the community, embodied in its inve

the community, embodied in its inventory of signs and their syntactic rules of combination.
But drawing the contrast in quite this way may be overly ethnocentric in
privileging the speaker's intention too much and reflecting an "individual­
ist" ideology of personhood typical of the industrialized West (see chapter
14). Duranti (l988b) argues that what an utterance means in a Samoan political debate is not what the speaker intends it to mean, but fundament­ ally what the powerful participants in the debate ultimately determine it to mean. It is the conventionalized social processes of negotiation and inter­ pretation that fix its meaning. Contrary to Grice, in Samoa and elsewhere, meaning is not something one communicates to others, but rather some­ thing one creates with others. That this creation is heavily conventionalized in linguistic and cultural practices is the fundamental insight of Bakhrin (1981,1986). As we create meaning in an ongoing relationship, we carry our history of linguistic and cultural practices from many other previous rela­ tionships. Our language is full of words, expressions, genres of our predeces­ sors and our earlier relationships, which provide a vast pool of conventional linguistic practices to draw on in forging meanings. Examples are legion, but a simple case is how the mere presence of once upon a time immediately invokes a fairy-tale (see chapter 18).
The notion of meaning Iam talking about here is not limited to linguistic
practices, but has been highlighted by Geertz (1973) and other symbolic anthropologists as basic to cultural practices too. Consider the following exampie from Geertz (1973), who, in turn, drew it from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1949). Geertz draws our attention to the difference between a nervous twitch realized in the blinking of one's eye and a conspiratorial wink. While as acts of bodily behavior these two events are nearly if not exactly the same, i.e, the contraction of an eye, from another point of view there is a world of difference between them. A twitch is just that, nothing more and nothing less, a bodily action. But a wink is meaningful: it signals, perhaps, that you and I both know that I'm lying through my teeth, but that the person for whom I am spinning a yarn does not know this. It further signals that I would like you not to inform him of this. In short) it signals that I want us to enter into a conspiracy to conceal the truth. It is this meaning that I and you as members of American, British or Australian culture interpret from the physical contraction of the eye. This wink is a cultural act: we experience this pbysical contraction of the eye as meaning­ ful and interpret it as such, as an invitation to a conspiracy.



Meaning as "Mental Representation"

But let us inquire further into the nature of this meaning that the signs of cultural and linguistic practices have. Where exactly can it be found? How

8 Introduction


exactly does one know how to interpret thespian as "actor" or a wink as an in~itation to a conspiracy? The usual answer is through concepts "ideas, thoughts or mental constructs by means of which the mind apprehends or comes to know things" (Lyons 1977:110). In other words, the physical form of a sign such as its phonetic sequence or a contraction of the eyelids calls into playa concept in the mind of anyone who "knows" this sign; its phy­ sical form is merely a stimulus or gesture to bring to consciousness this idea or thought. or in modern parlance, this mental representation. This position entails postulating a pre-given natural world, the world out there, the source of perceptions, which is re-presented to the mind as concepts, mental re­ presentations, for the purposes of mental functioning, the analogy of the mind as the "mirror of nature" (Rorty 1979). Such a view necessarily postulates a rich inner world of mental constructions, which lies behind and provides the meaningful basis of signalling practices in the domain of language and culture.
Note that this approach sets up a dichotomy between a mental "internal"
meaning and a physical "external" signal and raises a number of potentially serious problems. For example, what forges the link between the internal and the external? The external gesture is highly conventional, ultimately socially and publicly mandated. In this sense it gains a kind of objective existence, but the internal meaning is subjective, the functioning of an indi­ vidual mind. What ties subjective experience to objective act? How can we derive public conventional meaning from the individual's private mental experience, Or vice versa? And further, how can we know that a particular objective act is assigned the same meaning by two individual minds; in other words, what establishes the meaning as shared? Of c

Results (Indonesian) 1:

the community, embodied in its inventory of signs and their syntactic rules of combination.But drawing the contrast in quite this way may be overly ethnocentric inprivileging the speaker's intention too much and reflecting an "individual­ist" ideology of personhood typical of the industrialized West (see chapter14). Duranti (l988b) argues that what an utterance means in a Samoan political debate is not what the speaker intends it to mean, but fundament­ ally what the powerful participants in the debate ultimately determine it to mean. It is the conventionalized social processes of negotiation and inter­ pretation that fix its meaning. Contrary to Grice, in Samoa and elsewhere, meaning is not something one communicates to others, but rather some­ thing one creates with others. That this creation is heavily conventionalized in linguistic and cultural practices is the fundamental insight of Bakhrin (1981,1986). As we create meaning in an ongoing relationship, we carry our history of linguistic and cultural practices from many other previous rela­ tionships. Our language is full of words, expressions, genres of our predeces­ sors and our earlier relationships, which provide a vast pool of conventional linguistic practices to draw on in forging meanings. Examples are legion, but a simple case is how the mere presence of once upon a time immediately invokes a fairy-tale (see chapter 18).The notion of meaning Iam talking about here is not limited to linguisticpractices, but has been highlighted by Geertz (1973) and other symbolic anthropologists as basic to cultural practices too. Consider the following exampie from Geertz (1973), who, in turn, drew it from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1949). Geertz draws our attention to the difference between a nervous twitch realized in the blinking of one's eye and a conspiratorial wink. While as acts of bodily behavior these two events are nearly if not exactly the same, i.e, the contraction of an eye, from another point of view there is a world of difference between them. A twitch is just that, nothing more and nothing less, a bodily action. But a wink is meaningful: it signals, perhaps, that you and I both know that I'm lying through my teeth, but that the person for whom I am spinning a yarn does not know this. It further signals that I would like you not to inform him of this. In short) it signals that I want us to enter into a conspiracy to conceal the truth. It is this meaning that I and you as members of American, British or Australian culture interpret from the physical contraction of the eye. This wink is a cultural act: we experience this pbysical contraction of the eye as meaning­ ful and interpret it as such, as an invitation to a conspiracy.Meaning as "Mental Representation"But let us inquire further into the nature of this meaning that the signs of cultural and linguistic practices have. Where exactly can it be found? How 8 Introductionexactly does one know how to interpret thespian as "actor" or a wink as an in~itation to a conspiracy? The usual answer is through concepts "ideas, thoughts or mental constructs by means of which the mind apprehends or comes to know things" (Lyons 1977:110). In other words, the physical form of a sign such as its phonetic sequence or a contraction of the eyelids calls into playa concept in the mind of anyone who "knows" this sign; its phy­ sical form is merely a stimulus or gesture to bring to consciousness this idea or thought. or in modern parlance, this mental representation. This position entails postulating a pre-given natural world, the world out there, the source of perceptions, which is re-presented to the mind as concepts, mental re­ presentations, for the purposes of mental functioning, the analogy of the mind as the "mirror of nature" (Rorty 1979). Such a view necessarily postulates a rich inner world of mental constructions, which lies behind and provides the meaningful basis of signalling practices in the domain of language and culture.Note that this approach sets up a dichotomy between a mental "internal"makna dan fisik 'luar' sinyal dan menimbulkan sejumlah masalah berpotensi serius. Sebagai contoh, apa menempa hubungan antara internal dan eksternal? Gerakan eksternal sangat konvensional, akhirnya sosial dan publik mandat. Dalam pengertian ini itu keuntungan semacam keberadaan objektif, tetapi makna internal subyektif, fungsi pikiran yang melarang masing-masing indi. Apa hubungan pengalaman subyektif objektif Act? Bagaimana kita dapat memperoleh umum berarti konvensional dari pengalaman mental pribadi individu, atau sebaliknya? Dan selanjutnya, bagaimana kita bisa tahu bahwa undang-undang tujuan tertentu yang ditugaskan arti yang sama oleh dua pikiran individu; dengan kata lain, apa menetapkan arti sebagai bersama? C