10. Key Symbols--Ortner

Welcome to Section 10. In Section 9 we considered Geertz's idea of culture as a set of symbols. This week, we consider yet another Symbolic Anthropologist who takes an Interpretive Approach; Sherry Ortner.

Identifying Key Symbols

Can one or several symbols can tell you all you need to know about a culture? Sherry Ortner thinks so. According to Ortner, a few key symbols are crucial to understanding any culture. To establish whether a symbol is key, you can:

1.  analyse a cultural system and chose which symbols formulate the underlying elements of the culture (i.e. what you as an anthropologist think is important)
2. look at what people say is important (i.e. what they say is important)

There is “not one key symbol to every culture; cultures are of course a product of the interplay of many basic orientations, some quite conflicting”. 

Key symbols are not 'hidden'; they are 'out there'

Ortner writes that all key symbols will “be expressed somewhere in the public system, because the public symbol system is ultimately the only source from which the natives themselves discover, rediscover, and transform their own culture” (94). This point probably relates to the public vs private debate regarding hair symbolism. I think Ortner's saying that she's not too concerned about what the necklace you inherited from your great aunt means to you. She's concerned with the symbols we [the 'natives' of our culture] share with others in our group or society; like the national flag, the cross etc.

Summarizing and Elaborating Symbols

Ortner distinguishes summarizing from elaborating symbols? What is the difference between the two?

1. Summarizing symbols ('feeling with' symbols)

Summarising symbols are, for example, the cross, and the flag. They sum up, represent in an emotionally powerful. Summarising symbols are those in which we have an emotional investment; Virgin Mary. To identify one I think of summarizing symbols as basically Durkheim's sacred symbols. They are sacred so you don't want to see them desecrated. Because we feel very strongly about these symbols, I think of them as 'feeling with' symbols.

 2. Elaborating symbols ('thinking with' symbols)

Elaborating symbols are rarely sacred Elaborating symbols are good to think with e.g. man as a machine; cricket and baseball provide metaphors for life. There are 2 kinds:

a.       Root metaphors "provide categories for conceptualizing the order of the world”

b.      Key scenarios "have elaborating power : provide categories

Both provide orientations i.e. cognitive and affective categories; and “strategies” i.e. programs for orderly social action in relation to culturally defined goals” (95). We use these symbols more for thinking with than for feeling with, so I think of them as 'feeling with' symbols.

 2a. Elaborating symbols: Root metaphors

 One kind of elaborating symbol is root metaphors. They provide categories for conceptualising experience. COWS provide many categories for the Dinka. The LIVING ORGANISM, Douglas notes, often provides a category for conceptualising social phenomena; now machines sometimes provide this metaphor (e.g. CARS: That guy's a always firing on all cilinders, living life in the fast lane"). Root metaphors also illuminate the life, space, and time as the WHEEL in Indo-Tibetan culture. Therefore they “sort out experience, to place it in cultural categories, and to help us think about how it all hangs together”.

In my society, we use COMPUTERS as a model for brain: I can't process what's going when it's noisy; there are too many inputs.

Maybe you could also say we HAIR is a root metaphor: "That was a close shave. Nex time you let you hair down be more careful. Don't get in the way of uptight [?] people. The bullet came within a hair's breadth of your shoulder.

2b. Elaborating symbols: Key scenario

The other kind of elaborating symbol is provides modes of action. Ortner implies that there are several categories of key scenarios. Every culture, Ortner writes, has its own "vision of success" and what it considers "the best ways of achieving it". These 'best ways to achieve to it' are key scenarios. Her writing on key scenario is tentative and vaguer than her usual clear style, but Ortner seems to outline three kinds of key scenario:

• Myths. These include the rags-to-riches story that is part of the American dream. This provides young Americans with a model to live-by. Young Australians are happy to leave uni and get a 'proper' government job. Young Americans are happier going out alone, using their individual and entrepreneurial skills to make it big. 
• Rituals. Success and the way to achieve it are "dramatized for all to see" in certain rituals. These rituals would include naven, slametan, and potlatch. Key scenarios may also include formal, named events which are enacted according to unarticulated formulae. In Ortner's words:"they formulate the culture's basic means-ends relationships in actable forms". They are "modes of action appropriate to correct and successful living in the culture". 
• Key cultural strategies. For Minangkabau of Indonesia the model for a successful life is to leave home, make a fortune, return every year for overflowing with gifts for everyone at the end of fasting month, bring honour to oneself and one's family. 

So, working through this with my student Jacq, we think that in Australia, possibly the Australian Dream of getting married and owning a house is a key scenario of the key cultural strategy type. Australians tend to freak out about not owning a house (an apartment/condo will not do; that will apparently ruin Australian families!).

Another contemporary Australian example from Jacq relates to an in ideal female key scenario. The idea is that you get out of the home, have a career, prove you are successful outside the home, then you marry and have children, you give up your prestige and career for your children and husband, in fact your prestige transfers to your husband. And that is a model for women to live out. It is expressed as a narrative in a movie called "Kate and Leopold"; the message is you sacrifice your career for your children.

As far as rituals, we could say that the potlatch, a feast with elaborate gift-giving and communion with spirits, shows Kwakiutl people what success is and how to achieve it. To take an example of rituals in contemporary Australia, as my colleagues in Anthropology at La Trobe University point out, "schoolies" a week in which graduating high school students congregate at famous holiday areas, is a correct and successful way of being a teenager. (It also happens to be the liminal phase of the rite-of-passage from high school student to graduate). In America, "Spring Break" is part of being successful college student; and for parents or grandparents hosting a Thanksgiving is part of success. 

Summarising vs elaborating symbols

Elaborating symbols are for catalysing thought and action. Summarising symbols are more about emotional commitment. But it's probably useful to think of elaborating and summarising as two ends on a spectrum of symbols. As Ortner stipulates, the distinction between elaborating and summarising is one of function, and either kind could always function differently (e.g. a cross could inspire someone to martyrdom).

Reading Ortner

OK now I've confused you with my interpretation, it's much better to read the original: Ortner, SB 1973, 'On Key Symbols', American Anthropologist, vol. 75, no. 5, pp. 1338-1346. (jstor.org/stable/674036).


You might also, if I haven't put you off, want to watch my presentation on Ortner's ideas:

Here are the notes for my Ortner presentation.

Expanding Ortner's 'Root Metaphor' Concept

In developing theoretical competency, or critical thinking, it is important that you push your understanding past just remembering and recognising theories. You also need to apply and combine theories.

Here's an example. In Metaphors we live by, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) provide possibly more than 100 examples of everyday metaphors used in Western, English-speaking cultures.

To repeat, in this subject, I'm not looking at 'creative' and 'artistic' use of symbols by poets, novelists, artists etc., nor are Lakoff and Johnson. What they call "everyday metaphors" seems exactly like Ortner's "Root Metaphors". These  include: 

1. ELECTROMAGNETIC FORCE as a symbol for love: When I first met him I felt attracted to him, but we needed a spark. There is an incredible energy between us, it’s like the atmosphere is charged.
2. MONEY as time. "Can you spare me five minutes of your time? I've invested so much in our relationship and it's come at a huge emotional cost. I don't know if it's worth me going on." 

We don't use HUNGER metaphors in either case. In the USA, we don't say:

1.  "When I first saw him I felt thirsty for him, but we need an appertif. There is an incredible gas cooker between us, it’s like the soup is lemony. 
2. “Can you cook for five minutes of your time? I haven’t eaten much in our relationship and it’s come at a huge emotional hunger. I don’t know if it’s the flavor for me to continue. 

But perhaps we use HUNGER metaphors in other scenarios, such as sex: she's got hungry eyes but I don't have the appetite. 

Let's now take Lakoff and Johnson and compare their ideas with Ortner. From Ortner's persepective, we could say that:

• ELECTROMAGNETIC FORCE is an elaborating symbol for love, and, 
• MONEY is an elaborating symbol for time.

Alternatively, using Turner we could say  that

• ELECTROMAGNETIC FORCE is a positional symbol for love, and, 
• MONEY is a positional symbol for time.

In summary, it seems to me that: 

•  Lakoff and Johnson in "Metaphors We Live By"'
•  Ortner on Elaborating Symbols, and
•  Turner on Positioning Symbols 

are talking about the same thing. They are talking about symbols/metaphors that connect with other symbols and signs.

Key Symbols in the Kwakwaka'wakw Cannibal Dance

In his Cultural Anthropology, Robbins applies Ortner's (and Geertz's) ideas to the Cannibal Dance of the Kwakwaka'wakw. I've used his ideas in this blog.

Critical reflections

Note that Ortner’s elaborating symbol seems to develop Turner’s positional symbol idea. Also it seems that Ortner's summarizing symbol is based on Durkheim's sacred symbols. Thus, the beauty of Orther's theory is that it ostensibly brings two formerly disparate theories (of Durhkeim and Turner) together.

Ortner's theory about elaborating symbols also works well with Lakoff and Johnson. Lakoff and Johnson are not anthropologists, they hail from the field of hermeneutics. Unfortunately, as scholars we have a hard enough time keeping with developments in our own disciplines (actually it's difficult enough to keep up with sub-disciplines). I wish Lakoff and Johnson had got together with Ortner; their results might have been magnified.

After reading Lakoff and Johnson, I think that root metaphors probably number in their hundreds in my own culture. So I'd say that Ortner made a more important discovery than she gives herself credit for. She showed a way to link what we might call the idioms of a language to a culture and society. By contrast, I have struggled to apply the idea of key scenario in many instances, possibly because I'm still a little unsure about what this concept means.

Conclusion

In Section 11, we will consider Douglas's idea that systems of symbols are imperfect reflections of reality and out of these imperfections filth and disgust emerge. For now, the take home message: In a symbolic system, some symbols work to organise the system (elaborating); others work to sum up powerful feelings and crucial ideas (summarizing).