Eyebrow threading during pregnancy in tamil

Anthropology Tamil Research Paper

Compare and contrast the purpose and practices of flower divination of and prescriptions for achieving cukam (see Daniel, Ch. 5) with the purpose and practices of undertaking a pilgrimage to worship Lord Ayyappan in order to achieve a kind of temporary moksa (Tm: mokam) or what Daniel refers to as “equipoise” (see Daniel, Ch. 7).
Be sure to address (a) concerns about kunam/dosa disequilibrium in flower divination and (b) the metaphysical movement from “firstness” to “secondness” to “thirdness” in a Tamil pilgrimage (Daniel Ch. 7).
Another way to think about this is to explicate the following semantic opposition:
“Degraded” equilibrium (Tm: cukam = Kn: madi = “purity”) vs. “Genuine” or “ultimate” equilibrium or “equipoise” (Tm: mokam; Sk: Moksa).
1. Your paper must have a thesis statement. Explicitly state and underline your thesis statement.
2. Everything following your thesis statement must clearly work to support it.
3. Your paper must clearly deal with a topic that relates to our course.
4. Your paper must be correctly formatted according to MLA standards.
5. Your paper must be at least 6 – 8 pages in length. (Including Introduction and Conclusion.)
6. You must properly integrate several lines from at least three of the texts we have read in class.
7. You must also properly integrate several lines from at least five of the sources within your annotated bibliography. “In Fluid Signs. Being a Person the Tamil Way” by Daniel, E. Valentine.
8. Your research paper is due on Monday, May 30th.

FLUID SIGNS Being a Person the Tamil Way

E. Valentine Daniel

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

Copyright© 1984 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Daniel, E. Valentine. Fluid signs.

Bibliography: p. 303 Includes index. 1. Tamils. I. Title.

DS432.T3D3 1984 306' .089948 ISBN 0-520-04725-7

84-163

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

For Vanessa

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Note on Transliteration xiii

1. Introduction 1

PART I. TOWARD COMPATIBILITY 59

2. An Or Known 61 3. A House Conceived 105 4. Sexuality Exposed 163 5. Kul)ams Divined 182

PART II. TOWARD EQUIPOISE 225

6. A Theoretical Interlude 227 7. Equilibrium Regained 233 8. A "Differant" Conclusion 288

Bibliography 303

Index 313

Acknowledgments

During the course of this study I have accumulated many debts. Grants from three sources funded the fieldwork on which this study is based. The National Science Foundation met the greater part of the expenses of the project, the Danforth Foundation, some of them. A grant from the Amherst Memorial Fellowship fund enabled me to carry out some essential ancillary field research in Sri Lanka among Aru Nattu Vellala expatriates.

To Lee Schlesinger I owe my successful experiment in gathering and interpreting maps drawn by villagers, which was to subsequently lead to my discovery of the iir concept. I also owe thanks to James Lindholm, who along with Lee taught me the value of asking those crucial questions whose quintessence lies concealed in their apparent simplicity. To Nick Dirks, who patiently read over selected portions of various drafts of this manuscript and who proved to be an invaluable source of helpful suggestions, I am grateful.

Among my teachers at the University of Chicago, A. K. Ramanujan helped sharpen my awareness of the aesthetic dimension of Tamil culture through his poems and informal musings, luring the simple qualities of commonplace recog- nitions to inhabit snatches of words. Victor Turner intro- duced me to the rich possibilities of comparative symbol- ogy, and Terry Turner showed me so many different ways

X Acknowledgments

of seeing the forest for the trees during times when I was trapped in the thicket of my field notes. My greatest intel- lectual debt is owed to McKim Marriott, my principal adviser, mentor, and friend, whose high standards of meticulous fieldwork remain paradigmatic and whose skill at critically reevaluating the most convincing idea and interpretation has been unfailingly sobering. Others whose comments, criticisms, and editing of various portions of earlier drafts of the manuscript have enhanced the clarity of the final product are: Bernard Cohn, Veena Das, Dianne Mines, Ralph Nicholas, Paula Richman, Michael Silver- stein, and my colleague Jean-Paul Dumont. Peg Hoey's good taste and good judgment have contributed enor- mously in converting many passages of good Sri Lankan English into good American English. To her and to Larry Epstein, who perused the galleys, I express my thanks.

ToR. Srinivasan, my research assistant in the field, who willingly toiled with me through both happy and trying times, I owe thanks. To all my friends and informants in Kalappur and its neighboring villages, to all my friends in Tiruchirapalli, and to all my Aru Nattu Vellala friends in Sri Lanka, who gave so much of their time and put up with all my prying and rude questions, I shall ever be grateful. I must single out A. Devadas, at whose suggestion Sherry and I chose to work in Kalappur and without whose help our fieldwork might not have been possible.

Special thanks are owed to my sister, Indrani, and to my nieces Rowena and Vero, who generously gave of their time and love during the preparation of this book, in typing, in taking care of Vanessa, and in assuming many of the house- hold responsibilities, thereby freeing Sherry and me to devote ourselves to its completion. The greater part of the child care was assumed by my father and mother, who lovingly and happily gave long hours of their retired life for Vanessa.

To three individuals from the University of California Press I owe a special word of thanks: Stanley Holwitz and

Acknowledgments Xl

Shirley Warren, the kindest of editors, let so many dead- lines slip by, and Sylvia Tidwell made the incomprehen- sible comprehensible in countless ways. Need I add: they were patient.

Finally, and most important, I owe the most special of debts to Sherry, who unstintingly gave of her time, energy, and intellect to help me work through almost every page and idea of the second, third, fourth, fifth, and seventh chapters of this book, who cleared up my thinking when- ever I was unable to do so myself, who lifted up my spirits with sober encouragement in times of despondence, and who saw to hundreds of details, great and small, which have helped make this study an accomplished fact.

Where I have erred, the blame is mine. I dedicate this book to my daughter, Vanessa, who has

taught me more lessons than I could number, foremost among them being those of faith, hope, and charity.

Note on Transliteration

1. Long vowels are distinguished from short ones by a dash over the appropriate roman letter substitute of the corresponding Tamil character.

Vowels

Short

a

u e 0

Long

a i u e 6

Approximately as in

up; ask (Brit. Eng.) in; eat put; boot egg; ale solaire (Fr.); poke

Most Tamil vowels are pure, with no diphthongs. 2. Long, or stressed, consonants are differentiated from

short, or unstressed, consonants by a doubling of the roman letter representing the appropriate sound. For example,

Stressed Unstressed

mullai ("grassland") mulai ("corner")

XIV Note on Transliteration

3. Retroflexes are indexed by the placing of a dot beneath the letter. These occur only in the following forms: t, n, I, and r. The retroflexes are to be phonetically dis- tinguished from the dentals, t, n, l, and r, which roughly correspond to the sounds of the italicized letters in the English words panther or father, cunning, cal/, and in the Scottish roll.

4. The voiced sounds like b, d, j, and g are not repre- sented as such but are represented by p, t, cc, and k. Whether a sound is to be voiced or not is determined by its position. The above consonants are voiced after nasals; p, t, and t are voiced between vowels; k is pronounced as an h or a g. The sound of sis repre- sented by c.

5. Where s or s occur, they indicate Sanskrit words or words in Tamil whose Sanskritic origins are still "fresh," so to speak.

6. The tch sound in the word catch is rendered by a double c, as in paccai ("green").

7. Names of persons and places have been spelled in the text without any diacritical marks, to conform to the manner in which these names have come to be written in English in India. Diacritical marks are provided for the names of deities, jiitis, and the pseudonym of the village where this research was carried out, Kalappur.

1 Introduction

An Overview

If one were to seek out the principal theme that binds most sociocultural studies of two generations of South Asian anthropologists, the one that is bound to surface over and over again is caste. I do not intend to review in any way this literature on caste, except to allude to its somewhat paradoxical nature. By focusing on the caste system, schol- ars who consider it a uniquely Indian institution (Bougie 1971; Dumont 1970) and those who see it as an extreme manifestation of its rudimentary or vestigial counterparts found in other cultures (Berreman 1960; Watson 1963) have both in their own ways subscribed to the creed that to understand caste is to understand India. Caste studies, by becoming autonomous, closed systems of inquiry-ends in themselves-have prevented scholarly inquiry from escap- ing its confines and taking into account symbolic constructs more pervasive and regnant than caste, and more natural to the cultural matrix of South Asia than the "naturalized" one of caste.

This is not to deny that several principles have been identified as underlying or generating the caste system, the

2 Introduction

most popular being that of purity versus pollution (Bougie 1971; Dumont 1970; Dumont and Pocock 1959; Moffatt 1979). Unfortunately, these present but half the truth, in- asmuch as they are chosen from within an artificially en- closed analytic system called caste. The inability to go be- yond or beneath caste arose from the failure to see that jati, meaning "genus" (the source concept of the ill-translated "caste") is not applied to human beings only, but to ani- mals, plants, and even inorganic material, such as metals and minerals, as well. What is more, jati itself is a develop- ment from a generative system of thought that deals with units at both the suprapersonal as well as the infrapersonal levels. There is no better term than substance to describe the general nature of these variously ranked cultural units. In other words, differentially valued and ranked substances underlie the system known as the caste system, which is but one of many surface manifestations of this system of ranked substances. 1

Having said this much, I must hasten to say that the ranking of substances itself is among the least of my con- cerns in this book. Steve Barnett has written two com- mendable essays using ethnographic data gathered in Tamil Nadu which deal directly with the issue of rank and substance2 (1976, and with Fruzzetti and Ostor, 1982). My

1The first notable exception to the traditional approach described above came in working papers written around 1969-1970 by Ronald Jnden and Ralph Nicholas on Bengali kinship (published in 1977). Somewhat later, between 1970 and 1972, Inden's Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago on marriage and rank in Bengali culture and Marriott and lnden's joint essay on caste systems were written (published in 1976 and 1974, respectively). Susan Wadley's study of Karimpur religion (1975) as well as Kenneth David's dissertation on bound and unbound castes (]972) also point to inadequacies in the "purity-pollution" para- digm, and so does the excellent essay "From Varna to Caste through Mixed Unions" by S. J. Tambiah (1973).

2ln this regard, Barnett's insistence on the difference of his use of "substance" --derived from, and faithful to, Schneider's analytic terms (biogenetic substance and code for conduct)-from the more culture specific usage in this and other recent studies (Marriott and Inden 1974, 1977; Inden and Nicholas 1977) is hereby recognized. (See Ostiir, Fruzzetti, and Barnett 1982: 228.)

Introduction 3

interest focuses on certain other properties of substances, .J namely, their ability to mix and separate, to transform and . be transformed, to establish intersubstantial relationships 1 of compatibility and incompatibility, to be in states of equi-/ librium and disequilibrium, and to possess variable degrees/ of fluidity and combinability. __ _

I intend to trace these properties of substance3 not through studying some esoter-ic form of ethnochemistry but by looking at certain phenomena in the cultural world of the Tamil villager, phenomena that are part of daily, ordinary, routine life. These phenomena are a Tamil's attempt to cope with the substance of his village, or iir, his house, or vztu, his sexual partner, and his own body under conditions of sickness and health, and finally, to search for the substance from which all these various substances derive.

The last-mentioned quest for the one undifferentiated, primordial substance of perfect equilibrium may be an extraordinary one, but the awareness of such a substance is neither extraordinary nor esoteric. This is made clear by the following creation myth, told to me by an elderly villager in the presence of a number of other villagers who threw in their own versions, corrections, and modifications as the narrative unfolded. The myth is intended to serve the func- tion of a prolegomenon to the thesis developed in this study.

God (Ka~avuD was everything. In Him were the five elements of fire, water, earth, and ether [akasam ], and wind. These five elements were uniformly spread throughout [the three humors] phlegm [kapam], bile [pittam], and wind [vayu]. They were so evenly distributed that even to say that there were phlegm, bile, and wind would be wrong. Let us say that they were in such a way that one could not tell the

3My use of the singular substance as well as the plural substances somewhat interchangeably is intended. It is in keeping with the Hindu world view (to be discussed later) that the various substances are but manifestations or permutations of a unitary, primordial substance.

4 Introduction

difference between them. Let us say they were nonexistent. Similarly, the three primordial qualities, or dispositions (kw.zams), or rajas, satvikam, and ttimatam, neither existed or did not exist. That is why we still call God KU1pitftan [He who transcends all qualities]. Even the question as to their existence did not arise. Then something happened. The five elements started to move around as if they were not satis- fied, as if they were disturbed. Now, as to who disturbed these elements or why they were disturbed, no one knows.

At this point, a second villager interrupted the narrator to suggest that the one who caused this mysterious distur- bance was Kamam, the god of lust. The narrator found his suggestion unacceptable, because Kama had not even come into existence at that time. But his friend insisted that Kama himself was distributed throughout Siva's body, as are the humors, the elements, and the kuDams. After considerable debate, it was agreed that it did not make sense to speak of Kamam existing when he was as evenly distributed throughout Katavut's body as floating atoms (a~ws). Then the narrator continued.

Let us say that what disturbed them was their talai eruttu [codes for action or literally, "head writing"]. 4 When the elements started moving around, the humors started sepa- rating from one another and recombining in new propor- tions [afavuka!J. These new combinations resulted in the three ku~ams. Now the ku~ams and humors and elements all started to move hither and thither.

Then came the separation, as in an explosion, and all the jatis of the world-male jatis, female jatis, vegetable jatis, tree jatis, animal jatis, Ve!)a!a jatis, Para jatis-were

4 Tamils believe that at the time of birth Ka\avu! writes a script on every individual's head and that the course that each individual's life takes, to the very last dl'tail, is determined by this script. This script, or writing of God on one's head, is known as talai eruttu. In the present narration, my informant ascribes "head writing" even to the particles that constituted the primordial being (Katavu!).

Introduction

formed, and they started meeting and mating and procreat- ing. This is how the world came into being.

5

I then asked him, "What happened to KatavuL then, in this explosion?" He replied:

Oh, He is still here. Not as before, but He is still there, more perfect than any of us. He has more equilibrium [amaitinilai] than any of us. In Him the humors are more perfectly and uniformly [camanilaiyiika] distributed. That is why He does not fall ill, as we do. Our humors keep moving, running from here to there and there to here, all over our bodies and out of our bodies and into our bod- ies .... But even in Him the elements, the humors, and the kuDams move around, try as He might to keep them in equilibrium [otiimal iitiimal]. That is why He is unable to do the same kind of thing for too long. If He meditates for more than a certain number of years, the amount of satvikam begins to increase. So then Kamam comes and disturbs Him, and then He goes after Sakti5 or Asuras. 6 This results in an increase in His rajasa kuDam. When rajasa kuDam increases beyond a certain limit, He must return to medi- tating. But most of the time, He is involved in lila. 7 All our ups and downs are due to His lilas. But that is the only way He can maintain a balance [camanilai pa[uttaliim].

This creation myth, in drawing on the world view of the villager, reveals several central cultural beliefs.

1. All differentiated, manifest substantial forms evolved or devolved from a single, unmanifest, equilibriated substance.

5That is, seeking the goddess Sakti to indulge in sexual pleasure. 6He goes after the Asuras ("demons") to make war. 7Ula may be translated as the play or the sport of the gods. One villager

translated Ilia by the phrase "doing something for the heck of it" (vera vela illatatala cumma irukka mu\iyataUila ceivatu).

6 Introduction

2. What triggered the "first"8 movement (action, or kar- mam) of the generative process is an unknown, hence presumably inner property, such as the codes of ~n.d for action that are "written" into all substances. This IS like the "dissatisfaction" of the five elements that one informant equated with desire, which replicates at a higher level of organization the inception of other disequilibriated entities.

3. Different entities in the manifest world have different degrees of substantial equilibrium. Katavurs ~odily substance is in a more equilibriated state than IS the bodily substance of human beings.

4. As a result of disequilibriation, men and even gods must continue to strive to restore equilibrium to their bodily substance. This equilibriated state within the body is the key to health and well-being.

Seen in the light of the above myth, much of a villager's activities takes on a new meaning and a new purpose. These activities, including the most ordinary and routine ones, are aimed at restoring lost equilibrium. The restora- tion of equilibrium among the multitude of qualitatively different substances (or rather, qualitatively different sub- stance complexes, compound substances, or composite substances) in the phenomenal universe is not easily ac- complished. The process is invariably complex. At times, certain substances attain equilibrium with respect to other substances only when they are qualitatively different; at other times, qualitative similarity is required for bringing about equilibrium; yet again, there are times when two substances are able to achieve equilibrium between them- selves only if one is higher in some respect than is the ot~er, and not vice versa. Thus a balanced (equilibriated) meal m a South Indian home must consist of all six different flavors,

sstrictly speaking, given that Hindu ontology is based on cyclical time, there is no absolute first event. The choice of an event as "first" is an arbitrary one, one of convenience. For a similar myth obtained in rural Bengal, see Davis (1976).

Introduction 7

whereas a marriage will be harmonious (in a state of equilib- rium) only if the partners in marriage belong to similar, if not identical, jatis; however, the male in any marriage must be older than the female (i.e., rank higher with respect to age) if healthy (equilibriated) sexuality is to be achieved, and so on. Clearly, these are but a few of many more possible ways in which states of intersubstantial equilib- rium are attained.

While I hope that someone will undertake the compelling task of enumerating and delineating precisely the various types and dimensions of possible modes and means for achieving intersubstantial equilibriums, in this study I do not intend to embark upon such an enterprise. Part I and Part II are divided according to two broadly differentiatable types of action. In Part II, action will be directed toward bringing about (or restoring) a state of ultimate, perfect, and unlimited equilibrium of substance. Orthodox Hindu con- cerns with salvation as release from saY(lsiira, the cycle of births and deaths, the merging of the individual soul (iitman) with the universal soul (brahman), are all closely related to the ethnography of Part II. In Part I, by contrast we shall encounter people's actions aimed at restoring sub- stantial equilibrium between substances in domains or con- texts that are limited by time, space, and place, among other thing~. The concerns of Part I implicate equilibrated states of a lower, less inclusive, marked order, whereas those of Part II implicate an equilibrium of the highest, unmarked, and most inclusive order. Stated differently, concerns with intersubstantial equilibrium in limited, lower-order, and less inclusive contexts stand in a metonymic relationship to the all-encompassing equilibrium attained in salvation- salvation being not unlike the equilibrated state described to us as having existed in the primordial being at the be- ginning of time in the creation myth above. From the more inclusive perspective, then, context-specific, equilibrium- directed actions are mere rudiments or facsimiles of actions aimed at achieving the ultimate equilibrated order that transcends all contexts.

8 Introduction

More specifically, insofar as the above-mentioned lower- order, less inclusive states of intersubstantial equilibrium are concerned, I focus on a particular expression of this equilibrium, that of intersubstantial "compatibility." The preoccupation with limited equilibrated states is evidenced in almost all of a Tamil's daily activities. Such preoccupa- tions are most often expressed in terms of compatibility. For example, be it with respect to the food one chooses to eat or not to eat or the way one chooses to build one's house or not to build it or the kind of partner one opts to marry or not to marry or the day and time of the year one selects to perform a certain ritual or not to perform it, concern with equilib- riums or equilibrated states is expressed in terms of com- patibility. "Will this food be compatible with my body?" one asks. "Will this house, if built in such and such a way in such and such a place, be compatible with my horoscope?" "Will the time of the day that I set out on a given business venture be compatible with my mental state at that time or not?" The Tamil word most often employed in such in- stances, which I have translated as "compatible," is ottu- vanlfal which also connotes fitness or appropriateness. This concern with compatibility of substances is complemented by specialists' as well as laymen's knowledge of numerous fine distinctions made of the phenomenal universe, distinc- tions characterized by differentially ranked and valued sub- stances, be they Brahmin and Parayan, male and female, bitter earth and sweet earth, bile and phlegm, or consonant and vowel. Disequilibrated or incompatibly conjoined sub- stances are "ill," or "imperfect." This knowledge I have referred to operates at every level of existence and aims at restoring intersubstantial compatibility, if not ultimate equilibri urn.

The knowledge required for the attainment of ultimate and perfect equilibrium is of a special kind. In contradistinc- tion to the knowledge that is at the service of states of limited equilibrium, this knowledge blurs all categorical distinctions until the very distinction between self and

Introduction 9

other is transcended. The process of this transcendence will be illustrated in Part II, whereas the four chapters of Part I that follow this Introduction will be concerned with rela- !ionships of compatibility and incompatibility between and among substances encountered in everyday life.

Apart from this broad organizing principle, the arrange- ment of the chapters of Part I and Part II was basically motivated by a whim, a certain pretension to some measure of architectural finesse. It is not new. Brenda Beck has already written an ethnography on South India, which is basically a replicate of the Chinese box principle (1972). Mine was intended to portray a series of enclosures, con- cealing the "person" at its core, where I wanted ultimately to arrive. The organization of these chapters in this manner was not intended to be a simulacrum of any cultural reality.· Almost fortuitously, however, this organization facilitated· understanding of the fluidity of enclosures in Tamil con- , ceptual thought, whether the boundaries of a village, the , walls of a house, the skin of a person, or the sign vehicle of a ' sign. Another related benefit was my ability to appreciate the cultural reality of the non individual person. Or to put it in terms that anticipate the next chapter, one begins to know a person by knowing the "personality" of the soil on which he lives. So to the question, Wasn't the person at the core the real person? the answer is like "the exhortation of the Majorca storytellers: Aixo er y no era (it was and it was not)" (Ricoeur 1977: 224).

Chapter 2 concerns a person's compatibility with terri- torial substance (ur). The territory that affects a person's bodily substance is the village in which he is born and, to a lesser extent, the village or town or country he chooses to live in. These effects are manifest in significant events as varied as the ups and downs of personal fortune, happi- ness, state of health, or anxiety about the afterlife. We shall also see that village is too flabby a term to render a culturally, though cryptotypically, crucial distinction between an ur and a kiriimam, the former denoting the quality or disposi-

10 Introduction

tion of a territorial unit, especially with regard to its effect on and effect by its inhabitants, and the latter denoting a terri- torial unit, usually a village, which has clear demarcating boundaries. Kiramam would lend itself with ease to distinc- tive feature analysis, whereas ur calls for a pragmatic analy- sis (a Ia Silverstein 1976) in order to unpack its meaning.

In chapter 3 I close further in on the core person by attempting to understand, in cultural terms, the nature of the relationship between houses and those who own or build them. Once again it will become evident that this relationship, as in the case of villager and village, is under- stood in substantial terms. The inhabitants of a house or an ur are concerned as to whether they are compatible with that house or that ur; furthermore, there is sufficient evi- dence that this compatibility is expressed in the idiom of compatibility of substance.

Chapter 4 will sketch the way in which a male and a female exchange substances in sexual intercourse as well as sketch the formation of the nature of the fetus that results from the combination of these sexual-fluid substances. A healthy child is the result of a mixing of compatible sub- stances, not only those of male and female but also of other substances, such as the gaze of auspiciously positioned planets at the moment of birth. Furthermore, it will be shown that not only is the health of the child determined by the compatibility of the sexual fluids but the health of the sexual partners is likewise determined. In the final chapter of Part I, we will focus our attention not on interpersonal exchange of substances but on certain very essential intra- personal substances whose equilibrated state is quintessen- tial for the well-being of a person. In this chapter we will learn how action, or karmam, itself operating as a sub- stance, mixes with a person's prior kul)am9 substance and qualitatively alters the balance of kul)ams for better or for worse. This intrapersonal flow of substances will be ex-

9 Provisionally defined here as "quality" or "disposition."

Introduction 11

plored through the analysis of a popular rite of divination. In Part II, the knowledge of diversity is replaced by the

knowledge of unity, and the quest becomes one for perfect equilibrium and conjunction through a transcendental ex- perience of the undifferentiated tranquillity of inner unity. A pilgrimage of villagers in which the anthropologist par- took becomes the ritual means to effect this experience. For most pilgrims this experience proves to be only a moment's revelation; for some, it leads to a permanent release from the differentiated, manifest world and a total immersion in one's essence, which is the universal essence, the undif- ferentiated primordial substance. From previewing the organization of the text and outlining its main argument, I would like to move on to consider the theoretical matrix in which the text is embedded.

This book was not born with a great title but had to struggle through several intolerable ones before settling on the present one. The last abandoned title read, Kalappiir: From Person to Place Through Mixed Substance. The Semeiosis of a Culture. The trouble with that title, apart from its pon- derousness, was that it failed to include some of the other

' even more interesting, topics discussed in the book, such as houses and boundaries, disputes and color symbolism, marriage and compatibility, sex and divination, sickness and health, food and flavors, ghee and semen, and much more. While all the key terms in that abandoned title spelled out the major abstractions that have helped frame the book, the omitted details-some large, some small-are the ones that have given the volume life. Hence the present com- promise, a title that neither says too much nor too little, constructed with the hope that even the reader who fails to see the whole point of the exercise in abstractions will, after having read this book, feel adequately acquainted with life and living in a tiny Tamil village in South India and will be able to partake in the imagination of its people and the genius of its culture. Before we steep ourselves in the ethnographic description that perfuses the main text, it is

12 Introduction

only proper to delineate some of the major theoretical terms and assumptions that constitute the discursive context of the text. The reader may, however, choose to skip over the rest of this introductory chapter save the last section, en- titled" About This Research," continue to read from chapter 2 through the end, and then return to these unread pages and read them as postface.

The Culture Concept Revisited

The first concept to be considered is "culture." Weber understood culture as "the finite segment of meaningless infinity of the world-process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance" (Weber 1949: 81). There are at least two anthropological theories of culture that influence this study: the first comes from the writings of David Schneider, and the second comes from those of Clifford Geertz, both, of course, belonging broadly to the Weberian tradition filtered through Talcott Parsons. I fol- low Geertz and Schneider, as well as Ward Goodenough, in understanding culture not to be an adaptive mechanism accounted for in behavioral terms. "Culture" is to be clearly distinguished from its use by those whom Keesing has characterized as adaptationists (Keesing 1974). "Culture," as it is employed in this study, also needs to be distin- guished from its understanding in what has come to be known as cognitive anthropology, which found its earliest formulations in the writings of Conklin (1955), Good- enough (1956, 1964, and 1965), Frake (1961 and 1962), and Wallace and Atkins (1960). For the cognitivists, culture is not unlike the semantico-referential grammar of a language (see Silverstein 1976), Chomsky's "competence" or de Saussure's "langue," a set of codes to be learned and lived by. The cultural domain of the cognitivists corresponds to Schneider's "norms," which are like patterns and tem- plates in that they are "more or less complete, detailed,

i I

t I

Introduction 13

[with] specific instructions for how the culturally significant parts of the act are to be performed, as well as the contexts in which they are proper" (Schneider 1976: 200). To be sure, the present study, as any cultural study ought to, will have a great deal to say about norms and rules of and for be- havior. This is not to be equated with culture, however.

Culture, or more precisely, a culture, is understood here- in to be constituted of those webs of relatively regnant and generative signs of habit, spun in the communicative act engaged in by the anthropologist and his or her informants, in which the anthropologist strives to defer to the creativity of his informants and self-consciously reflects upon the differance inherent in this creative product of deference. This definition requires parsing, and to this task I now turn.

The notion that culture is a web of significance we owe, once again, to Max Weber, whom Geertz paraphrases in his semeiotic definition of culture when he says that "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun" (1973: 5). I emphasize the communicative act in order to underscore the proposition that culture is public. This is, however, not to say that it may not exist in someone's head as well, a posture that Geertz seems to take in his dissent with the positions of Goodenough, Levi-Strauss, and Schneider, when he says, "Culture ... does not exist in someone's head" (1973: 10). Schneider's rhetorical re- sponse, "For if culture is not internalized by actors, where can it be, except in the heads of observers?" (1976: 206), is equally one-sided. Jnsof~ras-cultw:e's m!lnife.stationis..to be £ou.lld.in..the.mmmunicative .ii!Ct, verbal or otherwise, it is a . .. function of "private" semeiotic structures to open up, to engage with other "private" structures, in public. The mo- ment of cultural creation is one in which the private and the public, the internal and the external, become mutually im- manent. I shall postpone my discussion of the anthropolo- gist's part in the communicative act of culture making until I have explicated my use of signs for the usual symbols that occur in most definitions of culture.

14 In traduction

Signs in Culture

At the very outset it behooves me to explain why [have substituted signs in place of the customary symbols that cultural anthropologists prefer to employ in their defini- tions of culture. In the preparation of this book, I have sought to use as systematic and analytically coherent a semeiotic terminology as I possibly could. The semeiotic terminologies employed by symbolic anthropologists have proved to be either inadequate or riddled with needless inconsistencies. The writings of David Schneider (1968 and 1976), Clifford Geertz (1973), and Victor Turner (1967 and 1978) represent the former, while Leach (1976) is an ex- ample of the latter. Fortunately, we have in the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of modern semeiotics, the most thorough, coherent, and comprehensive classifi- cation of signs available to date. As will become evident, I shall use but a very select portion of his semeiotics in the present work. In my opinion, even this limited use of a systematically developed semeiotics is preferable to the use of an unsystematic one.

In Peirce's scheme, a symbol is but a kind of sign, the icon and the index being among the better known of his other sign types. Before we explore further Peirce's more detailed classification of signs, Piowever, let us examine the semeio- tic sign in general, as Peirce defined it for us: "A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses some- body, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equiva- lent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. The sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object" (2.228). 10

The most obvious feature of the semeiotic sign is its triadic structure. When it is juxtaposed with de Saussure's

10 All references to Peirce's Collected Papers (vols. 1-6, edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, 1932; vols. 7-8, edited by Arthur Burks, 1958) will appear in the text accompanied by the conventional volume and paragraph number.

Introduction 15

dyadic sign, the difference becomes even clearer. De Saus- sure understood the sign to be a dyadic relation between a signifier and a signified, a concept and a sound image (de Saussure 1959: pt. 1, chap. 1). Milton Singer (1978) has analyzed in some detail the distinction between what he calls the semiological (de Saussurian) tradition and the semeiotic (Peircean) tradition in the study of signs, sym- bols, and culture. He makes the point that by adopting the semeiotic perspective of the sign, we are, thankfully, pre- cluded from executing a cultural analysis that neglects the empirical subject as well as the empirical object.

More significant, the symbol, used in its non-Peircean, dyadic, de Saussurian sense, yields a view of culture as a hermetically sealed, "autonomous entity of internal depen- dencies" (Ricoeur 1978: 110). This phrase of Ricoeur, which was used to characterize structuralism's view of language, is even more devastatingly appropriate when applied to semiological studies of culture. The semeiotic sign, includ- ing the symbol, defies any such closure. We shall have more to say about the openness of the semeiotic process. Let us turn now to consider the semeiotic constitution of reality.

Tlze Semeiotic Constitution of Reality

In the definition of the sign by Peirce which we have already presented, it is clear that the sign is one correlate in an indivisible triad: sign, object, and interpretant. "Nothing is an object which is not signifiable; nothing is a sign which is not interpretable as signifying some object; and nothing is an interpretant that does not interpret something as signify- ing an object" (T. L. Short 1982: 285). Apart from establish- ing the indecomposability of the triadic sign, this view of the sign contains within it elements that are likely to disturb the idealist as well as the materialist. This is good: At best, such a disturbance should be enlightening, at worst, sober- ing. This disturbance is thrown into clear relief in another, somewhat later formulation of the definition of the sign: "A

16 Introduction

Sign, or Rcpresentamen, is a First which stands in such a genuine triadic relation to a Second, called its Object, as to be capable of determining a Third, called its Interpretant, to assume the same triadic relation to its Object in which it stands itself to the same Object" (2.274). From this defini- tion it becomes clear that the representamen-the artifact, sign vehicle, or event, which we commonly identify as the sign-is the First, and the object is not the First. This is what makes Peirce's realism a semeiotic realism, the only kind of realism, in my opinion, that is capable of preventing an- thropology from falling victim to either behavioristic posi- tivism or to ungrounded idealism. For the best synthesis and explication of Peirce's complex and at times confusing thesis, I refer the reader to the study of Peirce's scholastic realism by John F. Boler (1963). 11 For the purposes of the present study I shall content myself by quoting from Boler and Peirce on Peirce's position. Boler claims that Peirce's realism is in fact a synthesis of epistemological realism on the one hand and epistemological idealism on the other. Epistemological realism maintains that "we cannot think whatever we want: something forces our opinion and is, at least to that extent, independent of our minds" (p. 10). "We find our opinions are constrained; there is something, therefore, which influences our thoughts, and is not created by them" (Peirce 8.12). This is "the real," the thing inde- pendent of how we think it (Boler 1963: 14). As for his epistemological idealism, we find Peirce maintaining that "since an idea can resemble or represent only another idea, reality itself must be 'thoughtlike' or of the nature of an idea" (Boler 1963: 11; see also Peirce 6.158, 5.310, and 8.151). Peirce eventually comes to define reality as what will be thought in the ultimate opinion of the community (Boler 1963: 15; see also Peirce 5.311 and 5.430). Thus, in his

11More recent, splendidly lucid, and critical evaluations of Peirce's realism are to be found in the following: Robert Almeder (1980), Bruce Altshuler (1982), Karl-Otto Ape! (1981), and Thomas Olshewsky (1983).

Introduction 17

definition of reality, Peirce's epistemological realism is present in the insistence that an individual's thinking must con:ply ~ith something other than itself; his epistemologi- cal 1deahsm is likewise maintained in the notion that the "other" is the ultimate thought of the community (7.336, 5.316, and 5.408).

It must be made clear from the outset that Peirce's com- munity is a community of inquirers-not any defined ~om~unity of inquirers but an indefinite community of mqmrers. Furthermore, this notion of the community is inextricably linked with his concept of truth and the in- crease of knowledge. Since he was a scientist himself, this community of inquirers, for Peirce, was for the most part a co_mmunity of truthfully, faithfully, charitably, and open- mmdedly communicating scientists. I say, "for the most part" because there are passages in Peirce's writings where he formulates his vision of a community in such a fashion that it transcends all manner of anthropocentrism, includ- ing that of human scientific inquiry. The following passage is a striking example.

The catholic consent which constitutes the truth is by no means to be limited to men in this earthly life or to the human race, but extends to the whole communion of minds to which we belong, including some probably whose senses are very different from ours, so that in that consent no predication of a sensible quality can enter, except as an admission that so certain sorts of senses are affected. (8.13)

For the cultural anthropologist whose primary interest is in understanding the culture wherein he or she carries out field research, the community of inquirers or believers is a far more limited community, a historical community. The :'community's thought," in Peirce's language, is a partial Isomorph of the anthropological concept of culture.

The fusion of epistemological realism and epistemologi- cal idealism of a Peircean sort may also be found in Marshall

18 Introduction

Sahlins's discussion of value in the context of his critique of historical materialism. Sahlins writes,

No cultural value can ever be read from a set of "material forces," as if the cultural were the dependent variables of an inescapable practical logic. The positivist explanation .of given cultural practices as necessary effects of some matenal circumstance ... [is] false. This does not imply that we are forced to adopt some idealist alternative, conceiving culture as walking about on the thin air of symbols. It is not that material forces and constraints are left out of account, or that they have no real effects on cultural order. It is that the nature of the effects cannot be read from the nature of the forces, for the material effects depend on their cultural encompassment. The very form of social existence of mate- rial force is determined by its integration in the cultural system. The force may then be significant-bu~ signif~­ cance, precisely, is a symbolic quality. At the same ~Ime, this symbolic scheme is not itself the mode of expressi~n. of an instrumental logic, for in fact there is no other logiC m the sense of a meaningful order save that imposed by culture on the instrumental process. (p. 206)

In the triadic structure of the sign, the object is a Second. The object, though empirical, need not b~ a material th~ng. Peirce uses the term in its Latin Scholastic sense, meanmg, that which is "thrown before" the mind, that toward which one's attention is directed.

The interpretant, as already implied, is the third co~relate of the sign. More precisely, it is a correlate of one s~gn .to which the represented object is addressed and by whi.ch Its representation is interpreted. In general terms: the ~nte:­ pretant is the locus of interpretation, ~ha~ ~y ':hich a sign Is contextualized, that which makes s1gmflcahon part of a connected web and not an isolated entity.

Without an interpretant, the First and the Second, the rcprescntamen and the object, will fo~ever rem~in uncon- nected, existing apart from any meamngful reahty. Eq~ally true is that without an object and representamen, there will be

l.

Introduction 19

nothing to connect and ergo no interpretant. In other words, for a sign to function as a sign, there must be present in it all three correlative functicms. Objects may exist in the universe as individual empiricities or existent facts, but they do not become real until and unless they are represented by a sign, which representation is interpreted as such by an interpretant. This process of signification is as real in nature as it is in culture.