of a “jaguar” may put in danger other fellow “men”).
Wagner continues as follows:
The metaphors that combine to make up a set of consistent meanings do not oppose each other; such metaphors exist in a complementary relationship to one another. I will call such a set of complementary metaphors an ideology. Each of the component metaphors of an ideology involves a different aspect of the same whole, and thus they neither overlap nor innovate upon one another. […]
Since ideologies are made up of metaphors, any metaphoric innovations made upon them in effect metaphorize what is already a metaphor. […] [In short] metaphors […] depend upon each other; each uses the relation signified by the other as its own context. […]
[…] [Thus] [t]he relationship among specific metaphors with a culture can be one of complementarity (consistency) or of innovation (contradiction). A set of complementary metaphors, whose meanings are consistent, constitutes an ideology, but the distinct ideologies of a culture stand in an innovative relationship to one another, that is, they achieve their meaning by metaphorizing, and hence contradicting, one another […]
The importance of innovative extension cannot be overstated […] [insofar as] [t]he creation of meaning […] extends the culture […].(⦹)
Wagner, therefore, demonstrates that meaning is “the constitutive and organising power in cultural life”(⊛), and that metaphor, with its “emergent” or “transcendental qualities”(⦶), is the key element in the production of meaning and, consequently, the key element too in the “modeling of culture,”(⦿) since culture itself is, as we have seen, “analogy based on (and subversive to) other analogies,(⊚) that is to say, “a ‘flow’ of analogy”(⊙) – a metaphoric network.(⦽)
Hence, just like metaphor can be said to be the mirror of meaning, meaning can be said the mirror of metaphor: they form, so to speak, a double-reflecting surface, similar, one could venture, to that of the Tezcatlipoca among the Toltecs, made of polished obsidian glass.(⦷)
(⧁) Roy Wagner, Habu: The Innovation of Meaning in Daribi Religion (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1972), pp. 4-6.
(⦼)Similarly, “sister,” “wife,” “husband,” “brother,” etc. are metaphors by which someone’s identity is metaphorised to form a relation that serves to stress both her/his distinctiveness from, and her/his similarity to, other women/men (those whom I can marry and whom I cannot, those whom other can marry and whom they cannot, etc.). In a word, metaphors (i) represent semantic, meaningful possibilities (e.g. by metaphorising my identity as X’s “brother” and Y’s potential “husband” I delimit two possible, different albeit interrelated, worlds, of consanguinity and affinity, respectively) which (ii) take the form of semantic, meaningful cuts (X is my “sister,” Y my “wife,” I am Y’s “husband” and X’s “sister,” etc.) in an otherwise extra-semantic, meaningless or undefined, continuum (one that, by definition, not only lacks “sisters,” “wives,” “brothers,” or “husbands,” but also Xs, Ys, and Zs as such, since Z, Y, and X are, like everything else, metaphors in turn); and this also why “[t]here are no consanguines before the inception of the idea of exchange,” which means that “my sister only becomes a “sister” when I apprehend (or anticipate) her as a “wife” for someone else, as Viveiros de Castro says (The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds [Chicago: HAU Books, 2015], p. 160).
(⧀) Cf. however the quick references supplied in Wagner, Habu, pp. 5, 7.
(⊕) Ibid., p. 6.
(⊗) Cf. Pierre Clastres, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (translation and foreword by Paul Auster; New York: Zone Books, 1998), passim.
(⦹) Wagner, Habu, pp. 6-8.
(⊛) Roy Wagner, Symbols That Stand for Themselves (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1986), p. ix.
(⦶) Ibid., p. 5 n.4.
(⦿) Ibid., p. 7.
(⊚) Ibid., p. ix.
(⊙) Ibid., p. 12.
(⦽) Thus the cultural relevance of what Wagner calls “re-perception,” to which he dedicated a fascinating monograph (An Anthropology of the Subject: Holographic Worldview in New Guinea and Its Meaning and Significance for the World of Anthropology [Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2001]) based on his ethnography among the Usen Barok of New Ireland (in Papua New Guinea), for whom what we call “meaning” in tautologous terms has little sense-making value: “meaning,” for them, is always about re-perceiving, and hence re-semiotizing; thus their permanent metaphoric recursiveness and their permanent shifting perspectives. In fact they do not call it “meaning” but something which ought to be translated as “tricking” (pidik).
(⦷) Cf. Roy Wagner, The Logic of Invention (Chicago: HAU Books, 2019), p. 4.
Bororo parakeet headdress, Mato Grosso, Brazil. Photo: Vatican Ethnographic Museum