The most common use of the term ethnosemantics, certainly among anthropologists, is to designate a movement, also known as ‘ethnographic semantics’, ‘ethnoscience’, ‘cognitive anthropology’, and often ‘the new ethnography’, that was centred in North America and practised, as an explicit method and school of thought, primarily in the 1950s and 1960s. Growing out of the Boasian tradition (see above) and the discovery methods of descriptive linguistics, it sought to identify patterns of meaning underlying domains of explicit knowledge in different societies.
The key idea motivating‘the new ethnography’ was that to understand a people’s culture it was necessary to reproduce their knowledge: culture was knowledge. This came after a long history of studying domains of cultural knowledge of the natural world, as well as a great debate on the appropriate way to study the social world, particularly kinship organization, between (mostly British) proponents of the study of attitudes and behaviour and (mostly American) proponents of the study of knowledge of social organization, largely through linguistic usage (Zimmermann, 2002). To redefine culture not as behaviour or sentiments or attitudes, but as knowledge, was a radical move that seemed to put it into the realm of what an outside observer could also know. The question came to be how various peoples’ knowledge was organized.
Here the initial inspiration came from linguistics, from a movement in semantics called componential analysis, spearheaded by Eugene Nida (the full theory is laid out in Nida, 1975), which sought a rigorous empirical method for discovering the dimensions of organization of minimal traits, distinctive features– the idea comes from Roman Jakobson’s identification of a
limited set of distinctive features in phonology (Jakobson and Halle, 1956)– on which mean- ings were based (Barnard, 1996). This inspiration is clear in the opening manifestos of the movement, Ward Goodenough’s paper ‘Componential Analysis and the Study of Meaning’ and Floyd Lounsbury’s ‘Semantic Analysis of the Pawnee Kinship Usage’, both published in the same issue of the journal Language in 1956. As Lounsbury puts it
It is asserted that both grammar and vocabulary hold clues to a people’s world view. This, of course, amounts only to saying that language is meaningful, but that the meanings involved, and their classification, differ from one society to another; or that language is used in relating to the natural and social environment, but that different peoples experience differently and find varying significances in their environments. Of particular interest in this connection are the so-called obligatory categories in language– those features of meanings or of situations, real or imputed, of which the structure and usage of a language force recognition. It is with these that we shall be concerned in this paper. They are to be regarded as distinctive features of meaning.
(1956: 159) The quest will be for elementary particles or dimensions of meaning, atoms of meaning, or components. But unlike Jakobson’s distinctive features in phonology, which form a limited universal set, usable for all languages, the components of meanings are not asserted to be universal– that question is left open. The work to be done is one of discovery and the elaboration of discovery procedures. As Goodenough puts it
I have sought to avoid entanglement in general semantic theory. Adequate theory can develop, it seems to me, only as we seek seriously to describe real systems of meaning as manifest in the contexts of linguistic utterances.
(1956: 203) As it happened, both of these articles dealt with kinship. Goodenough’s was presented as a theoretical piece, but it is mostly made up of an analysis of kinship on the island of Truk in the Pacific. Lounsbury’s is presented as an analysis of kinship terminology, but in fact it is full of theoretical and methodological innovations. It is impossible here to reproduce the arguments of these two papers. Suffice it to say that each discovered principles that made these extremely complex systems make coherent sense.
Now of course kinship had always been one of the great issues, or rather was the great issue, in social anthropology in its British mode: after Lévi-Strauss’s 1949 tour de force in the Elementary Structures of Kinship (see 1967 [1969]), to have these two Americans apparently offering under- lying cognitive, rather than behavioural, patterns that explained overt systems was impressive, to say the least.
Roy D’Andrade (1995: 30) gives a vivid, and somewhat wistful, portrayal of the early impact of‘the new ethnography’:
It is difficult to explain the beauty which a semantic analysis of kinship terminology held for some anthropologists in 1960 … [S]uch an analysis was experienced as a nearly magical process of discovery in which elegant simple patterns emerged from an initial jumble of kin terms and kin types. The patterns came out of the data, and, once seen, were unforgettable.
Goodenough’s 1957 paper ‘Cultural Anthropology and Language’ sets the tone for the whole movement. It defines cultures as systems of knowledge:
As I see it, a society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and do so in any role that they accept for any one of themselves.
(1957 [1964]: 36) Goodenough’s definition explicitly excludes behaviour, emotion, and material things from culture, leaving a domain that, it is hoped, will be amenable to rigorous mapping. The way to map it is through vocabulary, and as for the neo-Humboldtians, this is to be approached through what are initially treated as recognizable domains.
One particularly impressive working out of unexpected patterns was carried out by Harold Conklin (1962) on the pronouns of Hanunóo, a language of the Philippines. The Hanunóo have what to us looks like a bizarre organization of pronouns, which give the translation equivalents‘I’, ‘you (singular)’, ‘he or she’, ‘we two (i.e., you and I)’, ‘we (exclusive of hearer)’, ‘we all’, ‘you all’, and ‘they’. This is a system of eight terms. The translation glosses use criteria that determine Western pronominal systems: person, number, and gender. But Conklinfinds an organization based on three quite different dimensions: inclusion or exclusion of the speaker; inclusion or exclusion of the hearer; and minimal or non-minimal membership. This is presented inFigure 4.1, in which the three dimensions are marked respectively as S, H, and M: This is a perfectly coherent and usable system, but one that depends on entirely different criteria than those we are used to.
Primarily using exhaustive studies of vocabulary in relation to realia or social relations, this kind of ethnosemantics reconstructed the knowledge of a given group of people, sometimes of a presumptively representative individual, about a relatively easy-to-define domain such as that of kinship, plants, animals, or diseases (i.e., ethnobotany, ethnozoology, ethnomedicine, whence the common rubric‘ethnoscience’) or, as an illustrative example, American lunch counter foods
mih
kuh
tah
muh
yuh
H
S
M
H–
S–
M–S–H–
M–
MS–H–
MSH–
MSH
MS–H
M–SH–
M–SH
M–S–H
dah
yah
kuh
tah
muh
mih
tam
yuh
yah
tam
dah
(Frake, 1962). In each case, the researcher sought to use the lexicon as a key to uncover the organization of that knowledge in the minds of its bearers.
Closely related to this‘new ethnography’ was the appearance of a school in descriptive lin- guistics and translation practice that came to be known as tagmemics. Initially developed by Kenneth Pike of the Summer Institute of Linguistics as a way of improving Bible translation, tagmemics insisted on the difference between the points of view of external, objective obser- vation (labelled ‘etic’, from ‘phonetic’) and of system-internal analysis (labelled ‘emic’, from ‘phonemic’; Pike 1957–70). An ‘emic’ approach would, then, require a focus on the specific organization of meanings in particular social contexts. It was Pike’s colleague Eugene Nida who developed the kind of componential analysis that would be foundational for ethnosemantics (Nida, 1975). Tagmemic analysis seeks to capture the specifics of any text in any language as a way of formalizing what is actually there without prejudgment, and with the assumption that meaning goes all the way up and down the levels of language. Coming out of this tradition, scholars such as A. L. Becker (1995) have used tagmemics to analyse the play of meaning in linguistic forms in a wide range of languages.
These approaches raise an immediate problem for anthropological method. If vocabulary is the magic key to culture as knowledge, then it is not clear why there is any need to spend actual time with the people involved other than in collecting and analysing vocabulary. The ideas that culture equals knowledge and that knowledge is verbally based ideation (rather than, say, internalized bodily habits) directly challenge the traditional anthropological practice of participant observation. Mary Black (1969), pushing the argument to its logical end, worked out many aspects of the Ojibwa knowledge of the world by sitting and eliciting, primarily with individual informants in a basement. Surely the issue is what kind of thing you are trying to learn.