Minimal pairs in ethnography

[John McCreery]

On Anthro-L, Greg Matheson asks about the use of minimal pairs in
ethnography. What follows is one anthropologist's probably highly
idiosyncratic view of efforts of adapt the methods of linguistics to areas
of culture other than language. I am cross-posting this message to linganth,
where someone who is better informed may be able to provide a fairer
perspective.

In the sixties, when I was in graduate school, the potential of linguistic
methods for improving ethnographic description and anthropological theory
was a hot topic. On the one side were ethnoscience and ethnography of
speaking, both growing directly from American roots in pre-Chomskyian,
Bloomfield/Pike linguistics. In Europe, meanwhile, Levi-Strauss's
structuralism had become the intellectual rage.

In a very American way, both ethnoscience and ethnography of speaking were
highly focused on methodology: each was, in its own way, an attempt to
develop techniques that that would yield  precisely defined data from which
formalized fules could be inferred.

Ethnoscientific work focused on  rules said to govern indigenous (the native
informants') taxonomies in highly specified areas. Plant and animal
classifications were frequently researched topics. Kinship terminologies
were also given ethnoscientific treatment. All of this work was frequently
criticized as too narrow in focus and limited in scope to be of interest to
anthropologists primarily concerned with holistic descriptions of total
societies, cultures or communities. It did, however, produce one great
triumph: Berlin and Kay's pioneering work on color classification, that
continues to this day to influence work in cognitive science.

The ethnography of speaking has, over the years, become increasingly
concerned with ritual, storytelling, theater and other examples of verbal
performance: all relatively easy to study because performances have clear
beginnings and endings and a comprehensible structure. There has, however,
been a shift away from rigorous linguistic to more literary and aesthetic
forms of both description and theorizing.

Levi-Strauss's structuralism grew out of similar roots. Here, however, the
path led from Boas to Jakobson, who combined interests in poetics and
phonology and, on the phonological side, developed the theory of distinctive
features. In phonology, distinctive feature analysis is, however, rooted in
the fact that the human vocal tract produces a limited range of sounds that
can be described with sufficient precision for linguistic analysis with
reference to the position of the tongue, lips, palate, etc. Levi-Strauss
proposed that a similarly limited range of possibilities structures myths:
careful analysis of such recurring distinctions as the raw and the cooked,
the sweet and the sour, the high and the low, etc., would reveal what he
called a Mendelevian table of the mind, a set of basic elements defined by
minimal contrasts, whose permutations and combinations would account for all
possible forms of myth--in a manner analogous to the way in which "deep
structures" are supposed to account for all possible forms of language in
Chomskyian linguistics. Like Chomsky's linguistics and ethnoscience,
structuralism has also been criticized (by our own Tim Mason, for example)
as too arid and inhuman, too far removed from the hurly burly of actual
social interaction to be of any great interest to those with an interest in
understanding human behavior.

Still, as in the case of Berlin and Kay's ethnoscientific work on color
classification, there may be something to it. Not the all-conguering panacea
that enthusiasts once took it to be, but a useful tool, nonetheless, for
understanding certain aspects of human activity.

I offer in evidence my own work, which may, because Greg Matheson is now in
Taiwan, be of particular interest to him. There is a Ph.D. dissertation "The
Symbolism of Popular Taoist Magic" in which I attempt to parse the rules
that govern all of the rituals in the repertoire of the Taoist healer with
whom I worked in 1969-71. There is an article entitled "Why don't we see
some real money here?:Offerings in Chinese Religion" that appeared in 1990
in the Journal of Chinese Religions, and a subsequent article entitled
"Negotiating with Demons: The Uses of Magical Language," that appeared in
1995 in American Ethnologist, and, most recently, a chapter on "Traditional
Chinese Religion" in Ray Scupin's new reader on the anthropology of
religion.  Chinese religion is a very fruitful field, indeed, for the
application of structuralist methods, since it is shot full with such
contrasts as that between silver and gold spirit money (offered to ghosts
and gods respectively), food offerings that are whole and raw, whole and
cooked, or cut up and ready to eat, even or odd numbers of incense sticks,
that sort of thing.

As I mention in another recent paper on "Persuasion," I have also found
training in this style of analysis very useful, indeed, in working with the
art directors who create the images used in ads and in selling their work to
multinational corporations.

Cheers,


John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
Tel +81-45-314-9324
Fax +81-45-316-4409
email mccreery at gol.com

"Making Symbols is Our Business"